It occurs me to that, true to the form of society where, despite its invisibility, the civil sector is more important in the day to day than the government sector, there is an ideal tax occurring and it’s not in the government’s hands (much). Our system of private school tuition-scholarships is a system where the upper middle class pays more than cost and part of that payment is directed towards those who cannot afford it. There are a number of features of this tax that make it ideal. The first is that it is voluntary and not imposed by force. It is not a punishment on those who are productive–it allows them to be more productive by giving an education to their children and thereby incentivizes payment. It also directly benefits those who work hardest, and extents the opportunities available to the poorer members of society to help themselves. It extends the capitalist system, which I continue to regard as the most moral system the world has ever seen (though I recognize that my intellectual opponents think that that’s because it created my moral system to defend itself). It helps break down class barriers by making it easier to rise (although by no means guaranteed–one still has to work for it) and by educating the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the poor together. It hopefully incentivizes ambition to rise by showing its possibility, as well as by spillover effects through continued friendships of scholarship beneficiaries with their friends from before. It also creates a potential group of apostles of higher education that can help fix some broken social systems in the communities from which they came. It also goes to research, the maintenance of a stable social structure, and endowing houses of education with prestige. All good things. And because they’re backed up by massive donations from private donors, among the people that choose to pay, it’s a highly progressive system where the richest pay millions of dollars, the middle class hundreds of thousands, and the poorest pay substantially less.
Scholarships/tuition as a system of taxation widens opportunity rather than redistributing wealth. Everyone but the most die-hard leftists should be happy.
There’s been somewhat of a backlash recently against the belief that it’s right for everyone to go to college, and until this line of thinking occurred to me I was sympathetic. And it’s true to the extent that higher education is useless and expensive. But it should get less expensive for the lower class (though not free on a massive scale, that’s asking for bubble, toil and trouble)–private universities should massively expand scholarships in the name of a capitalist ethic. Though I accept the general critique: scholarships should probably be given more towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics than towards humanities majors (especially in a university like ours, where STEM majors have to read Plato and Rawls, too, and therefore get a decent lesson in how to be a voter in a liberal democracy).
