Pelosi: Giving Artists the Luxury of Unemployment. Meanwhile, is Obama writing Europe off?

Did I miss a great renaissance in European Art with the advent of socialized medicine there?  Nancy Pelosi imagines how the Democrats will give freedom to artists to "quit their day jobs" to concentrate on their art, by passing the Democrat's Health Care Bill.  Which we will only understand once it's passed, she says.

Pelosi has a point about the distortions produced by providing tax breaks to employers, but not to private citizens, for the purchase of health care.  (This unfair situation arose out of the desperate attempts of employers to get around wage and price controls during World War II by offering health benefits in addition to wages.  When the IRS tried to impose taxes on these benefits, the people revolted).

But Ms. Pelosi also seems to be imagining a utopian dream world where the same amount of money just magically appears and makes its way into the government's coffers even if people make much less money.   If everybody becomes an unemployed  artist, living romantically on love, beauty and a few dollars scratched together from selling his work (don't forget to pay the sales tax and self-employment tax, Mr. Artist), who will do the hard, unartistic jobs that pay the bills?  She also seems to want to punish people who become entrepreneurial to the point of hiring significant numbers of employees. And people who make "more than their fair share" of money.   If you subsidize unemployed artists, you get more of them.  If you punish job creation, you get fewer jobs.

A tax base containing more struggling artists and fewer employers and high-wage employees moves the  the "fiscal neutrality" fiction concerning the health care bill even further from reality.  It's that type of unintended consequence that helped turn Lenin's dream of a utopian society (where everyone would be freed from drudge labor to pursue meaningful work like art)  into a society featuring a privileged nomenklatura contrasted with forced labor ("we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us") along with gulags and starvation for those who did not fall into line.

Even though the vast majority of American progressives reject Stalinism, much of the utopianism of early Marxist-Leninist theory remains in their good-hearted, benevolent plans for the rest of us.  And you can tell from listening to Ms. Pelosi that she really does believe that she is helping people.  But childhood stories which she has related in interviews have also revealed that she has a profound admiration for political power.  This is consistent with her behavior in pushing through health care reform.  Benevolence is often accompanied by thuggish or dictatorial behavior.  Totalitarianism is very tempting, even (or perhaps especially) to the benevolent.

Has Ms. Pelosi not noticed the financial condition of her own state?  That's what happens when progressives control the legislature for a few decades.   Pelosi is not doing so well herself at leading the nation into a "pay as you go" direction.  And she looks forward to creating vast new federal bureaucracies where government employees will be paid better than the shrinking private sector, and where they will probably be largely exempt from the health care rationing which her romantic starving artist will experience.  Because re-arranging wealth is far more noble than creating wealth, so bureaucrats deserve better treatment.

And then it will all fall apart, as in Greece and, barring a federal bailout from better-run states, California. But maybe art can console us.  If we do better than the Europeans in that department.

 Another point by Kenneth Anderson from the link above, concerning the EU's current problems with the financial crisis in Greece:

. . . These European leaders know better than anyone on the planet how the shift to their domestic social model implies geopolitical decline. So they have no doubt as to where Obama is taking the US in foreign affairs. . .

The post linked above makes reference to a second post on the reasons developed for forming the European Union in the first place:

. . . the Obama administration’s pooh-bahs seem to have written off Europe as the past, Asia is the future. The irony is that it is precisely on account of striving so desperately, so mightily, to become a Western European democratic socialist state that the Obama administration feels no need any longer to look to Europe. It has already priced-in internally anything of ideological value Europe might have to offer, on account of the transformations under way in the US. We’ve now got — thanks to the decension of Bush and the inclension of Obama –anything of value Europe might offer in the way of values, so why pay attention to those losers? . . .

Of course, the one missing piece of that puzzle is how it is that Europe went into decline, and whether that lesson for the US has been priced-in ....

I wonder how the European art scene will change when Europeans start to internalize the possibility that America will not longer be paying for Europe's military defense? The Russian Bear is stirring. And the Islamists are on the rise.

 Any chance of a return to "hard" totalitarianism in Europe in response? It's been less than a century.  Anti-semitism is on the rise again . . .