College President Wary of Big Government

That alone is a newsflash. Usually, college presidents approach big government with their hands out.

At the Cato Institute on March 30, 2017, Mark Zupan, president of Alfred University, noted that trust in government is at an all-time low. It currently runs at 19 percent, down from 66 in the 1960s. Dr. Zupan is the author of Inside Job: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest, published this year by Cambridge University Press.

“In the developed world, government now includes 50 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 28 percent of the workforce,” Dr. Zupan said at Cato. He notes that it is “also good to look at the non-military bureaucrats in the military,” when tracking the growth of government.

Moreover, the benefits of this growth are, at best, illusory. “If we want to transfer 50 cents, it will cost us $1.50,” Dr. Zupan pointed out.

It gets even worse when you don’t live in a democratic republic. “India requires 60 state approvals to build a skyscraper and it takes 10 years,” Emily Ekins, a research fellow at Cato, who moderated the talk, said, quoting from Zupan’s book.

Also, Ekins noted, when polled, “54 percent of Indians said they paid a bribe,” to a government official. It’s even worse for the poor, Ekins noted, “75 percent of slum dwellers said they paid a bribe.”

Photo by Fellowship of the Rich

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