The semester has started, and the students are in full swing letting us know just how dissatisfied they are with how much college costs. I agree. I don’t know exactly how much it should cost; I just know that they are paying a lot more than I did. Perhaps it’s because higher education, like most government activity, is just another opportunity for people to launder money.
Students buy books with grants, loans, or other forms of financial aid. Then, friends of mine who work in college bookstores report that students return the books and exchange the money for iTunes gift cards, candy bars, and other items that are not covered by their student aid. I know that when I was in college I had friends who took out loans and bought cars with them. I don’t know how they paid their tuition, but some of them never went to class. After all, as long as you are still in college you don’t have to pay back the loans, and several folks I knew finally graduated in 2010. We end up with a significant fraction of the student body that is actually making very little progress towards graduation if they are progressing at all, who are beneficiaries of student financial aid for which they think they will never have to pay, particularly if they never get a job. This is depicted well in a college humor spoof I enjoy greatly.
The more I watch the behavior of government, the more convinced I am that government is really just a money laundering operation. Bastiat points out in “The Law” how the oppressed turn the tables when power changes and become the oppressors. So in essence, the plundered become the plunderers, except that government can do it behind the law, in the guise of law, by the force of law, and masquerading as according to the law. Obama has given special funding privileges to pet projects in green energy, despite the fact that they keep going bankrupt or moving to other countries after receiving tons of money in loans (Solyndra anyone?). Other presidents probably did the same thing. I have previously written perhaps here but definitely elsewhere that I suspect Feinstein’s husband is heavily invested in Smith and Wesson and Sturm, Ruger, and Co. and that she used her position to create an artificial run on guns and bullets by which to pad her wallet. It has been done in the past. It is called war profiteering usually, which is a war crime, but according to the current government and the media that’s a crime that only Republicans can commit.
At our group meeting in the department this month, we saw some examples that hit home personally. All of the chairs in the laboratories were replaced last term, without regard for the fact that the chairs they chose do not fit underneath the lab benches, which meant we ended up buying other new chairs for some labs, including my desk. We probably got a sweet deal because whoever owns the chair company is in bed or in business or in the pews with someone with authority over the college's purse. They have spent months trying to install a new autoclave in the microbiology prep area, and we finally learned that it cannot be done because nobody in the state is authorized to work on this special kind of pipe, and you can’t get a license to work on it in Nevada. This means some connection in California likely got a special and exclusive deal to work on it. It’s collusion. We found a way around it. While not technically money laundering in the classical sense, these kind of specially privileged projects appear regularly in government. That’s how government has worked.
I do not tend to work that way. My father tells me regularly that he thinks I should work towards a tenured professorship. He knows that offers the best job security. What he doesn’t realize is that many of those people do as little teaching as possible, and if we are an educational institution doesn’t it make more sense for our best instructors to teach as much as possible and pay them commensurately? Right out of college, I attempted to leverage his connections to get a job, but they were either unable or unwilling to help me. My siblings have fared similarly. In fact, I got this job because of what I know rather than who I know, and I continue to stay and teach and advance because I excel. It does take a lot of work. I suspect quite a few people work here because they are well connected with people in positions of power, but if they are not the best people for the job, we are shortchanging everyone who walks through our doors.
Liberals like to project on conservatives our penchant for “big business” as if that excuses big government. What they don’t want you to notice is that it’s a red herring. Like all members of the oldest profession, they are also capitalists, and they also support only businesses that launder money back to them. They like to see only the set of facts that validates what they believe. Even if their facts are true it does not license them to ignore the rest of the facts. Today on Facebook someone posted this thought without attribution: “People who work for a living are being undermined by people who vote for a living,” and that is true REGARDLESS of your party. I have been saying for years that the politicians are their own favorite constituents, beneficents, and beneficiaries, and if you happen to benefit from their policies, it’s largely coincidental. As the Samaritan told Jesus, "the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table". When Obama came to Vegas yesterday, he took credit for things that are true in spite of his policies, but because they happened during his presidency he likes to link his policies as causative, even though coincidence is not necessarily causality. He flies to Vegas to give a speech, which costs this city in lost revenue and increased security during his visit, and then he tells other people not to come spend money here. He transfers money from areas he doesn’t like to the ones he prefers.
It is a consistent mark of capitalism that people put their money into things they like. Sometimes government guilt trips them into liking certain things or eschewing others. Ultimately, we vote with our feet by putting our money into the things we prefer. Government doesn’t like that we get to choose; they want to decide for us what each of us needs. We don’t “need” assault rifles, but we do “need” healthcare, even though I only go to the doctor each year because the state tells me that I must. We don’t “need” big SUVs, but how else do people transport all six of their children in one car? They do not know what we need. They want us to want what they want us to want. At least they could have the intellectual honesty to admit that not enough people want what they want us to want. As for me, I just want them to leave me alone and let me do my job and live my life as well as I can.
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