Against the subsidy of nightclubs

Just as we start here, yes children, your current elders did used to do all this sort of stuff. Where do you think you, you next generations, come from? Having pointed that out:

As a DJ, I know the government must intervene to save the night time industry

Dave Haslam

The increasing closure of nightclubs threatens jobs, as well as the future of music and the souls of towns and cities

No.

At least, not yet, not without further examination.

It is, of course, possible that government action is destroying a previously viable business sector. Given our views here that wouldn’t surprise in the slightest. But it’s also necessary to grasp the point we like to make so often - there are structural declines in business sectors as well, simply things that have passed their time.

So, we need to work out whether nightclubs are failing because of enemy action or because they’re going the way of buggy whip makers and coal mines - things we either don’t need, or don’t want, or at least need fewer of. If it’s enemy action then stop said enemy doing that. If it’s structural then the correct response is a shrug and an “Ah, well”. The general point is true whichever of these it is that is affecting nightclubs.

Yes, we know, dance is the oldest of the human arts, that the young gather to do so is hardly a surprise. And yet there is - clearly and obviously - a certain amount of sexual display and even sexual commingling that accompanies the practice. Such sexual display and commingling now has other outlets - Grindr, Tinder, Bumble are the ones we oldies have heard of as they appear in the newspapers often enough - so is the decline in the nightclub sector because of actions to force it to decline or the disappearance of one of the uses to which nightclubs used to be put?

Before whatever might be done is even planned, let alone done, we need the answer to that question. If the - to adapt the old vernacular - meet market function is now online, not in physical space, then this is a secular, systemic, change and not one that requires action to reverse. If it’s the other, if it is supply being suppressed even while demand remains strong then we should stop doing whatever it is that is doing the suppression. No, not subsidise, not grant special conditions, but stop doing that suppression - for if the one sector is suffering from such conditions then so will others. We should lift the same such weights upon all sectors, not just the one.

So, yes, we’re against the subsidy of nightclubs, either way. Even as what should be done differs dependent upon the answer to the important question. Why are nightclubs having these problems? Is it government or folk now have another method of finding sex?

Just to note, an observation that the young no longer do use nightclubs to meet others rather proves the point.