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May 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:40
749 Universities and the 'Public Good'

Are state subsidies a good solution for 'social goods'?

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is day one of Freedom Aid Radio, the full-time extravaganza, the Philosopalooza, which is Freedom Aid Radio.
Thank you again for making this possible.
And now we are not joining me in the car doing my commute.
We are joining me in the car where I am on my errands, and I'm going to deposit my big fat check from the extra bunch of work that I did.
So I wanted to, without further ado, go to an excellent, excellent post that a listener put on the board.
A new listener, welcome. This fine gentleman is a socialist, which should not make us shiver with horror, but rather with anticipation.
And... There's a lot that we have in common with this gentleman.
A distrust of political hegemonies, a dissatisfaction with the existing order of things.
So I would like to have a chat with this gentleman, and I think it would be of interest to you as well.
So, he writes, in terms of universities, the common good, say, in the context of universities, is served by adding to the sum total of human knowledge.
As they have become more subject to the principles of economic rationalism, the overall benefit to society universities provide has diminished.
And he gives a reference. This is on the board.
The facts are that in ten years, public spending on universities has been cut savagely.
Academic staff now have to cope with much larger classes than previously, while the students they teach are more varied in age background and academic commitment.
Staff are required to teach in areas new to them, while at the same time they are pressured to publish more, to bring in research monies, and to undertake more administration and committee work.
Most are seriously stressed.
In the institutions that currently call themselves university, knowledge is only to be pursued if it is valuable in the meanly focused sense that it makes money.
Research and teaching are valued to the extent that a price in dollars can be put upon those once intrinsically valued activities.
Market forces determine what is to be researched and what is to be taught.
Today's climate of economic rationalism requires top-down management to enforce decisions and procedures that maximize economic gain to the virtual exclusion of all else.
Not only does this economic rationalist approach ignore the efficiencies of not being under-resourced, but it also fails to recognize the benefits of pure research.
Less so perhaps in fashionable areas like biology, where there's obviously money to be made, but take a field like anthropology.
There may well be significant discoveries to be made that could enable large increases in productivity across society.
But because any immediate financial return from such pure research appears unlikely in this field, what was once done for the sake of being done is neglected, because there isn't a quick buck in it.
So the ratchet handle of science doesn't get cranked unless there's a payoff on the next click.
How to address this problem without some sense of collective interest?
Anyway, I have to admit that my vision of the perfect society is theoretical pie-in-the-sky stuff, thus subject to many assumptions on the part of the reader, since it's basically impossible to articulate the whole idea in one setting, let alone conceive of answers for every little detail, just like the idea of a world without governments.
However, having never really paid much thought to pure anarcho-capitalism, I'm prepared to give this notion the kind of chance my ideas have almost never received, And so I'm in the process of wrapping my head around some of Stefan's podcasts in order to understand what it is you guys are advocating.
I can't imagine! There's a commercial incentive for everything that needs doing at this stage, though.
Well, that is a very wise, I do believe, very intelligent and very thoughtful.
And there is much, much, much that I agree with it and much which I admire in it.
First of all, let me tell you what I like and admire in it, if that means anything to you, just so we can understand that we do have a lot of common ground when we have a conversation like this.
The first thing that I admire, brother, is your dedication to To the idea of knowledge as, to some degree, at least from an economic standpoint, as an end in itself.
My opinion is that the purpose of philosophy is happiness, in the same way that the purpose of medicine is health.
And so, happiness, what does that have to do with economics?
Well, there are some necessary things that you have to have in order to be happy.
Food and shelter are fairly important.
But there's lots of things in life that we value enormously which have nothing to do with economic gain.
Music and children spring to mind.
Music does not make you economically more productive or rich, and in fact it costs money to buy, or at least it did when I was younger.
Perhaps when I was your age.
Who knows? So music is something which gives us enormous pleasure, which is a net negative to our economics.
Children, of course, are economically a complete disaster.
But we do have children because they give us pleasure, and their little feet stepping on us when they are five or so years old, giving us little...
Geisha Backrubs is quite a delight.
So, I absolutely, completely and totally am on your side, brother, when you talk about the need to have knowledge and wisdom and activities within the human sphere of action which are not predicated on money.
Love is not predicated on money, and if it is, well, it's not really love, as we've talked about before.
So I absolutely agree with you that there are enormous values in the world that are not measurable directly financially.
And so you and I are on the same page.
