Kink.com's Government Subsidy

California has given a little more than $46,000 to Kink.com the San Francisco based fetish entertainment company. Really it isn’t that much money and doesn’t compare to subsidies that have been given to companies that make poisons and weapons.

I’d rather Kink.com give the money back for purely pragmatic reasons. This is the kind of government spending that Republicans can point to with glee and use to horrify the ordinary majority of voters. It isn’t as if Kink.com really needs the handout.

California’s government has been subsidizing torture-based pornography. The subsidy has been routed through the California Employment Training Panel (ETP), an agency set up to make state businesses more competitive with foreign and out-of-state ones by paying contractors who train in-state workers. Kink.com, famous to San Franciscans as the pornographer that not long ago bought the massive former Armory building in the Mission District, received its training through the Bay Area Video Coalition, a Mission nonprofit that provides classes in video and multimedia technology.

Is government spending obscene? Well, it paid to train S&M filmmakers.

Daniel Riedel of Kink.com said the company plans to fight to retain the subsidy.