The fatal shortcoming of Obama's proposal for free community college for all

A February 4 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal notes that Obama's "free community college" proposal ignores a fundamental, immutable economic principle:

The spirit behind President Obama’s recent proposal to make community college free is understandable, but he has fallen victim to the fallacy of composition. He has made the mistake of believing that if one person benefits from an action, then everyone else who takes the same action will also benefit. Economics teaches us otherwise.
Although getting an associate degree or some college education at a community college may benefit any one person, in the aggregate a policy that increases the supply of people with associate degrees can backfire unless it has been designed to fill an existing excess demand. Otherwise such a policy will merely exacerbate an existing excess supply of labor with that level of educational attainment.

Unless our economy magically creates positions for this excess supply of labor, what we'll end up with is overtrained restaurant workers.

Let’s play “Spot the Logical Fallacy”!

This July 29 letter to the editors of the Ventura County (California) Star contains a significant logical fallacy. Do you see it?

Bumper-sticker rage

Knowing the hazards of “road rage,” I recently experienced “parking-lot rage” when confronted by a bumper sticker that read: “I’m a Republican. Not everybody can be on welfare!”

For the person on whose vehicle that appeared: I’m a socially liberal Democrat who’s not spent a single second on welfare.

For those of you on the right whose arch-conservative stance has been allowed to dictate county and city government, nestled as they are in the bosom of the Ronald Reagan Library, who think that bumper stickers are cute and funny and want to know where you can get yours, I proudly pay my taxes, something your respected tea-party people pout about and demonstrate against. How dare you portray me a deadbeat!

I proudly served in the U.S. military, something your recent president and vice president disdained. How dare you question my commitment to this country with your absolutely ignorant bumper stickers! How dare you!

— Bob Jackson, Simi Valley

Poll shows success of left's propaganda efforts

Rasmussen released the results of a recent poll asking Americans whether they preferred capitalism or socialism, without defining either term.

Only 53% of all respondents surveyed agreed that capitalism is better, while 20% insisted that socialism is better.

Have Americans lost faith in the engine that made our country the leading economy in the world? Possibly not, because when the poll question was changed, replacing the term "capitalism" with "free-market economy", free markets were favored by 70%.

Rasmussen suggests an interesting explanation for this divergence in results:

The fact that a “free-market economy” attracts substantially more support than “capitalism” may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets.

There is a germ of truth in this. American capitalism does not rely heavily on free markets, but that is largely the fault of the government, not of businesses.

When government shows its willingness to act as a regulatory sledgehammer, why wouldn't corporate America attempt to use the system to their advantage and to the detriment of their rivals? If the government concerned itself chiefly with ensuring the free flow of goods without partiality (which was the original intent of the Constitution's "commerce clause"), then we could say that American capitalism was built on a foundation of free markets. We are ridiculously far from that reality.

But I think Rasmussen attributes to the public more sophistication on this issue than it deserves. Ask the average American if capitalism relies on free markets, he or she will pause thoughtfully and then reply, "Huh?"

A more likely explanation is that the public has succumbed to a generation of anticapitalist propaganda in the media and in our public education system. This seems to be borne out in the demographic breakdown of Rasmussen's data.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

Those of us who are old enough to have personal memory of the effects of fully-realized socialism (as seen in the late, unlamented Soviet bloc) are much more likely to distrust the economic prescriptions of the European Union and the Obama administration.

These results do not bode well for America, because it won't be long before the younger generation -- a third of whom currently prefer socialism -- takes the reigns of power. Some will probably come to their senses before then, but how many of these will go on to become activists for freedom?