The American Spectator

TAS Live

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New York Times Magazine , noted that "the distance between the campus and the market has shrunk" (a bad thing, in his view). In the campus turmoil of 40 years ago, few would have anticipated the current "saturation of higher education with market thinking." His basic complaint was this: Campuses are no longer centers of rebellion. To which a junior at Yale responded: br> /p>

"How do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents who sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don't. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the Internet."

br> Meanwhile, politics plods on as though nothing has happened. Vast attention is paid to the presidential election, because journalists love it. On the hustings, at least, the socialist dream lives on, particularly in the realm of medical care. And who would have thought that the leading GOP candidates would be the former mayor of New York and the former governor of Massachusetts? But the truth is that whoever gets to be president will be severely constrained by market forces. (Foreign policy is a key exception. Presidents seem to have been granted the power to lead the country into war at will.)

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, a useful idiot for the left, is yelling with excitement because Obama & Co. are promising to raise our taxes. But if a Democrat wins next year, I wonder if that will really happen. If free-market ideas can penetrate the campus, maybe they can even reach into the Democratic Party.

topics:
Taxes, Foreign Policy, Education, Mainstream Media, Television, Business, Russia, Energy, Oil