And I think that that's just a wise thing to say or believe overall.
So I'm very much with you on that.
That having been said, there's some challenges in this realm that I think you bring into the conversation that I'm having trouble with.
And I'm certainly, you know, willing to be an idiot having trouble with it.
And you can let me know if that's the case and hopefully correct me if I'm speaking out of the wrong orifice.
So it's true that there are things in life, the economic value of which cannot be measured.
Love and the value of children and the beauty of music and so on, right?
And yet, you want to measure them.
So this is the thing that I have some trouble with.
If I go to my wife and I say, honey, your love for me is priceless.
The love that we share is priceless.
And then I say, but actually it's about $12,512.
Actually, it's not even about. That's exactly what it is.
That's a bit of a contradiction, right?
I mean, if I say that something is both without price...
But then I attach a price to it, I'm sort of contradicting myself.
And I think that, I mean, again, this is just me taking a first swing at your argument, so let me know if I've gone, even when I've gone completely astray.
But if you say something, this exists, which cannot be measured, the value or price of which cannot be measured, but I'm going to put a price on it, which is the price that the public should pay to have it, right?
And so... If you say that a Department of Anthropology produces value or has a value that can't be measured in terms of price, but that the price of a Department of Anthropology is a million dollars a year, I'm a little confused, right?
Because then you're saying, well, it can't be measured in terms of price or value, but the price obviously can be measured, and that's the price of the salaries of the people who are The teaching there, I guess the heating, the school grounds, whatever it is, all the stuff that goes into running it.
And of course some students will pay money to go to it, but let's just say that the net negative for your Department of Anthropology, or archaeology, or whatever it was you said, is a million dollars.
A million dollars a year, it's in the hole.
So here we have an economic situation.
It's a million dollars a year in the hole.
What that means is that it's valued by society at minus one million dollars.
We'll start with that position, right?
So then the question is, if you believe that archaeology is worth $2 million a year, but it's only able to generate $1 million a year in book sales and student tuition and all this, but it costs $2 million a year, it's in a whole $1 million a year.
So if the Department of If archaeology is going to continue, then you need to come up with a million dollars a year somehow, right?
I mean, so we already have an economic argument.
So saying that economics is not how we should make the decision, I think is not the case, right?
I mean, because the people who want to teach, who want to learn, they're all making economic decisions, unless you can get...
Teachers who are, I don't know, independently wealthy, who are willing to work for free, you face an economic calculation, you know, sort of like it or not.
That's not capitalism, that's just reality, right?
That you've got a million dollar a year deficit, which means that, you know...
You need a million dollars, right?
So the traditional answer in many spheres is public funding, right?
So to say, well, there's this value to society that's diffuse.
It doesn't accrue to any one particular person individually in the way that an MBA or a law degree does.
And so we're going to tax and we're going to fill this million dollar hole with tax money.
So the real question is how do you replace the million dollars that is missing after the books close on this archaeology department?
And there's really only three ways to do it.
There's only really three ways to do it.
And again, this isn't me, this isn't capitalism, this is just sort of basic reality, right?
The first way to do it is through trade, right?
Through voluntary trade.
So, I don't know if...
You know this. I mean, I'll just go over the basics.
You're a very smart fellow. You understand economics.
So the trade is the win-win situation of voluntary trade.
It's an exchange of values, right?
You've got a million dollar hole, you've got to fill it with something.
So how are you going to fill it? Well, you can trade, right?
So, you know, if I have, I don't know, Anna Nicole Smith's diary and you are an Anna Nicole Smith fetishist and you want to spend 10 grand on her diary and we make the trade on eBay or something, then it's clear, as long as nobody's defrauding or coercing anyone, it's clear that you want Anna Nicole Smith's diary, you know, every day of which seems to be inscribed with more drugs, right?
You want Anna Nicole Smith's diary more than you want the $10,000 that you're going to pay for it.
I want the $10,000 more than I want Anna Nicole Smith's diary.
This is an objective measure of which we value, and we know that because we are willing to make the trade voluntarily, without coercion, without defrauding, or anything like that.
So this is sort of a win-win situation that is basic to any sort of market or reality, to life, right?
I mean... To trade, it is as, you know, voluntarism to trade is to coercion to trade as love is in relationships to rapists in relationships, right?
Love is a voluntary win-win negotiation.
We hope, at least we hope, it's not a narcissistic attachment or something.
