In 2015, president Barack Obama unveiled a proposal — “America’s College Promise” — to waive tuition at community colleges, allowing students to complete an associate degree (or the first half of a bachelor’s degree) at little or no cost to themselves.

Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton offered up even more ambitious plans in 2016. Sanders proposed to make all public colleges and universities tuition-free, Clinton to provide a 100% tuition subsidy to students from families making less than $125,000 per year.

So far, these plans haven’t gone anywhere. Meanwhile, college tuition continues to rise faster than inflation and student loans constitute one of the largest forms of consumer debt in America. Something’s got to give.

At the moment, what’s giving is college itself.  Work experience and industry skill certifications are beginning to replace a college degree as a job qualification (Glassdoor, an employer/employee review site, reports on 15 large companies that have formally dropped degrees from their hiring requirements).

With college as we know it becoming less valuable and online/distance learning becoming more viable, change is coming whether we like it or not. Why not seize an opportunity for “free college” as we wind down the existing system?

A great deal of government spending on higher education goes to the maintenance of increasingly unnecessary physical plant, as well as on paying professors to deliver the same live lectures over and over to students in physical classrooms (with those students paying big bucks for new editions of textbooks on subject matter which doesn’t change — college-level algebra, for example).

Record the lectures. Make them freely available on streaming video, with accompanying online textbooks. Allow anyone seeking an undergraduate degree (or just taking a class or two) to register for a small per-semester fee, with small additional fees for proctored exams, required lab work, etc. Call it $100 per semester, give or take — less than a thousand dollars for a bachelor’s degree, versus the current $90,000 (average for in-state tuition, books, room/board, etc. at a public college or university) or more.

Public universities could dramatically reduce energy/maintenance costs (and divest themselves of real estate wasted on dorms and other obsolete facilities) while serving more students. Yes, some faculty would have to find new jobs (hopefully in private sector education). Others might re-focus on research.

No, this plan wouldn’t replace every degree program. Some things require group settings and costly equipment. But a lot of the way we do college now is like holding on to buggy whips instead of adopting those newfangled horseless carriages.

Government-provided education as we know it is, thankfully, on its way out. Why not make it cheaper and more accessible as it fades into history, instead of just marking time as we await its collapse?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251 accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of “spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The purged users stand accused of posting “massive amounts of content … to drive traffic to their websites” with suspicious “timing ahead of US midterm elections.”

Facebook admits to “legitimate reasons” for such behavior — “it’s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations.” Not to mention the operations of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and a bunch of other users/pages which weren’t purged.

Facebook also admits that it has previously “enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate …”

In other words, Facebook’s administrators are meddling in politics — including the 2018 US midterm elections — in the name of preventing meddling in politics.

Who benefits from the meddling? It doesn’t seem to fall along “left/right” lines in particular. The victims come from across the political spectrum — from Reverb Press on the left, to Right Wing News on the right, to the libertarian Free Thought Project — some with millions of Facebook followers.

The primary thread connecting victims of the purge seems to be that they are critics and/or opponents of the American political “mainstream” or “establishment.”

In a sense, this is nothing new. Even before Internet “social media,” the old guard “mainstream media” tended to draw fairly narrow lines on either side of the perceived political “center” or “consensus” and avoid coloring (or publishing e.g. reader letters that colored) very far outside those lines. One might support or oppose a tax increase, or even a particular tax, but opposing taxation in general? Why, that was just crazy and not worthy of consideration — or of column inches.

The Internet and social media threatened to change that. In fact, they DID change that … for a little while, at any rate. But now Facebook, Twitter et al. are part of the establishment, and they’re starting to act like it.

How can we fight that trend?

Some would have us classify social media as “public utilities” or something of the sort and regulate them as such. But who would regulate them? The very establishment in question.

On the other hand, it’s becoming clear that these companies are already looking more and more like extensions of the state — and the establishment the state serves — than like bona fide “private sector” actors.

What is to be done? From where I sit, the only real option is to see if the next generation of “social media” — sites/services like Diaspora, Mastodon, Minds, MeWe, Gab, et al. — can supersede Facebook and Twitter in the same way that Facebook and Twitter superseded print and television news and the more centralized/static site model of the older Internet.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The International Monetary Fund refers to cryptocurrency only once in its 215-page World Economic Outlook for October 2018, but that reference is telling: “Continued rapid growth of crypto assets could create new vulnerabilities in the international financial system.”

Ironically and counter-intuitively — but in my opinion not accidentally — that sentence is grouped in a paragraph  with worries about the potential of cyber warfare to “undermine cross-border payment systems and disrupt the flow of goods and services.”

Cryptocurrency, of course, is the perfect solution to “cross-border payment systems.” In terms of both movement and accounting, it simply ignores borders.  A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin — in Minneapolis, in Mumbai, in Moscow. And it can be moved between those three cities in a tiny fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort  it takes to set up wire transfers between bank accounts and to exchange dollars for rupees, or for rubles. All without government permission, too.

The “vulnerabilities” the IMF worries about are its own. Cryptocurrencies are, to varying degrees, resistant to supervision, surveillance, and regulation by entities like the IMF and its 189 member governments (the so-called “international financial system”).

Those governments (and their intermediary institutions like the IMF) fear money they can’t control. Who can blame them? The long history of central government banking is a history of money and markets easily subjected to taxation and political manipulation. Its purpose is to shear the sheep — that is, to clothe the ruling class at the expense of those who produce goods and services of actual value.

The brief history of cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a history of emerging financial (and, ultimately, political) freedom for the productive class. That’s its philosophical genesis and its technical goal: Putting wealth beyond the reach of the thieves and extortionists who call themselves “governments.” Crypto is, as the anarcho-syndicalists like to put it, “building the new world in the shell of the old.”

Some players in the crypto sector seek co-option by the existing “international financial system” — for example, seeking regulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and its global equivalents.  They’re backing the wrong horse. The old “international financial system” will be replaced, not reformed.

The IMF’s purpose is not to facilitate “cross-border payment systems and … the flow of goods and services,” but to control them.  Fortunately, the time when that was even remotely possible is coming to an end.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY