The government is not a good patron of the arts, says Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine. For one thing, it doesn’t have the taste to pick good from bad. But that’s not to say it should never have a role — as a censor, for example:

[C]ensorship is a precondition of the greatest art, at least if history is anything to go by. I mean a negative censorship, in which there are things that you can’t say, rather than a positive censorship, in which there are things that you must say: The latter is deadly. Preferably also the censorship should be light-handed, capricious, and unpredictable: The perfect recipe for the production of art (though, as every cook knows, some recipes go wrong even when you stick to them) is absolute monarchy with incompetent censorship and religious belief.

He’s quick to say he wouldn’t actually advocate censorship today. Read it here.