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Good evening. Tickets to see Taylor Swift in London are apparently going on the resale market for over £4,500, which is marginally less heartbreaking for me than my granddaughters, obviously, but raises questions even more profound than her lyrics. The philosophically

snooty one is about the moral connection between price and value. St Thomas Aquinas taught

that raising prices to the limit demand will bear was exploitation, if not theft. Classically

liberal economists, on the other hand, argue that value can only be defined by what people are prepared to pay.

At root, it's an argument between fairness and deficiency.

The more immediate issue is whether access to culture, high and low, should be entirely dictated by the market.

And to what extent of at all, the art should be subsidised by the state.

A posh seat at Coven Garden can cost as much as

£245, even more for a really in-demand West End play. Glastonbury is £360 this year.

The more expensive premiership football season tickets are nudging £2,000. Should everybody have the

right to be entertained, perhaps uplifted?

Is there an economic case, an argument about national well-being,

a levelling up imperative for government funding of the arts?

If so, who decides what's art and what it's worth and how?

Aquinas v Swift, cost and value, and what price art.

Our moral maze tonight, the panel, Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and inter-religious

studies at Edinburgh University, the commentator and campaigner, Inaya Fulharin Amman,

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, and James Orr, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, Mona, your cultural fix I have just learned, rather surprisingly, is Michael Jackson, not live, obviously. Is that a costly enthusiasm?

I don't know why you're surprised. I mean, no one can deny that Michael Jackson was a huge artist

and his legacy lives on.

Yes, he was a costly enterprise,

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