Who decides which culture Hungary funds — a committee or you?

Indoklás

This line is the substantive activity of the chapter — the money the NKA awards to applicants across literature, music, fine art, theatre, film, heritage, festivals, and community programmes, allocated by professional colleges whose members are appointed by the minister responsible for culture. Two distinct classical-liberal objections apply, and they should be kept separate because they point to different parts of the reform. The first is a **dispersed-knowledge problem**.[^4] There is no market price for "the cultural value of a poetry-magazine print run" or "a regional folk-music festival", and the relevant information — which projects an audience actually wants, which producers can sustain themselves, which forms are worth supporting at the margin — is dispersed across thousands of would-be patrons and consumers. A central fund cannot aggregate that dispersed knowledge; this is not a problem of administrative will or college expertise, but of information that simply does not exist in centralised form. It substitutes the judgement of a small number of appointed college members for the revealed preferences of the cultural public. The college members may be expert and well-intentioned; the structural point holds regardless of their quality, because no committee, however expert, has access to the information that voluntary patronage and ticket revenue generate continuously. The second is **public-choice exposure**, and it is the sharper objection in the Hungarian case. A discretionary grant fund of this size, allocated by ministerially-appointed colleges, concentrates a benefit on an organised constituency — the recurring applicant community of cultural organisations — while the cost is spread across lottery players and copyright payers who have no say in the allocation. The recurring applicants develop a professional dependence on the fund that generates a structural lobby for its preservation, independent of the cultural value produced. This is not a hypothesis about the NKA specifically: it is the predictable consequence of any arrangement in which a renewable discretionary budget is allocated by political appointees to a self-selecting applicant pool. The arrangement also exposes the allocation to capture by whichever bloc holds the appointment power — a vulnerability that exists by institutional form, not by the conduct of any particular set of college members.[^2] The mechanism here is one the whitepaper's foundations make legible directly: discretionary state allocation generates rent regardless of who administers it. A reform that changed the composition of the colleges, or tightened conflict-of-interest rules, would redirect the rent to differently-credentialed recipients; it would not eliminate it. The rent is produced by the discretionary-allocation structure itself. The phase-out destination is not the abolition of cultural support. It is the replacement of central discretionary allocation with **decentralised voluntary patronage routed through the same revenue base**. The earmarked revenue streams need not vanish. The copyright-collective payments already originate in voluntary cultural transactions and can be returned to or retained by the rights-holders and their organisations. The gambling-tax earmark, if it is retained at all, can be distributed as a **tax-credit or matching mechanism for private cultural giving** — the donor chooses the recipient, the state matches at a published rate, and the dispersed-knowledge problem is solved by letting thousands of small allocation decisions replace a few large ones. The international comparator is the **United States' reliance on tax-deductible private giving** as the primary cultural-funding channel: federal direct funding through the National Endowment for the Arts has held at 207 million dollars a year from fiscal 2023 through 2026, a small fraction of total US cultural funding; approximately 90% of US arts funding flows through private sources — individuals, foundations, corporations, and earned income — with direct government appropriation accounting for the remaining share.[^3][^6] The mechanism is patron choice at scale, not committee choice at the centre. For a Hungarian household, the per-capita arithmetic is modest: 17,614.6 millió Ft of grants spread across roughly 9.6 million residents[^7] is about 1,835 Ft per resident per year. The figure is small, and the analysis does not pretend the NKA is a major fiscal burden. The case for reform is structural, not fiscal: the arrangement substitutes committee judgement for dispersed knowledge and creates a standing political-allocation channel. The size of the line is not the criterion; the mechanism is.