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“[Daniel] Brook, citing the social critic Brendan Koerner, calls college debt America’s new ‘ambition tax.’ Inspired by Brook, I coined some other new taxes bequeathed to us by the demons a triumphant Goldwaterism has set lose. There is, for instance, the ‘idealism tax.’ In 1980, a University of Chicago student paid a $5,100 tuition–and, if her heart called her to teach in a Chicago public school, earn two and a half times that: not impractical. Now the relevant numbers are $31,500 and $38,500. Brook’s stuff on teachers and even mayors priced out of the cities they serve is devastating.”
“Put simply, in a society where to fail in business is to make economic survival impossible, fewer and fewer are willing to take the chance. Where are entrepreneurs better off? Dreaded Old Europe, according to the quite conservative Financial Times: ‘With its low [real estate] costs and generous welfare net, Berlin is an entrepreneurs’ heaven, where barriers to entry are low and failure rarely entails personal ruin.’ Brook claims, counterintuitively, that America’s self-employment rate is lower than it has been in decades. What if you do give it a go? ‘[T]he holes in the American safety net, health care chief among them, make entrepreneurship and family life mutually exclusive.’”
