… is from page 91 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One:
The unique position of college and university faculty members as both labor and management offers many different kinds of opportunities to serve their own interests, rather than the interests of the students or of the academic institutions.
DBx: Yep.
Any institution that enables producers to satisfy their interests in ways that do not involve those producers first satisfying the interests of consumers – consumers who are free to spend their own (and only their own) resources – is infected with corruption. Such ‘producers’ appear superficially to be working to satisfy consumers, but are in fact promoting their own interests at the greater expense of others. Professors who teach either lazily or (worse) with ideologically driven biases appear to be teaching but, in fact, are greedily cheating students – and also cheating taxpayers and donors. Businesses and workers protected by import restrictions appear to be working, but, in fact, are greedily cheating consumers and unprotected producers.
An essential feature of a market economy is that it enables you to gain materially but only on condition that you, in pursuit of your gain, assist other persons to pursue that which they seek to gain. A common feature of intervention is that it enables you to gain materially by obstructing other people’s ability to pursue that which they seek to gain.
How ironic that interventions and other distortions of sound property-rights arrangements are called by some people “progressive” and lauded by other people as promoting the “national interest.”
