Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

Carrie Lukas went to her Harvard reunion, and noticed an irony:

No reunion would be complete without fundraising. During the dinner, for example, class officers encouraged us to donate to a scholarship program. Two current recipients took to the podium to thank the class and describe why they needed the support.

One student, an immigrant from Africa named Daniel, had been putting himself through school by renting out an apartment in Chicago. That plan collapsed when the renter stopped paying. Daniel went to court—four times—for an evection order but was shocked at the difficulty of removing the squatter. All the laws, he said, favored the tenant over the property owner. So far he’s out more than $20,000 in foregone rent, with thousands more for legal bills and plane tickets from Boston to Chicago. Yet the tenant still was living in his home, rent-free, with no penalty. Daniel told me he’s given up hope of recouping the lost income and now is focused simply on reclaiming his stolen property. If it weren’t for this scholarship, he would have had to drop out of school.

Daniel shouldn’t have had to thank the Harvard alum for his scholarship. It is the thoughtless liberalism inculcated at such “schools of government” that have created the very laws that made him financially needy in the first place. At dinner, my fellow graduates applauded Daniel and shook their heads in sympathy at his desperate situation. But if we were back in school (likely in a class named something like “Creating Equality Through Access to Affordable Housing”) they would readily have been cheerleaders for laws that favor the poor tenant—unable to afford the market rent—over the greedy property owner.

No one dug further into the true lessons of Daniel’s story or considered what it says about the liberal policies that universities like Harvard promote. The honored alum instead toasted their noble sacrifice to “public service,” patting themselves on the back for helping a victim that they helped create. A more fitting metaphor for government today I can’t imagine.