NAS Blog

“It is widely acknowledged that in markets where buyers and sellers are free to choose what they want”

This is the issue of contention — the great fear that the buyers might truly BE free to purchase what they want — and only that which they want. Powerful interest groups have a LOT to loose were that to happen.

Think “bundling.” Think about a merchant who has to by a bunch of widgets from his brother-in-law to keep family harmony but can’t find anyone to sell the damn things to, and really can’t just throw them away — he will include them with something else in a promotion of sorts. “Donate blood and get a coupon for a free widget”, “spend $50 and get five of them”, etc — it is not uncommon for a merchant to have something that “isn’t moving” and to just want to get rid of it.

Think “cost shifting” — why were the Ford Escorts of the late ’80s and early ’90s so cheap?
In a word: CAFE — “Corporate Average Fuel Economy.” For every Escort they built, Ford could then build a SUV and average the two together to meet the CAFE requirements. And when CAFE ended, the Escort immediately became a much bigger car.

What Ford essentially did — what the government made Ford do — was force the people who wanted to buy a SUV to subsidize someone else’s purchase of a small car. If it were a direct tax — at least before Obama — there would have been open rebellion much like there would be (and was) when people simply had to send in their income tax payment at the end of the year. There likely might have been a court challenge that well may have won. But by hiding this tax in the CAFE standards, people were forced to subsidize something they otherwise would not have subsidized.

The same thing is true of higher education. BudLite drinking Joe College is the SUV customer. And I want to be very clear here — I am talking about a cadre here that isn’t all white, isn’t all heterosexual and half of whom aren’t male — I am talking about the culture wars and political correctness and the open contempt for all the values of, well, the Western Christian Liberal Enlightenment and the rest of Western Civilizaiton — and some of the most horrific abuses of individuals I have witnessed at Planet UMass involved individuals who were ethnic minorities, who were gay, and who were female.

Most of these weren’t public but one that was involved a Black South African just after Apartheid ended — all his life the young man had wanted to be treated like everyone else and he comes to UMass where we have Federal Title VI and university policy that says he is supposed to be, and then he receive all kinds of grief for not “acting black” enough. A decade earlier, an AfroAm professor reportedly was forced out of the department after he converted to Judiasm. This is what I am talking about — and it is an oversimplification to say “Joe College” but it *IS* “Joe College” whose costs are being shifted to pay for this stuff.

Take law school. Presume that the bar exam is a valid gatekeeping instrument — there should be a direct correspondence between law school GPA and bar exam scores, and one should either pass or flunk both. Yet every law school I know of has bar prep courses — you graduate law school and then you study for the bar exam. So what did you learn during 3 years of law school, I ask.

Critical legal theory would not exist were it not subsidized by everyone who has to hire a lawyer. Its costs are shifted first to the law students and then to their customers. So too with the rest of the politicized garbage in both law schools and higher ed in general — parents would not pay for transgendered bathroom facilities if they had a choice, so we must not let them have such a choice.

I look at three recent hires at UMass Amherst. Three women known for their “social justice” activism and not what the are hired to do — one to administer the student judicial system, the other two to assist students with disabilities. None really have relevant degrees, one only has her baccalaureate. The prior work experience of the woman overseeing the student judicial system — teaching social justice courses.

Joe College simply would not go to UMass Amherst in a free market situation. If his price for anything else was the same, not less but just the same, he would go to the other option. He wouldn’t put up with the discrimination — and yes, there is race and gender discrimination at UMass — it just victimizes disfavored groups so no one cares about it.

And that is what all the entrenched interests are worried about. There is a lot of stuff being subsidized that simply would not be in a free market.