From: mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian,comp.org.eff.talk,alt.amateur-comp,soc.culture.usa,alt.activism
Subject: Re: [misc.activism.progressive] Clinton Office Requests Comments
Date: 5 Jan 93 15:34:23 GMT
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Organization: CenterLine Software, Inc.
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In article <4JAN199322424251@venus.tamu.edu> gmw0622@venus.tamu.edu (Mr. Grinch) writes:
>In article <1iab94INNsdv@armory.centerline.com>, mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes...
> >Considering that room, board, and tuition at most top-notch universities costs
> >close to the median family income in the US, its pretty obvious that
> >Libertarianism would tie quality of education to family wealth as closely as
> >it is tied in most third world nations (and used to be in most modern industrial
> >nations.)
>>
>Most taxes are paid by the middle class.  The middle class can't possibly
>save money by paying taxes to subsidize universities rather than paying the
>university directly.

Actually, it can.  Simply because meritocratic distribution of college funding
can have better results than nepotistic funding.  And that's exactly my point
above: in most third world nations, college funding is primarily nepotistic. 
Reliance on nepotistic funding guarantees waste of the talents of the pool of
candidates that haven't wealthy relatives.

And of course, your response entirely sidesteps the issue of ENTRY into the
middle class.  The subsidies that enabled the education of my family have been
paid back by taxes on our higher earnings.

>You are trying to make more champaign by pouring it
>onto the rug and sucking it up rather than drinking it straight from the 
>bottle.

Please spare us your "reasoning" in metaphors.  They are easily turned:
better everybody gets a swig than one person is drunk.

> >My parents were impoverished immigrants.  They, my sisters, and I could
> >never have afforded our educations which propelled us into the middle class
> >without substantial government loans and subsidies.  I defy you to point to
> >a nation that creates and perpetuates a large middle class without such
> > subsidies.
>
>I don't suppose you'd believe me if I were to claim the USA had a large middle
>class BEFORE there was massive public education,  that in fact without that
>large middle class we wouldn't have the tax base to support this government 
>spending in the first place?  Nonetheless,  it's true.

Yes, but that large middle class was a product of pre-industrial government
subsidy: ever hear of the Homestead Act?  And its long list of predecessors?
And state agricultural research?  That large middle class consisted primarily
of farmers until the major migrations to the cities that engendered massive
public education.  Giving small allotments of farmland away for free is a
subsidy that has seldom been replicated.

>What I'd like you to find is instances of the head of a government agency
>declaring his agency to be superfluous and harmful and that it should be 
>eliminated.  Who knows,  maybe you'll actually find some and convince me that 
>governments can be trusted to regulate their own growth.

You set a standard for government that private industry won't meet either.
Let's ask a tobacco company to declare itself to be "superfluous and harmful
and that it should be eliminated."  Isn't it funny: both know they have
constituencies.

I don't think you'd have to look to far to find departments of government that
have been abolished or diminished.  Reorganizations are common.

Mike Huben

"Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under
a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the
kind of life he led there before joining the family circle."   Samuel Beckett
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian,comp.org.eff.talk,alt.amateur-comp,soc.culture.usa,alt.activism