Does Higher Education PRODUCE Wealth? No!
Check out a great article here by Gary North on the governmental cartel known as academia:
Higher education serves the business world as a screening system. They can hire people knowing that these people have displayed these valuable traits: (1) an unwillingness to assess the long-term alternative economic returns from their use of time; (2) their psychological ability to spend many hours a week listening to economically useless lectures; (3) their willingness to leap through a series of bureaucratic hoops that have no justification other than maintaining the existing bureaucracy’s authority. These are the traits desired by businesses in a world where the government regulates the marketplace. They are the traits of bureaucrats. This is the world aimed at by government regulators. It is a world remade in their image.
These traits have little to do with successful entrepreneurship. Businessmen make use of this system because it produces obedient middle managers. Also, it screens indirectly for IQ. Only people with IQ’s above 100 are likely to get through college with a degree.
Businessmen know that entrepreneurship is as entrepreneurship does. They can cull the hot-shots in terms of actual performance on the job. Will Smith’s movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, is an artistically compelling description of this system. It is a true story.
To think that America’s tax-subsidized system of education is the source of America’s economic growth is to confuse cause with effect. It is only because of rising productivity that governments can afford to build and fund the self-regulated, insulated, and monopolistic industry known as formal education.
These systems get what they pay for: graduates who believe that the state is the source of economic growth. I offer Bernanke’s speech is a typical example.
(For more on this, see here.)
American manufacturing was outsourced to Asia. Is this a good thing?
The move to paper-shuffling has been a direct effect of the bureaucratization of the American economy. The Federal government is the prime mover here, not the free market. The free market has responded to changing economic incentives. As the state has claimed ever-greater control over the American economy, profit-seeking businessmen have shifted production to meet the economic demand of the government. The government taxes money, borrows money, and prints money. Then it spends it. Entrepreneurs follow the money.
The academic guild helps the “Haves”. But where does wealth originally come from?
The heart of economic production is a combination of (1) entrepreneurial economic foresight […]; (2) a system of sanctions imposed by consumers: profit-and-loss; (3) private property.
The Future of U.S. Medicare:
People pay $1,500 for services worth $7,000. Is this program likely to grow? Is it likely to bankrupt the Federal government? Will this lead to mass inflation and long lines in clinics with waiting rooms filled with old people? Count on it.
If you wonder why there is a boom in health care services, cease wondering. It is not simply that Americans are aging. It is that the Federal government has created a bureaucratic monster based on subsidized health care services. Today, the unfunded liability of Medicare in present dollars is in the range of $70 trillion.
What do students learn in community colleges?
Whatever their part-time, $15 an hour instructors can teach them. These are liberal arts institutions, mostly, and to get an AA degree, a student must take half his courses in the liberal arts. By the academic standards of the public schools in my day, let alone my parents’ day, these courses are high school courses — tax-funded, dumbed down high schools — for students who did not do well in high school.
Why are colleges relatively low cost?
… tax-subsidized costs imposed on local property owners… Furthermore, this cost would be lower if the state did not restrict the number of schools. How does it do this? Through the system of academic licensing, known as academic accreditation.
Are public libraries used to improve job skills? No.
Have you ever walked into a library and seen a section on “Job Training”? I never have. Is there any indication that people are coming in to get materials on career enhancement? No. How do I know? Because the local library closes at 5 p.m., before people get off work. If public libraries were serving people looking to improve their job skills, they would open at noon and close at 8.