Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

"I'm Melting!"

     "I'll help you, my pretty," said the candidate today at a rally at a college in West Virginia, "and your little dog, too!"

     I saw it on a television at a pizza place out in the sticks.  Final exams in my courses are over, so I had a free afternoon, and used it to go biking with my son Davey out into the Rhode Island countryside.  We stopped for lunch at a little place called Pete's Pizza, where Pete had some rather gruff and backwoods things to say about the lady on the hustings.  "I'll make Big Oil pay," she said, probably pandering to the stupid and ill-informed, possibly stupid and ill-informed in her own right.  It is hard to tell, with the modern politician.  She promised instead to use biofuels and solar and wind to help make us energy-independent.  Whether that might include appending millwheels to the mouths of congressmen was left unclear.  "If we can put a man on the moon," she began, falling back upon her reminiscences of Shakespeare.  Yes, the old man on the moon argument a fortiori.  The idea is that if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can squeeze all the power we need out of the wind and the sun, and the Cubs can win the World Series.  Yet, in a way that the candidate did not see, the argument sort of works in this case.  We could put a man on the moon because we had the knowledge of physics to do it.  We also have sufficient scientific know-how to make oil cheaper.  I believe it is called "Drilling".

     Well, that wasn't the stupidest part of her speech.  "You should be able to afford a college education!" she shrilled out, and it never occurred to her, for once, to apply her socialism to price gougers that make the oil companies look like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa.  When I enrolled at the ol' mater ferox, Princeton, back in 1977 (I am dating myself, I guess), tuition was $8000; room and board added about $1800 more.  That was it.  No nasty student fees, either.  Back in 1940, four years at Harvard cost a little less than one and a half years of the median American household income.  Read that sentence again carefully, and consider who was probably making that median income: a plumber, a grocer, a farmer.   If Harvard's prices were comparable now, what would the sticker read?  Maybe $60,000?  A little more?  For four years, no less.  Multiply by four the cost of my first year at Princeton, and you come up with about the same deal.  My father, who sold insurance and did all right, but was nowhere near being a rich man, could have paid for all four years, including room and board, with a little less than a year and a half of his gross pay.

     So then, I'm finally seeing the Socialist Light!  Why not put price controls on Harvard?  That place doesn't need all that money; Harvard has more money than many a nation in the world, never mind schools.  Cap the price!  Better yet, lower it, by force -- and watch as the lesser schools are compelled to lower their prices in turn.  Or lower them all, on a sliding scale.  You can do it, Hilaria Regina!  You have the technology.  Threaten to kill their accreditation.  Withhold all government grants, or government-backed loans.  Send in the National Guard.  The Constitution?  Isn't that the scrap of parchment used as a model for the pretty designs on the bathroom tissue in Washington?  No one cares about the Constitution.  The Constitution won't pay for a college education.  It won't even pay for a college miseducation.

     "But Mr. Esolen," one might protest, "don't price controls always distort the market?  Don't they result in weird gluts, or hoarding, or shortages?"  Yes, they do -- but in this case they might not.  If, for instance, I know that the Committee on Public Safety has recommended price caps on slaughtered pigs, and if those prices won't reimburse me for my time, effort, and outlay, I'll put my money elsewhere and let the porkers starve.  You want a pig -- fine, here's what's left of a pig.  But the typical academic is not comparable to a pig-dealer.  The pig-dealer is a practical man of affairs.  He can tan hides, maybe, or sell goat's milk, or something.  The typical academic, were it not for that massive public welfare program known, I think, as Mister Ed, would be on a streetcorner with his mortarboard turned up, singing snatches of Proust for nickels and dimes from bored passersby.

     So, my green candidate, leave Big Earl alone.  He's actually given us a few things people want or need.  Go after Big Ed.  After all, it doesn't matter whether a policy works, so long as it's enforced from above.  With skywriting, too.  "Surrender, Harvard!"  How I would love to see that day.

He Wants Us to be Alone

Or: Seeking the Sounds of (SETI) Silence.

Nick Bostrum writes at MIT's Technology Review about extraterrestrials: Where Are They? He hopes they don't turn up, for it would mean bad news for Man. It's an interesting article from a number of vantage points. (I've my own ideas about his Great Filter, and I think it's all Good News. But he's not writing about that.) Anyway, it's a bit out of the ordinary, but provocative.