oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting

>oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting

No way -- I threw in 1600s Europe as well as subsistence farming in there.

I think the Patreon point is really interesting. I really don't like Patreon or anything like that, but is a bit miraculous. There's some really, really, niche art up there. That sort of art would have NEVER found an audience, even as recently as the 90s. If it had to be on TV, or in a book, no publisher or producer would have touched it. And even if they had, said publisher or producer would have never managed to find the 0.001% of the population who was interested in it.

The kind of niche art that's available now was simply never possible in any other time in history.

A potential counter-argument could be something like: yes, in the past artists could not have just produced just what they wanted, but perhaps more artists were previously employable (even if they had to just make paintings or Jesus or some other popular thing they didn't really care for.)

What do you think about that?