The MEC's modus operandi on full display

With all that is on our national plate, the Most Equal Comrade has decided that this is the time to unveil a new approach to making higher education affordable.  No, really, this is a new approach, newer than the one from his first term, because the failure of that one to solve anything has to be obscured with a new, new plan:

"We've got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt," said Mr. Obama, without a trace of irony at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same man who three years ago forced through a plan to add $1 trillion in student loans to the federal balance sheet over a decade said on Thursday, "Our economy can't afford the trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don't have the capacity to pay it."

True to form, his need to deflect blame from himself requires a willingness to throw some of his loyal fellow Freedom-Haters under the bus:

Mr. Obama specifically blamed colleges and universities for charging too much. "Not enough colleges have been working to figure out how do we control costs, how do we cut back on costs," he said. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency, and then to allocate federal subsidies to the schools that Washington believes are providing the best education at the lowest cost.

Particularly jarring for Mr. Obama's fans in the faculty lounge, he talked about them on Thursday in the same disrespectful manner that he normally reserves for entrepreneurs. "And I've got to tell you ahead of time, these reforms won't be popular with everybody, especially those who are making out just fine under the current system. But my main concern is not with those institutions; my main concern is the students those institutions are there to serve," said the President.

Conservative readers may be tempted to chuckle here. And we concede that this latest Obama regulatory onslaught couldn't happen to a nicer bunch than the university elite who did so much to elect him. But while shifting control of universities from lefty professors to the U.S. Department of Education may seem like a transition between six and a half-dozen, it is not.

As maddening as it can be to see how liberal academics spend the wealth created by hard-working citizens, Americans should think long and hard before allowing the federal government to dominate a system of higher education that is still by all accounts the envy of the world. If the feds are deciding what a quality education is in order to dole out billions in annual aid—in an era when most students can't afford to matriculate without some form of aid—Washington will certainly dominate. Tying aid to whatever the bureaucrats decide is the right tuition is a back-door form of price controls. Even more disturbing is the idea that a federal political authority will decide which curricula at which institutions represent a good educational value. 

 

And on top of that, he proposes capping the paying-back of student loans at 10 percent of the incomes of those bearing the obligation.

These people will try anything, no matter how convoluted and lacking in hoss sense, to avoid the normal-people free-market solutions to society's dilemmas.  And the reason why is pretty plain to see:  There's no role for them if people make their own economic choices.