Posted on 07/03/2017 2:00:33 PM PDT by reaganaut1
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The reason why I say that the case for abolishing the NEH, as proposed in President Trump’s budget, just got stronger is that it funded an egregiously political hatchet job of a book that was recently published, namely Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean.
Using phrases like “radical right” and “stealth” are sure to get accolades from leftists who love a good horror story about their supposed enemies. Never mind that any fair account would have to say that there is nothing stealthy in what the “radical right” wants. Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians want a return to limited government under the Constitution and have never hidden that. If that’s “radical,” so was the American Revolution, which also sought to secure individual liberty against an overreaching state. And as for putting democracy “in chains,” that was exactly what the Constitution’s drafters intended.
But the fact that MacLean has written a book meant to confirm leftist biases isn’t the main problem. The problem is that she has chosen to target and misrepresent economist James Buchanan (1920-2013), who received the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his path-breaking work on public choice theory. MacLean portrays Buchanan as the dark, racist figure who provided the intellectual veneer for the movement to downsize the government.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
What the Hell are “the Humanities” anyway? I know what the “Arts” are; they’re things that almost no one will buy, so the government steals our money to fund them.
The government subsidized arts and humanities are constantly at war against Christian doctrines from the Bible. They carry the Counsel of the ungodly’. A national coalition of ungodly people can pool their money for what they want. It is wrong for the government to collect and distribute monies for philosophical whims.
teh government should not be in the business of subsidizing art. if you wanna be an artist, get yourself a sponsor like the greats did. this would keep down on all the charlatans and junk art...
Buchanan was a humble, quiet, brilliant guy. I know many of his colleagues, students, and proteges, and they are uniformly brilliant and decent people, and the all talk about him in glowing terms. This attack is sickening.
This is one of those things that taxpayers should feel free to support,but only if they want to,just as the Constitution specifies.
100% agree.
I love art and music. But for some odd reason, the stuff that is funded by tax dollars is nearly always ugly crap. Get the government out of the “art” business.
Do these Leftards openly admit their love of Globalist Communism and their support for Stalin, Mao, Castro, and every Commie dictator that ever came to power?
If not, then they are stealthy Stalinists, same as always.
Still, I have to say, the US federal government is not the Medici's or the Borgia's, and has no business sponsoring or patronizing the arts and humanities. With other peoples money, after all.
The case against NEH and NEA was plenty strong when LBJ proposed them, and this article is a withering attack on one example of NEH subsidized work.The “Great Society” conceit was always about a “great” government. The Constitution was framed to protect us from such pretensions. As Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense (1776),
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.Government is an expense. And government is not God (which certainly is the conceit promoted by journalists and well as card-carrying Democrats).
Bump
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