Springtime for Hitler

Mel Brooks' The Producers was a play and movie that skewered creators of Broadway shows by creating a musical (funny, but in awful taste) entitled "Springtime for Hitler". The song ran through Bill Wilson's mind and my own as he reports on calls by the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times for the Feds to create a Department of Culture.

The editorials focus on the problems arts organizations are having in securing funding. As a patron of the Columbus Symphony, which is currently on financial life support, I can certainly relate to their concerns. However, the editors apparently have forgotten that Departments of Culture tend to be used for more sinister purposes as agents of totalitarian régimes. Mr. Wilson recalls how the culture ministry was used for censorship by Adolf Hitler, and how the Communists directed their writers, composers, and artists to create bland and worthless works through their "unions". We have a National Endowment for the Arts that works reasonably well. There is no need -- and considerable danger -- to elevating it to a Cabinet department.

The problem with influential liberals is that they want the government to force us to pay for charities and arts that people should be voluntarily supporting out of their own pockets.

Culture is wonderful, but only if it is generated in a free society -- free, that is, from the government control that comes with taxpayer dollars.