[Peace-discuss] Free higher education

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer:

...It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely free in the 
USA ... It's less than four months of what we waste on administrative costs by 
not having a single-payer health care finance system...

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/College.html

In a recent talk he gave in Canada ("Public Education Under Massive Corporate 
Assault"), Noam Chomsky cites my LBO piece on the costs of college, and how easy 
it would be to make higher ed free in the USA:

"Now that's one important way to implement the policy of indoctrination of the 
young. People who are in a debt trap have very few options. Now that is true of 
social control generally; that is also a regular feature of international policy 
--- those of you who study the IMF and the World Bank and others are well aware. 
As the Mexico-California example illustrates, _the reasons for conscious 
destruction of the greatest public education system in the world are not 
economic. _Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make 
higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 
percent of gross domestic product. The personal share of about 1 percent of 
gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 
households. That's the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than 
four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system, 
which is an international scandal.

"[The U.S. healthcare system is] about twice the per capita cost of comparable 
countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact it's the basis for the 
famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind of healthcare system as other 
industrial countries, not only would there be no deficit, but there would be a 
surplus. However, to introduce these facts into an electoral campaign would be 
suicidally insane, Henwood points out. Now he's correct. In a democracy where 
elections are essentially bought by concentrations of private capital, it 
doesn't matter what the public wants. The public has actually been in favor of 
that for a long of time, but they are irrelevant in a properly run democracy..."
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