In last week’s “Nickels and dimes push American Dream out of reach”, the Inkwell Editorial Staff did a fine job of complaining about the rising cost of education at Armstrong. They lamented that the administration responded to an increase in demand in the “purely capitalistic fashion” of raising prices, and they groaned that some students will now be unable to pay for school.
What the Staff failed to do was offer any kind of realistic alternative to the present system.
If you were to ask one of them (as I have), I imagine their solution would be to try to have taxpayers foot the bill. This sentiment highlights the anti-social nature of collectivist thought: that some must be made to pay for the benefit of others. Instead of seeing AASU as a part of the community, they see the community as simply a potential donor of funds. They see our university as something separate from the community, as a leech, as an entity with interests contrary to the community’s. They would object to this analysis, surely, but it is the logical conclusion a rational person would come to after examining last week’s gripefest.
The Inkwell is overlooking the economic axiom that it costs more money to give more people a service. Education is a service and more people in our area want it. To pay for increasing student demand, the administration at AASU needs to raise more funds. These funds can be found either in new revenue streams or by finding ways to reduce fixed and variable costs. The Inkwell Staff would like to paper over this by making the new revenue streams come from the taxpayers.
I have the AASU budget in front of me now. The largest expense seems to be staff salaries. Next time you hear a student whining about the cost of education (which, let’s be fair, is still dirt cheap at AASU), ask them to take it up with the eggheads grading their tests. Next time your hear one of our bright professors wax on about the evils and vagaries of the market, and about how capitalism and greed are making it impossible for students to afford college, ask them if they’d take a pay cut to help you out.
Part of going to college is learning how to be an adult. Here’s an adult lesson: you do not have a right to someone else’s property simply because you want it, or because you think you can spend it better than the person you are taking it from. The people who The Inkwell would like to have pay for your education have their own anxieties about the economy. These are people who are trying to live the American Dream that the Inkwell cited, and for that the Inkwell would have them punished. The Inkwell claimed that they saw the American Dream as “the one that said anyone can make it, if you just work hard enough.” In reality, the Inkwell would have that dream transmuted, through the sorcery of doublespeak, into one saying that “if you work hard enough we’ll tax you to pay for things that we find more important than the things that you value, because we just know better than you, and because the only way to really make it is to sponge off the labor of others.”
The Inkwell’s true dream is the state-induced nightmare that tens of millions of people have fled from in order to get to America. It is a nightmare that must be rejected if liberty is to live to see another century. As a student at AASU you can reject this nightmare by admitting that you do not have the right to steal the wealth created by another person’s labor, even if that theft would mean lower tuition for you.
And if you are unmoved by arguments from morality, there is a more pragmatic reason for AASU to keep its hand out of the tax-funded cookie jar. If you tax the community enough to pay for your school, there will be fewer jobs out there once you get your degree, and the jobs that will be available will be tax laden to support the next class at AASU. By raising taxes on working Georgians and Americans to pay for your studies, you are ironically making your degree less valuable. Regardless of whether the Inkwell staff would like college degrees to be treated like commodities, they will behave like commodities, and we would be wise to scoff at the fatuous desire to ignore the realities of human praxis.
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