Sinclair Is Not Working

Sinclair Is Not Working

by Mark Luedkte

If you're like me, you jumped for joy to learn that Sinclair works for you. According to the commercials, Sinclair is the MIT of Montgomery County, but without the price tag. Those commercials for issue 39 have flooded our living rooms night and day for a week. Like everything else on TV that gets repeated over and over, they must be right, right?

I visited Sinclair's website to see how Sinclair worked for me. It turns out Sinclair isn't working for hardly anybody. Sinclair's graduation rates would embarrass Bob Huggins. Sinclair is a 2 year college, offering associates degrees and lesser certificates, but only 9% of students complete their programs within 3 years. 15.1% transfer. 17.7% return for a 4^th year. Presumably, the rest drop out.

Only government would consider a 9% success rate a success, and the only way such a failing organization could continue to exist is by taking money from citizens by force. Other than the terminally ill hoping for a cure, nobody in their right mind voluntarily pays for a service that fails to meet its goals, even after allowing for a 50% slip in schedule, 91% of the time. Despite dismal performance, welfare activists are pushing to increase taxpayer subsidies for Sinclair from $20 million to $31.7 million, rewarding failure.

Sinclair's dismal performance is a direct result of government subsidies. The solution is to get the government subsidies out of the school, promote competition, and let the power of the free market make "Sinclair works" more than a phony marketing slogan. Students who pay their own way are invested in their own success and tend to succeed. Students who have their education subsidized by taxpayers are cheated out of understanding the value of their education and tend to fail.

That's because subsidies undermine the value of a service. Services have value based on what somebody is willing to pay. In a free market, that value is expressed by the price of the service. Subsidies for a service artificially lower the price, and therefore people undervalue and overuse the service, and in the case of education, that leads to a high failure rate. The laws of economics and markets are natural laws like the law of gravity, they apply to purchasing education like anything else, and government interference cannot change them, only corrupt them. That's why government interference in markets, no matter how well intentioned, always backfires as it has with Sinclair which wasted 91% of our tax dollars.

Government intervention in markets is inherently tyrannical. If I went out and robbed people at gunpoint to put a young person through college, I would be arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed. And rightly so, because Americans generally know the difference between right and wrong, and taking money from people by force to give to somebody else, no matter how noble the motivation, is wrong. No vote or government force can make it right.

And contrary to liberals' claims that we live in a democracy, we live in a Constitutional Republic. That's because the Founding Fathers understood that democracy was just another form of tyranny, a tyranny of the majority, mob rule. That's why they founded America on the principles of limited government, the rule of law, and that every person is equal under the law.

But if government takes money by force from citizens to give to others, like Sinclair students, the Sinclair students are more equal under the law than the rest of us. That's illegal. That's why welfare, in all its forms including subsidies, is illegal under the Constitution. Sinclair shows us the wisdom of our history and our founding principles because it shows us that welfare in any form promotes failure. That's why government, regardless of any vote, has no power to pass laws such as Issue 39. Issue 39 is unconstitutional, and it promotes failure.

And no majority will force this law on us. The Health and Human Services levy was passed by 10% of Montgomery County citizens, illegally empowering government to take money from every citizen by force. That's not the rule of law, which is supposed to see us all as equal, not some more equal than others. That's not tyranny by majority. That's a tyranny of the minority.

Any form of welfare, such as Issue 39, is inherently divisive. Activists push welfare one small piece at a time, but it adds up to big money. Suppose you prefer to send your child to private school, to support a handicapped child, to donate to the cancer foundation, or to spend a week in Hawaii? You earned that money. You should be able to spend it as you wish.

Sinclair's subsidy will take $31.7 million out of Montgomery County's economy. The Health and Human services levy sucked out $71.4 million. Imagine the benefits of injecting a $103.1 million cash infusion into Montgomery County's economy. We wouldn't have 75,000 people on welfare, more workers would boost our economy further, and the free market would supply better services cheaper than government or Sinclair. But a minority of welfare activists empower government to take your money from you and out of our economy by force to support their agenda.

Citizens for Sinclair plans to purchase 2,600 TV and 800 radio commercials. They should donate that money to Sinclair instead and stop promoting failure and divisiveness through unconstitutional taxes.