In other words, this is yet one more area where competitive forces are much more powerful than charity forces, all for the betterment of the employees.

Oh and, I am still paying back my undergraduate student loans!!!

Right now, I’m just glad that the governor wrote into his budget a $75 million buy back for grad, undergrad and professional students at Cal State Universities and University of California. Of course, you don’t even pay your fees, so you got nothing to worry about there.

I have clearly fallen into the Bizarro World.

So really what we are talking about is another socialist scheme to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to those who didn’t.

Virtually no one attending college has earned their wealth, unless you count choosing your parents wisely as earning wealth. If that is the case, then Paris Hilton is the hardest-working woman in the world.

The public universities would get all the poor students? That’s exactly how it was in my father’s day. He was born poor, and received a completely subsidized education at City College of New York, courtesy of the GI Bill. CCNY was so overwhelmingly poor, and ignorant, that anti-Semites said the acronym stood for Christian College Now Yiddish.

But my father received an excellent education at CCNY, and worked hard all his life, and as a result retired with comfortable economic assets.

Likewise, Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynmann was kept out of some Ivy League schools due to anti-Semitism, but eventually found a home at Princeton and, later, CalTech. Feynmann was, like my father, poor when he was a child, and benefitted from an academic scholarship.

Universities have always operated partially out of business motives, and partially out of social conscious. Nobody becomes a college professor to get rich. Universities fight for the best and brightest students of any economic class, in part because they know that smart people will tend to succeed economically, and successful alumni are their best donors and marketing tools.

Am I allowed to mention “social conscience” here, or does that make me a Socialist?

One unintended consequence of this policy would be that those who could afford to pay full tuition would increasingly find the incentive to attend what used to be more expensive but what would now be competitively priced private colleges, compelling. The public universities would get all the poor students and the rich kids would be concentrated in private schools that would suddenly have money to hire the best professors. The kids coming out of the private schools would be in the greater demand and would command higher salaries and society would be further stratified with a decrease in social mobility.

The rosy outcome predicted by socialists would once again fail to materialize. When will they ever learn?