Maitre Chez-Nous

We begin with that most brilliant of economic popularizers, Frederic Bastiat:

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain." – from The Law

Old fallacies die hard.  Gordon Pinsent, one of the few Canadian actors, still working in Canada, whom most Canadians can name, was in a huff last week:

“We should be the landlords of our own industry, not the tenants,” said veteran actor and CBC presenter Gordon Pinsent.

“We know about Mr. Harper's master plan. We know about Mr. Dion's big idea. But it would be hugely comfortable to know that we have a seat at that table – not just in the children's section, not just below the salt, but right there, smack dab in the middle of the big meal.”

The difficulties and pressures being felt within the arts community are nothing new, Mr. Pinsent said. The business has undergone numerous starts and stops, applying “tourniquets” as it went along.

“Yet we still have this feeling here that we are practically compelled to bend or dissolve within the larger picture of the American sensibility, and we don't like it,” he said. “We all want to work. We're artists to begin with.”

Being a landlord requires ownership.  Ownership requires acquisition.  Acquisition requires, ultimately, payment.  You can't be a landlord when someone else is paying the bills.  Insolence hasn't usually been a salient Canadian characteristic, but it seems Mr Pinsent wants it to become one.  The standard counter argument, presented by the Prime Minister, is that no one is watching subsidized Canadian art, so why subsidize it? 

“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know those subsidies have actually gone up, I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people,” he said during a campaign stop in Saskatoon.

Vox populi and all that.  I recall that Mr Harper, in a different incarnation, mocked Preston Manning, his former boss, for being too populist.  I sometimes wonder where that clever young man went.  The old Harper, Calgary MA in Economics, would have pointed out that the state has no business subsidizing art any more than it has in subsidizing industry.  Art welfare isn't any more uplifting or necessary than corporate welfare.  Despite the talk of many artists - a generous term in many cases - that they adhere to the standard Leftist cliches about power to the people, they despise and fear the great mass of the Canadian public.  The clumsy bourgeois hordes living in Mississauga aren't interested and hold them in contempt; the very type of households many of these artistic types escaped from when they went off to university.  Sensitive creatures, they must be shielded from the slings and arrows of outrageous democratic fortune.  One of the reasons the Left so despises, not simply as a principle of good or bad economics, capitalism is because they know it's economic democracy.  The verdicts of the market are more clearly, more powerful the "will of the people" then periodic elections for government office. 

Many artists, deep down, want to be aristocrats, to have freedom without responsibility.  Thus Pinsent's arrogant demand to be a "landlord" of other people's money.  That the great mass of the public have no interest in the products of much of Canada's artistic talent, does not make them worthless.  The unfortunate tendency in Canadian conservatives circles is to dismiss much of modern Can-Con as high concept nonsense, just as earlier versions were campy.  Much of it is, but so much of everything in modern art or modern business falls under the same broad rubric. 

Being a philistine is good politics, and has the added bonus for the Tories of making them seem less Bay St and more Main St.  Surely one of the traits of conservatism must be conservation.  Culture is consciousness, it's what makes a nation.  Not the edicts of the state or success of its large corporations - which is one of the reasons why economic nationalism is, at best, silly.  The answer, as the Great Bastiat's quote at the tops alludes, is not to be pro or anti-culture, but pro-freedom.  If Canada's artists want to be landlords, and stop having to ask philistines like Harper & Co. for funding, then get off the dole.  There are plenty of rich people with taste in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.  Even in Calgary.  Art has a long history of being sustained by patronage and clever entrepreneurship.  The genius of the market isn't simply that it is democratic, but that it can be anti-democratic too.  Winner takes all in politics, but the market allows for niches.  Embracing the free market doesn't mean abandoning artistic standards.