January 5, 2006
WRTA
 Brown
Shoes Diary
Bill Frist--Prostitute and Pimp
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist took time out of his very busy
schedule to send me an email on Christmas Eve. He wasn't wishing me a
Merry Christmas or even a Happy Holidays. He was informing me that the
U.S. Government is unhappy with how taxpayers are spending our money and he's
going to correct our bad behavior.
He writes that the government has created a new multi-billion dollar program
to increase the spending of Americans on higher education. Ironically,
the additional funding is being called SMART grants. I'm guessing that SMART
stands for something like Science, Math, And Related Technology. I'd
suggest, for the sake of honesty in labeling, that they be called DULL
grants--Distortions Undercutting Learning and Liberty. Apparently, Mr. Frist has determined that
the hundreds of billions currently being spent by Americans on higher
education are not enough. He claims our institutions of higher
education are becoming uncompetitive with the likes of those in India and China. (I suppose that's why we see so few Indians
and Chinese at American universities.) The solution he concludes is the
one every politician resorts to--confiscate the hard earned money of
taxpayers and throw it at the "problem".
Now, it's not clear to me that America has anything to worry about when it comes to the
quality of its institutions of higher education, though improvement is always
possible. What is clear to me, however, is that subsidizing education
with taxpayer dollars is never going to improve quality. Quality is a
direct result of the effort of a seller to please a consumer, but if
universities get larger and larger revenues from coerced sources, they will
become less and less attentive to the desires of the consumer. One can
see the cycle repeating itself as each additional subsidy lowers the quality of
our schools allowing politicians to continue their meddling to
"fix" the problem. We've already run this experiment in K-12
schools and we know that public funding pretty much ruins educational
quality.
If we define a prostitute as a person who willingly sells his virtue, then
Senator Frist certainly fits this definition. He is obviously pandering
to a special interest group--it's probably not a coincidence that his spam is
targeted at college professionals. (And exactly how did he know I'm a college
professor and how did he get my email address? I'm not happy with this breach
of my privacy.) The Senator has abandoned his ethical obligation to
uphold the U.S. Constitution in order to curry favor with a segment of the
public. Politics always fills the ethics vacuum.
But Mr. Frist also thinks I and everyone else in education will support and
approve his plan because it puts money in our pockets. In this sense,
he's most definitely a pimp--a person who courts others to sell their virtue.
If he had sent me any other email on Christmas Eve, I don't know how it could
have been more insulting and distasteful.
Contact John D McGinnis
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