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© 2012 Sanjeev Sabhlok's revolutionary blog
This title is will provoke at least some people who've not understood the dynamics of public funding of higher education, and believe that higher education must not just be subsidised, it must be free!
I'm NOT a Bastiat. I don't consider all taxes to be theft.
But this one – the SUBSIDISATION of higher education – DOES qualify, in my view, as theft – the worst form of it all: from the poorest to the richest.
For those who wish to understand this issue, there's none better than Milton Friedman to learn from. Watch his video, below.
Btw, his book The Tyranny of the Status Quo was the first time I came across Friedman's work (apart from analysis of monetarist policies in textbooks for MA Economics that I was privately studying for), in mid 1980s, just after the AGP had come to power in Assam. Indrajit Barua, the great classical liberal thinker from Assam, who had become a good friend due to my calculations on the number of illegal migrants in Assam (I disproved his exaggerated claims – to his satisfaction – and that of AASU's), lent me this (very small) book which deals with public choice issues.
I'm afraid I didn't fully appreciate Friedman's insights into public choice and lobby groups in the mid-1980s, but this book was (along with my readings of Ayn Rand, Emerson, Voltaire, and many others) important background as I learnt first hand in the 1980s and 1990s about the destructive inefficiencies of government.
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Related posts:
- A debate on funding of higher education, with Tim Curtin: #1
- A liberal policy position on higher education
- Topsy turvy higher education system in India
- Higher education as a machine to generate leftists and eco-imperialists
- Higher education as the enemy of mankind’s progress! Much truth to this.
- Central banks have ONE MAIN GOAL: to loot the poor and hand that money to the rich
- Harvard University academics prove once again that the government is a poor manager of our money
- List of online VET and higher education courses
- Rahul Gandhi – No!! No government funding of political parties, but payment based on valid votes polled
- Indians don’t want to become rich. How else can one explain what’s going on?
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Government funding of higher education is theft DIRECTLY from the poor to pay the rich http://t.co/F9zH09N9
Government funding of higher education is theft DIRECTLY from the poor to pay the rich http://t.co/vHOd6nzz
Government funding of higher education is theft DIRECTLY from the poor to pay the rich http://t.co/F9zH09N9
Government funding of higher education is theft DIRECTLY from the poor to pay the rich http://t.co/F9zH09N9
HERE’S A COMMENT FROM TIM CURTIN THAT WAS EARLIER LOCKED OUT DUE TO COMMENT SYSTEM ISSUES. POSTING IT NOW.
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Hi Sanjeev
My system could not get this up at your Blog, so here it is:
Sanjeev, you disappoint me, especially as we agree on most other issues, but you are quite wrong about funding of higher education being by the poor for the rich. The truth is that the poor, especially in India, pay no income tax, nor much of any other taxation, precisely because they are poor and have little to spend on goods subject to sales taxes and the like. In Australia the top 10% of income recipients (incomes of more than $80,000 in 2003-4) account for over 45% of all income taxation, and the bottom 10% account for just 0.6% of income taxation. So how do the poor here get to pay for “the rich” at our universities?
However it is also worth noting that here many of the current poor 10% may already be at university and will in due course move into the top 10%.
Then there is the undeniable fact, embodied by yourself and me, that graduates earn much more than non-graduates and thereby pay more tax than non-graduates (unless they are adept at evasion, for which there are easy solutions). Not only that, as the only public service that graduates obtain that non-graduates do not is of course HE, which means that the incremental taxation accruing from graduates vis a vis non-graduates is attributable to whatever public funding there was of their HE, which is why as I have shown repeatedly* (and even some at Uni Melbourne) public funding of HE is such a good investment for the government.
Moreover the top 10% are very likely to send their kids to private schools, here and no doubt in India, at a considerable saving to state governments, and to use private health services, another saving for governments..
* see my many papers and my book showing how in effect all taxes are graduate taxes, given their much higher incomes and spending than those of 90% of non-graduates, many of my papers are available at my website http://www.timcurtin.com.
Best regards
Dear Tim, let me quote from BFN:
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No one can demand that every tennis player should be allowed to play in the Wimbledon tournament. It is one thing to provide a level playing field for people to develop their talent and quite another to demand entry to the highest levels of human activity. There is a thing called justice, by which only the best person, who not only has the talent but who has put in the necessary hard work, must win entry to the portals of higher competition. Entry into a portal of higher education is similarly a privilege, contingent upon significant hard work. It has nothing to do with providing anyone a level playing field.
Another reason why my government will not fund anyone’s higher education is because it would mean the poor would subsidize the rich. Tertiary institutions are ‘fishing nets’ to catch the society’s most talented people. Those who successfully complete tertiary education earn, on average, significantly more than those who are unable to gain admission to these institutions. The benefits of higher education are captured almost entirely by these people in exchange for services they provide when they join the workforce. Students going to tertiary institutes therefore will become much richer, on average, than the average taxpayer. If the average taxpayer were to subsidize their education it would amount to the poor subsidizing the (future) rich. There does remain the question of ensuring that all those who obtain admission to institutions of higher education are able to raise sufficient money to attend the courses. That can be easily resolved.
Details are in BFN.
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Basic point: the lifetime income of those who get higher education is FAR HIGHER than those who don’t. In that sense they are rich. They are therefore capable of paying for themselves (through loans: income smoothing/permanent income hypothesis). There is NO justification for others (which will include those who don’t get higher education, being 75 per cent of the population or more) to pay for these 10-25 per cent. These people can pay for themselves through subsidised loans on the line of HECS/HELP.