Even Inspired Legislation Must Be Sunsetted/Theory Of Cascading Labour

“Similarly, Humboldt introduced the practice whereby high school teachers in Germany must have a degree to teach thus directly linking schools to universities and also popularised the ideal of scholarship based on original research.”

See this is one of those measures that may have gotten of burst of good results at first but causes more and more trouble later on. I used to tutor friends and good looking girls in economics, and sometimes other subjects for free. I had the ability to step out of university and conduct tafe classes on economics at the age of 19. If price competition was still a viable thing in the labor market, I could have offered to do so for very little, and thereby help in bringing the cost of education down. By not falling into the “proletarian masses” (for want of a better description) after leaving Corporate Finance…….. I therefore would not have been doing my bit to depress entry level wages at the bottom end of the market.

((((You see how much intervention unwittingly depresses bottom end wages, and keeps people unemployed. I’ve termed this the “theory of cascading labour” ….. but the idea I got off Reisman. A properly run Capitalist society is not the rabidly unequal deal you would see it to be. Its not how the left would have it. Nor how those faux-libertarians posers at Catallaxy would imagine it either. Its this skewed version of capitalism we have that is the problem. ))))))

Now while I would have been teaching economics that was somewhat better than standard Keynesian bullshitartistry even then, at 19, my economics would not be as fully real-world-integrated as it is now. So I wouldn’t have been quite as sound as I am now. But I certainly would have been better than most of the other teachers.

This is how interventionism is Philomena. It usually starts like crap and continues to increase in the damage it does. But even brilliantly conceived interventionism, like that which you are describing here, will eventually reach decrepitude, start imposing hard-to-quantify costs. And now, more then a century on, has produced a monstrous education system. Monstrous in terms of costs. Monstrous in terms of teaching the kids many things that are just not so. I have great confidence in the teaching of Chemistry. And mathematics…..

(((((although in practice, to succeed at mathematics… most people tend to need a very gifted teacher. But at least I can be confident that even the less good teachers aren’t teaching utter bullshit)))….

…. I can have almost no confidence in the teaching of other subjects although you might name a few that I could agree on.

For economics you would have had to have the great good fortune of winding up at Pepperdine university and accidentally taking all of George Reismans papers in order to understand economics properly. George Mason has a good faculty. Or you might have just wandered off the street in Alabama and ran into the Mises Institute. Otherwise you would be taught a load of rubbish, and it may have taken you ten or fifteen years to recover if you ever did.

For Ancient History you would have to have been very lucky and ran into Victor Davis Hanson, sometime before 2001, when he started to spread himself a bit thinly. Or you would have had to just have happened upon Don Kagan as your lecturer.

Now the education system is so unsound you simply have to have dumb luck to choose the right teacher. And even then its not value-for-money, because the fees have gotten outrageously high. But the fees would be a lot lower under free enterprise, and particularly if people like me could just walk off the street, become an apprentice lecturer, and undercut everyone else on price.