As long as there’s a right and a left in politics, they’ll fight over who gets the giant pile of loot that the federal government controls, about a third of total national income each year. Each will see opportunities for cuts in the other’s list of favorite programs. Each, despite claiming not to want lavish, uncontrolled spending, will see its own pet projects as a useful exception to any plan for overall spending restraint.
But when you’re $37 trillion in the hole, as the federal government now is with no improvement in sight, surely the default reaction to each divisive new scandal over one program or another should be: cut everything. The squabbling—the tug-o-war over who gets what—will otherwise never end.
Is that Ivy League college you care about anti-Semitic? That’s reason enough not to force innocent taxpayers to foot the bill for it. Is it anti-Palestinian? Don’t make the already-oppressed U.S. taxpayer contribute to further imperialism, then.
Has the college historically been racist against blacks? Then surely it doesn’t deserve a government subsidy. Is it now racist against whites? Cut off those bastards’ government drip-feeds.
No college should receive grants from involuntary contributors. They get so much money from parents’ hard-earned tuition money as it is that they’ve largely run out of ideas for turning the money into learning. Instead of making America smarter, colleges have for years now been using their mountains of extra cash to fund Jacuzzis, heliports, and billiard halls in the faculty complex. Campuses aren’t becoming the new Athens, they’re becoming the Vegas strip.
End it (or rather, the government’s part in it), and don’t for a moment imagine doing so equates to making America stupider. On the contrary, it might lead to us becoming smarter and more competitive. Lazing at the federal trough is hardly an obvious model for bold inquiry or preparedness for a competitive real world.
As a wonderful side effect, the absence of federal money would mean peace-and-quiet-loving Americans wouldn’t be forced to underwrite the feuding political factions that use colleges as the readymade stage for their endless theatrics.
Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, please. Whatever resolution one may favor in the Middle East (preferably one with minimum bloodshed), one ought to be troubled by the tendency of the two sides, when arguing on campus, to replicate the errors of the Middle East states they prefer. Over there or on the campuses over here, pro-Israeli activists usually want (in the long term) quiet and non-violence imposed by a higher authority even if that authority is sometimes brutal, while the pro-Palestinian activists in turn generally think they have an unlimited right to disrupt, vandalize, and attack so long as that authority exists.
As with everything else, let the market decide. Get the government out of it and we needn’t worry whether Trump is prone to disrespect pro-Palestinian speech by students or for that matter disrespect woke speech from professors—or disrespect anything else, really. If government doesn’t fund these institutions in the first place, it’s not Trump’s call. And it shouldn’t be.
The market would end the pretense of nationwide homogeneity and consensus on issues such as how to handle anti-Israel activists and, as with everything else in our society that works well and improves over time, allow diverse customers (mainly the parents of students plus alumni or private grant-making institutions) to pick and choose based on the revealed behavior of different colleges.
You want colleges that allow protests even in classrooms previously designated for other activities? Hey, fund what you like, man. You want to send your kids and/or your money instead to an institution that expels people for disrupting class? You should be able to do that, obviously, without the government countermanding your desires. You should even be able to sue a school that promises to expel disruptive students and then fails to do so.
Expulsion is not a death sentence, after all. There’s a good chance that once bounced from classrooms—and if they keep trespassing, from campus—the protestors at the stricter schools will get jobs and go on to lead productive lives. Or if they’re recidivists, perhaps vandalizing things out in the world beyond campus, well, they’ll likely find the wider world more willing to arrest them than their coddling professors were.
Allow markets to function and let the law—and private vigilantism when necessary—defend property. No need to delve into the offenders’ complex personal histories, regional loyalties, or political philosophies. If we’re not all shackled to them by the bonds of government-mandated collective funding, things will sort themselves out soon enough, largely to the liking of the varied preferences of the people involved.
Similarly, Planned Parenthood obviously shouldn’t be funded by unwilling taxpayers, nor similar efforts overseas (and it’s telling that libertarians who let this or the college-subsidies issue slide, thinking the broader goal of fostering sexual liberty or intellectual stimulation sounds roughly speaking individualistic and freeing, tend eventually to end up becoming more Democrat than libertarian). Just leave the rest of us out of it, so to speak, and you might be surprised how comfortable we become with your notion of tolerance.
For each government subsidy, by contrast, there’s inevitably an associated culture clash, often one that needn’t have existed at all. As Netflix’s new interest in Sesame Street demonstrates, the good stuff will usually find a new home in the marketplace (including the marketplace of voluntary, non-governmental philanthropy) without dragging the unwilling down. The bad stuff, like half the world’s performance art, will no longer have an enslaved population making its promulgation on PBS possible—though neither should it be banned. Again, leave the unwilling out of it and there’s no need to fight about whether it’s good art.
Most of us agree that colleges and cultural institutions shouldn’t live or die by the whims of a monarch or a president who thinks he’s a monarch. End that problem by ending government’s involvement in these institutions altogether. And if you’re tempted to whine that the subsidies must continue simply because “art is important,” reach for your own wallet instead of the next person’s, and as you do so, maybe glance away from the painting for a moment at that $37 trillion federal debt mentioned earlier.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey