Power & Market

You're a twenty-something student and have recently graduated. You're excited to go and take on the world. However, you owe over $50,000. All you wanted to do is gain an education. This massive debt now looms over you. How can the world be so unfair? Why shouldn't this education be free like the other forms are? Shouldn't education be a right? Step in, Democratic Presidential nominee, Elizabeth Warren. She recently set out her plan to cancel student debt and abolish tuition fees. Her plan offers free tuition, as well as eliminating existing debt of up to $50,000. Each household with income below $100,000 would have up to $50,000 of debt wiped out.

What's There Not To Like?

Surely free higher-education, is beneficial to society as a whole? If smarter people are coming out of colleges, greater value will be created in the economy. The trouble with this is that far too many degrees are not aligned to market demand. Religious Studies may be of interest to the student, but there aren’t many businesses or jobs that require such degrees. There is a case for creating a well-educated workforce, but this has turned into educating for educating's sake.

The System Is Not Aligned With The Market

Too many students are coming out of the educational system and not utilising their degree. Whilst unemployment rates are low among graduates, many find themselves in jobs that don't require a degree. From Starbucks baristas to Wal-Mart assistants — many now have a degree.

Some majors are more prone to underemployment than others. Performing arts graduates for example have an underemployment rate of 65.7% . Graduates in Leisure and Hospitality don't favour much better, with an underemployment rate of 63%. By contrast, engineering and educational graduates score favourably on underemployment measures. The difference is that there is demand for engineers and educators, but not so much for performing arts.

There is a clear disconnect between the market and the educational system. Whilst the market demands graduates in science and engineering, the educational system provides graduates in arts and media.

"Free" College Wont Re-align The Market

Making college education free is not going to resolve the disconnect between the market and colleges. If college education is free, there is no downside of coming out underemployed. The risk associated is almost eradicated. One of the crucial parts of college education is determining whether it's of value. It's an investment. An investment that future earnings will be enhanced as a result. Will the enhanced earnings be worth more than the $50,000+ spent on education? By removing the cost, Warren's proposal changes the incentives. The cost-benefit is changed. There is a significant benefit, but little cost. This incentivises greater participation. When the price of any good is removed, the demand for it will increase. College will be no exception.

More students going to college may seem like a good thing. However, what will they be going to study and what value will that degree have? Based on existing statistics, many will continue to come out underemployed. If we are educating millions of individuals that are not utilising that education, resources are wasted. Those same resources could be used to invest in capital equipment and increase productivity.

The Mess that Is American Public Secondary and Primary Education

Elizabeth Warren justifies her plan as part of an effort to help racial and ethnic minorities get into college. However, given how little government schools at the primary and secondary levels do for students who are low-income or non-white, it’s hard to have confidence in just another government education scheme. After all, at lower levels of public education, instruction and outcomes are notoriously poor for just the sorts of students Warren says she can help. What reason do we have to believe that universal government education at the college level will finally get it right?

If Warren wants to expand college access, she’s be more worried about ensuring schools provide the skills necessary to enter and thrive at higher education institutions. Right now, that simply isn’t happening.

Social Security is going bust, a report released by trustees of the federal government’s entitlement programs claims. And without more money being poured into the system, the report argues, tens of millions of Americans will receive only three-quarters of their Social Security benefits in the near future. But even if trustees hadn’t figured that out by now, you would have known this was bound to happen. Unless you never heard any Austrian economist explain why Social Security is nothing but a Ponzi scheme.

According to the trustees, Social Security’s funds will be tapped out by 2035, meaning that this generation of working men and women may never see a dollar from what they “invested,” forcefully, over the years. In order to fix this problem and make Social Security solvent again, the report urges lawmakers to act.

“Lawmakers have a broad continuum of policy options that would close or reduce the long-term financing shortfall of” Social Security and Medicare, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and other trustees wrote in their report to Congress.

