[throwaway77385]

I'm reasonably sure funding for the arts is globally as low as can be.

If we applied the rule of "it has to be good to be worth it" and money is the main indicator for "good", then what about the myriad products and services that are low quality / terrible, yet make tons of money because they can afford to shove marketing down everyone's throats and thus stay relevant?

Most popular music is downright awful to me. Do I want to take their money away because I don't think they deserve it? No. On the other side of that coin I'd like to see some kind of counter balance. How many artists were considered awful until they suddenly became the biggest deal ever? Often posthumously.

This tiny sliver of funding for some people you may not like won't take anything away from you.

The early internet was so great because it was full of weird things. We've lost ALL of it, due to commercialisation. We stand to lose even more if we don't do something to fund the people who dare to be weird.

This goes right back to the thing Bezos said about how we need to become interplanetary so we can inhabit the galaxy, because if we inhabit the galaxy we could have a thousand Mozarts. I think we could already have a thousand Mozarts if they weren't busy slaving away in Amazon's warehouses.

Once there's a trillion humans in the galaxy and they're still all slaving away in warehouses, we still won't have any Mozarts.

Not everything can or should be quantified by money and economics.