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Of Harvard and Harsanyi
David Harsanyi provided a response to David French’s defense of Harvard. Per French, Trump is apparently a threat to the First Amendment for withholding taxpayer money from Harvard. If that’s the case, then perhaps I should start billing Uncle Sam for my posts here on Ricochet. It would certainly be preferable to keeping my day job.
Harsanyi echoes my own views regarding antisemitism; although most pronounced on the left, its influence is also creeping into the right. He also does nothing to dispel my low opinion of TDS and its practitioners.
You can find the whole article here: No, David French, we have no constitutional duty to subsidize Harvard
If you prefer a TLDR version, below are some key snippets from Harsanyi’s article:
David might not be aware that in addition to the joint-government task force’s claim that Harvard leadership failed to meaningfully confront pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation of Jewish students, there’s also a blistering internal university taskforce report that maintains that Harvard allowed antisemitism to permeate “coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.” Harvard concedes, “members of the Jewish and Israeli communities at Harvard reported treatment that was vicious and reprehensible.”
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Harvard, a private institution, can do as it likes. There’s nothing illegal about coddling extremists or pumping out credentialed pseudointellectuals. If the Trump administration failed to follow a bureaucratic process before freezing funds to the university, fine. Get it done. But what “constitutional principle” dictates that the federal government must provide this specific institution with $3 billion in federal contracts and grants? Giving it to them was a policy decision made by the executive branch. Withdrawing the funding is the same.
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If your answer is that the school feels a profound obligation to defend free expression, I suggest you speak to some pro-Israeli or pro-capitalist or pro-American or social conservative student on campus and see how comfortable they feel about airing opinions. Harvard finished last for the second year running in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s “College Free Speech Rankings” in 2024, along with Columbia University and New York University. The only speech Harvard values is the extremist variety.
Published in Education
I like the way you think. First Amendment, baby!
This gets at something that I have been wondering about. The government gives these institutions unfathomable amounts of money. I assume it’s mostly tax money. What would happen if they stopped doing that? Where do the drug companies get their money? How much of that is profits and how much of that is from the government? Honestly, how much of this is just waste and ripping people off?
David French is mentally ill.
I have to agree with Harsanyi. David’s argument sounds more like a “norms” argument than a “due process” argument.
Does that make sense? Basically, you are asking a meaningless question. It would be impossible for even an omniscient observer to answer.
French is in the Kristol zone.
Harsanyi’s logic will mean nothing to him.
In a way, the Ivy schools are a pyramid scheme. The senior faculty make the junior faculty apply for grants where 60% of the money goes to the department, which passes some money further up the chain. It is all based on tax-payer dollars and benefits the expansive and over-paid non-teaching leadership at the schools. Shut that scam down.
“Mostly”? What other kind of money does the government have?
(And don’t say “borrowed”. Government borrowing is just deferred taxation…)
Well, Mark, do you not consider the fact that the nation’s debt will ultimately be paid by the taxpayer? What about all those people screaming about the tariffs being a tax on the people? And inflation? There are still a few revenue sources that are not direct taxes.
The Treasury General Account doesn’t result in many checks being produced in today’s electronic environment, but there are still some. Do you think the average young person today could reconcile(balance) a checking account?
This is a fact and a very pertinent question is why would the people favor doing this when the funds going to actual public schools across the country through the Department of Education are failing to produced acceptable results? Private universities have no call on public funds.
What is the word for money that either comes from United States bills and bonds or taxes? That is what I meant. My apologies to everyone that didn’t understand that.
Fair enough. I worded it that way because I don’t know. Some of that money might come from donors.
This is what I meant, and I thought it was understood.
The whole situation somewhat reminds me of an article I read about public utilities. Big public utilities are a scam that the legislators and the public utility executives used to rip everybody off. We can stop the whole thing with compact nuclear reactors. (now somebody’s going to give me a great big lecture about why this is dangerous and likely not possible lol go ahead lol). It seems to me that there would absolutely have to be one hell of a lot of graft and waste in doling out money this way for research.
Thanks, Bob.
You raise many points, each of which would be worthy of its own article!
(I limited my Comment #5 to answering the question Rufus raised, and giving a proof that the answer is correct. If you (a) dispute, or (b) would like clarification of, any of the four points in that Comment, please identify it so that we can (a) try come to agreement on it through reasoned argument, or (b) I can clarify it.)
I would just call those cash flows “taxes plus borrowing.” (I don’t know of a word for the two combined).
The two are by far the majority of all cash inflows to Treasury.
Some of the additional sources of cash not included in “taxes plus borrowing” are, off the top of my head:
Somewhere a Libertarian is shouting the word “theft”.
From the context I took “tax money” to refer to cash flows whose Source was taxes, as opposed to other Sources like borrowing, lease payments, civil fines, etc. In that case, the only correct answer to…
…is the one I gave: There is no relationship between a particular Use or set of Uses and a particular Source or set of Sources. Money is fungible.
So the question is meaningless if that is what Rufus meant by “tax money”.
You took “tax money” to be a kind of money sitting in a stock of money. As if you could divide a stock of money into two stocks, and say “examining the dollars in this stock, I can tell that they are tax money. The dollars have an oak-ey smell. This account over here, number 65933-00 is clearly license fee money; the dollars have a ruby red color.”