Options include hiking up taxes and slashing benefits, two policies that seldom find any support from elected officials on both sides of the aisle. As such, it’s clearly impossible to work on any Social Security “reform” that will actually help to prevent it from falling apart.

But is there any way that Social Security can be actually saved?

Abolish Social Security

President Trump thought he wouldn’t have to do anything to the entitlement program. As a matter of fact, he claimed that his plans were going to boost the economy enough that Social Security’s problems would be easily solved.

But the U.S. government has long been in debt. Quite deeply, as a matter of fact. As a result, money is not being put aside in some special fund for Social Security. What the government runs on is borrowed and printed cash, as the Federal Reserve keeps postponing its plan to slow down on the expansion of its balance sheets. But as the number of Americans who are 65 or older is expected to grow by a third between now and 2040, the cost of Social Security will continue to rise.

Considering that the program both undermines economic prosperity and damages the average American’s relationship with money by giving beneficiaries incentives to remain dependent on the government, ending it shouldn’t be a tough call. Especially knowing it will no longer be capable of fulfilling its obligations in the coming future.

But Social Security still has friends in high places.

It is thanks to big businesses and their connection with the government that we have the program in the first place. After all, if President Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t listened to hot shots at the time, who were upset smaller businesses were not giving employees retiree pensions, the federal government may have not been used to force everyone to pay for similar programs.

As Murray Rothbard put it, Social Security didn’t hurt big, established firms but their competitors, as the program “penalizes the lower cost, ‘unprogressive’ employer and cripples him by artificially raising his costs compared by the larger employer.” Unfortunately, not many Americans see the program this way.

With generations relying on the failed system over the years, it is certain we won’t see any politicians doing much to gut it. But hopefully, Americans will finally refuse the system once they learn it is both ineffective and based on policies that benefit big corporations on the expense of the little guy.

What’s not to hate about such a dysfunctional scheme?

Originally published at theadvocates.org.

Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. By Anthony Flood. Independently published, 2019. I +93 pages.

Anthony Flood tells that in “the early 1970s, I was an acolyte of Herbert Aptheker(1915-2003). Known mainly for his writings on African-American history he was also, during the Cold War and even after, a theoretician of the Communist Party USA (CP).” (p.1) Flood became Aptheker’s research assistant and friend, but he eventually turned in disgust from his mentor, repulsed by Communist tyranny and atrocities.

Flood has documented a striking example of the way Aptheker’s rigid adherence to the Stalinist line corrupted his historical writing. Aptheker is best known as a historian for his American Negro Slave Revolts, his doctoral dissertation, published in 1943. In that book, he never cites the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938), a study of the San Domingo Revolution of 1791 that overthrew the slave regime and established the Haitian Republic. Aptheker fully recognized the significance of the event; why then does he ignore James’s book? “What scholars virtually never even mention. . .is Aptheker’s life-long practice of rendering James invisible.”(p.15)

The answer, Flood suggests, is that James was a follower of Leon Trotsky. “Aptheker could not have missed the reviews it garnered in scholarly journals and the mainstream press. And yet in the few pages he devoted to that revolt in American Negro Slave Revolts, he neither cited Black Jacobins nor even listed it in his bibliography. For a card-carrying Stalinist like Aptheker, however, there was no lower form of life than a Trotskyist. “(p.80)

By no means did James ignore Aptheker. To the contrary, he attacked Aptheker for downplaying the role of blacks in abolitionist organizations. The Stalinists, James claimed, viewed blacks as subordinate shock troops of a prospective revolution rather than independent actors, and this  Stalinist line Aptheker faithfully followed. True to his policy of treating James as an invisible man, Aptheker never responded to James’s criticism.

Flood discusses a number of other examples  of the corrupting effects of Aptheker’s Communist bias, such as his tendentious The Truth about Hungary, approving the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and his claim in a newspaper article written in 1950 that the lack of revolts in North Korea showed that the Communist regime in power had popular approval.

