Writing for Positive Liberty, libertarian D. A. Ridgely critiques “That Old College Lie,” an article I recently wrote for Democracy arguing that the key to holding down college costs in the long run is to increase transparency in the higher education market. Says Ridgely:

I think Carey has a point regarding the data resulting from various recent attempts at objectively measuring academic achievement at the university level, the point being that such data should be available for public consideration. But I mean “should” in the sense that the schools should as an ethical matter release the information, not that government should require its release. And, of course, I disagree completely with Carey’s calls for more government spending and more government regulation of higher education.

I have a fair amount of sympathy for the libertarian perspective. But stuff like this makes me wonder if they’re putting me on.  I was under the impression that libertarians see the world as properly consisting of autonomous individuals and corporations acting out of pure self-interest–that indeed, the most famous libertarian of the 20th century developed a whole philosophical system premised on the notion that selfishness and ethical behavior are the same thing. Yet here’s Ridgely saying that colleges should choose to release potentially embarrassing information that self-interest currently leads them to hide, for “ethical” reasons. I thought that was supposed to be the opposite of ethical? It’s almost as if libertarianism as currently practiced by the likes of Ridgely is less a coherent way of thinking about balancing state and individual power and more a way of dressing up reflexive anti-government thinking in the trappings of philosophy…

Meanwhile, Andrew Gelman provides a thoughtful take here. He disagrees with my critique of universities as insatiable revenue-gathering and spending machines:

I agree that this describes colleges…But doesn’t it really describe almost anybody? I mean, who among us, Ubs excepted, figures out how much money they needs to spend and then goes and gets it? The much much more common pattern, I think, is that people get what jobs they can do and, ideally, want to do, and then if they need more money, sure, they try to get more. But when people make more, they tend to spend more and feel the need for even more, etc. I don’t see at all what’s special about universities here–this just seems like a cheap shot to me. Universities are like other organizations: they’re happy to take money that people are willing to give to them. I mean, I don’t see Apple saying, “Hey, we have enough money–we’re gonna give out i-pods for free.”

Sure, but the difference is that nobody actually needs an iPod, so there’s no public interest in keeping the price of iPods below the market rate in order to maximize iPod use. By contrast, the majority of people really, really need a college education. And the people who need it most are those who lack family resources and other forms of financial and social capital: low-income and first generation students who are most sensitive to rising higher education prices. That’s why colleges receive hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and indirect public subsidies every year, while Apple is left to fend for itself. So when colleges increasingly turn to students as way to sate their bottomless hunger for resources (or when state legislatures do it as a way of raising taxes without raising taxes), it’s a big problem.