Readers of this space are well aware of the calls made by the Rio Grande Foundation for serious reforms to our higher education system due to poor performance and high costs to taxpayers. But another great reason to introduce market forces to higher education is that it would likely to result in a more ideologically-balanced academia. I’ve written before about UNM’s faculty and their hard-left views, but one Doug Morris who hails from Eastern New Mexico University makes the UNM folks look like Milton Friedman wannabees with his recent paean to singer Woody Guthrie.
Now, I’m not denying that Guthrie was a talented singer. What I am saying is that his political ideas, at least as represented by Morris, would have been an immoral disaster had they been implemented in the USA. Morris states repeatedly in his article that Guthrie supported communism. He argues that “private ownership of social and economic resources” is “anti-democratic and exploitative.” Lastly, he calls capitalism “tyrannical” and lumps it in with fascism, racism, militarism, and imperialism. This is just crazy.
As Ayn Rand noted, “laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.” All of the terrible things Morris discusses arrive at the point of a gun. Capitalism, unlike communism, is voluntary in nature. If you don’t want to trade, you don’t have to.
So, why doesn’t Morris get this and why don’t other faculty speak out? Two things come to mind: 1) Our education system is heavily socialized (with government ownership of the means of production and the means being the schools themselves). Therefore, the systems attract those who like and feel most comfortable in those systems (there are exceptions to every rule, of course). 2) Those exceptions don’t speak out due to the social pressure to conform which is placed on them by their peers and leaders of their institutions. After all, an attack on socialism and in support of limited or smaller government is a direct attack on the institutions themselves and potentially their budgets.
Nonsensical claims can be made by anyone. And, even more can mechanically regurgitate the original, but failed, words and concepts of someone else (e.g., Carl Marx), while attempting to link to the suggestion of someone else’s wisdom and song…it’s folksy sheek, baby…snap, snap, snap. It’s also eerily similar to methods and nonsense that Charles Manson used to subdue and enslave the impressionable minds of the younger cast-offs that came within his field of view. And it’s a pretty good bet that if that crazy little man wasn’t behind bars, then he’d probably be “preaching/teaching/singing” his own uninspired brand of twisted nonsense to college age university students, all the while attempting to label himself as a new age profit.
He’s no profit. In fact, he’s no better than the average dime-a-dozen assistant professors that are being churned out and attempting to make a name for themselves at most universities, today.
Just as private ownership has and will always inspire greater efficiency and care of limited resources, collective ownership has and will always inspire greater inefficiency and less care of these same resources…along with the creation of more free-riders, within an expanding collectivist society.
The unavoidable expansion of corruption, free-ridership and morally hazardous behaviors, inevitably leads to a complete collapse of the “collective” mass, under various notions of “collectivism/socialism/communism”. In the face of these incentive based behaviors, which invite an eventual collapse, tyranny is the product of the influence that is necessitated in an attempt to obtain a measured and tolerable balance of care, efficiency and contribution of collective resources, in the absence of individual inspiration. In the absence of individual motivation, tyranny attempts to force collective behavior, rather than inspire it.
The conceptual mistake of Social Justice is its attempt to replace individual inspiration (positive motivation) towards socially beneficial behaviors (i.e., efficiency, care and contribution) with tyrannical (negative) means of force (e.g., fascism, racism, militarism, imperialism, i.e., motivation at the point of a gun) in its efforts to achieve a desired level of balance, or defined “justice”. Simply put, and over the longer term, it is unbalanced, unjust and it doesn’t work!
Uh yeah……just stay away from me and my family.
http://education.enmu.edu/advisors/doug-morris.shtml