A closely related issue is whether governments should support some goods even when the public isn’t willing to pay for them. The French government, for example, spends 1.5% of French GDP a year subsidizing culture and related “higher values.”4 The implicit judgment is that culture is “more valuable” than what people will otherwise spend their money on, and that government is a better judge of “what is best” than are private individuals, at least for these particular sums of money.

The French also place a minimum quota on how many French-language movies must be shown on TV, specifically 40% of the total. For a while, there was even a French ministry of rock ‘n’ roll, to support the production of French-language popular music. The government tried to give the French people French rock ‘n’ roll instead of the American and British rock music that the French people were buying. Supporters of the policy say that subsidizing French culture is valuable in its own right, and that the aesthetic judgments of the marketplace should not be the final ones.

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The pragmatic criticism of French policy is to argue that these subsidy schemes tend to be counterproductive and wasteful. Maybe French movies would be more successful if they had to appeal to French consumers rather than to the French bureaucrats who hand out the subsidies. The more philosophical criticism is that people should be allowed to spend their money as they choose. In the latter view, freely chosen values have a moral worth of their own that is to be respected.

Of course, it is not just the French who give special support to some cultures and not others. The American government exempts the Amish, a small religious community living predominantly in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, from many forms of taxation and compulsory education. America’s approximately 300 Indian reservations have a special legal status, in part because the U.S. government takes special care to preserve those cultures. The U.S. federal government also spends money supporting the arts (though the American government spends less than does the French government), in part, because some people want to encourage a higher quality of art than they think will arise through the marketplace and voluntary charity. In fiscal 2014, the U.S. budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was just over $154 million.