Would you support a limited amount of taxes for scholarships for the most brilliant students if they cant pay for school?
No. Besides, the brightest students already get free rides to and by the top schools.
No.
If you support helping brilliant students, then donate or organize a charity. Taxes however mean you force people around you to pay regardless of if they want to.
That in my book is immoral. It is the manipulation of what is owned by others for your own purposes. Taxation is theft.
I make this question because it was brought up in a debate and I didn’t know how to respond, it seems at least at first glance, that people with merits should be able to study regardless of economic considerations. Assume for a moment that charity organizations in my country are non existent.
Can you help me formulate a compelling argument?
Sure, if we ignore scarcity.
Form one.
To justify which position?
I was under the belief that some of the top institutions in the USA let those with low income in free with the use of their endowment. Also, there are tons of big scholarship foundations (e.g. Rhodes) and there would be far more in a free society.
I can easily imagine the rich “sponsoring” poor but intelligent students to study etc.
So you want me to assume a non-free market?
That taxes shouldn’t be force on people even if it means to let good students go without education.
Its a complicated issue because it is a very unpopular way to put it.
They give free rides to all the really bright students of the world. Besides, schools also give free rides to poor student-athletes who are really good at sports.
Yes, exactly, Im not talking of the USA but Chile.
This is a Latin American country, no big charity organization here, state education is lousy and underpayed, private education is allowed but regulated.
However the thing is public schools are bad and private schools are usually good but somehow expensive.
Then public colleges (lots of state financing) are good academically and private colleges are usually bad (low standars).
Its crazy I know.
Right, so change the victims from the students to the people being coerced, and change the bad guys from the people who won’t donate, to the people arguing that donations won’t do it.
Look, people will make all sorts of emotional arguments to justify stealing from you without having to employ force themselves. It is much cheaper and they will be more successful if they can guilt you into paying, instead of having to stick a gun in your back.
You have to have the strength of your convictions and morals to say “stealing is wrong for any purpose” and “I would assist these people of my free will wouldn’t you? And if you would, then there must be more like us, and the use of force against those uninterested, is unnecessary”
If you fall for the “do it for the students” argument, then you are susceptible to the “do it for the women, the poor, the children” and so on. You cannot take a consistent position against these subsidies later.
This is the challenge we all face every day. Combating peer pressure and guilt. Pressure and guilt are excellent means of population control because they have no overhead. They are part of the self-policing social appartus. Even libertarians rely on these mechanisms to help order a free society in an economical manner.
No, first of all it’s aggression and second, who would decide which students are the most brilliant and under which criteria?
Thank you for your words liberty student
Well that’s relatively easy, academic tests are taken in school by the ministry of education and before going to college you have to take another test.
No. They can get a free (ignoring time, opportunity cost) education in economics from LvMI, and a free education in many other fields from MIT and Stanford.
But you assume that these test would not be biased. That may be remotely possible for subjects like math, but how would it work for history? In designing your test, you decide what would count as “brilliant”. If it’s a private scholarship that’s ok, your money, your rules. But if it’s a state scholarship, funded by taxes, in the end it has to be a political test. Or how do you see the chances for a briliant Austrian Economist, promoting a minimum state, to get a scholarship from the very entity he deems unnecessary?
I think LS’s response was very excellent, and as always, principled. I’d like to add a utilitarian alternative to state control.
Student Loans! Not only does this allow bright kids to go to college but it creates an incentive for them to do something productive with their education since they have all these loans to pay off.
Your friends are implicitly assuming that society would be a poorer place if smart kids don’t go to school. This is only true if the smart kid can repay his education costs to society. The loan model achieves this. Giving people full ride no strings attached scholarships results in Africa-American-Woman’s Studies majors.
If the state played a smaller role in higher education, then there might be greater opportunities within the market to borrow against the future value of your human capital. Whoever lent you the funds to study would be entitled to a certain percentage of your future earnings for an agreed number of years.
Such mechanisms do not currently flourish as fully as they otherwise might, since the state’s expansive role over funding for education tends to inhibit such market developments.
Yup, where there is a need, the market has an incentive to meet that need.