Culture vs. health care – On conflicts and priorities

Today the report on the Guggenheim’s Helsinki project will be published.  Rumors suggest that the report will find that Helsinki is a suitable place for a Guggenheim museum. A museum that the city of Helsinki should pony up a few hundred millions of euros to build. Spending this much taxpayer money on a museum may seem preposterous to some.

Some have suggested that in a time when the public sector has to save money by cutting down on funding for health care, building a brand new museum for 200-300 million euro is a bad idea.

However, inevitably an argument far too often heard has also been made suggesting that pitting health care against culture is populistic and a false conflict. City council member Laura Kolbe was quoted in the local newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet on January 3^rd as saying exactly this.

Her argument was that since the money for a museum comes from the city’s budget for culture, while the money for health care, comes from another part of the budget. Thus, no conflict between the two!

Charming as this argument may seem to some, this is really not that sensible. Fundamentally, the money comes from the same source, that is the taxpayer. Just because fraction X of the budget this year is devoted to culture and fraction Y to health care doesn’t mean that these fractions have to be the same for all eternity. It’s not as if these fractions were some law of nature that man cannot change.

Thus, as long as the proponents of the museum cannot show that it really is a profitable investment for the city, in the sense that it will bring in more money to the city than it costs, then they should really be honest and acknowledge the conflict.

This is not to say that the museum shouldn’t be built if it’s not a profitable investment from a economic point of view. But if it’s not, then the argument should be made clearly why it is more important than say health care. Anything else is intellectual dishonesty.