The world has just finished what, for Americans, is the curious spectacle of the Soccer World Cup. Every four years since the 1930s teams representing 32 countries have met (in a different venue each time) to decide who is best. Much of Europe, South America, and Africa come to a halt during the three weeks of Cup play.
How is capitalism being treated in American popular culture today? The signals are mixed, but generally the picture is bleak.
The Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it's not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It's the astounding power of market commerce itself.
A Jewish Batman? A female Robin? The Dynamic Duo battling on behalf of truth, justice, and Austrian economics? Are we in a parallel universe or what? We are indeed if we are reading The Batman Chronicles, the Winter 1998 issue, devoted to "Elseworlds," in which "heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places."
Like Martha Nussbaum, whose Cultivating Humanity is addressed above, John M. Ellis is concerned with multiculturalism.
In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That's the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.
Extremes like bloody backs distract from the main issue, which is not whether taxpayers should subsidize grotesque performance or perverse photography, but whether they should subsidize art at all. Market theory, of course, follows one simple rule: those who want something should be the ones to pay for it. In particular, those who want art, or a specific kind of art, should put up the money, whether by purchasing tickets or becoming a generous benefactor.
