"More like this, please"

Jon, my virtual landlord, sent me this link to Ghost of a Flea with the comment "More like this, please". I can only concur:

Socialists do not create wealth for themselves; they parasitize the wealth of others, primarily through confiscatory state bureaucracies. Therefore, to destroy the left, the next real conservative government has to do one thing (and one thing only): Stop paying the left to destroy civilization. Shut down the CBC's national television news, shut down funding to arts and social science departments at all publicly funded universities, shut down all fine arts funding, shut down all tax incentives to write or produce leftist propaganda in whatever medium and let all of the above fend for themselves in the marketplace.

Problem solved.

We can no more win this war so long as we continue to fund the other side through our taxes than we can expect to defeat the Islamic forever war against us even as we fund the jihadis every time we buy gasoline.

We're often told (almost always by folks directly or indirectly benefitting from government grants) that it is the government's responsibility to fund the arts, and that "we wouldn't have any culture" if the feds and the provinces turned off the taps. Even if we assume that they're right, and that nobody would ever act, paint, write, or sculpt without a stipend, can it really be proven that we'd be culturally weaker? How much subsidized art is actually aesthetically useful (even as a bad example)?

Also, Nick provides some useful post-election advice to the Tories:

Related note to Stephen Harper: Those arts grants cuts did not cost you any votes; at least not until you restored them in a bid to placate Quebec. Quebec was not — and cannot be — placated and you must know there is not a single publicly funded artist or arts functionary in the country who would vote "Conservative" under any circumstances. But you can alienate your base by kissing Quebec's ass and you can alienate your base by tacking so far to the centre we might as well vote Liberal Classic instead of your New Coke version of the same agenda. Do the right thing now, please.