Flood’s book is enlivened by stories of his conversations with Aptheker and Aptheker’s bitter enemy, the philosopher Sidney Hook, who was one of Flood’s professors. His careful account of the “invisible man” in Aptheker’s historiography is a valuable contribution.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled sweeping new legislation on Thursday that would impose a federal cap of 15% on credit-card interest rates.

The bill would also allow state governments to set interest-rate ceilings even lower than the federal mandate.

Naturally, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are framing the bill as something designed to help "ordinary people." But in reality, the legislation will only act as to reduce access to credit for low-income and other high-risk borrowers.

Credit card companies don't attach high interest rates to credit cards because they are mean and cruel. Credit cards with especially high interest are that way because the borrowers have been determined to be an especially high credit risk. Credit card companies want people to borrow money from them, so if they can make loans at lower rates, they will, in order to undercut the competition. But these companies also must make sure they're likely to cover their costs. Thus, the high interest rate exists to ensure the lender can make consumer loans while still accounting for the high risk of default by borrowers based on a risk profile.

Given that interest rates are similar to a "price of money," if Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez manage to slap a new limit on credit card interest rates, they will be essentially imposing a price ceiling on credit cards.

And price ceilings are sure to lead to shortages.

That is, they'll lead to shortages in consumer credit for high risk borrowers — many of whom will be low-income borrowers.

If lenders cannot price their product in a way that allows them to recover costs, they'll simply stop providing that service. Rather than face lower interest rates on credit cards — as Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez imagine will happen — high-risk borrowers are more likely to not be able to borrow using credit cards at all. Given that default rates are generally higher for low-income borrowers, the cost of collecting payments is higher. Lending to high-risk groups then is only possible if the price of those loans is higher. Without the higher price, the service will go away.

Cutting Poor People Off — "For Their Own Good"

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly what Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez want. One way to claim to have "done something" about high levels of debt is to simply cut off potential borrowers from credit.

After all, there is an implicit paternalism in efforts to place roadblocks between low-income/high-risk consumers and the products those consumers may wish to purchase. In the minds of a government planner, the solution to the problem of people borrowing "too much" money is to pass a law preventing them from doing so.

This, of course, is inherently unfair to those people who are — for now — in the high risk category, but who do pay their bills most of the time. (They might simply be in their category because they are young and have never established much of a credit history.) Moreover, many people who missed payment in the past may now be much more reliable and less prone to default. As people who fit a certain high-risk profile at first, they're likely to face high rates. One of the best ways these people can build good credit, though, is to first gain access to credit at high interest rates. Over time, they will increasingly gain more access to credit on better terms. Should these people then be punished and cut off from credit because they can't qualify for more moderate interest rates right away? The effect of the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez legislation would be to do exactly that.

Meanwhile, lenders who offer loans to high-risk groups are themselves being blamed for the proliferation of credit card debt among American consumers of all types.

In his essay on payday lending — an issue very similar to that of high-interest credit cards — Tom Lehman analyzes the accuracy of these sorts of claims:

Finally, the allegation that payday lending "causes" chronic or habitual borrowing may ignore the old adage that "correlation does not equal causation." As indicated above, it is a well-known fact that payday loans appeal to a clientele that face numerous financial difficulties (many of them self-induced), quite independent of the payday lending industry itself. Most of these households have failed to establish good credit, have poor credit histories, are not known for their timely bill-paying habits, frequently bounce checks, frequently change jobs, and may relocate often. In short, they are the type of people who are going to be frequently short of cash and who will borrow "chronically" when given the opportunity. Because payday lending institutions provide them with this opportunity to borrow when other institutions will not does not mean that payday lenders cause this behavior. They simply provide an opportunity for this behavior to be exhibited more often than otherwise.

As is so typical of politicians, the answer offered by this new legislation is to limit the options available to the most at-risk populations.

A better approach is to allow freedom for both borrowers and lenders, to treat borrowers like adults, and to not assume they are incapable of managing their own money.