In response to Ron Paul’s proposal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, my wife, Jane, writes of her experience:
“In January of 1957, I was a student intern in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. government’s Department of Health, Education and Welfare; precursor to the Department of Education that Ron Paul would like to abolish. I worked in the Division of Higher Education for several months and my experience there taught me that the area I worked in for that Division was a total waste of time and money. Even though I was totally ignorant in economics, I soon became aware that the project I was working on was a good example of the efficacy of the market over governments. One of the Division’s projects was the creation of a college and university guide book. As an intern/clerk, my particular job was to contact the administrative offices of U.S. colleges and universities with a long list of questions for them to answer; information that would be gathered into the government guide. Even the people working there were aware that Lovejoy’s College Guide was already doing the job much quicker and more efficiently than we were and that it would have been better to just copy their information, if indeed a government guide was even necessary. Looking back, I wonder if the reason for this project, and probably for others as well, wasn’t just to provide another expenditure to help them spend that year’s allotment. The bureaucrats working in the Division were quite open about their need to spend all the money in their annual budget before the fiscal year was over so they could ask for more for the next year. One can only imagine the multiplication of such useless projects in the past 55 years, and the expenditures that might have been avoided if a Ron Paul had been around then.”
3:57 pm on April 24, 2012
