Maggie's Farm

Peter Drucker on the Dangers of College-for-All

By recreational drugs, I mean everything from pot to crystal meth and heroin.

They are all readily available on most streets in the US (but at far-above free market prices despite being free of sales taxes) and are widely popular. I find it difficult, from a libertarian point of view, to make a continuing argument for our Federal ongoing, attempted but failed prohibition. If some people want to live in a haze for a few hours - or all the time, why not (as long as I do not have to support them)?

In a free country, having things be legal does not mean that you condone them morally, spiritually, or in any other way. Adultery is not illegal, and neither is devil-worship nor alcohol abuse. Recreational drugs used to be legal in the US, and I doubt there were more social problems with them back then. Maybe less, because when they were not illegal they were cheap. Are any of our readers old enough to remember when there was cocaine in Coke?

Funnily enough, now a Large Coke without coke is illegal in New York. Crazy world in which it is easier to buy cocaine in front of the minimart than it is to buy a Big Gulp inside.

What's your opinion?

Just don't make the argument that "It's bad for people." That will not fly, because driving is dangerous too. So is mountain-climbing.

Please review the debate in comments before commenting. Pretty good debate.

The book seems to deal with the issues with which the American founders grappled. Comments on the book here: Huemer’s “The Problem of Political Authority”.  A quote:

Huemer systematically addresses the justifications that have been articulated for political authority over the centuries, from hypothetical social contract theory to consequentialism and everything in between. I will give away the punchline by noting that his arguments would appear to fatally damage all of them.

Political philosophers generally start by attempting to construct a complete moral framework within which they justify their positions. Huemer takes an entirely different approach. He does not assume that we all agree on a single universal moral framework. He only assumes that most of us generally share similar moral intuitions about certain sorts of situations in the average case. (The strongest sort of assumption he demands is that his reader agree that beating people up without provocation is usually bad.)

Because he demands that the reader agree with him on so few things and so weakly, Huemer’s argument gains enormous strength, since there is no need to accept an all-encompassing ethical theory to believe the rest of his arguments.

Mead's post quotes this:

Half of those surveyed…said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And they dinged bachelor’s-degree holders for lacking basic workplace proficiencies like adaptability, communication skills, and the ability to solve complex problems.

Related, What College Graduates Lack - Americans have lost their competitive edge. Can college restore it?

As I have said here many times, a Liberal Arts education is not job training. It's designed to be about life-enrichment and about molding civilized and thoughtful citizens with deeper understanding of the world and of their own civilization than secondary schools can offer.

If people want job credentials, I'd advise majoring in Medieval History, Classics, or Renaissance Literature, and minoring in Accounting, Engineering, hard sciences, or Econ (or the other way around) - combining the life-enhancement with the utilitarian.

The kids should consider this: anything that can be learned just as well at The Great Courses/Teaching Company should not be studied at great expense in college. With all the alternative ways of learning higher ed material nowadays, spending big bucks for it makes no sense. And if you need a class and exams to provide the discipline, then one should work on one's discipline.

You can obtain a top-notch Liberal Arts education with them, with as much breadth or depth as you desire. I eagerly await the day that the company will offer their courses for college credit.

Article here.

If you ask me, America could use more cowboy capitalism. The only jobs that 74,000 pages of regs provide is jobs for lawyers.

Furthermore, stifling regs just put us on The Road to Oligarchy because rules, laws, and regs always end up raising the barriers to entry of upstarts. See Subway Restaurant Founder Slams Destructive Federal Regulations