"Congress Will Fund It"?
What better way to engage in fiscal recklessness than in the pursuit of collectivist indoctrination?
Chris Myers Asch and Shawn Raymond, both in their early 30s, already have built a successful nonprofit to encourage college attendance in the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta. Now they want Congress to fund free higher education for civil servants.
…
At the core of the proposal are these ideas: The 5,000-person undergraduate academy would be funded mostly by Congress at a cost of $205 million a year. Incoming freshmen would be nominated by members of Congress, in a process much like that at the military academies. A certain number of spots would be allocated to each state.
The details of this silly Warm Fuzzy Feeling boondoggle are unimportant — the project will of course never come to fruition. The economics of it, meanwhile, are straightforward — see generally, “opportunity cost.” If there is a demand for civic opportunities in our colleges and universities (and there is), then colleges and universities will provide it (which they do). There is no objectively demonstrable market failure here, so of course no government intervention is warranted (does anyone really believe that we have too few civil servants in our federal, state and local bureaucracies?).
But none of that was my main point. This was: “they want Congress to fund” and “would be funded mostly by Congress…”
Um, no. Congress never has funded and never could fund anything. Taxpayers fund things, not Congress. That’s a distinction that should never be overlooked. When it is, bad things happen.
Perhaps the Civil Service Academy should be sure to teach that.
(Via Cato@Liberty.)
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