Ashara
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Ashara has not written any posts yet.
That's a fair point, and I agree with both of your solutions: We should promote the availability of works from past eras, and encourage more new art from underrepresented cultures and groups. But I don't think there's any need to discourage or reduce the creation of new art overall. There seems to be a concern that truly beautiful works of art will get buried under a flood of disposable pop culture trash and forever lost in the glut. I'll admit there might be some truth to that, but for the most part, I think it's a greatly overblown fear. Shining jewels are bright enough to stand out on their own merits.
Also, I don't really want a world where all art is high art. There are times when I'm in the mood for low art, sometimes I just want to sit back and enjoy some shallow comedy or mindless action movie. I enjoy a good steak, but that doesn't mean I never want to eat hamburgers or cold cuts again.
Unless you consider variety to have its own value, which I do. I disagree with just about all of that post's fundamental premises.
I don't think society should discourage economic inefficiency, at least not beyond the inherent discouragement that comes with unprofitability; I agree that unprofitable activities shouldn't be actively subsidized, but I don't see why they should be actively suppressed either. If someone had a lot of money to burn and wanted to fund some vanity project with no real artistic value, or just decided to give money to writers and painters and filmmakers to do whatever they wanted even if it had no public appeal, I don't see anything wrong with... (read more)
Your post reminded me of this article, which touches on a lot of the same points, albeit with a bit more vitriol for a certain kind of anti-aesthetic libertarian: https://fee.org/articles/against-libertarian-brutalism/
Except the thrive/survive dichotomy applies to conservatives and liberals in the classical sense, not the economic right and the economic left. And by that standard, libertarians are firmly in the liberal category, even if their right-wing economic views are more commonly associated with conservatives in modern times. Even the rhetoric that right-libertarians use to justify their economic policies is distinctly different from - and in some ways, diametrically opposed to - the rhetoric that conservatives use to justify the same or similar policies. Conservatives tend to focus a lot more on scarcity and have a very survival-of-the-fittest interpretation of capitalism, whereas the libertarian view of capitalism is centered more around the idea... (read more)
Most libertarians I know believe that a more 'right-wing' economic system will help the poor, along with everyone else. Libertarians generally don't tend to worry about "freeloaders" the way conservatives do, which is why they mostly focus on government regulations and corporate welfare, while conservatives mostly focus on social welfare. When libertarians do take a stand against social welfare, it tends to be less about freeloading and more about welfare programs creating perverse incentives (e.g. discouraging people who want to work but would lose their benefits and be worse off if they did). Just look at the difference between libertarian and conservative arguments against the minimum wage. Conservatives will go on about... (read more)