But either way, dating somebody who's willing to go out with you voluntarily is the same as free trade, and coercive redirection of funds is the same as rape.
I mean, not even metaphorically, like, So, we have that challenge up front.
So, how is it we're going to fill the million dollars?
Well, we're either going to fill it through trade, and by that what I mean is some Indiana Jones type is going to sell his story to a movie factory or sort of a movie studio for...
A million dollars, and they're going to donate that money, or maybe his right to sell that story is part of his contract.
Maybe they're going to write a book, come up with a deal for National Geographic, you're going to rent the school grounds out to, I don't know, discos or something, right?
Something. You're going to do something.
To sort out this problem of how is it we are going to spend, how is it we're going to fill this million dollar hole, right?
That is the challenge, right?
So in that situation, we definitely have the fact of the matter being that we can trade with someone.
Or we can say, well, we're going to increase the value of your degree by mixing in some economics or philosophy training stuff.
And therefore, we're going to raise the price of the degree more so than it's going to cost us just to produce it.
You know, there's lots of different things that you can do.
And of course, I don't run universities other than this one.
But I don't know what it is exactly that could be done.
But in all these situations, something can be done wherein you can fill that million-dollar hole with a trade of some kind, right?
With some sort of exchange of value in whatever it is that you're doing.
So... Oh, you could sell the lectures online.
Whatever it is you're going to do, right? That's sort of trade.
And that's obviously non-coercive, assuming, again, no fraud or any of that kind of crap.
So we've got a non-coercive situation wherein you're going to find a way to fill that million-dollar hole.
And, of course, that's perfectly within the tenets of the free market and so on.
Now, that's sort of one way. Now, the other way to do it, the second way, is that you say, help me, right?
I mean, you do this sort of pleading for donations or asking for donations.
You have, I don't know, the wall of generous donation heads or whatever, people who give money to this cause or this environment.
That you say to them, hey, give me some money and I'm really going to appreciate it and you're going to do all these good warm and fuzzies and you're going to give them, you know, public galas or whatever that cost less, hopefully, than the donations and so on, right?
So you're going to have a situation where...
People are going to donate money to your cause, right?
To whatever it is that you're doing. And, I mean, this is how I live now, right?
I mean, this is how I live now, imitating Captain Kirk.
And it works.
I mean, it works. Yes, it's unstable, but we'll get back to that a little bit later when we start talking about the solution that is often put forward in the sort of socialist sphere, which is the sort of public funding solution.
So... Charity, of course, is the second way that you can get the resources that you need, and charity is a very powerful force in human affairs.
I mean, it is love, it is children, it is music, it is, you know, to some degree, forget music.
But charity is a very powerful thing.
It's a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year economic aspect of the free market.
They give money to things that they like, that they want.
So that's sort of one aspect of looking at it.
And I think it's a very powerful way of looking at it, that you have trade, voluntary trade, or you have charity as a way of filling this million-dollar hole.
Now, the third way is something that...
Well, it's not so good. The third way of transferring resources, of filling this million-dollar hole, is violence, coercion, theft.
And this, of course, may be appalling to you, and it may make no sense to you, and I understand that, and maybe it makes no sense at all, but I'll sort of go through the reasoning of how it looks from the anarcho-capitalist standpoint, and then you can let me know if I'm full of crap.
So, the way that taxation works, right, if you're saying, well, we should fill this money with public funds from the community that are, you know, gotten through taxation and so on, and then the way that taxation works is perfectly identical to if I run this university and I want the million dollars for the anthropology department that I go to...
My neighborhood. I go around my neighborhood.
I go to my neighborhood and I say, I need $100 from 10,000 of you.
I go door to door and I say, listen, I need $100 for this anthropology department.
And someone says, no, you know what?
I prefer the music department.
I'm not going to fund it.
I don't agree with it.
I think it's racist or bigoted or nonsense or whatever.
I've never heard of it. I don't speak English.
Whatever. I'm just not going to give you the money.
And then you say, well, you know, it sounds like I'm asking for it, but really I'm not.
And if you don't give me the money that I want for this Department of Anthropology, I'm going to take out my gun and take it from you.
And if you still don't give it to me, I'm going to have to shoot you, especially if you resist my, quote, arrest.
I mean, this is perfectly frankly and perfectly honestly, this is how taxation works, right?
It's the threat of force in return for if you give up the money, then you don't get thrown in jail, right?
