A dear friend recently send me this article about the Skidmore Historic Society Museum.
Initially, I assumed he was praising their independence, and cited Hillsdale College as another example of an institution refusing to feed at the government trough.
But my friend had sent me the link to ridicule it. I guess he found the museum’s sign and lawn shoddy. He also called Hillsdale College a “creepy, backward college run for and by religious nutbags, and a place where no sane person would send their kids, ever.” Such vitriol is sadly typical among advocates, witting and unwitting, of government power.
My friend’s larger point was illustrating the failure of private institutions to provide a public good, because, he said “it cannot be done profitably.” This, of course, is a combination of economic fallacies.
1) The argument is a version of the “the broken window fallacy,” because it ignores what might have happened if people were allowed to keep their money.
Say, I rob a group of people, and build a decent museum with their money. They scrape together the little bit of money I did not take and manage to build a crappy museum alongside mine. Now, I use the disparity not only to justify the robbery, but to argue for more of it.
2) If a museum is not profitable, i.e. if people do not willingly exchange their wealth for the service a museum provides, then we do not value it. We don’t want it, and shouldn’t be forced to give it money.
In this example and elsewhere, the rhetorical challenge for liberty advocates remains, as Frederic Bastiat put it, comparing the unseen to the seen. My friend sees government museums, but doesn’t see and fails to imagine the goods and services that never came into existence because money was confiscated for the museum’s construction and operation.