As I’ve been saying, we should have no expectation that this administration will actually save money. The latest bill includes significant cuts to education—cuts that I, along with several experts, consider necessary. Yet the broader efforts of budget reform have been rendered meaningless, as any savings from these reductions have simply been redirected to other areas of spending.

However, the federal government is not broke because of research funding; the NSF has a $9 billion budget compared to a total government budget of $6.8 trillion (that’s 0.13%). The government is broke because both parties make promises, whether it be mandatory benefits or tax cuts, without a corresponding revenue stream. They’ve been doing this for decades. The current bill going through Congress doesn’t even cut the overall budget, but moves funds to the military, away from things like R&D, and borrows large sums of money to fund tax cuts. We can decide as a nation to significantly reduce our support for basic R&D. That’s a legitimate question, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that this is because we are trying to rein in the budget deficit. That is demonstrably false.

Supporters of the status quo can relax: the spectre haunting colleges is not that of communism but, at worst, social democracy, as espoused by Bernie Sanders et al. Marx and Engels, by contrast, wanted something rather different: ‘in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Communist Manifesto, 1848). Nothing like this exists, or has existed. The old lie about Russia being socialist or communist (Marx and Engels used the terms interchangeably) –and later, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc –was identified remarkably early, in the August 1918 edition of The Socialist Standard (see The Revolution in Russia: Where it Fails).

Anyone who believes you can cut the NSF budget by half and not have a brain drain, is just a fool.

What a mope! For sure, you were a dope about Ludwig. And plenty of others. But you have had plenty of opportunity to remedy the deficits. Find something you really love and run with it, I say!

And I have to laugh about the poor Columbia students. Their deprivation! Countless opportunities to hear an endless stream of the greatest symphonies from all over the world at Carnegie Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Endless, endless. If your foundation lacked, that is your fault.

All true. Even more important is the fact that they have abandoned the pursuit (and transmission) of truth and knowledge as their telos.

Good piece.

Being an out-of-the-closet conservative on campus is far worse than you can even imagine.

That is absolutely true both in terms of some majors in general, and then some otherwise legitimate majors at specific IHEs. Economics at UMass Amherst comes to mind — it once did (and I believe still does) host the annual worldwide conference on Economic Marxism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the only place that could…