Ron Paul explains why there is no such thing as “free” education.
Chris Rossini: Public colleges and universities should be tuition-free. Dr. Paul please help the students out here.
Ron Paul: There is an old saying, there ain’t such thing as free lunch and there ain’t no such thing as free education. You can try to make somebody else pay for one’s education. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t The biggest fallacy on this is, first you must not force somebody to pay for something that you get. I’ve always wondered why we should subsidize people that go to college by people who don’t get to go to college, the working man has to pay the taxes and suffer the consequences to send somebody else to college. It isn’t free even for the people who think they are getting free. We gave these generous loans that you mentioned and it pushes up prices and there is an inflationary factor there that is artificial, but even the group ends up with the debt. Right now they have a debt of 1.3 trillion dollars and most people know it is not going to be paid.
Some will try to and there will be a liquidation of that debt there, there will be a default on this. Even if they are able to get tax money or borrowed money or printed money to send the kids to school, they still pay, because the debt is built in and that 1.3 trillion becomes public debt. Who suffers? It’s going to be the generation that is supposed to be in help. They are the ones who will have to pay this off later on. It will be invisible, you won’t see it, it might be because of a weak economy, which we already have and a lot of these kids are not getting jobs when they leave college. It might be because of inflation of general prices and they will have to pay. It will be a consequence of debt. The very people that are supposed to be helped by free education are the ones that suffer the consequences and they end up with the problems and if there is a lot of cost to be paid and no jobs that is a consequence they are not looking for.
It is just always this political promise, we will give you something for free, you vote for us and everything will be ok and when a country is freer and richer and have a sounder currency it can go on, but for the last several years despite the recent congressional and government reports, the economy is not booming. There is still a tremendous unemployment out there that they don’t count, once they leave the labor market, they don’t count them. It is this idea that something for free, which I consider immoral and it is not in the Constitution that the federal government can take over education of everybody and we all suffer the consequences and it certainly is not very practical because the education quality right now is very low. So, I think more and more people should wake up and realize there ain’t no such thing as free lunch and free education.