How to Fix the Debt Ceiling (A Bigger Threat than the Fiscal Cliff)

How to Fix the Debt Ceiling (A Bigger Threat than the Fiscal Cliff)

Quoting from this article from the The American (the online magazine of the American Enterprise Institute), “A default by the U.S. government is more potentially damaging than the fiscal cliff — and more easily avoidable, if Congress modernizes the debt ceiling.”

Colleges Stampeding to Online Ed

Colleges Stampeding to Online Ed

This article discusses the ongoing experimentation by elite colleges and universities with online education.  However, unlike previous efforts by the likes of Coursera and Udacity, this latest effort by a consortium of 10 prominent universities (including schools such as Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern) called “Semester Online” is fully monetized.  While students from consortium member institutions do not have to pay any additional tuition in order to participate, apparently non-consortium students have to apply, be accepted, and pay tuition of more than $4,000 a course.

Milton Friedman on JFK's 'Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.'

Economist Milton Friedman in “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962):

“The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”

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Milton Friedman on JFK’s ‘Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.’

Economist Milton Friedman in “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962):

“The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”