The Times They Are A Changed (to paraphrase Bob Dylan)

In the 1970’s I worked 8 to 5 in downtown LA. Following that I took an express bus to Cal State, LA, gobbled down a reasonable dinner in the school cafeteria and started class at 6 pm. Due to situations like that and others in my life I have prided myself as a hard working, self reliant, conservative American. But the realization hit me that I couldn’t do that today given current tuition prices. Also, I ate a somewhat subsidized meal. Today, it’s likely that food service at Cal State, LA is a mall-like court of fast food outlets as it is now at Sac State.

While much discussion has occurred, both pro and con, about college sports subsidy, inflated faculty salaries and benefits, too many foreign students, etc. the largest culprit by many orders of magnitude has been administration especially diversity and similar programs. Not surprisingly, they employ the graduates in fields such as Gender Studies who would otherwise be unemployable.  Our institutions of higher learning have become self-perpetuating organizations with education as the excuse and no longer the reason. The very people the colleges exist to help have, instead, become the victims.

There is no need to repeat the severity and personal hardships of the student loan debt crisis. The Liberals have created this crisis and now advocate high tax solutions such as free college while ignoring the causes. They create problems for the opportunity to offer solutions that increase government and reduce personal freedom with the human suffering induced being irrelevant. I saw this phenomenon in LA. The central city was down-zoned with many developers creasing business or finding themselves bankrupt. Like with student loan difficulties, there is no need to repeat the squalor or disease of homelessness. But the environmentalists thought they were saving the city while the far left knowingly exploited them to create a demand for government control over housing.

But while I was “subsidized” as a college student, it was clearly in the context of someone helping themselves, not surrendering their freedoms to dependency. The goal of liberal democracy (in its historic meaning) is to guarantee opportunity, not to guarantee success. This was well articulated by Abraham Lincoln in his signing the Land Grant College Act (officially the Morrill Act) creating our state university system. Affirmative Action espouses the opposite ideology.

From the far left to the far right, there is now an overly abundant public discussion of our social welfare system. I find it more framed in rhetoric than fact. All societies have had social welfare systems. In 19th century America it was primarily voluntary organizations like the Masons, Elks, etc. Our local Italian Benevolent Society dates from that period. In the Middle Ages, it was the Catholic Church. Religious charities still play a major role in social welfare today, but are and have been under attack by the secular left.  I still cringe recalling Obama’s cohort attacking The Little Sisters of the Poor. Before that, the left vicously attacked Bush for discrimination when he proposed that church-run child care facilities which received government money would be expected to hire those of the same faith or domination. But Bush was right, and endless data shows that religious-oriented social services have higher success rates.

But throughout history until a few generations ago, social welfare was primarily the extended family. It still is, but not to the pervasive extent it was in the past. Now we have care giver programs, etc. that subsidize and partly replace the family.

Today’s situation is “a changed” and our politics seem simply insane.  I find it, except for far left motives of destructive social upheaval, beyond comprehension to have an open border for criminals and terrorists along with granting some of them welfare. That is one of many examples of the impossibilities of today’s discussions. Nevertheless, I refuse to give up hope and make the following proposals. I do this in the context of sadly having to acknowledge the existent government role, the vast number of single parent households and other manifestations of the immediate past than can only change over a generation or two.

Firstly, colleges need to be audited as if they were corporate takeover candidates or Chapter 11 make overs. Costs can be eliminated without sacrificing the clear goal of education. Since most colleges are state run or regulated, but dependent upon Federal aid, there are various issues here. The Federal do- -as-I-say began with New Deal aid programs and has probably polluted America ever since. Given today’s political landscape, the initiative would come from Trump. I don’t like the predicament we’re in of having to further strengthen the federal government, but I am a realist and that’s our only choice.

I’ve always supported public transit, like the land grant colleges, because it helps people help themselves. And the situation there is not unlike universities. Transit agencies with business people on their boards (unheard of in California) run far more efficiently. Again, this could be changed with Federal grant requirements, but we are in the same quagmire as with education. 

Real public discussion seems the only answer, but that possibility seems to diminish daily. But it’s still important to ask in formulating social welfare policy: Does this help people help themselves or does it encourage dependency?

Copyright 2019, Mark L. Bennett