Gilmore bloggers hype his big government record on education – again

I honestly thought I had put this tuition freeze nonsense to bed months ago, but Spank That Donkey seems determined to bring it up again.  STD insists that Gilmore should be praised for pouring oceans of cash into the state’s higher education system, calling it “putting excess tax revenues to work for the People.”  This is alarming on multiple levels.

First of all, limited-government conservatives believed the people themselves are the best to judge what to do with “excess tax revenues” – not elected officials, not even Republicans that STD likes.  “Excess tax revenues” are owed to all the people, and should be sent back to them in the form of tax relief, not plowed into the politcally-correct, hyperliberal, right-wing no-go zones that are our public universities (I should know – William and Mary Class of 1994).

To get an idea of just how selective public university students are, I examined the public higher ed enrollement numbers for the last seven years (SCHEV), and then compared it to the number of households in our Commonwealth (Census Bureau).  Here’s what I found:

Year	Students	Households	%
2000	267,746	2,699,173	9.9%
2001	278,461	2,729,881	10.2%
2002	287,872	2,750,203	10.5%
2003	293,315	2,758,374	10.6%
2004	296,774	2,817,881	10.5%
2005	302,981	2,878,454	10.5%
2006	306,024	2,894,202	10.6%

In other words, Gilmore’s decision to plow “excess tax revenues” into the higher education system benefited less than one in every nine Virginia households – hardly putting money to work “for the People.”

From a different angle, however, this is even worse.  One of the many things the American right has done to change the deabte on education in general is to force Americans to see that a government monopoly is not the best way to deliver education.  At the K-12 level, this has led to numerous conservative proposals for education reform under the umbrella of educational choice – in essense, taking the entire idea of government help for education and restructuring it so that the students, not the institutions, are aided.  The conservative movement is making similar moves in housing, medical insurance, and other areas.

Gilmore’s tuition freeze, by contrast, moves in the exact opposite direction.  It doesn’t strengthen individual choice; it limits it by forcing them to use public education in order to benefit from the aid.  It doesn’t embrace the free market; it distorts it by using government power to artificially lower the prices for government-funded universities to the detriment of private and religious ones.

That Gilmore would do this is not surprising; he is a conventional politician, and it’s easier for conventional politicians to write huge checks (with money taken from taxpayers) to institutions.  That STD and other bloggers who worry about the size and scope of government would parrot such populist, left-wing pablum is deeply disturbing.

Fortunately, we have a choice for the U.S. Senate, in particular the chance to choose a more creative  and principled politician: Bob Marshall.  If anything, STD’s latest attempt to win over Republicans should make Marshall more attractive as a candidate, not less, by comparison.

Cross-posted to Bloggers 4 Bob Marshall