Bernie Sanders recently put out this tweet commenting about entry into college should not be affected by a person’s parents’ money. What he is alluding to is that college/university should be free.
There are many issues with this tweet, so let’s address the most superficial issue:
Questions are *not* arguments.
Anybody can ask questions all day regarding any position and they may even trip up the person being questioned, but it does not validate the questioner’s opinion nor does it invalidate the questionee’s claims.
Questions are useful in getting people to more explicitly lay out their claims or to show contradictions in those claims. If the answer is contradictory, then that is what invalidates the questionee’s opinion and not the question itself.
Sanders is relying on others’ emotions for people to answer that it is very insane, and that it shows we need “free” college. The primary issue is that emotion is not a substitute for reason in argumentation, no matter how much progressives wish it to be so.
Furthermore, we live in a world of scarce resources, and to finance one action necessarily requires a corresponding reduction in or absence of financing another action. For example, under Sanders’ plan providing “free” college to students would require less money in investments on Wall Street, i.e. taxes from Wall Street speculation would finance “free” college.
Additionally, students forego many, if not all, other career plans when attending college, i.e., the opportunity cost for attending college is the absence of gaining other skills, knowledge, etc. “Free” college advocates rarely ever address the opportunity costs of going to college. They simply ignore that it might be better for many to go into other pursuits.
As a result of subsidized college there would then be less mechanics, CEOs, entrepreneurs, etc.. The supply of potential employees in some fields will decrease, while some other fields, e.g., psychology, will have an increase in the supply of potential employees.
This creates two problems:
- Shortages in the former fields and
- Surpluses in the latter fields.
Now society as a whole will be worse off because consumers’ demands require more laborers in the former fields than the amount willing to be employed at the market price, and those demands also require less laborers in the latter fields. This outcome is seen as suboptimal from the consumers’ points of view.
While it would be nice for us to be able to provide anybody with anything they wish, we cannot purely because of scarcity. This leaves us with only one choice: economize and use those scarce resources for the most highly valued goods and services according to the consumers.
This is not an exhaustive list of reasons why this tweet and the reasoning behind it is flawed; for instance, any ethical considerations have been left out of this post. This post does show, however, that Sanders and the advocates for “free” college do not understand reality, or rather scarcity.
Be First to Comment