The best thing about Kamala Harris’ political debut last week was the backlash.
I don’t mean a political backlash; Harris’ Attack”price increase” was probably smart policy. It reinforced his campaign’s message that heto fight for the people.” That economists scoff at the tools he would use in this fight probably doesn’t matter much.
Nevertheless, it is reassuring most economists rolling their eyes at the government’s price controls. Few lessons in economic history are clearer than the futility of that approach, as Robert L. Schuettinger and Eamonn F. Butler chronicled in their 1979 book, “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation.”
Read more: Goldberg: This is why Kamala Harris avoids the press – and gets away with it
In the short-lived debate about private sector “greed” caused by Harris’ proposal, we heard almost nothing about public sector greed.
By almost any measure, balls and others rivets have become much, much cheaper over the last century. Recent spikes in food prices were just statistical noise in this broader trend, the causes of which are well known: the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, bird flu and general inflation.
At the same time, goods and services whose real prices are masked by government control or intervention have become much more expensive. The costs of higher education, health care, housing and other goods and services strictly regulated by the state and municipalities have clearly exceeded inflation, while cars, computers, clothing and other less regulated goods and services have generally increased. budget.
Read more: Goldberg: What convinces voters that the economy is worse than ever?
The average inflation-adjusted costs of higher education are increased 130% since 1990. The cost of elementary school education is skyrocketed too. National health care spending rose from $435 billion in 1970 to $4.5 trillion in 2022. standard $2022). The U.S. population grew by 64 percent during that period, while health care spending increased by 934 percent.
The left rarely describes these increases as price increases or blames them on greed. Insurance companies are often criticized – usually for trying to keep costs down – while pharmaceutical companies are often seen as scumbags. And for-profit universities sometimes draw progressive ire. But affordability crises produced by the public sector more often receive different responses: consumer or service provider subsidies, or debt forgiveness at the expense of taxpayers.
Taxpayers who want to keep more of their own money are said to be greedy, while those who want to take it from them are seen as compassionate.
No condemnation of universities that have spent huge sums of money on administrative posts at the expense of of professors. Since the 1970s, the number of full-time administrators and other non-teaching professionals in higher education has exploded. Paul Weinstein Jr. of the Progressive Policy Institute was found that Caltech, UC San Diego, and Duke have more faculty than students. Georgia Tech’s student-to-faculty ratio is 37:1, while the student-to-non-faculty ratio is 11:1. According to Weinstein; MIT has almost nine times more employees than the faculty.
Public elementary schools are doing worse while spending more. The results of 13-year-olds in mathematics, social studies and literacy have been in the bill. But all we hear from the Democrats is that we need to give schools more money.
This is partly because the education sector is an important part of the Democratic coalition, having served as the party’s political ATM. decades. In every election cycle since 1990, teachers unions have given Democrats at least 93 cents of every dollar in political support. Donations from universities and public sector trade unions usually follows a similar pattern. This does not include extras political action promote Democrats.
But I don’t think gross donor hijacking is the whole explanation—nor do I think conservatives defend the private sector just because the rich buy and pay for them. Going back at least to the philosopher John Dewey, education has been seen as a kind of secular, democratic, religious ritual – and rightly so. Like another right of progressives, health care, education is seen as something that the state should provide for the betterment of all. Cost concerns are seen as heartlessness or heresy.
I obviously have philosophical disagreements with this worldview, but it’s not a dark or defensible point of view. But it is so myopicly obsessed with well-intentioned goals that its proponents are blind to the means. Residents of the public and non-profit sectors have become a type a new class which believes it is or should be immune to market forces that tend to make almost everything outside the public sector more affordable over time.
The value of exact prices is that they force necessary compromises. The approach of progressives is to start with goals – what they think the exact price (or wage) should be – and devise means to accommodate them. It hasn’t worked for 40 centuries.
If it’s in the news right now, the LA Times opinion section has it covered. Subscribe to our weekly opinion newsletter.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
