“RFK Jr., You’re No JFK” proclaims John Turres in The Wetumpka Herald (August 1). Although “early on, Kennedy was getting a lot of attention and even support, because, well, he’s a Kennedy, and that’s what the family label gets,” Turres doubts that the halo effect will last as Democratic voters find out more about how Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. substantially differs from his uncle John Fitzgerald Kennedy — and, for that matter, Robert F. Kennedy père.

The “Kennedy for me” of JFK’s campaign promised to be “not so doggoned seasoned that he won’t try something new.” In the current decade, new (or even lightly used) tricks are viewed as a menace to the gerontocratic order. As Andy Page noted in a 2021 letter to The Wall Street Journal, few Democrats would still join JFK in championing “the mobility and flow of risk capital from static to more dynamic situations.”

Even radical leftists chide the 69-year-old junior Kennedy’s lack of enthusiasm for reviving similarly senior-citizen-aged programs. Current Affairs magazine’s Lily Sánchez and Nathan J. Robinson berate RFK Jr. for substituting a “delusional faith in the free market” for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and “the general policies of social uplift that progressives support.”

Sánchez and Robinson consider RFK Jr.’s description of the economy as combining “a cushy socialism for the rich and this kind of brutal, merciless capitalism for the poor” a too-little-too-late “mimic[ry of Bernie] Sanders’ language of class antagonism.” They should know better, since they are aware that such “language of the populist outsider” draws from Noam Chomsky — who has traced his own view that “the state is there to provide security and support to the interests of the privileged and powerful sectors in society while the rest of the population is left to experience the brutal reality of capitalism” back to Adam Smith. It was the precedent of “bourgeois economists” who shared Smith’s laissez-faire convictions that led Karl Marx to acknowledge in an 1852 letter that “I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.”

Sánchez and Robinson view “the profit motive of the pharmaceutical, health insurance, and other related industries” as the root of their dysfunction — when in fact it is their scrupulous restraint of trade that enables them to reap revenue while ill-serving the public. (RFK Jr.’s claim that “some corporations don’t want free markets … they want profits” actually underestimates how antagonistic market competition is to corporate profit.) Rediscovering how class privilege springs from political power would do more to undermine it than dusting off FDR’s New Deal — or JFK’s New Frontier.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, August 3, 2023
2. Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
3. Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
4. Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
5. “Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], August 3, 2023
6. “Kennedy: For free or not for free?” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], August 3, 2023
7. “Kennedy: For Free or Not For Free?” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, August 8, 2023
8. “Kennedy: For Free or Not For Free?” by Joel Schlosberg, The News [Kingstree, South Carolina], August 9, 2023

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 Live skit), 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, Wahpeton, North Dakota Daily News, July 3, 2023
2. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, July 10, 2023
3. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Wilson, North Carolina], July 10, 2023
4. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], July 10, 2023
5. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], July 10, 2023
6. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], July 10, 2023
7. “Never Too Late to Call College a Scam” by Joel Schlosberg, Carolina Panorama [Columbia, South Carolina], July 19, 2023
8. “Opinion: Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, July 25, 2023

“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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Spending or Saving, Only Free Choice Can Make School Choice a Real Choice” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 8, 2023