PT

The college tuition explosion isn't some mysterious market failure—it's government intervention working exactly as Austrian theory predicts it will. When you artificially increase demand for any good through subsidies while constraining supply through accreditation cartels, prices skyrocket. Basic economics. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that flooding higher education with easy government credit would make college more "affordable." The opposite happened, naturally. Tuition has outpaced inflation by orders of magnitude since federal student loans became ubiquitous. Universities quickly realized they could capture every dollar of subsidy by simply raising prices. Why wouldn't they? Students don't feel the immediate pain—they're spending tomorrow's money today, courtesy of Uncle Sam's printing press. And the debt? Non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The perfect setup for moral hazard on an industrial scale. This follows the same pattern we see everywhere government "helps": housing subsidies inflate home prices, healthcare subsidies inflate medical costs, and agricultural subsidies distort food markets. The state creates artificial demand, cronies capture the rents, and taxpayers get stuck with the bill. Students graduate with crushing debt loads for degrees that often provide negative economic value. The solution isn't more subsidies or loan forgiveness—that just doubles down on the original error. End federal student lending entirely. Let the market determine what education is actually worth. Watch universities scramble to offer real value at prices students can actually afford. But that would require admitting the entire edifice of government "investment" in education is a wealth transfer from productive taxpayers to academic bureaucrats.