Sorry Taxpayers, Paying You Back Is Bad for My Bliss

If I had more time I'd write at greater length about this already infamous New York Times op-ed on student loans -- which conspicuously fails to mention that the writer apparently got all of his degrees from pricey Columbia University -- but the piece largely condemns itself. What I think is worth contemplating is how far out of mainstream thinking its sentiments are. Alas, maybe not that far.

No doubt most of the public wouldn't support people not repaying their student loans just because they don't like them, but the idea that freely chosen debt should be forgiven or curtailed is getting lots of play, from President Obama's push for programs that would lead to forgiveness for big borrowers, to Senator Elizabeth Warren's private debt buy-up proposal. And calls for free college are roughly the equivalent of calls for loan forgiveness. No, they aren't saying that borrowers should renege on commitments they've already made, but they are saying that the college cost burden should be dropped even more squarely on the shoulder of taxpayers going forward.

Of course the ultimate problem, beyond the immediate, crushing cost, is that the more you have other people pay for students' decisions, the more wasteful those decisions will tend to be. And even at current subsidy levels, those decisions are very, very wasteful. But that's what happens when politicians decide taxpayers should never get in the way of a student's bliss.