Time Article

Logos Story

Way to go Logos!

Diogenes Video

1. Educational cost at the college level have skyrocketed.
2. Most people believe that they need a college education to get a decent job (although this is becoming less true).
3. College has two parts: training/instruction and “the college experience”. Both are worth something, but it is hard to argue that they are worth what people are now having to pay. (This last part is opinion and not fact, but I am confident that I am right and that more people are coming to agree with me.)
4. The need for greater piles of money to fund college education has led us (as a people) to increasingly turn a number of our children into debt slaves. They leave college with debts that, given the degree they have received and they job that it will lead to, can never be paid off.
5. Debts that can or will never be paid off are called “bad debts” and eventually companies have to “write them off” (i.e., cancel them).
6. Colleges are holding an incredible amount of bad debts…and they are starting to understand this. (FYI, if you are thinking that this is going to mean a boom for online colleges, think again. They are holding a higher levels of bad debt than other colleges because students at online schools tend to drop out more often and tend to not pay up.)
7. Ergo, the gig is almost up.

Here is an article in the local paper about a community college that was going to a two-tiered system that gave preference to people who could actually pay. The story is so scrambled that it is hard to make sense of it. Here is what is going on: Colleges are fund strapped; they are going to offer courses for more money (i.e., raise rates on some classes); the “rich” will be able to afford these classes; all heck is breaking loose because college is supposed to be a place of equality and uniformity….but it already is not. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Big changes are coming:

Article

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Gene Veith Interview

Also, I had no additional time to look into the website, but I am sort of tingling because there is a website devoted to classical astronomy. (Dante fans, perhaps the kingdom is coming!)

Patriotic Poetry

It is also exactly the sort of patriotism that will not be seen in an election year.

Berry Response

Berry Critique

He is criticizing from the Thomistic/Jeffersonian position that democracies are best served by (and the republic best protected by) having many small businesses rather than fewer larger corporations. This could be tied to small farmers, but it need not be tied exclusively to them. It can be tied to small merchant shops, small schools, small factories, etc.,. These businesses are not “too big to fail.” Their failure does not sink the economy. If something is “too big to fail”, then it would seem obvious that in a democracy where the government is going to take out a fictional national credit card and heap mountains of debt onto the backs to tax payers to save businesses that they deem “too big to fail” that tax papers would have an interest in limiting their liability by fostering small businesses and discouraging gigantic corporations. This “discouraging” could take the form of governmental “oversight” and increased taxes. This would be replacing one sort of “orc talk” (see Returning of the King “Scouring of the Shire”) for another equally dangerous type. Perhaps we could simply begin by disconnecting the corporations from their legislative servants in Washington by restricting their ability to write law through legislators. Thus, small farmers would not be chocked out of business because they have to meet rules and regs written by ADM and Cargill. Thus, small banks would not be destroyed by stress tests that were constructed to test Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Thus, it would be possible to start a college without having a couple million in the bank and accreditation on day 1. Let’s start with this sort of capitalism and see where it goes. The post is still worth reading:

In Defense of Berry