The burden of proof should be on the policy maker and subsidizer to ensure the purported goals of spending tax many are met.
My wife works in public procurement for research, but there too suggesting such a thing is taboo.
This is of course by design: subsidies are a political tool for passivation of opposition, soft bribery and economic channeling of economic and societal outcomes. The less oversight and transparency the better.
The Flanders region only got a publicly and centralised database of (some) subsidy channels in 2019, after decades of liberal and right-leaning people lobbying for transparency.
There is no such initiative for our federal government.
What is the harm in letting people live their lives producing art without a freaking OKR tracking their output?
I always find it fascinating how people assume that if you're not slaving away making someone else richer, it's a problem.
The argument is always something in the lines of "I'm paying for it". Well, we all know that if the only people actually making money out of our society paid their fair share, we'd be able to subsidize programs like these and much more without a problem.
People contribute to society in ways other than working. We simply choose to not value any of it in today's society.
It's not like these people are buying yachts, right? It feels so petty to me when we complain about helping out people with the bare minimum.
There are too many subsidy receivers for anyone to ever visit in their life, even if they spend 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year visiting them.
Reminds me of education. Being from the most educated jurisdiction in the most educated country, everyone is sure we need to fund it, but nobody seems to know what we get from it. The usual suspects (stronger economy, more engaged society, more progressive socially, etc.) that everyone loves to attribute to education lag behind much of the rest of the much-less-educated world...
> The burden of proof should be on the policy maker and subsidizer to ensure the purported goals of spending tax many are met.
The burden on policy markers is simply to keep the bosses (i.e. the general public) happy. The burden of proof rests on the public at large to justify their goals to the policy makers, perhaps, but is that really necessary? If the people want something arbitrary because it makes them feel good, why not? The universe doesn't care.
Its not for the policy makers to descide what is good art or not.
Has any Belgian artist in the past forty years been as impactful as Bill Watterson?
Most folk artists are, by global standards, mediocre and irrelevant. But I don't think anybody really cares.
Could the same be true for Belgium?
I don't really know enough to dispute this, but this statement is setting off alarm bells as a thought pattern that would be easy to fall into but hard to falsify. Most artistic output in the world is mediocre and irrelevant. Seeing the same from Belgium is not enough to say the policy is not working.
Belgium has about the same population and GDP as Ohio. Genuine question: how does the "artistic output", however you want to measure it, compare between Belgium and Ohio?
Note that I am not claiming this is any way "worth it", especially with your comments on the middle class which seem to be echoed by other Belgians. I'm only asking about the actual artistic output in isolation.