By Professor Doom
Yes, the old sage
ranting “it’s all crap” or “we have lost our way” is a bit of a cliché, but I
honestly have more than just my own experience and opinions…I have evidence.
Maybe it’s just a
matter of opinion when I say standards have fallen…perhaps my memory (and my
old tests) paint an incorrect picture of the reality of higher education
decades ago. Perhaps riots against free speech have always been common on
campus, and I just don’t remember them. Perhaps the minimal pay for the
teachers and incredible pay for the administrators has always been how it
worked and I just never noticed.
But, gentle
reader, I promise you, the campus restrooms I went to in the past did not have
tampons in them. I go to men’s bathrooms exclusively…and I really think I would
have noticed if such things were there.
Today, men’s rooms
on campuses have tampons in them. I’m serious. The
purpose of higher education is supposed to be about education and research…and
not about providing feminine hygiene products to everyone. It’s not just one
campus, either, as I’ve covered this new
front in the social justice war before.
Seriously, we’ve
lost our way. I want to focus on another campus which has abandoned higher
education in favor of social justice feel-gooder-ism (note: this is not the same
as DO-gooder-ism), because what’s going on here is such a great experiment of
socialist policies. Yes, knowledgeable people can predict the outcome, because
all such experiments have turned our poorly (much like with gravity), but for
educational purposes, there’s little harm in doing it again.
Let’s go off to
yet another campus, to see how this doomed plan is working out:
Seriously, how did
none of the Vice Presidents of Tampon Supply and Diversity not see this coming?
You’re in a men’s restroom, there’s a bowl of somewhat valuable things
there…why not grab a handful, at the very least, and give them to your
girlfriend? It’s not like you’ll be denying anyone else in the room something
they’d want/need. I don’t condone theft, mind you but why should this resource
just sit there and rot for the cause of Social Justice?
I really want to
point out how the tampon fiascos are merely another case study in why social
programs fail. The whole “we’re doing nice things for everyone, and everyone
will play nice because we mean well” is such a beautiful concept, but the
reality of how the real world works is far sadder.
Greed, and inefficient
use of resources, has taken over at U of Rochester, but at least it’s
hilarious:
Just over
11,000 students attend Rochester University. But in the first two weeks of its
Pads and Tampons Initiative, the university has gone through nearly 16,000
tampons and pads—in large part because people keep grabbing them in bulk, sometimes
along with the baskets they’re stored in, the student newspaper reported.
--you know,
normal thinking people, upon seeing the rapid theft of goods, would stop
supplying the goods. Not socialists, of course, because they're just spending someone else's money.
Almost 50% more
feminine hygiene products have been taken than there are students, a huge
amount for two weeks.
This is one of
many serious problems with socialism: you make it free, then everyone wants it,
everyone takes as much as possible. Eventually it becomes an entitlement, just
one more straw that eventually breaks the entire economic system. Honest, whole books
have described how socialism eventually fails, in detail (warning:
not a light read).
The initiative hasn’t even lasted a month, and already the
university has burned through more than half of their $5,000 budget for
menstrual products.
--When the
money runs out, I’ll be shocked, shocked, when the people responsible for this
initiative refuse to drain their own bank accounts to keep it going. I mean,
they honestly believe this is a worthy cause, so of course they’ll spend their
own money on it, right?
Like every other
social program, economic predictions of the costs involved are always off by a
huge margin. Again, it’s basic economic principle (too bad such is never taught
in the schools), but if you lower the price then it increases demand, which
reduces supply which should in turn increase the price, lowering demand…but
that last step doesn’t happen because the price isn’t paid by the actual user.
It doesn’t matter
if you’re talking about health care, higher education, or, well, tampons, it
always plays out the same. The effects are insidious, not just to those in the
system, but to those outside of “the protection” the system offers (do keep in
mind, the students, male and female, are eventually paying for those “free”
tampons, even if they don’t understand exactly how…).
It’s the same
thing in health care—those insured by our byzantine system are sort-of
protected, but the ones without the protection? They get obliterated by a ridiculously
expensive system.
Both health care
and higher education have been warped by feel-gooder actions. Will the Tampon
Socialism Experiment play out differently? Let’s see:
Last week,
one member of the Students’ Association made an “emergency run” to a local
store and “bought them out of pads and tampons, to the tune of nearly $1,200,”
the Campus Times reported.
I humbly ask the reader to read between the
lines in the above action. The store shelves were cleaned out of the “free
good.” Imagine a non-college student, in desperate need of a tampon, who,
responsibly, went down to the store to get the desired item.
It’s not there,
it’s gone…and now she’s been hurt by the socialist tampon system. For insult to
injury, you can bet the store (and all stores near campus) will raise their
prices on these products…or not stock them at all, seeing as they’re “free” in
the campus restrooms, further harming the people not being helped by the Tampon
Experiment.
It’s sad that
there’s nobody on campus with enough knowledge to use the empirical evidence as
a demonstration of how all socialist programs function.
And I’m telling
you, higher education was never supposed to be about tampons anyway…
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