"Last friday 'fine artist' Steve Maharey and bullshit artist Judith Tizard launched a new 'Arts Employment Imitative - PACE', " notes Libertarianz Leader, Peter Cresswell, while confirming that 'Imitative' is in fact the correct spelling for this "make-work art jerk-off."

Speaking today in a joint statement, Libertarianz spokesman to deregulate the arts Lindsay Mitchell asked: "What, pray tell is an 'Arts Employment Imitative?' Is the government implying that the work of an artist merely imitates employment? It certainly merely imitates employment if the artist can't make a living out of it - which is clearly the case if WINZ are now putting 'developing' artists on welfare. Are they going to do the same for unsuccessful dentists or plumbers?"

Mitchell points out that the vast majority of people 'assist' themselves into a sustainable career, sometimes at enormous personal cost and risk - and now they are being asked to make up the wages of people whose work nobody wants to buy. "Why shouldn't artists take out loans as an investment in themselves in the same manner that other trainees or students do?" she asks.

One of the artists already 'assisted' was named by the NBR last week as an "artist to invest in." If investors weren't being taxed to the hilt to support the hundreds of thousands of 'clients' already enjoying WINZ' largesse, they would have far greater ability to support the artists they themselves judge as worthy, and to do so directly. Instead we see the government interfering in the free market once again - interfering in the voluntary exchange of goods and services."

"Like all arts funding, this is censorship in reverse," says Peter Cresswell, an architect by profession. "Grey-faced bureaucrats deciding what smearers of paint and elephant dung - or which particular venturers into irrationality - will be deemed worthy of being deemed 'artists.' Beware of governments bearing gifts! As Ayn Rand said, you might think 'that governmental repression is the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country. It is not. There is another way: governmental encouragement.'"

"I am a working artist," concludes Mitchell, "but I can find no justification for anyone with absolutely no interest in the Arts to be forced to hand over their income to support what they would not do if un-coerced."

"It's enough to make you vote Libertarianz!"

ENDS

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