You are making the same category error as Rufus either way.
All the fungible money in the Treasury General Fund belongs to the American people.
I think I’m a libertarian and the only thing I care about is the government should just spend money on actual public goods. Look it up. It’s logical and it isn’t that big of a deal. All of the socialist stuff that we supposedly treasure like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and welfare could be handled with printing money for life insurance contracts when the kid is born. You stick your own FICA into it. We could print up money for insurance for things like type 1 diabetes that you were born with as well.
I don’t apologize to everybody that misunderstood what I meant.
They force us to use government money, and then they inflate the crap out of it, and lie about the rate of inflation. There obviously isn’t a single inflation number for every person or family anyway. It’s stupid.
We obviously don’t need the government producing anything but public goods as I described.
That’s how severe of a libertarian I am. lol
2/3 of the country is broke or has horrible cash flow. Libertarianism is the answer.
This is a really good point. I’m penning an article now that will address the inflation in housing costs being the major element we have been experiencing while the government and media will speak mainly about eggs and gas prices. That is bad.
Of course the “inflation” in housing costs isn’t all just currency inflation/devaluation, it’s also – perhaps even mostly – artificial scarcity due to regulation etc.
What decade are we going to stop doing this? They shoved a whole bunch of people in the housing right before the 2008 crisis because they decided we were an “ownership society” which only means your house value is going up faster than what it takes to repair it and anything else you own. This included a ceremony at the White House that had ACORN at it. Now nobody can afford anything. I just found out three different people in my life that I don’t talk to you very much totally have their back against the wall because of inflation. Life is about profits and wages and everything else is just central planning BS. They have to stop central planning and they have to stop lying about central planning.
They run with too much inflation and they lie about it. What are you supposed to do? Generally, you’re supposed to buy a house. Years ago, the stock market wouldn’t be that dependable as an inflation hedge. Now it never goes down. People now freak out if the stock market goes down a little bit. So a savings account doesn’t have a yield and everybody thinks it’s stupid. Now 2/3 of the country can’t afford anything, especially a house. I would say at most, it would be normal if 20% of the country had its back against the wall, but that’s not how we run things.
You are also supposed to fork out FICA slaves in the midst of this stupidity that you can’t escape.
Libertarianism (big ELL) has no limiting principle and is thus unworkable. Smart-Conservativism (doing what is proven effective) would have us return to the days where the States outspent the federal government.
I just heard for the third time today a guy on Hate Radio bragging about how much lower the trade deficit is right now. Like Trump cut it in half or something. If you’re getting 75% off on everything you buy from overseas, what do we care? They have to spend the dollars in the United States anyway, which generally means more investment. It’s a dumb metric and they are all excited about it. Yeah.
I just thought of another one. Remember two or three years ago when everybody was getting angry that Black Rock and all the hedge funds were buying all the houses and renting them out because nobody can’t afford a down payment and obviously the percentage of income that a mortgage payment is is terrible right now? What about that? Did they get public relation firms to get that discussion suppressed? They need to build more houses right now at a minimum.
This is really good TV and a good explanation of how California has [REDACTED] their housing market.
First, let me say how they screwed up their fire department. The metric for measuring a fire department was the number of firefighters you have per 1000 residents or something like that the highest in the country is 1.7. Los Angeles was at .7. How stupid can you be? They have all kinds of gear that they just put in the storage that they can’t use. They had these gigantic cisterns just sitting there. It’s like living in a fireplace there, so they don’t have enough firefighters, and the roads are all screwed up blah blah blah. But let’s blame the Libertarians in the insurance companies.
This is totally worth watching.
Public goods only. If you are going to force us to use government money, set the inflation rate at zero and don’t lie about it. I’m not asking much. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are obviously stupid, and since nobody else thought of anything, I thought of replacing it with life insurance contracts*. No Republican ever talks like I do on this.
*The reason I say life insurance contracts is it’s somewhat like a savings account but you only get like 60% of what US equity returns. Something like that, but it’s guaranteed and you don’t pay taxes on it. You can borrow against it. If you fill that thing up with what would be effectively FICA taxes when you are young, you won’t have anything to worry about.
When I say public goods only, I don’t mean, privatize all of the silly stuff like roads, police, fire, border control, the Pentagon, etc. I don’t even mean get rid of the EPA. I’m definitely all for honest and competent public health which we did not have during COVID-19. I’m just saying, get rid of all of the obvious stuff like education, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security on and on it goes. That’s the way it used to be before Woodrow Wilson, and the effectively having a federal central bank. Central Banks should do one thing: back up a bank that actually has collateral with a penalty loan rate. We should have legalized hard drugs 40 years ago, but no now the cartels have so much money it’s too late to legalize drugs. The government would provide hard drugs at cost, and you’d have to sign away for it like your fellow citizens are helping you kill yourself. You take it inside the walls of a big brutalist building and you stay within three blocks. If you don’t do that, you go away to prison for a million years. Now, what are we going to do?
Like Adam Carolla says, the LA government and police department only uses government force against people that have checking accounts.
Etc.