The best and the brightest

In the Feb 2010 Reason (apparently not yet online), Matt Welch writes about "More Than Zero ... Anyone who has expended energy arguing for free trade, market competition, and the open exchange of ideas has repeatedly encountered the same obstacle: zero-sum assumptions misapplied to dynamic nonlinear phenomena. ..."

In California, politicians and public sector unions help each other and government is now very expensive. The WSJ (Jan 2-3) reports that "The Golden State starts the year another $6 billion in arrears despite a large income and sales hike last year." And there were some cuts, including to the budgets of the UC system.

Meanwhile, from back at the old school, we get this report from the New Yorker's Tad Friend. "All morning at Pauley, people proposed direct actions. A student facilitator summarized each idea on a projection screen: 'rolling strikes'; 'nationalize all universities'; 'socialist revolution'; 'a tent city in Sacramento'; 'create a shadow Board of Regents'; 'occupy Wells Fargo bank downtown Oakland'; 'strike in March'; 'act now f**k March'; and 'capitalism is bad.'

To be sure, the story highlighted the efforts of Prof Ananya Roy to moderate the crazies. But nowhere is anyone cited as pointing to Sacramento politics. The protestors revert to the romance of class warfare, but their predicament was created by the redistributionists who are their natural allies.

It's very simple and all the people cited in Tad Friend's piece are supposed to be among the brightest students and professors we have.