What Price Education?

When you subsidize sometehing then you get more of it.

If you subsidize mortgages you get a housing boom.

If you subsidize college you get a ton of colleges.

And other things don’t get made or built or done. The simple rule is that subsidy is a net waste of resources, because resources are scarce. If you overuse them, becuase someone is handing them out for free, then you abuse them.

Conservative Thomas Sowell makes this point rather clear in his three part article on The Economics of College. Part II, and Part III. If people had to pay the true costs of college, they would use much less college, he writes.

But what about the poor? Well, they could raise the money by issuing stock in themselves. Savvy investors could make money off them with equity participation in their careers. And the price would be much less because if college education weren’t subsidized then it wouldn’t cost as much.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we believe that even K-12 education should be free of government subsidy. Most people can afford 3-4 years of basic education. (And charities could help those that can’t.) Then most people would probably do better going to work at 12 or 13 and doing their education in apprenticeships or internships as they went along.

What? Child labor? Yes, and it would do them a power of good. After all, we are not talking about sending children into textile mills or down the mine. We are talking about sending them to McDonalds or even onto the construction site.

But what about 12-year-olds operating construction equipment? Why not? At 12, young boys might actually take instruction from their elders. By the time their hormones are really kicking in at 16 they might be competent behind the wheel. Unlike now.