The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

> I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful.

Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.

I do a lot of things as an amateur but at pretty high level: athletics, music, art and more. I also pay a huge portion of my income as a software developer in direct and indirect taxation. Convince me I should fund people to focus full-time on things where they can't make a living, the same things I love to do but realize can't be your sole pursuit.

You've conflated people busting ass who can't keep up with those following their passion in the arts voluntarily. Those don't feel anything like the same thing to me. I don't think I'm alone in a perspective that if you keep taking more from me I'll stop contributing all together, and we'll all fail. The ultra-rich and others with means to avoid picking up the tab have already done so.

> Convince me I should fund people to focus full-time on things where they can't make a living, the same things I love to do but realize can't be your sole pursuit.

You already are, it's just going to the ultra wealthy and pension fund kids, while you slave your life away making that stock go up because you believe there should be no other choice.

So why not have the worker get/keep more of his money, instead of giving it to a different group of "others"?

Because the worker doesn't have the ability to be able to protect his interests when he is just keeping his money.

The rich are able to keep larger portions of their income, and then eventually leverage that to be patrons of political power and set the rules for themselves.

You are also not in the same category as the super rich, so theres an unspoken blurring of the terms here as well - theres no sense in considering a normal perso, or a rich person against someone like Bezos, who has the wealth of several countries.

The debate was if workers get taxed, should that money go to artists and op above me said that that money now went to rich people.

I advocated for workers to keep more of their money.

It's not about protecting interests, leverages, political powers, etc., it's just more net pay at the same gross pay for the workers. Why choose where the workers money goes, if they can keep more, and just pay the artists by visitng concerts or buying their music? Why does government have to be involved?

>why does government have to be involved.

>Taxes

If you have taxes, you already have a system which redistributes wealth to places that society requires, so government is already involved.

So the question becomes how the government is involved.

In any system with competing interests, a no holds barred contest favors the most willing to maximize their advantages. Wealth even concentrates even in video games.

To ensure a system where there is some degree of fairness between humans, to ensure that your position in society is not locked in to your inherited fate, or even to ensure that fewer taxes are taken from workers, you need the power of a shared government.

Also: The American position is usually to have no trust in government, which is encouraged by having a right wing media sphere that is dedicated to inserting as much distrust into the system as possible.

So by default in an American context, it’s hard to conceive of a government with high trust, and the default is to never give money to it.

I was born in a socialist country, with red stars, a dictator, government owned everything, and smuggling jeans and coffee across the border. I'm still here, but the country doesn't exist anymore. Now, our parts over here makes us a small and pretty OK doing EU country with a relatively nice living standard.

I don't trust the government. Why? Because they can't properly operate with the money they're given by us, the workers. Same goes for many recepients of that money, especially the ones outside of "social help".

Yes, we fund art, we have public tenders, artists apply, they get a few thousand euros, produce something to fit "the current political theme" (eg. everybody is talking about ecology, let's make a performance where they throw trash at eachother), 10, 20, maybe 30 people see that, mostly family and local homeless people coming for the free wine, papers are stamped, checkmarks on all the right places, and money has exchanged hands. I would much rather live in a system where workers get to keep that money and spend it for art in whatever way they want. Even in a "semi-mandated" way (eg. tax benefits if you spend X euros yearly on art stuff).

And that's just peanuts compared to other stuff our government spends money on, our healthcare system is beyond broken, forcing you to pay government healthcare insurance (deducted by your employer, at 14.92% of your gross pay + 37.5eur extra, around 5keur yearly per average worker) but when you need an ultrasound for possible kidney stones... well, the waiting times are 6 month, but if you pay out of your pocket for a private clinic, somewhere around 100 eur, you can get one today or at the latest, tomorrow. If you're sick for up to 28 days, your employer covers your sick pay (80% of normal pay), if longer than 28 days, the government pays for that... sounds ok, right? We have people on sick leave for two, three years (24-36months * 80% of ~2500eur average monthly gross) waiting for eg. a knee surgery, that costs 3-5k eur at a private clinic, even less at a government one, but because our government insurance decided to pay only for 20 such surgeries yearly, and the waiting line is 70 people, you're screwed.

So yeah, I don't trust the government. I trust an average homeless alcoholic more with money management, especially because he's operating with his own money for his own benefit, and he'll make sure to get the most booze for whatever he managed to gather and not spend more than he has.

Well then it should dishearten you to know, that the 2024 Economics Nobel, was won by people who showed that good institutions cause nations to be wealthy, not just correlate.

You’re obviously educated and on HN, so you can appreciate how much harder showing causation is.

Sadly, that does mean, the citizens need to get together and make their system more trustworthy. Getting more money in the hands of workers will not result in a better overall system.

Or in simpler terms - Distrust in the government is the enemy, and all the factors that cause it, real and perceived. Corruption, weak information economies, weakened judiciaries, depleted citizen capacity to build consensus.

We need those systems to work.

But we the citizens have very limited possiblities of what to do... we can vote for basically one of two options and that's it, and both options are bad. Newcomers have no chance of breaking through (unless they're cherry picked by one of the options and pumped up by the media... which one side does every 4 years).

The government has the monopoly on violence. We pay the government, we pay the people that should check that they didn't do anything bad/wrong (police, anti-corruption services, etc.), we pay the court system, but they don't do anything. Things that work in every corporation (eg. procurement offices and oversight over them) are broken in many if not all governments, including ours.

If the government wants trust, then they must earn it. So far they haven't. And I'm talking about the whole pyramid, from the top politicians, to the lowest traffic police officer not doing his/her job. And in the system where a politician steals money, the investigators dont investigate and the courts don't prosecute, we can reduce the money they get, because they obviously are not doing the jobs we are paying them for. Jail 10, 20 politicians, and I'll gladly support more investigators (paid by the taxpayers). If they don't, we don't need the ones we already have.