To the Editor:
Why do you not support free-market principles in student loans with the same tenacity that you support them in other areas? You endorse a proposal by the Obama administration to abolish guaranteed loans, thereby eliminating all consumer choice and competition in federal student loans.
In an editorial about the airline industry in 2007, you wrote that the government “could have gone further and opened up the American market to more competition, and the superior service and lower prices that come with it.” You also said, “We hope that politicians will embrace the free-market principles they so frequently tout.”
Your support of a government monopoly in student loans—which could eventually have the Department of Education managing $1 trillion in loans—is irreconcilable with your embrace of competition elsewhere.
Competition in student loans has created significant consumer benefits: free delinquency and default prevention services, increasingly important in this economy, as well as better terms, college access programs and consumer-friendly processes.
Kevin Bruns
Executive Director
America’s Student Loan Providers
Washington, March 5, 2009
Note from KBJ: Two words, Mr Bruns: "Nanny State." The editorial board of the New York Times wants cradle-to-grave protection against all of life's contingencies. The more power the federal government has, the easier it will be to engineer society. Things such as family, church, the market, and states' rights are impediments. The sooner they are destroyed, the sooner we achieve heaven on earth. (Note that progressive heaven = conservative hell.)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 