Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss argue for regulating colleges like businesses. A slice:
Colleges are strategic in their behavior of selling services. Regardless of colleges’ legal status, they behave like competitive enterprises, not passive state agencies or charities passing out benefits to selected beneficiaries. To increase the appearance of selectivity, schools encourage students to apply even if there is little chance of admission. A former dean of admissions at Tulane said, “Colleges are a business … and admissions is its chief revenue source.” Schools track prospective students in a way that is similar to the “algorithms that Amazon … or virtually any other online retailer uses to offer you other things you might like based on your past selections.” There is nothing surprising about these sales practices when they are employed by for-profit firms. Their use is yet another way in which colleges behave like for-profit sellers.
By contrast, in those places where ordinary buying and selling can happen in relative freedom—in retail and service industries—buyers have punished progressive activism. Last year, to stick with the example of transgender ideology, when Target brought out a line of trans clothing items for children, customers revolted. The news media portrayed the backlash as a result of stupidity and misinformation, but parents knew what they saw—a “Pride collection” for children—and didn’t like it. Target’s stock lost about $10 billion in valuation.
Eric Boehm decries Washington’s fiscal incontinence.
Arnold Kling describes his journey away from the political left. A slice:
You decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. I believed Bernie Saffran enough to become an economist myself, and to be open to diverse points of view. I believed my wife enough to resist faddish liberalism. I believed a lot less in Robert Solow when he took a cavalier attitude toward the plagiarism of which I was a victim. I believed that most of my colleagues at the profit-seeking Freddie Mac were knowledgeable and well-meaning. I believed Vint Cerf that the Internet was an institutional innovation. I came to appreciate the entrepreneurial mindset when I tried my own Web-based start-up. And I believed Russ Roberts that market-friendly Austrian economists are not just a bunch of cranks.
Donald Trump II is a brave new world, and look no further than his strange choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department. Only months ago Mr. Trump was calling the Kennedy family scion a “liberal lunatic,” yet now he wants to hand RFK Jr. the power to “make America healthy again.” Good luck making sense of this nomination.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation,” Mr. Trump said in his nomination statement. HHS “will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives.”
Say what? That riff could have been written by leftist activists who view corporate America as the root of every public-health ill. Mr. Kennedy comes out of that movement, whose goal is to ruin the U.S. drug, agriculture and grocery industries—not improve or reform public-health agencies.
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Some Republicans have rallied in support of Mr. Kennedy because they think he will make public-health agencies more transparent and weed out alleged collusion between Big Pharma and government. But he lacks the experience and temperament to manage, let alone reform, HHS’s unwieldy bureaucracy. Mr. Kennedy’s expertise is as a gadfly.
Mr. Trump’s desire to focus on America’s health agencies is welcome, but RFK Jr. won’t make America healthier. He’s more likely to harm public health by spreading confusion and attacking the American companies that are saving lives and feeding the world.
Also critical of Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr. – and of Matt Gaetz – is National Review‘s Mark Antonio Wright. Two slices:
But there should be no mistake, by rejecting Matt Gaetz’s bid to run the Department of Justice and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to head the Department of Human Services, the Senate would be doing Donald Trump a major favor.
Stocking his administration with bomb throwers and cranks will not help Donald Trump.
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The Kennedy and Gaetz appointments are not merely the conduits for bringing poor policy choices and maladministration to key departments of the executive branch; those choices are guaranteed to bring scandal and chaos and instability to government because those two men are lightning rods for personal scandal, chaos, and instability.
