Allow me to clarify: Tax art rather than subsidize it, at a roughly comparable rate to other industries. I don’t think it matters much whether it’s exactly the same, slightly higher, or slightly lower.
One of the techniques of rational argumentation is called the “Principle of Charity”. When reading and interpreting what someone said, you should infer missing details in order to make their argument the strongest argument possible. In a lw-centric example, Eliezer’s idea of “The least convenient possible world” is the principle of charity, specialized to interpreting hypothetical situations.
I don’t understand the point of your paragraph explaining the principle of charity as if I might never have heard of it. If the implication is that I was being uncharitable to you by not interpreting “tax X” to mean “fail to exempt X from the default taxes”, I strongly disagree. When someone says, for example, that cigarettes should be taxed, they don’t just mean that the same sales taxes that apply to everything else should also apply to cigarettes (as if the default were to exempt cigarettes). Rather, they mean that there ought to be a specific tax on cigarettes in addition to whatever taxes would ordinarily apply, in order to discourage consumption of cigarettes. (This is known as a “sin tax”.)
In the context of the above discussion, the only reasonable interpretation of your remark was that you favored a sin tax on art, analogous to existing sin taxes (in some jurisdictions) on “harmful” products such as alcohol, cigarettes, and the like. If you hadn’t meant this, and simply meant that art should be treated like any other product, you would have simply said “I wouldn’t subsidize art”; as opposed to saying “I would tax art rather than subsidize it”, i.e. “not only would I not subsidize art, I would actually tax it”.
In case this needs still further clarification, the reason this is the only reasonable interpretation is that (so far as I know) art is not exempted from existing taxes. If it were, then the interpretation of “tax art” to mean “subject art to the same taxes as everything else” (i.e. “remove the exemption”) might make sense. As it is, however, “tax art” is highly misleading if what you mean is merely “remove subsidies” (where “subsidies” mean things like government grants, university salaries, etc, rather than tax-exemptions, which, again, don’t currently exist).
Allow me to clarify: Tax art rather than subsidize it, at a roughly comparable rate to other industries. I don’t think it matters much whether it’s exactly the same, slightly higher, or slightly lower.
One of the techniques of rational argumentation is called the “Principle of Charity”. When reading and interpreting what someone said, you should infer missing details in order to make their argument the strongest argument possible. In a lw-centric example, Eliezer’s idea of “The least convenient possible world” is the principle of charity, specialized to interpreting hypothetical situations.
I don’t understand the point of your paragraph explaining the principle of charity as if I might never have heard of it. If the implication is that I was being uncharitable to you by not interpreting “tax X” to mean “fail to exempt X from the default taxes”, I strongly disagree. When someone says, for example, that cigarettes should be taxed, they don’t just mean that the same sales taxes that apply to everything else should also apply to cigarettes (as if the default were to exempt cigarettes). Rather, they mean that there ought to be a specific tax on cigarettes in addition to whatever taxes would ordinarily apply, in order to discourage consumption of cigarettes. (This is known as a “sin tax”.)
In the context of the above discussion, the only reasonable interpretation of your remark was that you favored a sin tax on art, analogous to existing sin taxes (in some jurisdictions) on “harmful” products such as alcohol, cigarettes, and the like. If you hadn’t meant this, and simply meant that art should be treated like any other product, you would have simply said “I wouldn’t subsidize art”; as opposed to saying “I would tax art rather than subsidize it”, i.e. “not only would I not subsidize art, I would actually tax it”.
In case this needs still further clarification, the reason this is the only reasonable interpretation is that (so far as I know) art is not exempted from existing taxes. If it were, then the interpretation of “tax art” to mean “subject art to the same taxes as everything else” (i.e. “remove the exemption”) might make sense. As it is, however, “tax art” is highly misleading if what you mean is merely “remove subsidies” (where “subsidies” mean things like government grants, university salaries, etc, rather than tax-exemptions, which, again, don’t currently exist).