Wealth Creation VS Wealth Redistribution

In 2007 I was browsing the Internet, when much to my surprise I found a database for New England Arts, about which I had not previously been aware. I thought that I had already entered our business information in all the Maine and New England directories. I proceeded to add our information but soon found out that this database was different from all the others, it required agreeing to terms created by The New England Foundation For The Arts. Upon reading the terms, I found them completely unacceptable as it virtually required giving the New England Foundations For the Arts unlimited rights over any information submitted to the database or “deep linked” to the data base- with the term “deep link” left undefined.

In 2011 I am growing our business through another arts database, which is popularly known as Etsy. It is for all things handcrafted including paintings and other art works. The work that one can find in this database runs the gambit form the young artisan starting out and creating an original product in their living room to artists who have won national awards and been in many museum shows.

Etsy is so far a well known secret, a marketing venue designed for the micro economy that exists beneath the radar of public and private management of the economy which targets concentrated wealth and concentrated job creation. Etsy is a database, of sorts, but it is a visual storefront database, global in scope and conceived from the outset to be affordable to anyone, priced as a marketing venue collecting minimalist fees from those that partake of it. In the publishing world it is a highly recognized resource for ideas and talent, and so for the vendors of Etsy, Etsy is more than a way to sell their handcrafted art, it is also a means of exposure to magazines and blogs- a central piece of the social networking marketing, which is touted as the wave of the future for micro, small, and medium sized businesses.

Contrast this to that other database- The New England Foundation For the Arts that enjoys as its partners all the government art bureaucracies in New England. This is not surprising since the birth of extended government art bureaucracies coincides with the institutionalization of the National Endowments For the Arts. State government art agencies were created as conduits for the flow of capital re-distributed by the federal government through the NEA. The function of state art agencies as channels for redistributed capital has continued ever since. Today it is sometimes hard to distinguish a separation between government, foundations, and non-profit organizations. Just last summer the Maine legislature incorporated a new business classification into the statute governing the LLC. The new classification is known as the L3C designed to (allegedly) make it easier for foundations to give money to private enterprises without violating federal tax codes. One of the requirements for a business to procure L3C status is that it must not “intend” to make an “income”.

In order to have any information listed in the New England Foundation for the Arts Database, one must sign the terms of agreement, which allots onto NEFA unlimited rights over any thing in their database. The language of the agreement has similarities to language used by large private sector businesses such as Google and Adobe, but upon reading those private sector agreements one finds that there are limitations applied to Google and Adobe assuring the user that the company is only asking for rights that are necessary to conduct their businesses and no more. Over the years since 2007 I have written NEFA in objection to the terms of agreement. The phone is answered by voices sounding both young and naïve who explain it away by saying that the legal department just wanted to cover as broad a range a possible (for NEFA). They have certainly done that!

Why would anyone agree to the terms? – First and foremost because they don’t read them, and then because NEFA ties agreement to the terms with access to the inner networks of grants funding. The Maine Arts Commission is now using the New England Foundation For the Arts database to process its grants, which requires applicants to agree to the NEFA terms of agreement if they apply online.

The other night I heard The National Endowment For the Arts mentioned as a possible place to cut to reduce the national deficit. Can we as a nation exist without the National Endowment for the Arts? I don’t know about our government art bureaucracies, NEFA, and the vast network of non-profit arts funding – But Etsy can.

AFTER NOTE: This is an interesting Article on developments in Etsy. When third parties started developing new API's by reversing the Etsy API, rather that suing them, Etsy embraced and welcomed them in a win-win approach to innovative and creative marketing

Government Arts unequivically equate "the arts" with "non-profit organizations"

The Email from The Maine Arts Commission says it all:
The Maine Arts Commission Presents
Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative
There are only 70 seats left for this free event, sign up today.
Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, will visit Portland, ME, on July 1 as part of “Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative,” an arts management symposium. Kaiser will provide counsel and encouragement to nonprofit arts organizations in need.

Kaiser will be at the Portland Museum of Art between 9:15 and 11:30 am on July 1 for this invaluable symposium where he will provide counsel and encouragement to nonprofit arts organizations in need. During this free symposium Kaiser will address the key challenges facing nonprofit arts organizations through such areas as fundraising, building more effective boards of trustees, budgeting and marketing.

Tickets for this event are free and must be reserved online at http://artcrisis.eventbrite.com. Seating is limited and we suggest that you reserve your seats early to avoid disappointment. Thanks to the kindness of the staff and leadership of the Portland Museum of Art, all those attending the event will also receive free admission to the Museum for the day.
Complete details of this event, including directions, parking, Museum information, bios and local attractions, can be found by visiting http://mainearts.maine.gov/kaiser.aspx.


At Andersen Studio, we know this well as neither "high growth" private capitalist, nor non-profit organization, we have long been relegated to the economic sector non-creative masses by the authority of Maine's corporate state.

The Goverenment and Industry Partnership VS the Motivation for the Non-Profit Organization

A few years ago I read two books:

The Free Agent Nation by Daniel H. Pink

The Non-Profit Economy by Burton Allen Weisbrod

The Free Agent Nation now seems like a relic from our distant past, while the principles in The Non-Profit Economy, which lays out the distinctions and roles that separate the private economy, government, and the non-profit economy, cry for public review.

