The US Department of Education now offers the world a list of good (legitimate) institutions of higher learning in the country whose citizens support it with their taxes. Of course, those same citizens’ taxes also extensively support the great majority of the listed institutions themselves, typically through that same Department of Education, so with a few conspicuous exceptions like Grove City College and Hillsdale College, it’s pretty much their client list. In fact, every time you pull up the name of an institution, you’re offered a link below the name that leads to information about how you can tap tax revenues to attend these institutions. It makes for a very strange display headed by names like Grove City and Hillsdale.
It’s a very brave effort by Leviathan to perform a market function, and it’s inspired, ironically, by the recent scandals in which a large number of the highly educated bureaucrats who staff the very government of which this Department of Education is a part were found to sport degrees from diploma mills most definitely excluded from this list.
And why might such government Departments be more shot-through than the ranks of private, for-profit entities with holders of these bogus “degrees”? Well, the immediate answer is that entities funded by tax revenues commonly pay their employees more simply for having advanced degrees, while private employers more commonly recognize the disconnect between even legitimate advanced degrees and actual productivity. But the ultimate answer, which grows out of this, sounds more like an echo: the government doesn’t serve a market: it extorts its revenues.
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:A 50% tax on the poor and a 25% tax on the rich is regressive, even if the rich pay more absolutely. Similarly, something with absolute payments like that that translate into higher percentages the poorer you get is regressive. You might not like the word regressive, but that is the connotation it has in our language, and it doesn’t even matter what the word is. We all KNOW what the concept we are talking about (poor pay higher proportion, lower absolute), and can discuss whether that’s a good or bad thing from there.”
It has negative connotations, unfortunately. Anyway, someone who opposes regressivity per se would have to oppose abolishing a tax, since not-taxing the rich saves them a lot more money than does not-taxing the poor.
As Mises said, “You’re all a bunch of socialists!”
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