Tony, please. I can only assume your question is disingenuous...that you know my beef--as outlined in my other post--was not with commisioned artwork, but with the inefficiencies of a govt bureaucracy.

Far too often, govt departments are not motivated to be cost-conscious or even particularly productive. My sister-in-law's experience in a govt-funded social services agency is instructive. Yearly, they'd purchase expensive new office furniture, not because they needed it, but because they were deathly afraid that if they brought a year in underbudget, they face funding cuts the next year (since they'd shown they could do get by with less). Put simply, the furniture was purchased to make sure they spent every last cent of their alloted funds.

Such behaviour is unethical (but apparently not atypical in a govt dept) and has nothing to do with free market forces. The government mindset celebrates inefficiency and allows--if not encourages--low productivity. The latter is an observation from my days at that great Canadian bastion of left-wing lunacy, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The CBC is funded to the tune of half a billion dollars (Cdn) a year, which seems like a lot until you see firsthand the titanic funnels of inefficiency and low-productivity down which they pour the taxpayer's loot.

This, again, has no relationship whatsoever to the forces of the free market. It has nothing to do with the interests and the needs of the people, and everything to do with bureaucratic aggrandizement, and inefficiency as a way-of-life.

The free market needs to be just that...free. It's free when it's guided by the needs and desires of the community, not dictated by some disinterested pencil-pusher whose primary interest is in how much of the budget he can singlehandedly spend.