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.