Art with a message is perfectly acceptable on the public tab, so long as the message is perfectly acceptable. Even the intellectual right has turned soft on subsidies. Key right-wing thinkers have come out for censoring popular culture, and Robert Bork has brutally severed censorship from the issue of who pays. They would be just as offensive if their display were financed by a scatterbrained billionaire. The position against public funding for the arts is marvelously libertarian, constitutional, and progressive.
Art is expression.
If you oppose censorship, you must oppose the handicapping of government-sanctioned viewpoints, inherent in decisions to fund this but not fund that. The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, is private and all paid up. It's a perfectly reasonable position. All it lacks is adherents. Contributing Editor Thomas W. Hazlett teaches economics and public policy at the University of California at Davis and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.