Fallow Land

Thomas Sowell has just written an interesting column on the problem created by government subsidy of higher education. I greatly respect Sowell, but I think his column can be extended just a tad.

Why does the government waste national resources by subsidizing a kind of higher education that results in politically correct drones? If the question is framed in the right way, it answers itself.

Perhaps the government pays people to go to college for the same reason it pays farmers NOT to till their land. It is a subsidy to assure non-production.

If people are trained in non-production, they will more easily be rendered into indentured servants. And what is someone who owes tens of thousands to the banks if not an indentured servant of those same banks?

Indentured servants used to be tied to the land, because the land was the primary means by which to generate income. Now that income is no longer agriculturally based, but service based, getting people to sell themselves into servitude requires only control of what people know.

This is best managed by keeping them away from real knowledge and feeding them pablum instead: thus the modern liberal "curriculum." And - for bonus points - you get them to pay you for the privilege of being intellectually castrated.

It's a sweet system, if you own the means of production.

Seen in this light, the government subsidies to higher education make a ton of economic sense. Corporations get indentured servants who are made psychologically subservient, forced to pay off huge debts, and are thus unable to start businesses which might otherwise compete directly with the existing corporations.

It is no coincidence that a great number of the multi-millionaires in the nation today are college dropouts.

Update
Walter Williams, one of the leading economists in the nation, wrote a column this week (two months later) that paraphases my point above.