It's a shakedown, right? I mean, it's what the mafia does.
I won't burn down your store if you pay me a thousand bucks a month.
So given that sort of basic reality, the third way that you can fill up this million dollar hole is by using violence to get the money from people.
And, of course, then if they don't give you the money, you can throw them in jail.
And this will be preceded by some polite letters saying you owe us some money and then some not-so-polite letters, a court date, and so on.
But if people don't pay their taxes, then they clearly do get thrown in jail.
And if they resist the arrest, then the policeman will shoot them and then said policeman will face no sanctions.
In fact, he is well paid for this kind of enforcement, right?
This is how people in power, this is how power works, right?
That you take a dollar from people and you pay 10 cents for the threat, right?
You pay 10 cents for the enforcers and you keep 90 cents for yourself.
So that's the way this kind of stuff works.
So I'm just driving up to the bank machine here and it would appear that it's just a guard truck.
So, this is not good.
This is not moral. And I'm sure that you agree, right?
I mean, you may never have looked at it this way before.
It may, you know, still be appalling and horrifying to you, and you may have every rational argument against it in the books, and you can certainly take your swings at it, but this is an idea that is pretty well tested and true.
The fact that you've never heard of it should tell you something about your education.
I assume you've never heard of it, otherwise you'd already be an anarcho-capitalist.
So... Clearly, we have a situation where we've got a million dollar hole, which you and I both agree may have value to people, may be important to people.
We've got this million dollar hole. And the question then becomes, how do we fill it?
And we either fill it through trade, or we fill it through volunteerism, charity, or we take guns out and wave them in people's faces, scream at them, and if they don't give us the money, we shoot them.
That's the nature of the state.
You pay your money. Or we shoot you.
And you cannot get shot if you are willing to be arrested and thrown in the rape rooms of godforsaken hellish.
Government prisons, right? So, I mean, that's how it works.
I mean, I'm not making anything up here.
I'm just trying to not put too much icing on the shit sandwich that we as citizens sort of have to eat in terms of our subjugation to the whims of the state.
So, that's the way that I see this million-dollar hole being filled.
These are the only ways that I can see that this million-dollar hole is going to get filled.
Now, there may be other ways.
I'm certainly willing to hear them, but as far as the resources being reallocated goes, I mean, I guess you could create value, but, I mean, you really have to trade to get that value enabled and so on.
So, basically, when you say that there are things that don't have a price...
But this is the price, and it's more than it can generate.
That's perfectly fine. I mean, children consume far more than they generate, right?
We don't say to our baby when we bring it home three days later, we don't say, well, enough of this lying about, being lazy and grabbing your feet and stinking up the place.
It's time for you to start earning your keep, and you don't get any of mommy's best boobs until you start mowing the lawn.
I mean, we don't do that, right? I mean, children consume all these resources.
We're more than happy to do that because, you know, we love them and all this kind of stuff, right?
So... So from that standpoint, this is what you're sort of proposing, right?
And I agree with you.
I mean, there's tons of stuff that people have in their life that they can't assign direct economic value to, but which costs.
And there is an economic calculation that's involved in that.
And all of that, I think, is perfectly hunky-dory.
The question is, how do we solve it?
And we say, anarcho-capitalists say, not so much with the violence.
And is that horribly or unbelievably harsh?
I don't think so. You know that song?
Two out of three ain't bad, right?
I mean, that's all we're saying, is that you've got these three ways, and we just don't want the gun.
We don't want the violence. We think that the violence is wrong, whether it's you doing a shakedown in the private sector, or you doing a shakedown in the, quote, public sector.
You know, right is right, wrong is wrong, violence is violence, gun is a gun.
And we just say that's not so good.
Now, The problem as well is that...
I sort of put out a scenario for you which hopefully will also help make some sense, at least out of this perspective.
You know, whether you agree with it or not, this is sort of a perspective that I think is at least helpful to think about or important to think about.
Let's say that you...
Think that this department of anthropology is really great and it's part of a socially good necessity and so on.
You think all of this. And you sort of figure it out and say, well, we need a million bucks to make this happen and make this work.
And... So you figure this out and you sort of write your articles for the New Yorker or whatever and you say, anthropology is, we need an anthropology department in this town and by God, if we don't have one, we are a cultural wasteland that makes Las Vegas look like, I don't know, Plato's Symposium.
So we've got to have it.
