What about the least essential?
- Tax consultants - helping companies avoid contributing to society
- Marketeers - manipulating people into buying worse products for higher prices
- Middle management - causing a lot of fuzz while doing nothing of significance.
Just to name a few. An artists contribution may be abstract but it’s certainly there. There are others that actively sabotage society and very often they make a lot of money.
Isn’t the whole idea of public broadcasting that it doesn’t need to be commercial, that it can go for quality over entertainment value?