The School of Being Ripped Off

A friend of mine who is infuriatingly brilliant (note both my sarcasm and jealousy over his powerful mind), has to retake the GRE because his scores passed some sort of cutoff date. While he agrees with me that this is a complete scam, he argues that state regulation is needed to get rid of these scams. My retort is simply that the hidden costs of regulating said scam is a scam in and of itself, and it becomes a matter of which set of pigs will do the stealing.

The political class, whether capitalist pigs, or state pigs, have no interest in providing accessible, quality education. In other words, we are not dealing with a niche-based, freed market education environment. In even more other words, education in this culture is another mechanism of control on the part of those at the top of the pyramid. Said control is for profit/politics, and NOT for the consumer. If it truly WAS for the consumer then they would be BEGGING my brilliant friend to come to their school.

In a freed market, colleges would actually have to compete. They would have to build a solid, long term reputation for high quality turn out of students. They would also be subject to the desires of the students (customers), and not to the state, or Pepsi, or other kinds of nonsense.

Schools would have to teach what people truly desire to learn.

In a context of state capitalist power and fiat currency, there are virtually NO incentives for real competition.

There is a fundamental reason the political class does not desire a freed market, and this is not because the children need to be protected. This is because in such an environment the power shifts to individuals.

This is not to say that one can't wring a quality education out of this culture of monopoly we live in, it's just to say that it will come through being stolen from by pigs.