Just got to, got to, got to have it. And nobody takes you up on it.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
Nobody wants it. Nobody cares.
So, now you've got a bit of a problem, right?
Because you think that it's important, and it certainly, obviously, is important to you, and you don't have the million bucks, right?
Because if you've got the million bucks, you're going to write sort of asking other people to pick up the slack, as it were.
So, if nobody but you is interested in this, then...
Clearly, I think it would be a pretty tough argument to say that it's the social good that is being served.
If you're the only person who cares in any way, shape, or form about this anthropology department, clearly it has nothing to do with the public good.
Now, If it's you and one other guy who think that, boy, this would be the best thing ever to have this anthropology department, does that equate to the public good?
I think that would be a tough argument to make as well.
So without laboring the point, I think that we can see that there must be some democratic aspect To this thing called the public good.
Because if it's just one person, it's kind of tough to say that it's the public good.
Even if that person is totally and completely right, and everyone else is totally and completely wrong, well then it's just one guy being right, and everyone else being wrong.
But that's still not the same as the public good, right?
So then... Once we recognize that a number of people, some significant number of people must want this particular thing in order for it to fall remotely into the category of the public good, right?
Otherwise it's just some people's opinions about what is better for everyone else.
And that's not really, I think, what people mean when they say the public good.
However, it ends up sort of appearing.
So, then we start to get into, I think, some very interesting territory, which is the following.
If, in order for something to qualify as a public good, there must be some significant number of people who want it or approve of it, then they'll give the money, right?
They'll give the money. And then people will, you may say, or other people may say, but they won't give the money.
Why? Because people are short-sighted and selfish, right?
And that's fine. But then it's not a public good.
It's not something that people want.
It's not something that people want.
The only way we know that people actually value something is, will they give money to it?
Will they invest resources in it?
If I say, I love my children, but I'd rather buy, I don't know, another iPod than buy them food, then clearly I don't really love my children.
I mean, this is how we know facts about people's values, right?
What do they do with their resources?
If I say, I love my wife, but I would rather go to the bar than go and spend time with her, then...
Clearly, I prefer the bar to my wife.
And we know what people's values are based on what they do.
So if I say I'm really into philosophy and I read lots of philosophy books but never put any of them into practice, which I've certainly been that guy in my life, then clearly I don't value philosophy that much, right?
The truth. So if you force people to fund things, you have no idea whether they actually value it.
And in fact, what you are saying by saying that people should be forced to fund stuff, and I'm not saying that that's your opinion, but that's the logical consequence of this argument, the argument that you're putting forward about sort of forcing people to pay for stuff through taxation, forced transfer of resources.
You're saying that they actively don't value it, right?
I mean, this is the paradox.
That is at the heart of these kinds of government or social transactions.
If we say that people care about the poor, then we don't need a welfare state.
The welfare state, which is the forced redistribution of income to the poor, much to the latter's detriment, I might add, but we don't have to get into that now.
The logic of that is saying that people hate the poor.
Because otherwise they wouldn't need to be forced to fund the poor.
They must hate the poor.
Because if we don't force them to fund the poor through taxation and the welfare state, then nobody will fund the poor.
But, of course, everyone you ever talk to about charity says, well, the poor have to be helped.
It's the paradox. Everybody I've ever talked to about privatizing education says, well, but what about the children of the poor?
Who should get educated?
It's like, well... I mean, to ask the question is to answer it.
To ask the question is to answer it.
So when you say, and I'm sorry for oversimplifying, and please let me know if I've gone totally right.
If you say, well, we need to forcibly fund an anthropology department for the public good, then what you're saying is people don't want an anthropology department.
People don't want an anthropology department.
So it's clearly not in the public's interest.
It's not in the public good for there to be an anthropology department.
The moment that you say people have to be forced to pay for it, then you're saying that people don't want it.
In the same way that you can be pretty sure that a guy who rapes a woman believes that she won't fall in love with him and have sex with him voluntarily.
We know that. I mean, that's just empirical, right?
The moment you say that people must be forced at gunpoint to fund something, you're saying they don't want it.
They don't want it. But people don't say that.
They'll use stuff like they'll use terms like the common good.
And this is not your fault.
This is just everyone, right? But it's not true.
The accurate statement is, I think there should be anthropology departments, and anybody who disagrees with me should be shot.
Which also breaks down to, I believe there should be anthropology departments.
