Well, what you spend your time thinking about is your own responsibility. It’s not as if “Big Liberal” has taken control of your thoughts.
Surely you’ve heard the phrase “pick and choose your battles?” Maybe this time your wife was right. (For the record, if I had been there, and a bunch of say, Tea Partiers started talking, I’d probably just ignore the whole thing. It’s not worth letting them ruin my evening.
Yeah, I have to agree with this. It wasn’t those shitheads who spoiled the evening, it was Bricker’s inability to rise above it all. I recommend trying to “be here how”. It’s really the only place we can be.
City Opera went under for a number of reasons, financial mismangement among them. The Met is doing fine, and probably doesn’t need the (minuscule) government funding it gets.
The opera company I really miss in New York is the now-defunct Amato Opera, located on the Bowery, right next door to CBGB. Right up until the end, you could see an opera for thirty bucks, which is pretty good. I have no idea whether or not they got government funding, but they were in business for decades, proving that opera isn’t only for the well-heeled heading uptown to Lincoln Center, where midrange tickets go for $150 each (at least).
Personally, I might nix support for the other places but keep the Kennedy Center, for diplomatic and tourist reasons. But I’m not that attached to this concept. Recall that we might be talking about 3% or less of the these big-city budgets.
Was the show sold out? Then they were not subsidizing the city. Otherwise, they were contributing to the fixed costs of running the show. (Marginal costs of filling an extra seat tend to be low, unless the show is sold out.) They should congratulate themselves and form a mutual admiration society with other high minded orchestra goers, for they truly are raising the bar, bring culture to an unwashed nation.
Well, actually telecommunication and electrical utility systems are natural monopolies. So they receive price caps to avoid gouging… as well as subsidies at times. Ever hear of the rural electrification program? The telephone poles in Backcreek Iowa didn’t build themselves. Of course now most of the infrastructure is in place, internet and cable aside. There’s also a fair amount of cross-subsidy involved- low income people can get lower rates for local service.
But no, I don’t think electrical utilities are a public good and I should clarify that an indoor opera performance is certainly not a public good as it is neither non-excludable nor non-rivalrous. But the existence of high culture itself (and information in general) is arguably a public good which might justify limited subsidy. The weird part of this discussion is that the subsidy of the tax deduction dwarfs that of the direct grant, judging from the numbers reported upthread. And the grants at least have the virtue of transparency.
See that person over there? He won’t call his Congressional Rep to Support The Arts. ::Sniff::
Bricker finds such behavior uncouth. I disagree and opine that it’s the best entertainment of the evening!!!
Can someone explain how something gets to be called “high culture”? Who makes that decision?
The beautiful people.
ETA: Sorry, I was wrong. Wikipedia decides.
No, you were right the first time. I do.
That wikipedia article was obviously written by one of the beautiful people!
Further… I like art. I like lots of art. Opera, I don’t get. I’ve tried, but I don’t get it. Sure, some of the songs are good. But to sit through an entire Opera? No thanks.
Actually it’s “N’est-ce pas, non?” 
It appears *they *did, too. 
I guess the lesson here is not to go to the opera.
So, did you take the opportunity to find out why the mood was so heavily against you and take time to evaluate your ideas to see if maybe you may be in the wrong about the subject? or did you just hunker down and whine that other people disagree with you?
I’m with Bricker on this one. There are a lot of wealthy and powerful people in DC who like to go to large production shows, like opera. They have found a way to get taxpayers to cover part of the cost of their tickets by implying that that money helps the poor in some vague way. That’s shameful enough already but to use that subsidized entertainment as a forum to advocate for even more handouts and to chastise those who don’t agree with the handouts is just common, ordinary tastelessness. Clearly exposure to the arts isn’t helping the wealthy. If anything it only makes them more snobby and entitled.
Did you see the figures posted on page 2? The WNO is not some national loss leader being propped up by substantial federal funding. It gets less than one twentieth of its funding from the government. As noted earlier, I am against public funding of things like opera, but it’s hard to call this a handout to the wealthy.
Yes, thank you. Some of the money that goes to the WNO is used to bring opera to the non-wealthy and the WNO makes a point of advertising that, as your site carefully lays out. Some of that money is also used to subsidize the ticket price of wealthy patron of the arts, which your link doesn’t bother to mention, and those patrons would like more please, based on Bricker’s OP. I think you make my point perfectly.
Or maybe I’m wrong and those patrons pay the actual cost that such an opera would cost in a free market at a private venue. I would love to learn that that is the case. Your link does not make that claim.
Looking at the figures on page two (of this thread), the WNO got $1.2M from the government in 2011. One can discount that as a trivial amount of money I suppose but that is one single organization, in a city with a number of arts organizations, and one single city in a big country. If it’s so trivial, why fight for it?
And while I hadn’t thought about it before, this Slate article offers some interesting numbers on how opera is paid for. I hadn’t considered that donations ($19M to the WNO from the page 2 stats) are tax deductible too.
Only if you’re standing on your head. Your claim that there is nothing definable the WNO does for “the poor” is simply wrong.
If it’s so trivial, why fight against it?
I don’t think 1.2 million dollars is trivial at all. I think that is a huge amount of money to give to an organization who’s public good amounts to exposing their form of entertainment to a wider audience, an art form which only a tiny percent of the public enjoys in the first place. You guys who think opera should be supported by the government are the ones suggesting that amount is trivial. Heck, not just trivial but not enough.