• Entitled Students

      Posted by John Stossel | March 07, 2010

      University Cuts ProtestsSomething bothered me watching college students protest tuition increases this past week. Governor Schwarzenegger's reaction bothered me too. Years ago, he professed to be a student of Milton Friedman. But now he's just another cowardly politician.

      Although still facing an enormous deficit, he proposed to increase funding for higher education by 12%. A few thousand people at Berkeley threw a fit, and the governor responded by promising hundreds millions more...

      That’s from Peter Robinson’s Op Ed this weekend, which neatly sums up the students’ attitude:

      They demonstrated the entitlement mentality and self-absorption that has come to dominate much of higher education.

      Robinson shows that the entitlement mentality only grows.

      Despite the budget cuts, California will this year devote $3 billion to the U.C. system. That's about $13,000 per student—more than the $10,000 per student that Illinois devotes to the University of Illinois and better than double the $6,000 per student that New York devotes to the SUNY system. Yet Mr. Schwarzenegger did not denounce the agitation at Berkeley. He gave in to it.

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      Education
      Government

    • JOHN HAS A NEW BOOK! ORDER TODAY

    This Week's Show -- May 16, 2013

    Government is at war against the little guy.

     

    Bureaucrats pass thousands of regulations to "keep people safer" and "make the marketplace more fair." Today 170,000 pages of federal regulations are on the books. Break just one rule, and government may wreck your life.

     

    So Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson started a "Victims of Government" website that features victims of overregulation.

     

    Nevada bureaucrats tell people who teach movie make-up that they must get an expensive license or close.

     

    Stossel has two empty rooms in his house now that his kids moved out. Using sites like Roomorama, he could make a little money and rent the rooms out. But two years ago, New York passed a law that makes most of what apartment rental sites do illegal. Stossel debates Liz Kreuger, who sponsored that bill.

     

    Is there any hope for the little guy? Authors of "Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers", Edward Lopez and Wayne Leighton, point out that deregulation did happen once. Americans pay much less to fly and to ship something because the CAB and ICC no longer exist. And we have cell phones because the FCC finally allowed spectrum auction. They say the only time things change is when the right people, the right ideas and the right circumstances all come together to repeal the bureaucrats rules.

     

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