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1. Social Security Intention: Provide seniors with material security Result: It makes things worse. By any calculation, if the working people right now were allowed to put the same money they pay into social security (12.5% including employer portion) into an interest bearing retirement account they would receive a much higher payout once they retire, but we are not allowed to opt out.

Umm, Social Security DOES provide seniors with material security. Have you given a moment's thought to why participation is mandatory? A significant percentage of the population will elect to not save any money at all. This is not supposition on my part, it would (and did) happen if Social Security were optional. The fact that they make this poor choice unfortunately does not relieve the rest of us of the burden of supporting them once they hit retirement age or even earlier if they become disabled. Another significant percentage of the population will suffer ill fortune on their investments and be largely wiped out, sometimes through no fault of their own. (think low level Enron employees) How exactly do you propose to deal with these individuals once they are past productive working age? "Screw them" is not an acceptable answer.

Social Security is EXACTLY what the name says it is. It's a humane safety net. Granted it could be managed better but it is mandatory for a good reason. I'm not a fan of the program either but I think the alternative of letting people opt out would have worse consequences. Social Security isn't and shouldn't be about making the most money for those who participate. The purpose is and should be to ensure that all our citizens have at least a small income. The purpose is to prevent homelessness and starvation. Since we can't predict who will need help the most I have yet to hear a better plan than to make everyone participate.

3. United Nations Funding
Intention: "To maintain international peace and security...blah blah"
Result: It does nothing of the sort. The most it can be said about it is that it provides a discussion forum where countries with dismal human rights record can rant against the USA and western democracies in general.

The real purpose of the UN is to prevent World War 3. So far it has succeeded in that mission. Anything else it accomplishes is really just icing on the cake. Furthermore there is significant evidence that the UN is often successful in peacekeeping roles. Not always but often. The UN has plenty of flaws but it you are going to say it accomplishes nothing without providing any evidence to support that claim I'm going to go ahead and say you haven't actually looked.

4. National Endowment for the Arts
Intention: To promote arts etc
Result: Frivolously pays taxpayer money to "selected" artists with connections, while majority of artists get nothing. How would you like to be a struggling artist who pays taxes while knowing that the portion of your money goes to other, more "special", artists based on subjective and vague criteria.

Have you actually read what the stated purpose of the NEA is? Apparently not. No one has ever claimed the NEA was intended to support every or even most artists. The NEA attempts to bring art to all Americans, not bring money to all artists. I pay money to support all kinds of government programs that I'll never see a direct financial benefit and I'm fine with that. I pay for roads I'll never use, parks I'll never visit, weapons I dearly hope we never use, medical care for others and plenty of other worthy goals. The NEA has a budget of about $155 million. It is a teeny-tiny little piece of the federal budget that arguably succeeds in its mission. It brings art to Americans. Do you really have nothing better to criticize? Are you seriously arguing that all artists deserve federal grants?

Can I go on?

Please don't unless you improve your arguments significantly.

We've actually had that for a while now.

Someone just forgot to tell the suits that they couldn't really commoditize culture without some serious problems creeping in.

Me, I'd like to see a Public Domain advocate -- an charitable organization with a decent bankroll that buys creative works on behalf of society, paying a lump sum in exchange for an immediate transfer into the public domain.

Oh, perhaps something like this?

Probably not exactly what you had in mind, but there it is. Personally, I'm a bit divided as to the intrinsic merit of something like this. On one had, the grouchy cost conscious republican in me thinks that the 'government' has no business spending money in this sphere. OTOH, the government (both federal, state and local) routinely wastes more money in an hour than the NEA goes through all year. Enjoy (while you can).

National Endowment for the Arts Report: Reading At Risk

That's the first study that came to mind. Granted, it's not necessarily reflective of the quality of someone's education that they choose to spend their time doing something other than reading--but when reading as a whole declines, there's a whole wonderful part of culture that becomes diminished, in a way, by the shrinking community. Not to mention that the potential readers lose out. Other mediums have good stories too, and ones well worth listening to, and things to learn and to enjoy--but reading is at least as important, and in many ways more so in that it stimulates the imagination.

Also, ask a teacher from inner-city schools thirty years ago for their horror stories... and then ask one from inner-city school teachers today.

• Variations on the Street Performer Protocol
• Through gov't taxes & grants
• Whuffie, in our future economy of abundance (once we reach the point where the notion of "working for a living" is made meaningless by more productive robots, molecular manufacturing, and better AI.)

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The USA has the National Endowment for the Arts to fund artists.

They also have administrations dealing with how forms and other official documents are written (see that fine print at the bottom of forms... isn't it a task of OMB to ensure that all government forms are written in a certain fashion?). I suspect they also have terminology commissions.

Most of these items are taxpayer funded. It would be possible to use taxes to fund creative works, but I don't think it would be a terribly popular idea in most countries (besides old-style communist countries like North Korea)

You might want to check out the NEA and NEH. While you may be correct in thinking they're not terribly popular, you can have public funding of the arts without repressive totalitarian regimes, starvation, and people trying to escape to China(!) for a better life. Come to think of it, I'd bet the average North Korean cares more about where his next meal is going to come from than whether some poet was commissioned to pen an epic tribute to their "Glorious Leader".

I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.

But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.

What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.

Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)

While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.