Do you think Higher Education in America should be completely funded by taxes?

[AggregateDemand]

No. The government should not get into the business of dispensing more non-cash benefits to the American people. We've already compromised by funding the compulsory education system, but since education is the cornerstone of democracy, the compromise is legitimate.

However, it would be beneficial to replace the failed welfare state with a universal income. Students could use their universal income proceeds to pay tuition, and drastically reduce dependence on FFELP loans.

[AggregateDemand]

I assume you're in favor of ending all hand-outs to corporate America, then? So ending all subsidies to agribusiness, tax abatement for industry, tariffs, copyright protection, etc?

Ag subsidies and tax abatement are both cash. Tariffs are not governed by the economics of positive rights or entitlements. Copyright protection is a constitutionally-enumerated non-cash positive right, not an additional non-cash program.

Are you high?

[AggregateDemand]

Think of how many brilliant minds have been prevented from going to college because we have decided to subject it to the free-market price system. Why should your income determine whether or not you go to college? In most Euro nations, college is almost completely free or students pay a paltry tuition.

An industry awash in government-backed educational loans is a free-market? I'm not convinced.

[AggregateDemand]

Economics of positive rights or entitlements? Please speak English, not libertarian. Thanks.

Copyrights are the greatest form of corporate nanny-statism because they grant people a monopoly over an idea. Why should anyone have the right to claim ownership of an idea or process? It's fringe logic that belongs in the ashbin of history.

Copyrights and patents are vital human rights. When a movie studio is required to pay JK Rowling for the rights to produce Harry Potter, I'm not sure how that can be construed as corporate nanny-statism.

For basic human rights, the method of administration is everything. Once upon a time, individuals and industry could patent something as general as an automobile. Thankfully, patent enforcement has changed. Today, we have problems with companies owning intellectual and creative property beyond the artists death, but this doesn't mean that the entire intellectual property system is corrupt.

A decade ago, some people believed that open source would replace intellectual property. Excluding a few industries, it hasn't come to pass.

[AggregateDemand]

You could make the argument that between the early 20th century and the 1970s or so, Americans basically had all of their education provided for free in the sense that you could very easily obtain a middle-class job by only using the free, compulsory K-12 education paid for by state and local taxes.

The biggest problem is that over the past 20 years or so, states have reduced public funding for state universities and required students to pay a larger portion of the cost as a result. It amounts to a generational wealth transfer from Gen X-ers and Millennials to Baby Boomers who got nearly-free university education and then turned around and decided no one is "entitled to handouts." Because Baby Boomers are pretty much the most horrible generation this country has ever produced and I'm all for calling their bluff and making them eat cat food with Ryan Budget-level SSI benefits when they're 80.

Basically the story of the United States for all entitlements. You can't exclude the Greatest Generation though. They pummeled the baby-boomers with Medicare taxes, and they turned Gen X and Gen Y middle class programs into the Welfare state. It wouldn't be so galling if the welfare state had achieved something beside institutionalizing poverty.

[AggregateDemand]

You say that as though poverty didn't exist before the mid-20th century.

I've read a lot of Joe Bageant's writings on growing up in rural Appalachia and one thing both the Left and the Right overlook about modern poverty is the extent to which it was as much a cause of urbanization as it was of any government policy or lack thereof. You had poor blacks and poor whites who for hundreds of years had basically lived very meager lives as subsistence farmers with little connection to the market economy beyond buying seeds and basic materials like cloth and flour.

And when those people stopped doing that and moved into low-wage service jobs in cities and small towns (or large cities, particularly with blacks), their entire way of life and support system was basically torn to shreds. So it's not all that surprising that some of them would start having problems with drugs or alcohol, or unstable marriages and families. Who were the people moving into all those big housing projects in St. Louis and Chicago and Detroit in the 1950s? They were people from the rural South. It was their first time in the "big city." Some of them had never had to do things like pay rent or open bank accounts before.

The fact that that urban migration happened shortly before the War on Poverty began doesn't imply that the War on Poverty caused the trajectory so many of those people went down.

It's a reasonable alternative theory, as long as you ignore the workings of the welfare state.

People who study the Welfare state find decades of abuse. Marginal tax rates in excess of 100% for welfare recipients. Improper use of non-cash benefits due to paternalistic mistrust between the public and the poor. Abuse of minimum wage laws. Abuse of rent controls at the local level, and poor project planning. Piracy of Medicaid by senior citizens. Failure by the education system in poor areas. Suppression of birth control and abortion services by moral-busy-body conservatives, which proliferates generational suffering. Then add the war on drugs.

Since the public judges the war on poverty by its moral intentions, not its effectiveness, the oppression continues. I'm sure the cultural changes during the 20th century were quite taxing on the rural subsistence farmers, but the war on poverty has turned economic transition into economic apocalypse for about 15% of the nation.

[AggregateDemand]

Yes, but education should not be publicly administered