Blindly loyal to “Progressive” dogma, Paul Krugman believes that there is no domestic problem (be it fact or fantasy) whose solution does not require more government spending. And so it is, as he argues in his column today, with the alleged poor shape of American higher education.
But if Krugman is correct, how is it that wide swathes of our lives work so well without such spending? Grocery retailing, for example, receives no handouts from government and yet serves customers with extraordinary efficiency and creativity. Ditto for restaurants, hardware stores, the press, language-learning software suppliers, and myriad other industries not suckling at the state’s tit.
Why, then, can education – a service that yields enormous benefits to those who purchase it and one, like churches (another successful industry!), that is largely tax-exempt – thrive only as a charity case?
