Franklin Einspruch on government intervention and unintended consequences: 

[Tuition fees] go up faster than inflation every year because we have generous Federal loan programmes with low interest rates and low selectivity. Easy loans stimulate demand, and higher demand drives up prices. You may think that the colleges should steel their wills and ignore the fundamental dynamic of the market, but as James Howard Kunstler put it, capitalism is not a belief system that you can subscribe to or drop out of, it’s more like gravity. Let that process continue for decades and you’ll put tuitions through the roof, with wildly different consequences for the rich and the poor. In other words, the state worsens inequality by mitigating the risks of lending. This isn’t academic at all. It is a consequence that will keep repeating itself until we quit causing it.

And Kristian Niemietz on the needy dynamic of political correctness: 

A positional good is a good that people acquire to signal where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them… PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

None of which will be news, I think, to regular readers. And hence the theatrical agonies about patriarchal cupcakes, insufficiently considerate spellcheck software, the serving of meals, racist hair, racist grammar, and the unspeakable crushing horror of the heteronormative barbecue. Also, Ace coins the term “the Cognitive One Percent.” I wonder, can neurotic, competitive signalling be redistributed?

And should you need to display your own moral elevation, feel free to tickle the tip jar.  

Thomas Sowell on political dogma versus education: 

Attorney General [Eric] Holder’s threats of legal action against schools where minority students are disciplined more often than he wants are a sweeping and damaging blow to the education of poor and minority students across the country. Among the biggest obstacles to educating children in many ghetto schools are disruptive students whose antics, threats and violence can make education virtually impossible… The idea that Eric Holder, or anybody else, can sit in Washington and determine how many disciplinary actions against individual students are warranted or unwarranted in schools across the length and breadth of this country would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

Ah, but reality be damned. Morality be damned. We must have racial quotas in school discipline. It’s the progressive way. Because nothing says fairness like dishing out excuses according to how brown a student is. And attempting to reduce disruption and violence by punishing it less when racial quotas have been reached… well, what could possibly go wrong?

Via Ted, a white male student named Tal Fortgang does as instructed and checks his privilege: 

I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathise with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend. I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin colour allowed my family to flourish today.

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labour in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

Naturally, Mr Fortgang is immediately berated by his betters, those more pure than he, and denounced as a “privileged piece of shit.”

Due to a copyright squabble among our would-be overlords: 

A radical publishing house, Lawrence & Wishart, which at one time was connected to Great Britain’s Communist Party, is demanding the removal from the Marxists Internet Archive of the Marx-Engels Collected Works — hardcover books that sell for up to $50 a pop… “What they are doing is actually restricting the masses’ ability to get these writings because they found a potential revenue flow by digitising the works themselves and selling some product to universities,” [said David Walters, a marxists.org volunteer]. “We think it’s the opposite of a Marxist approach.”

From the comments there, this tickled me: 

It seems counterproductive, in that you may have to live with capitalism in day to day affairs, but you would think the one item that you would work towards absolutely free, society ownership of is the instruction manual for making your desired mode of existence come to fruition, when that mode of existence depends on an informed, versed-in-Marxist-theory populace.

I think what made me laugh is the word “populace.” In my experience, the most willing readers of Marx and Engels, practically the only readers, are credulous middle-class college students, especially those with obnoxious personalities. 

Via Instapundit. 

Daniel Shuchman on the left’s latest Great White Hope, Thomas Piketty: 

Mr Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.” It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meagre US social state.” There must be an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth. He breezily assures us that none of this would reduce economic growth, productivity, entrepreneurship or innovation.

Mr Piketty also writes things like this. Let that one sink in for a moment. And Instapundit reminds us that the threshold for “earning too much” is very often, rather conveniently, “just above what a two-earner journalist or academic couple can plausibly make.”

Caleb Bonham on the things you can be taught in a creative writing class: 

A professor at Eastern Connecticut State University was caught on audio telling his class that Republicans will close colleges if they prevail in 2014 and that “racist, misogynist, money-grubbing people” want to suppress the liberal vote. In a four-minute recording of a classroom lecture Professor Brent Terry is heard strongly suggesting that conservatives are greedy racists who want to suppress the vote of anyone who might vote liberal. 

Readers may wish to revisit this bewildering screed from the first day of another creative writing class. 

And Theodore Dalrymple on productivity and its enemies: 

There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward. More to be feared even than the secret sadist, however, is the person who genuinely believes in the intrinsic value and even indispensability of his absurd task. He is as dangerous as any true believer.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Ace’s headline pretty much sums it up:

Selfless Crusader Against Income Inequality to Heroically Accept $225,000 for Nine Months of Sub-Part-Time Work from State-Funded Organisation to Occasionally Give a Few Quotes About the Scourge of Income Inequality.

Hiring Paul Krugman, a Guardian contributor and the left-leaning owner of this humble abode, is part of the City University of New York’s latest “inequality initiative.” Mr Krugman’s will be “a modest role” with no teaching or supervision commitments. In fact, neither party seems able to define what, exactly, that “modest role” will be. Hence the salary of $25,000 per month.

Update, via the comments: