Governmental Art/Humanities/Broadcasting is to Art/Humanities/Broadcasting as Chickens are to Watermelons

Among the priorities of the budget cutting bill first proposed in the house are the elimination of subsidies for the National Endowments of the Arts and the Humanities and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  When it was first started (1966)the National Endowment for the Arts had a budget of just under $3 million.  It now has a budget of about $167 million. The Humanities endowment is a bit larger at $171.  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets $460 million.  While the final bill is probably not going to go that far, the question is should it?

The argument for all three activities is fundamentally one on merit goods.  A merit good, in the formal language of public finance, is one which would not be produced in enough quantity absent governmental support.   From my perspective that has always been a very slippery slope.

For me there are two questions.  Absent governmental support would the things like the arts and humanities or "intelligent" discussion of events and trends be present.?  The answer to that one is simple.  Since the creation of NPR the variety of programming has exploded.  The proliferation of the arts has been significant in both depth and breadth.  Ditto potentially for the humanities - although admittedly that may be harder to demonstrate.

But then the second question is does governmental support add something that absent the support would be lost to society.  Here the advocates for governmental funding try to make a case.  But from my perspective it is hard to demonstrate that having several hundred million applied to broadcasting, the arts and humanities has actually enriched the mix.   More importantly there is the moral hazard that comes with any governmental funding - does it have the potential to distort the provision of that good or service?  In this, there is pretty clear evidence that the addition of funding has done little if anything to enhance and may well have impeded truly innovative activity.

A Washington Examiner column today summed up the question quite well.  We consume a lot of things that government does not subsidize.  The History Channel, ESPN, even CNN - in essence I do not care whether they have a particular ideological focus (as I believe CNN and the History Channel often do) but having neutrality does not necessarily merit public funding.

The opposite side of the case is also true.  While the NEH and NEA and CPB can demonstrate some positive effects of governmental funding, it is hard to imagine that elimination of that very small percentage of support - either for public broadcasting, or the arts or the humanities - would mean elimination of the function.  It should be about choices and we should choose to defund all three.