Student loan debt has risen steadily in the years since Barbara Ehrenreich saw that its “‘return on investment’ isn’t looking that good” in 2006. Public domain.
By the time that the United States Supreme Court decided Joseph R. Biden, President of the United States, et al. v. Nebraska, et al. on June 30, it was no longer surprising that a majority Republican Court would side against a Democratic administration in opposing broad executive power to forgive student debt — even if the supposed presidential authority for doing so ultimately descended from a claim by George W. Bush in 2002.
It wasn’t the “‘U.S. Does Whatever It Wants’ plan, which would have permitted the U.S. to take any action it wished anywhere in the world at any time” as explained in The Onion‘s satire.
These days, Democrats are the ones eager to interpret the Higher Education Relief Opportunities For Students (HEROES) Act as granting carte blanche over American campuses, while Republicans like Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett observe that “an instruction to ‘pick up dessert’ is not permission to buy a four-tier wedding cake.”
Initial support for the HEROES Act was bipartisan, so it might seem that the parties of plutocrats and educrats merely drifted back toward their default settings.
Biden frames his case as “providing relief to millions of hard-working Americans” rather than “billions in pandemic-related loans to businesses.” He doesn’t mention It’s a Wonderful Life, but clearly aims to evoke something like the real-life equivalent of the cinematic Bailey Bros. Building & Loan Association lending a hand to the little guys instead of fat-cat Scrooges like “Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the county.”
Yet just as George Bailey paying him off further enriches Mr. Potter (whose comeuppance had to wait for a 1986 Saturday Night Liveskit), subsidized student loans prop up the ever-rising costs that make taking on debt a commonplace prerequisite for college attendance in the first place.
Addressing her nephew’s graduating class of 2006, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that “it’s too soon to call college a scam, and as long as they teach a few truly enlightening things, like history and number theory, I won’t.”
Half a century earlier, Howard Zinn avoided taking Richard Hofstadter’s history classes at Columbia University after “hearing consistently that Hofstadter was not a particularly good teacher because he was so focused on his writing” (in the words of Zinn biographer Davis Joyce), but was deeply influenced by Hofstadter’s books, especially The American Political Tradition. Aspiring historians can order a copy online for less than 0.1% of the five-figure cost of annual tuition, the postgrad usefulness of which Ehrenreich notes may be confined to knowing how to “pronounce the day’s specials” while waiting tables.
As Dana Carvey’s Bailey asked, “What are we waiting for?”
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
“Is school choice bankrupting Arizona?” Jason Bedrick and Corey DeAngelis dispute claims to that effect by governor Katie Hobbs and State Representative Andrés Cano; their own viewpoint is in the title of their Wall Street Journal op-ed “School Choice Saves Arizona Money” (June 5).
It will come as no surprise that Hobbs and Cano are Democrats, or that Bedrick and DeAngelis are conservatives, fellows at the Heritage Foundation and the American Federation for Children (affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council rather than a youth brigade of the American Federation of Teachers). But how closely do the predictable lines on the issue really align with the sides’ averred principles?
After all, liberals trace their philosophical roots to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which suggested that government “leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children.” Mill’s observation that exceeding such a relatively modest involvement in schooling does “now convert the subject into a mere battlefield for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been spent in educating to be wasted in quarrelling about education” sounds like it was written this week rather than in 1859.
And if modern liberals have shed the scruples about government spending of even moderate classical liberals like Mill, it’s hard for them to object to it being misspent. If they agree with George Lakoff that “taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America,” then America — or a part of it like Arizona — gets to spend it as foolishly as its members allow it to, until they give up their membership. Some being spent via nominally private means doesn’t change the underlying caveat emptor.
Meanwhile, heavy subsidization has long become the status quo in education, crowding out more innovative approaches — as well as, ironically, more traditional parochial schools (and homeschoolers on both extremes). Bedrick and DeAngelis tout the partial control granted to parents over “a portion of their child’s state education funds” by so-called “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.” Yet wouldn’t the truly fiscally conservative way to empower scholarship be simply not taxing that money away from parents in the first place?
It was far-leftists like Alexis Ferm who foresaw that schools might only be truly public if they were “sponsored by the groups that want to use them.” Joel Spring notes in Education and the Rise of the Corporate State that such self-funding was “precisely how the Modern School was organized” by Ferm’s comrades in the early twentieth century as “a model for the type of education center the radicals were to create as an alternative to the existing system.”
Their discoveries — and the rediscoveries of Spring’s generation of New Leftist scholars — have been ignored. Yet the way forward out of today’s education quagmire may be indicated by the meeting of Freedom Avenue and Justice Street in Piscataway, New Jersey on the forgotten site of the Modern School.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
Burt’s Place brought the star’s red-white-and-blue style to the Omni International complex in Atlanta. Photo by Acroterion. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Is “cutthroat economic libertarianism” force-feeding Americans a “homogenized corporate culture?” New York Times opinion columnist Matthew Walther thinks so (“Shopping for ‘Woke-Free’ Beer? Read This,” May 1).
Walther correctly notes that current culture wars over beer brands like Bud Light have largely ignored how many of them are owned by a handful of larger companies — and how all of them operate in a larger marketplace dominated by “generic large-scale corporate profit-seeking.” But is this really “economic libertarianism?”
Walther observes that in the less consolidated industry of the 1970s, regional brewer Coors had real clout to enforce its owners’ union-busting conservatism despite being shunned by “respectable middle-class liberal social circles.” True enough, but the Coors-hauling outlaws of Smokey and the Bandit aren’t so tidily relegated to the same “right-wing” extreme.
After all, the Burt Reynolds vehicle wasn’t the only 1977 blockbuster in which rural restlessness and speedy smuggling defies domineering, corrupt authorities. Yet the Galactic Empire of Star Wars was inspired by the administration of the same Richard Nixon whom the Coors family considered a “squish” (meanwhile, the outlaw truckers on the Seventies screen were a nod to real-life convoys at odds with union bosses not for “feckless paternalism” but for compromising negotiations with plain old bosses).
The distrust of culinary as well as cultural homogenization was less a forerunner of the here’s-the-beef presidency of Coors favorite Ronald Reagan than an echo of the hippies busted for improper disposal of a communal meal in Alice’s Restaurant — or, for that matter, a parallel to the peanut seller then in the Oval Office decriminalizing homebrews.
Walther borrows the name of the 1980 book Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale to denote the antithesis of the globalized economy. Yet Sale’s less-remembered-than-its-title tome argued that the “growth of conglomerates and ogliopolies” would be halted if “the myriad government supports favoring large (and therefore largely unresponsive) businesses were withdrawn.”
The impersonality of commerce might seem to make the pursuit of any value system an exercise in futility. While Anheuser-Busch’s all-Americanism is diluted by the merger with Belgian Interbrew and Brazilian AmBev, groovy Ben & Jerry’s has been gobbled up by the equally multinational Unilever. Even the “staid Midwestern brands” and built-in-the-USA autos which Walther recalls as having been the acceptable alternatives to the Coors can and the “foreign car” were built from the raw materials of a worldwide market.
Yet the very tendency to enmesh consumers into webs more far-flung than they can trace is in fact a strength. As Milton Friedman put it: “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
