By Tom Woods
May 10, 2025
From the Tom Woods Letter:
Well, how about this:
There have been sharp cutbacks at the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), amidst word that the President would like to see them both abolished.
Word that the Department of Education would be abolished sent left-liberals into a frenzy: why, this will be a terrible blow for education! After all, the Department of Education has the word "Education" in its name!
You, dear reader, are thankfully more sophisticated than that.
You know perfectly well that the abolition of these unconstitutional federal departments will not mean we won't have any arts or humanities.
The annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is in the neighborhood of $200 million. Private funding of the arts, on the other hand, is in the billions annually. So we would indeed survive without the NEA - as indeed we did for our entire existence before 1965.
I might add that modernism in art often carried with it a sense of entitlement: artists came to believe that if voluntary support for their work was not forthcoming, this was a failure of the public rather than of their art.
These were misunderstood geniuses, you see, trying to challenge the public rather than cater to it. How dare you expect them to be like everyone else and have to create things people like in exchange for compensation! Why, you're crushing their precious artistic freedom!
State funding in the United States, which eventually came in the form of the NEA, partially solved this problem. Now art could receive support on the basis of who wrote the best grant applications, as opposed to who created art that people could actually stand.
(Of course, there's never been anything stopping private benefactors from supporting whatever art they like.)
As for the NEH: in an age of crowdfunding, worthy projects that may have been funded by federal dollars in the past can still proceed. Projects the regime would rather (in effect) keep secret because they're woke and ridiculous will have less success.
The American Historical Association cautions us that we need the NEH in order to support "the complex, nuanced view of our nation's history and culture that come only from deep research."
Attend one of the professional societies' academic conferences. Tell me that you're encountering a "complex, nuanced view of our nation's history" there. That's leftspeak for "you're a bunch of dumb racists, and your official history should be a series of Bolshevik-style humiliations."
Thirteen years ago, having long since given up on our professional historical associations, I took matters into my own hands and launched Liberty Classroom, my dashboard university whose courses you can consume at any time or day or night.
Here you'll find - taught by me, and by people I trust - the history your teachers kept from you, or didn't know themselves. Economics, too. Even logic - which I'd say we could use more of, wouldn't you?
Dozens of courses designed to make you a formidable debater, and to cure the educational malpractice that was imposed on us all.
Our master (lifetime) membership even includes my courses for the Ron Paul Curriculum, which means among other things you'll learn Western civ directly from me, from the ancient world to the present.
Your school may have screwed you, but it's never too late to become the educated person you want to be - and to have any lingering p.c. b.s. physically removed from your brain.
Until tomorrow we're having our anniversary sale, celebrating 13 years of truth-telling.
The link:
