Art is seen as a worthwhile endeavour even if it can't necessarily support itself as a private endeavour. It's for the same reason galleries and museums are subsidised by the government.

Anyone can call themselves an artist but to receive this money you would have to have a portfolio of work that is approved by the application programme.

Ireland already has a competitive economy. There is more to a country than economics and that includes promoting things like art to foster a sense of identity and promote Ireland on a world stage.

Milton Friedman wouldn't approve and we're okay with that.

He would have supported a broader scheme. His proposal in 1962 of a “negative income tax” (in Capitalism and Freedom) is the genesis of the movement to replace traditional social welfare schemes (which disincentivize employment and skew recipients’ consumption decisions) with simple schemes that just give money to poor people. (This eventually led to the Earned Income Tax Credit in the United States.)

Friedman’s negative income tax is equivalent to the contemporary notion of a guaranteed basic income (but not to a universal basic income, as only people earning below some threshold would receive it).

At a minimum you need a registered business, regular exhibitions or performances in your field, you have to register with the ministry of culture, and can't have a job. Contract work is allowed and encouraged. Also you are expected to apply when the government issues a Call For Creatives.

I think you get paid minimum wage as long as you continue fulfilling criteria.

> Self-employed in culture can be given the right to pay social security contributions from the state budget.

https://e-uprava.gov.si/si/podrocja/izobrazevanje-kultura/za...

I love the idea of having a list of "Registered Artists", where you get a basic income as long as you're prepared to Answer The Call of Your Country when needed.

"We need a nice cartoony figure for this public safety film! Find me some artists!"

"Here you go, boss"

"Naw, not those guys, have you got anything in a more Shel Silverstein-y kind of look? How about those ones?"

‘2,000 creative workers’ would make this quite competitive, even if it’s only 20k USD/year that could easily enable people to be artists who wouldn’t make a career of it on their own.

Pulling a 80 hour workweeks at 24, supporting yourself while doing something else is not sustainable. Similarly someone supporting themselves as an artist + a kid is suddenly a very different situation.

20k USD/yr is life changing for some people down on their luck.

Expectation that you have portfolio does not strikes me as outrageous either.

Writing a few songs on a guitar from Facebook marketplace is cheap. Turning that into a live show is expensive and time consuming.

Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.

Well done Ireland.

How is doing public reading of poetry not cheap?

I have friends who do standup comedy and they just show up at open mic nights and it doesn’t cost them anything. One is good enough that now the venues are paying him a little bit.

Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)

Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.

It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.

In other places (like Italy) there is.

Ireland's economic statistics are so badly distorted by US companies routing money there that there is an entire subfield of economics dedicated to trying to figure out what Ireland's real economic state is, called "Leprechaun economics". A common adjustment made by economics researchers when studying the EU is to just subtract Ireland entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics

https://www.cfr.org/articles/leprechaun-adjusted-euro-area-g...

https://democracychallenged.com/2025/05/14/irelands-phantom-...

> The key to understanding this disconnect is a number few outside Ireland pay attention to: Modified Gross National Income, or GNI*. Unlike GDP, which counts all activity happening within Ireland’s borders, GNI* adjusts for the distortions caused by the huge presence of foreign multinationals. And the gap is enormous. In 2023, GNI* was just €291 billion — meaning more than €219 billion of Ireland’s reported output never truly flowed into the Irish economy at all.

When looking at Ireland's own economy without the influence of US tax transactions, the economy shrinks by nearly half.

There is no single indicator of wealth, measuring wealth requires a number of measures to provide context and contrast. The Irish economy is largely comparable to the Danish economy. I'd say the Danes sneak in just ahead of us but well behind Norway and Switzerland.

Ireland for example is wealthier than either the UK or France on a per capita basis. The GDP of Alabama and Bavaria, Germany per capita is largely the same, yet you would be insane to think Alabama was in anyway wealthier than Bavaria.

I stand by my comment.

The Irish economy is competitive and your little 'gotcha' that is a common trope across various shallow sub reddits, increasingly at an alarmingly peevish rate simply doesn't persuade me or others who are interested in understanding these things at a deeper level. There is a time and place for that discussion and it really isn't this thread.

Danish GDP per capita is about $71k nominal. According to the Irish Central Bank mGNI per capita is a fair bit less than that at around $65k.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-mip/measu...

However, that assumes the modified GNI measure is accurate. If you believe these numbers the Irish became nearly 40% wealthier between 2020 and 2023. That would be a truly unprecedented spike in wealth never before seen in history, and I don't think anyone believes it. It's much more likely that their attempts to subtract the distortion of American corporate success from the Irish numbers aren't successful. Tech firms did great during the COVID period whilst the average person... not so much.

Well it has a competitive tax haven.

I don't give a shit about Milton Friedman. I do give a shit about wage earners in Ireland who are being forced to pay for an artist welfare program. Ireland has a competitive economy.

A lot of societies have realized there is value in supporting art and culture. For thousands of years that activity was sponsored by monarchs, royalty and other nobility. Up until actually quite recently, most first world countries without monarchs and nobles also provided substantial support for the arts.

Basically outlandishly rich and gaudy benefactors have always had so much money they could employ OTHERS to do trivial pursuits. Now - the average taxpayer will bear that cost.

Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.

If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].

In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.

[1] https://www.grossmanllp.com/independent-artists-on-the-offen...

So ironic I guess

God knows Walmart couldn't exist with all this rampant welfare.

Maybe if workplace democracy was enforced upon Walmart it would be an entirely different entity, likely for the better too.