While I was searching for The Nonprofit Economy, I came upon this paper, which expands upon the work of Weisbrod, published in Munich by Giovanni Cerulli


The redistributive role of non-profit organizations


ABSTRACT

By starting from the consideration that non-profit organizations cover a significant re-distributive function beside that of governmental agencies, the paper questions why government prefers to finance via transfers private entities likewise lucrative and non-lucrative entities rather than produce these goods directly.

By generalizing the Hansmann (1996) theory, we propose a “make or buy” approach in which the choice among three different ownership regimes (governmental, non-profit and for-profit) providing services in public benefit oriented sectors is affected not only by costs reduction (X-efficiency) but also by the level of transfers (degree of “redistribution”) decided at a political level.

QUOTE:


Nonetheless, as suggested by Borzaga (2001), two elements seem to be overlooked by this literature. The first relies on a scarce attention devoted to the internal structure of the non-profit institution that still remains an unexplored black box; the second refers to the fact that this literature has quite completely overlooked the evident fact that non-profit organizations also hold a relevant “redistributive function”, that is, they are set up for and operate with the explicit goal of modifying the distribution of income when the current one is considered as not consistent with social preferences (Borzaga, 2003, p. 39). This aim is particularly distinctive for non-profit organizations working within public benefit oriented sectors where, as we will see, beside the need for efficiency society considers also the need for equity. The paper aims to analyze this second issue by deepening the first one.

Maine Taxpayers Fund High Growth Capitalism But What Are Taxpayers Receiving in Return??

Letter to the Editor of the Boothbay Register

Dear Senator Trahan and representative Bruce McDonald,

I wrote to you couple of days ago about The Small Business Growth Fund.

This fund was created in 1995 and appears to be a state government investment in private entrepreneurship for high growth companies doing "public good" (which raises the question who decides what is for the "public good"-does the taxpayer have a voice in this or just the fund managers?)

I asked what does the taxpayer get out of it? I would think that if taxpayers have invested in a private investment company that this information would be readily available and assessable to the general public but I cannot find it.

I would assume that if every dollar the taxpayer puts in were matched by nine dollars of private investment, that the taxpayer is a 10% shareholder in the company- But as I have never seen this stated, it remains only an assumption.

On the basis of that assumption, it leads to the question- why is our state government in so much debt? I saw pitches at the Juice Conference that speculated profits in the billions. If this is the sort of "high growth" that SBGF invests in, then, why haven't the taxpayers, like the good citizens of Alaska, under the governorship of Sarah Palin, received dividends in the mail?

Is it because of the even higher costs of our state entitlement programs?

Entitlements help, especially when people do not have jobs- but even slaves have entitlements. Entitlements are an investment that slave owners have to make to maintain their assets.

Where are the "opportunity" programs for the small scale and modest growth sector of the micro-economy-, which is clearly excluded from investment by the taxpayer-, funded Small Business Growth Fund?

We need a new category for the small business sector that is not classifiable as "high -growth" capitalism or non-profit organizations. This is truly the private sector micro-economy- those small businesses on "Main Street", that we heard so much about when our Federal government was selling TARP to the public. We haven't heard anything about Main Street since then but the credit freeze is still alive and well on Main Street whose primary source of capital investment is self-generated profit, which, with many small businesses filing as S-corporations, (profit reported on individual returns) will be taxed heavily if self-generated profit exceeds $250,000.00. Then the private citizen will be taxed to an increased degree in order to fund our ever-expanding federal government and to pay the interest on our federal government's rapidly escalating debt.

Where are the "opportunity programs" for the people? The United States is transforming from the land of opportunity into the land of entitlements. If there were a growth in opportunity, there would not be such a large need for entitlements. When the House was first formulating the "Stimulus Bill" they called the small business sector " the engine of new job creation" and then allocated 200 billion dollars for food stamps and $450 million for loans for small businesses, which includes the "high growth" businesses that are exclusively favored by Maine's Small Business Growth Fund. Add to that continual extensions in unemployment and a federal administration that only recently got the idea that maybe it should focus on job creation- this after months of promoting the citizens of this country to "volunteer" service. Once the citizenry is programmed to accept that they MUST volunteer service, the dots can be connected between receiving entitlements and "mandatory" volunteer service- and there you have it- the people of the United States squarely become the slaves of concentrated power and wealth.

The Small Business Growth Fund was created by our state legislature in 1995. Times have changed. Where is the Small Business growth fund for small scale and modest growth companies, which are the foundational basis of a flourishing middle class? My family business was started in 1952 with the philosophy of creating a hand made product affordable to the middle class. In those days the middle class was flourishing and the distribution of wealth took the form of a bell curve, with the greatest amount of wealth distributed among the greatest number of people.

Both sides of the political divide agree that we need to move back to a more equitable distribution of wealth- but all the solutions for doing so are targeted at funding and stimulating growth at the top. This is not working! When is someone in government going to get the revolutionary idea of stimulating growth at the bottom to middle sector of the economy? Where is the Main Street Economy Growth Fund? It is in our self-generated profits, capped at $250,000.00 before being heavily taxed to fund the hegemony of concentrated power and wealth that is the new face of government.