By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Many people of mature years are amazed at how many young
people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders and are enthusiastic about the
socialism he preaches.
Many of those older people have lived long enough to have
seen socialism fail, time and again, in countries around the world. Venezuela,
with all its rich oil resources, is currently on the verge of economic
collapse, after its heady fling with socialism.
But, most of the young have missed all that, and their
dumbed-down education is far more likely to present the inspiring rhetoric of
socialism than to present its dismal track record.
Socialism is in fact a wonderful vision — a world of the
imagination far better than any place anywhere in the real world, at any time
over the thousands of years of recorded history. Even many conservatives would
probably prefer to live in such a world, if they thought it was possible.
Who would not want to live in a world where college was
free, along with many other things, and where government protected us from the
shocks of life and guaranteed our happiness? It would be Disneyland for adults!
Free college of course has an appeal to the young,
especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly
be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money.
Consider the costs of just one professor teaching just
one course. He or she has probably spent more than 20 years being educated,
from kindergarten to the Ph.D., before ending up standing in front of a class
and trying to convey some of the knowledge picked up in all those years. That
means being fed, clothed, and housed all those years, along with other
expenses.
All the people who grew the food, manufactured the clothing,
and built the housing used by this one professor, for at least two decades, had
to be compensated for their efforts or those efforts would not continue. And of
course someone has to produce food, clothing, and shelter for all the students
in this one course, as well as books, computers, and other requirements or
amenities.
Add up all these costs — and multiply by a hundred or so
— and you have a rough idea of what attending college costs. Whether these
costs are paid by using money in a capitalist economy or by some other
mechanism in a feudal economy, a socialist economy, or whatever, there are
heavy costs to pay.
Moreover, under any economic system, those costs are
either going to be paid or there are not going to be any colleges. Money is
just an artificial device for getting real things done.
Those young people who understand this, whether clearly
or vaguely, are not likely to be deterred from wanting socialism. Because what
they really want is for somebody else to pay for their decision to go to
college.
A market economy is one in which whoever makes a decision
is the one who pays for that decision. It forces people to be sure that what
they want to do is really worth what it is going to cost.
Even the existing subsidies of college have led many
people to go to college who have very little interest in, or benefit from,
going to college, except for enjoying the social scene while postponing adult
responsibilities for a few years.
Whether judging by test results, by number of hours per
week devoted to studying, or by on-campus interviews, it is clear that today’s
college students learn a lot less than college students once did. If college
becomes “free,” even more people can attend college without bothering to become
educated and without acquiring any economically meaningful skills.
More fundamentally, making all sorts of other things
“free” means more of those things being wasted as well. Even worse, it means
putting more and more of the decisions that shape our lives into the hands of
politicians and bureaucrats who control the purse strings.
Obamacare has given us a foretaste of what that means in
reality, despite how wonderful it may sound in political rhetoric.
Worst of all, government giveaways polarize society into
segments, each trying to get what it wants at somebody else’s expense, creating
mutual bitterness that can tear a society apart. Some seem to blithely assume
that “the rich” can be taxed to pay for what they want — as if “the rich” don’t
see what is coming and take their wealth elsewhere.
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