Federal Student Loans Drive Up College Tuition Levels
2023-12-18
Mises Wire contributor Kevin Van Elswyk, in his November 29 article “Student Loans: The Continuing Crisis That Is Getting Worse,” nicely summarizes the current confusion and scandal of federal student loan programs, which at this point appear a miasma that will likely turn into an outright student grant program as more and more of these loan balances are forgiven.
It is most unfortunate that the US government, with good intentions to increase college attendance, ever became mired in this student loan morass. The effort originally began in the 1960s when economists observed that college graduates typically earn higher lifetime incomes than those who ended their formal education with high school. Thus Congress included in the Higher Education Act of 1965 a federal policy to encourage as many
Can a Libertarian Find Hope in Prison? Maybe
2023-12-12
Contrary to popular assertions, Ancapistan is a real place and is conventionally referred to as prison. In all seriousness, I have been living in the US federal prison system for four years now, and in many ways, prison society actually is fairly anarchic. Considering these societies (plural because prison culture is heterogeneous across geography and across institutions’ security levels) seriously should dispel any notions of humanity that could be categorized as Hobbesian pessimism.
One obvious way in which prison is libertarian is the inability to utilize the state’s traditional method of sending people to prison as a form of punishment, given that prisoners are already in prison. More generally, however, at the facility in which I reside the institution staff rarely intrude into the