I think Brooks was mostly thinking of public education up to high school.

Reader comment on: David Brooks on Spending and Results

Submitted by JackGriffin (United States), Dec 27, 2011 10:19

And like Thomas Sowell said, good American universities are so full of foreign students they can hardly be called "American" universities. Anyone sitting in a classroom for a technical degree in a good American university will notice that only a very tiny minority of students, teachers and TAs do not have a heavy foreign accent. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Also, I don't get why it's not so obvious to everyone. Anytime the price of something is fixed, inflexible, opaque or paid for by a third party that the price of that good gets all out of wack and screwed up. It's no surprise at all that some of the things most valued by American society are full of waste and fraud and incredibly stupid prices. It's because we value them so much that we try to "give" them away or subsidize thus screwing up the price. The USSR took a full dose of socialist price fixing and the whole thing imploded in 50 years. Everywhere the US takes a tiny dose of price fixing it screws everything up. Teachers unions(public schools suck in general), auto workers unions (GM is govt owned), federal mortgage guarantees, federal student loans etc......

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