80. Nations should suspend government funding for the arts when significant numbers of their citizens are hungry or unemployed.

Many assume that the practical functions of arts are limited, as arts are generally isolated from material issues. Thus, it would be seemingly extravagant to invest governmental funding to arts industries when the citizens are suffering economic difficulties. However, as for the concrete matters, the arts have practical functions which cannot be replaced by other approaches. The arts serve to a society mainly in two respects. The first one is that the arts can be a useful method of governmental propagandas to overcome national difficulties. The second one is that arts industry is one of the important driving forces of economic growths.

First, because arts can be the useful media for governments to conciliate their people to follow the national policies, the governments need to maintain the financial support for arts despite of the economic hardships. The arts have a long history of being a powerful tool of propagandas when governments and their people were threatened by external factors. For example, when a nation faces national threats such as a war, which is one of the main factors causing unemployment and depression, governments used to resort to mass media arts to unify the people’s will and to boost the approving rate. USA’s film had been an effective motivation to its people and the people of its allies to quash the threats of fascists during Second World War. Many films in this troubled time such as ‘Mrs. Miniver’ had effectively inspired people to participate the war by accusing of the cruelty of Nazism.

Second, the arts can be the prime mover of economic development by being the basis of the newly established industries. When economic difficulties are dominant, the unemployment rate can also be raised by the hostile economic circumstances. In this situation, the governments are strongly required to create stable job positions. In this sense, investing governmental funding to the arts can be a good idea, because, the pure arts can be applied to various other arts industries which recently began to expand. For example, a video game or an animation movie industry encompasses the artists from different studies. To build one video game, the collaboration of music, painting, and literary is essential. Considering the expectable economic benefits from those new markets, providing governmental funding to the arts can be interpreted as the investment for the future.

In conclusion, the idea of banning governmental funding to the arts is not a good idea. It is because the arts have practical and irreplaceable benefits to the societies.