> So where does the mediocre violinist come in? As an currently
> unemployed wanna be artist, I can imagine working as an employment
> counselor in the WPA arts section. I'd have him auditioned to see if
> he was promising enough to join an amatuer orchestra for Sunday
> concerts in the local park. Maybe join a local poka band where he
> couldn't do much harm.
I agree with your basic thrust, but the test lies in the Sunday concerts in the park. If there's at least some modestly enthusiastic attendance (and you could easily imagine that even some people who don't go are glad that the concerts are there), then you've arguably demonstrated that the market underprovided Sunday concerts, which would automatically justify hiring the so-so violinist. If the music is really bad, nobody ever attends, and the concerts annoy other park-goers, then hiring the violinist was a bad idea. (And the calculation is also affected by the taxi situation - if there's a major taxi shortage and nobody can get a cab, it's less desirable to push the cab driver into violining.) But the point is that the success of the program is based on meeting an unmet social need, not solely on meeting the individual's desire to get paid for his labor of love.
This is sort of analogous to the wage-insurance system that Mitterand set up in France in the 80's for "les intermittents du spectacle" - film and theater workers who get paid by the job. You pay in when you've got work and if you rack up enough hours, you get a modest pension during the times you're not working. It allows people to survive as lighting technicians, extras in the opera, character actors, who don't always have steady work. The pensions are just large enough not to fully support people, but to allow them to live okay while waitressing, or whatever, until the next job comes. If the system didn't exist, a lot of people would be forced to go to law school or whatever and get a whole new career and then the French film and theater industries would contract drastically.
SA