The vast majority of people do not believe that there should be anthropology departments, and they should be shot if they act on that disagreement.
It's not allowing people to disagree with you, fundamentally, right?
It's another paradox, right?
Everybody expresses concern about culture, about diffuse benefits to educational people that can't be funded directly to people who benefit.
Everybody expresses concern about that, which is to answer the question.
I mean, if I said we should get rid of the welfare state and everyone said to me, damn right I hate those goddamn poor parasite bastards, right?
Or whatever, right? I'd be like, huh, well, maybe we're not quite ready to get rid of the welfare state yet, because clearly people haven't found too much of their humanity yet, or at least enough of it to help people in need.
But I take enormous comfort.
Enormous comfort. In the fact that whenever I say we have to morally get rid of the welfare state because it's evil and brutal and violent and destructive...
Immoral.
Whenever I say that, people say, well, what about the poor?
How are the poor going to be helped?
It's like, oh, thank God. Well, so now we have got no problem, because everybody...
And then you say, oh, well, people are just hypocrites.
They'll just say they'll help the poor, but then they really won't.
Well, here's where we get back to, I think, where the universities have ended up, right?
So your solution is, or a solution is, government funding, right?
So that violence can turn this kind of blood into wine, right?
This is the blood-to-wine transmogrification that this golden gun of using state violence is supposed to achieve, which it never does.
So what I wrote back to this gentleman was the following.
So let me ask you two questions.
One, the universities currently operate free of state control.
Because he's saying there's a market.
Market forces determine what can be researched and what can't be researched.
Which means that if he's saying market forces determine stuff, then he's saying that there's no coercion.
Market forces are the opposite of coercion.
It's voluntary interaction through charity or through trade.
So whenever anybody says market forces, they're saying no coercion.
Right?
If you say this guy is really good at getting women to go to bed with him because he had sex with 10 women last week.
Right?
So he's really attractive.
But clearly, you're ruling out rape.
If you say, oh, this guy's really attractive, he's really good at getting women to go to bed with him, he must have real mad skills when it comes to seduction.
No, he has a knife to their throat.
So if you're talking about seduction, if you're talking about attractiveness, you have automatically ruled out rape, because rape is a much simpler answer as to how some guy gets women to have sex with him, using the word sex very loosely there.
So when you talk about market forces, you have to be talking about voluntary trade.
You can't be talking about coercion.
So my question is, do universities currently operate independently of state control?
And of course the answer is, not even a tiny little bit.
They're all dependent on state funding, all the way back from the 19th century onwards through the GI Bill of the post-war period, which got a whole bunch of people in the university to be taught by decadent Europeans fleeing the Nazis, who then infected collectivism, onto the Republic, which left us into the 60s, which led to the decadence of the 70s, which led to the excesses of the 80s, which led to the alienation of the 90s, which, anyway, led to the freedom domain of the 2000s.
Anyway. So, no, of course not.
There are state schools, there are bursaries, scholarships, there's state control of education, state mandates, and of course the state prepares everyone for universities by putting them through the grindhouse brain mincing exercise in futility that is known as public school, right?
So, clearly, they don't operate.
And of course, the...
The accreditation is all state-controlled.
The state grants accreditation and can take it away.
So, I mean, there's just a massive amount.
And accreditation is required in a lot of professions, right?
Doctors and lawyers are, you know, hellish monopolies.
Nobody ever talks about monopolies like they're, I don't know, bus lines or, you know, things like, you know, a real monopoly is when you have a grocery store in a small town and there's no other grocery store and blah, blah, blah.
And I've never quite understood why people talk about that stuff rather than, say, the government, which is the ultimate monopoly, or even doctors, which are a coercive unionized monopoly.
But anyway, leaving all that aside...
It's clear that universities don't operate free of state control.
So what's going on in there probably has a lot more to do with coercion and state violence than it does with any sort of market forces.
Now, the second thing that I asked him was, as state spending on universities has declined, as he points out, over the last 10 years has declined rapidly, have taxes declined as well?
And the reason that I asked him that is that, in general, and I posted this on the board as well, I look forward to his response.
There's generally a five-step process in the way that the state gains control of a private sector or private institutions, private areas of the economy.
And we'll just take universities as an example here.
I think it can be helpful. It applies to a lot of different fields, but universities are fairly instructive this way.
So the first thing that the state does is it raises taxes to fund universities.
