A few weeks back, my internet perambulations brought me to a column about Donald Trump by Camille Paglia. Aside from her candid take on the GOP presidential candidate, what caught my eye were several letters and responses to letters regarding some comments that Paglia had apparently made about the GI bill in a previous post. Readers reminded her that the GI Bill, which Paglia apparently held up as an example of publicly funded college education, was not a mere giveaway but was instead compensation for military service. In other words, the GI Bill isn’t a welfare program or “social investment,” but value given for value received (years of military service). Those veterans forewent years of productive civilian life and put their lives and limbs at risk in an effort that itself cost America $4 trillion in today’s dollars. But, I write today not to debate the GI bill, but rather because the exchange brought to mind the shallow thinking that plagues too much modern discourse.
This exchange brought to mind a phenomenon far too common among those who raise examples from history or from other parts of the world as demonstrations of good statism: ignoring the “other half” of the story. Benefits come at costs and anything “free” is necessarily going to be rationed by some mechanism other than direct payment. Free college in Europe typically comes with restrictions – a student has to test into particular fields of study, and if you don’t get good enough grades to study your passion, too bad. Free isn’t also truly free. Food, housing and other fees do exist, with students in places like Sweden graduating with significant debt. Free health care will necessarily be rationed by some other mechanism, whether it be longer waiting times or simple denial of certain procedures or medicines. And, of course, riding on top of all this is the reality of free, i.e. the money has to come from somewhere.
European welfare states, which many American statists look at longingly as models that “work,” tax their middle and lower classes FAR more heavily than America does hers. In fact, despite the endless protests about how “the rich” are freeloading off the rest of the citizens, America’s tax code is far, far more progressive than those of the much-adored western European nations. Domestic statists want the goodies that the European states provide, such as publicly funded tertiary education, single-payer health care, robust family leave, robust vacation time, high minimum wages, robust safety nets i.e. welfare, and so on and so forth, but few will accept that they’ll have to be taxed far more heavily than they are now in order to have that stuff. Even the few who concede that their taxes are going to go up often presume that they’re going to get back more from the State than they’re going to pay in extra taxes.
In other words, they expect to come out ahead if America “socializes” some more. Given that their arguments for demanding this socialization are presented as altruism i.e. they want to see that others are better taken care of, this qualifies as rank hypocrisy and bald-faced lying. However, such accusations are best laid when there’s intent, and I don’t think that most advocates of socializing things like health care and college education are driven by such naked avarice. I believe they simply see the grass as greener elsewhere and don’t bother to consider what it takes to produce that superficially greener grass. They think shallowly, they think that what the other guys have could also be had here without upsetting the apple cart, and they trust the politicians who promise them that this is indeed the case.
Economics, at its core, is about scarcity. Every resource, every asset, everything of value is “scarce,” i.e. there’s both a finite amount of it and there are costs with acquiring it. Those costs aren’t just limited to the asset itself, but also include opportunity costs i.e. losing the ability to do something else with what one pays or trades to acquire that asset. That’s the other half of the story, the half that people choose not to think about and that politicians pretend doesn’t exist.
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