Tuition Refunds for Today's Uneducated Graduates

Most college and university graduates of the last generation or more are essentially uneducated in the nature and values of modern Western Civilization and its leading offshoot the capitalist economic system.

The courses that should have given them this education, namely, the courses in the liberal arts and humanities, did not, despite the fact that in many cases the students not only paid for this education but incurred substantial debt in order to do so.

These students deserve a refund. In the case of private colleges and universities they should be paid to the extent possible out of the endowments of the schools they attended, which in some cases amount to tens of billions of dollars.

For the rest, all government financing, direct or indirect, serving to support education in the liberal arts or humanities should be abolished, including in primary and secondary education, as well as in higher education.

In all cases in which licensing laws require degrees of any kind that contain a liberal arts or humanities component, that requirement should be deemed satisfied upon a statement to that effect from the candidate’s prospective employer.

This would make it possible for new centers of learning to be established that either avoided liberal arts/humanities courses altogether or offered new and different varieties of such courses.

It is time to defund "education" whose product is ignorance and savagery.

Trump Versus Our Enemies

Retired General Mattis has accused Pres. Trump of dividing the country in a time of crisis.(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/jim-mattis-trump-protests.html?searchResultPosition=2) 

This is a false accusation. The country has been growing increasingly divided for many years. The fundament division is between those who want to preserve the American way of life and the capitalist system and those who want to destroy it.

In the last week or more, the division has manifested itself as between looters and arsonists on the one side and their victims on the other. Pres. Trump stands with the victims.

General Mattis apparently does not know of this conflict. He represents the rare case of a general who apparently does not know that his country has enemies or who its enemies are. Fortunately, President Trump does.

Keeping Up With the Party Line at The New York Times/Pravda

From the movie review “Casualties of China’s Transformed Economy” by Jeannette Catsoulis, in today’s Times:

Bracketed by stunning long shots taken from the front of a moving freight train, Wang Bing’s epic, three-part documentary, “Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks,” is an astonishingly intimate record of China’s painful transition from state-run industry to a free market. Filming between 1999 and 2001, Mr. Wang and his sound engineer, Lin Xudong, painstakingly document the death throes of the Tie Xi industrial district in the city of Shenyang, in northeast China, a once-vibrant symbol of a thriving socialist economy.

How foolish of China to abandon its “thriving socialist economy” of perpetual mass starvation for a rapidly progressing market economy of soaring skyscrapers and rising living standards for hundreds of millions.

From the book review by William Grimes “Looking Back in Anger at the Gilded Age’s Excesses” in today’s Times:

Again and again, surveying the post-Civil War landscape, Mr. Beatty throws up his hands in despair. “The people supported the government, and the government supported the corporations and the rentiers with the people’s money,” he writes. “And the people did not seem to object, at least not enough of them.”
Maybe that’s because of wheeler-dealers like Jay Gould, who once boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” They just don’t make them like that anymore.

Or maybe it’s because the reviewer and author (Jack Beatty, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly) are 180 degrees wrong. Instead of the “robber barons” stealing the industries that did not exist before they created them, and impoverishing those who had next to nothing in the first place, the vast new wealth that the great industrialists employed as capital served radically and progressively to increase the supply of goods available to the common man to buy and increased the demand for the labor that he sold. That’s the actual nature and significance of the fact that, in the reviewer’s words, “The richest 1 percent owned 26 percent of the wealth, and the richest 10 percent owned 72 percent.” The hated rich created that new and additional wealth and were led by the nature of the profit motive, capital, and free markets to employ it for the progressive benefit of the masses.

Such is the intellectual and moral state of The New York Times, a veritable cesspool of wrong and vicious ideas serving day in and day out to poison the minds of its readers against the capitalist economic system and economic freedom.

This article is copyright © 2007, by George Reisman. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute it electronically and in print, other than as part of a book and provided that mention of the author’s web site www.capitalism.net is included. (Email notification is requested.) All other rights reserved. George Reisman is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics.