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Jul 13, 2012 -- 4:11AM, Dan_Lynch wrote:

The difference, here, is that the charity is done with the consent of the donors, instead of by force. Why is that sad?

Voluntary charity is something that may, or may not, be forthcoming.

If university education were taxpayer-funded, the impression would be created that a university education is a matter of right for all those who qualify - not unlike primary school education. (Of course, it can't really be a right in the sense of the basic freedoms, since circumstances could exist where a country might not be able to even afford primary education for everyone.)

And, so, one could imagine that with taxpayer funding, a lot more people would be going to university after high school than is the case in the U.S. now.

What's really sad, of course, though, is the absence of massive taxpayer funding for various forms of R&D so as to create jobs for all the additional scientists and engineers we could possibly produce with free tuition and presumably other measures. Don't you want a cure for old age to be discovered in your lifetime?

Mind you, I will agree that there need to be limits, and so perhaps we should continue to eschew using taxpayer money to create more philosophy or English literature majors than are produced through students paying their own way.