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Comment by logician76 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..

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It's not wrong. Making something free means paying for it in a transparent fashion.

Bernie Sanders is not talking about changing the institutional structure of college such that it somehow has no cost to provide. He is talking about the government paying that cost on behalf of students.

I agree with free education, by the way. We currently spend our budgets on much less useful things. But let's be honest about what it means and how it works.

Yes it is wrong, paying the cost of education at cost (for a government), or paying students to pay market prices (inflated by perception of value) is a huge difference. Which do you think Bernie Sanders was implying?

Bernie is not suggesting nationalizing all american colleges. That would be absurd.

In real life there are more possibilities in between 0 and 1.. Also look at how its done in other countries. Apparently americans can go to Germany to study for free in a recent article. Absurd indeed.

You do understand that all of those options require someone to pay for the services? I don't know why we're still having a conversation about this. An institution with employees costs money, unless the institution is entirely comprised of volunteers (in which case the volunteers are paying with their time).

Germany pays.

Bernie's plan is to pay institutions.

That's all well and good, but that's what it is.

"Making college free" is identical in every meaningful way to giving everyone who wants to buy it enough money to buy it.

Not necessarily. Imagine two scenarios:

"Here's the government school. Anyone can go there for free."

"Here's $50,000. Spend it at any school you want."

Without advocating one or the other, it's clear that these scenarios are not going to produce the same results at all.

In fact, there's been a great deal of debate about whether or not the second scenario ("school vouchers") is a good idea.

It is not so clear, actually, and the example of the K-12 public schools actaully shows it. Nominally, anyone can go to "the government school", but some are better run than others, and bestow more benefits on the students, and you end up moving the bidding war/arms race right over to "whatever mechanism the school uses to decide who goes there".

In the US, that usually means it spills over onto home prices in the best school districts. So, you get the same sorting of students, the same differential education, but people blow their budgets a different way.

This is not much different from the subsidized result.

(You may object: "But the schools can just sort by merit." Well, a) your previous comment said that it's not so easy to find a test that does so, and b) that's just another mode for the arms race: spending money on ways to game/hack the tests: cf, SAT prep courses.)

The same dynamic has happened for all previous kinds of subsidies to higher education: the amount the government pays for (or provides for free) becomes the new baseline, and people have to spend more money to distinguish themselves the unwashed masses who also go that education. Previously, a high school degree was enough, but now college is. With Sanders's plan (regardless of "free school" vs "pay your tuition"), we may end up at "Sorry, everyone needs a Master's now."

Like the site argues, the result of the subsidies is that everyone has to do the same things they did without it, but you also blow a lot of money unnecessarily.

You can't make things free by magic. Someone has to pay for them.

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