The universities then become, of course, dependent upon those funds.
If I give you a million dollars a month, your spending is going to increase.
I then yank it away. Your life is going to be a disaster.
So it's like a drug.
You get addicted to it. So the government raises taxes to fund universities, which then the universities become dependent on their funding.
Then, once the universities are dependent on the funding that the state is providing, the state...
It makes that funding conditional on adherence to particular state policies, be it education or accreditation or whatever content.
And then after the state gains control of the universities, it reduces the funding.
But it doesn't reduce the taxes that were raised to pay for the funding, originally, supposedly.
Because the taxes remain high, private solutions are impossible.
Then people cry for more funding and allow their taxes to be raised.
And this is how governments, like Tony Soprano, with that guy who ran the sports store in some early season who ended up getting into debt with Tony Soprano, and they just came through like a bunch of termites and ate out his entire, you know, got his whole store, you know, ordered a bunch of stuff and didn't pay for it, sold it on the black market, got him in trouble that way, and then they...
I don't know, forged checks, forged receipts, forged tax receipts, got a bunch of money that way, and then they burned down his store to get the insurance, right?
And he said, oh my god, you guys are killing me.
It's like, hey, dude, that's what we do.
That's what we do. That's what we do.
And that's true. That is what they do.
That is entirely what they do.
And that's exactly what the government does, right?
They come in like termites, and they just erase and destroy and undermine and wreck everything.
And it's this five, just go over it very briefly again, if you don't mind, this five-step process, right?
Oh, we need higher education as a public good.
Let's fund education and we will have a paradise on our hands, right?
And so they raise taxes.
And they then give all this money, and it seems like a great thing, right?
Oh, it's wonderful, like heroin, first couple of hits.
Apparently they're fantastic, right?
Oh, all this money, the guy in the States, the schools expand, and so on, which also further erodes the tax base as more and more people go into university rather than doing something productive.
So, it raises taxes to fund universities.
The universities become dependent on that funding.
Whoever pays the piper calls a tune.
Then the state says, well, you know, we're going to yank your funding if you don't do X, Y, and Z. And it starts off like nice stuff, and then it ends up being not-so-nice stuff.
After the government gains control, it reduces that funding anyway.
So it says, we're going to cut your funding if you don't do X, Y, and Z. And they end up doing X, Y, and Z to keep their funding.
The funding gets cut anyway. But...
Taxes don't get reduced. So because taxes remain high, and because the government has funded public universities to the point where all private universities have gone out of business because you can't compete with government-subsidized stuff, so taxes remain high, and the private universities have vanished, by and large. And this is more true up here in Canada.
It's still largely true in the States, though.
Then there's no private solutions.
So people can't conceive of private solutions anymore.
So do they say the government's got to stop controlling the universities?
No, because it's going to take forever, it's never going to work.
What they say is, oh my god, we need more funding.
And this allows their taxes to be raised yet again.
So this is how the government drives out private solutions, voluntary, peaceful solutions, and ends up completely wrecking all of the public solutions, the stuff that it owns.
And this is the sequence, right?
This is the sequence, and this is, of course, where we are, right?
So people say, well, you know, charity is dependent on this one, that, and the other, and it's, you know, it's a voluntaristic situation, and I don't know, should we do it?
It's variable, I can't trust it.
Well, you know, you can trust it one hell of a lot more than you can trust the government, right?
Because this is what happens every single time.
The government just comes in like a cancer and wrecks all of this delicate stuff with coercion and control and so on.
So after all of this, what gets blamed?
Who gets blamed for this?
Who gets blamed for this mess?
Who gets blamed for this escalating, multiplying violence that is destroying the intellectual life of the society?
Does the government get blamed?
Does violence get blamed?
Does coercion get blamed? No!
Of course not! What gets blamed is the free market.
The free market that has not operated in any way, shape, or form The free market is blamed for this problem.
The government doesn't get blamed.
Violence doesn't get blamed.
Voluntarism and freedom get blamed.
And you can see this. And again, no disrespect to you.
This is just the way that people think or don't think, I guess, is what stuff they inherit.
But that's sort of an anarcho-capitalist, at least my anarcho-capitalist interpretation of it.
So I hope that you found it helpful.
Thank you so much for posting this.
It was very important to get this topic out front and center.
So do let me know what you think.
I really do appreciate it. Huge amount of respect for your approach to knowledge and wisdom, which I think is entirely right.
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