Culture is not essential. Culture is something people choose to do.
Different people choose to wear different things, to think different things, to listen to different things, to watch different things and to do different things. These are effectively about lifestyle.
No-one has the right to force someone else to follow a certain lifestyle. Likewise no-one has the right to force someone else to subsidize theirs.
Why do people feel they have the right to force others to subsidize the Arts, the opera, Indigenous dance companies and the like? If these people want to keep these cultures alive, then let them do this with their own money and not taxes that others are forced to pay.
If you enjoy Plato, organize a symposium. If you like Shakespearean drama, then suffer the slings and arrows of having to pay for it your-self. Something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark when some poor soul working in a factory to support five children and a sick spouse is forced to pay taxes to subsidize the dramatic fetishes of the cultural elites.
Anyone who truly wanted to give opportunity to the masses, would advocate giving them back their taxes, and thereby giving them them the opportunity to choose for themselves what they want to do with their money - to see Shakespeare or not. The current scheme gives two choices: either pay of it and get ripped off, or pay for it, and then get ripped off another $30 per ticket to see it. This is hardly real choice.
Equally, why do people try to stop the building of MacDonalds restaurants? If they don't like US culture, they don't have to go to them.
The reason for these things is partly that they want their own lifestyles subsidized, and partly that they just want to control other people's lives, and impose their own culture and ideas upon them. Hardly consistent with their stated position on tolerance, is it?
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