Gilmore’s Big Government

D.J. McGuire points out how bloggers supporting Gilmore have made a pretty good case for Del. Bob Marshall’s Conservative approach to government. Good job, guys.

I’ll have more thoughts later…

LATER: As DJ said in his post:

Gilmore’s decision to plow “excess tax revenues” into the higher education system benefited less than one in every nine Virginia households – hardly putting money to work “for the People.”

From a different angle, however, this is even worse.  One of the many things the American right has done to change the debate on education in general is to force Americans to see that a government monopoly is not the best way to deliver education.  At the K-12 level, this has led to numerous conservative proposals for education reform under the e umbrella of educational choice – in essense, taking the entire idea of government help for education and restructuring it so that the students, not the institutions, are aided.  The conservative movement is making similar moves in housing, medical insurance, and other areas.

Gilmore’s tuition freeze, by contrast, moves in the exact opposite direction.  It doesn’t strengthen individual choice; it limits it by forcing them to use public education in order to benefit from the aid.  It doesn’t embrace the free market; it distorts it by using government power to artificially lower the prices for government-funded universities to the detriment of private and religious ones.

It comes down to who can best spend YOUR money and what it means to be a Conservative.

As one who took some time off before finishing school (three weeks to go), I have had to pay my own way during these last few years.  What drove my decision to attend VCU was a combination of factors that included very heavily the cost of tuition.   That tuition has increased by more than ten percent in the last two years and looks to go up yet again year after year.  Is this happening because the government isn’t subsidizing it enough or because the school is making bad decisions and isn’t being held accountable by me, the consumer?

That depends on who you speak to.  The administration of VCU will tell you that the state is at fault, that less funds from the state means tuition must increase.  Yet no where have the services provided to me or the students of VCU increased by 10%.  In fact, they went $10 million over budget for a business expansion and you can fully expect that buck to be passed along to the students.  But because we don’t demand accountability from the administration, no one’s going to know what’s going on, tuition will be raised again and the blame will be placed on the state.

So how are students and their families to afford these rates?  Is it up to the state to spend their money, your money, my money to pay for bad decisions on the part of VCU or GMU or UVA?

Or, are families better served by having that money in their pockets to begin with, to be able to make the choices on their own and demand greater accountability from the schools for the product they provide at the prices that they charge?

In the case of many Virginians, myself included, Gilmore’s policies to keep college “affordable” made it anything but.  Instead, it took more money out of the pockets of Virginians when they could have saved that themselves to put towards furthering their education through a means other than a state funded system that only benefits 10% of Virginian families.

When Virginia was faced with a surplus, Gilmore didn’t give that money back to Virginians, he increased spending and locked Virginia into a system that continued to take money from every family to no effective end.

When did increasing spending become a Conservative value?