A) The government building an entire logistical supply and warehousing chain across the country for groceries to support food welfare. Cold food, meat, spoilage & waste, a bunch of federal jobs.

or

B) The government gives citizens a bit of money, which they then spend at existing warehouses (with existing logistical supply chains) to buy food. Some existing warehouses will accumulate larger shares of this money, as it has more customers.

The existing warehouses in example B are called grocery stores, like Walmart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOXdtPBGXI

Seems like the it IS cheaper for the government to do it, odd how much better prices can be when you don't have to worry about making sure the fat cats stay fat.

edit: or maybe the communities served by walmart should build their own rain ponchos and bananas locally.

is the point of this conversation just to proclaim you don't like some guys? what is your claim here? what action do you desire the collective to take? what is the rule that society should follow?

why do you expect that rule to lead to a more prosperous, thriving society?

It is dismaying to find out how many American academicians take Marxism seriously - unless they stem from countries like Cuba that had the misfortune to actually let Marxist ideas rule them. It is mental fentanyl for certain kind of collectivist mind.

Give me Hayek and Buckley instead.

In practice? For example, nationalization of businesses and collectivization in rural areas, including suppression of "kulaks".

Binary thinking is analogous to quantizing an LLM to 2 bits (worse, actually). You're not going to get good results.

This is not the case.

Walmart doesn't have the lowest prices because they are efficient, yes conventional wisdom might dictate that but you are forgetting wholesalers exist from which conventional retailers buy from and the margin definitely tilts towards walmart but there was a time where they could easily compete against walmart and set their prices.

Now what's happening is that walmart has these special deals (in this case with pepsi) where pepsi would literally surveil all marts and see which is selling cheaper than walmart (FoodLion did that) and then what Pepsi did was cut off all the promotional money of FoodLion and increase their wholesaler prices.

Is this legal? Hell no. It's all completely illegal but the govt. stopped enforcing the law

Then when it was released by FTC, the whole document was almost redacted and Trump signed an executive order essentially trying to stop it from going out but some journalists dug/pressured for its release.

So walmart isn't the base because they are price competitive, hell-no. It's because they set the floor & have special deals with other companies to maintain that floor artificially.

Which actually leads to small retailers/chains shutting down because they can't compete on price and this essentially leads to a monopoly of walmart where it can dictate prices & increase them and the people are forced to STILL go to them.

And all of this while being immensely govt subsidized as you say too while paying their employees peanuts.

Actually Walmart when it was launched in germany was sued quite a lot for such practices that iirc they had to take an exit. No country wants a walmart because they know that they might use their american profits (which we discovered how come from shady practices themselves) and then use it to run marts at losses until the competition dies which is still immensely bad long term for the average consumer of whole world but particularly the americans in my opinion as all other govts are more protective of such industries for this good reason and walmart fails to measure up to those standards in other countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odhVF_xLIQA : We Uncovered the Scheme Keeping Grocery Prices High [More Perfect Union]

A lot of my points were heavily influenced by this video so I would recommend you to watch it to help understand more as well about what I am talking.

The deception of walmart actually fools a lot of people but the economical margin is actually quite low. It's the artifical floor that they set which gets unnoticed by many and this is why other retailers aren't able to compete, all of which is highly illegal but once again, the govt. stopped enforcing this law.

Maybe we should have a structure in place that taxes companies based on how many benefits their employees claim, say five times the total amount of money claimed.

> It also recouped more than the trial's net cost of 72 million euros ($86 million) through increases in arts-related expenditure, productivity gains and reduced reliance on other social welfare payments, according to a government-commissioned cost-benefit analysis.

Reminds me of the WPA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Art_Project

Your bio says:

> I'm not trolling. I actually want to know the answer, although my comment may feel less than diplomatic.

And so here is the real test. After reading the numerous responses to your question, do you get it?

I'm not in Ireland but it's the same everywhere. No one likes paying taxes.

Not saying that anything should be done about it. TBH I'd even like to have unemployment benefits be an optional insurance to reduce my taxes since I haven't gotten a cent out of it yet, but that's separate.

Just noting that artists aren't in some unique situation.

Nothing is stopping them from opening a company and giving themselves a fixed salary or doing some mix of salaried, freelance and under-table work.

Did you have to be the party pooper? People were trying to indulge one of the most noble and timeless of pursuits: pissing on the poor! >(

1. Nobody likes insurance salespeople 2. Unemployed carpet installers do not exist

...and I'm done commenting on Hacker News. What a group of interesting forumusers this is that yours is the top comment.

we got to move these Color TVs...

Dire Straits, Money for Nothing, 1985

Guest artist: Sting

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Dire-Straits/Money-for-Not...

We need more art that pushes boundaries and remains controversial. Instead, we favor the type of artist who attracts the most attention through their personality, whether because of their looks or a manufactured edgy image, while producing mundane, lowest-common-denominator work. We must support contemporary artists who move us forward rather than remaining stuck in popularity contests or constant nostalgia.

Under the current system, it is almost inevitable that influencers use their status to promote gambling ads and NFTs, ruining the lives of their fans. We need to break this cycle of rewarding increasingly poor behavior while making it harder for independent artists to earn a living.

I worked in "culture" for a while when I was younger. 90% of it is just disguised unemployment benefits for those that consider it a dirty word barely good enough for the hoi polloi.

You will live long, but I will have more fun.

No, I can figure out how to build a shelter. But I can't figure out how to be an artist.

So if you are so grossly incompetent that you can't figure out how to build a shelter to save your life, sure take your carpet installer and enjoy your hundred years of boredom.

Maybe they could sing up for say extra 20-50% tax which then get distributed.