Earmockery

Obama's new stimulus package was purported to have $50 million donated to the arts. In response to this, an artist has summed up my feelings better than I even could:

Voxbox, I'll wager that you'll return from your lofty exile to read this reply to your post. You make some good points, but this isn't an argument about bullet points. It's an argument about principle. The federal government's role was relegated principally to foreign affairs, whereas internal commerce, including the arts, would be the realm of states and interstate commerce - free of the shackles of a large, central government. James Madison, "the father of the Constitution," said, "The powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, [such] as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people."; and WHEREAS, Thomas Jefferson emphasized that the states are not "subordinate" to the national government, but rather the two are "coordinate departments of one simple and integral whole. The one is the domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government." (Taken from http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2009-10/Pdf/Bills/House%2...) The issue is not that FDR took millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fund a wagonload of murals; the issue is that he never should have in the first place. The principle of the matter is that the federal gov't is too large for its own and our own good, and it has overstepped its bounds time and time again. This "stimulus" package is a crock of garbage. Obama talked about change - here it is. What a change, indeed. INCREASE taxes FOREVER. Gee, thanks. INCREASE the scope of federal government FOREVER. Thanks again. INCREASE the peering eye of big brother, INCREASE funding, and therefore CONTROL over the arts. Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Chavez all knew/know this principle: control over the arts and media outlets means an extra measure of control over the "useful idiots" they claim to serve. If we accept federal monies for work, we are beholden to the federal government for the use of those dollars and the work they produce. We become accountable to a corrupt bureaucracy's agenda and slaves to the machinery of oppression, censorship, and even death. I join my voice to Simon9's and jbortiz99's - keep the federal government where it belongs - out of our studios and wallets and back to the very few realms it was designed to care for - war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. Obama can take his trillion-dollar rape of our posterity and flush it.