Ginandtacos.com‘s article Pretzels and Spite is a good, interesting blog with excellent points. I enjoyed reading it, but I keep coming back to one thing: The unencumbered free market is only good at one thing: lowering prices.

Perhaps this is true – something that’s certainly up for debate, and something that I, with my degree in economics (with a concentration in finance at that; I know, however do I live with myself) don’t agree with – but it’s not even an assertion that’s demonstrated in the example. The airline industry isn’t unencumbered; in all honesty, the “unencumbered free market” doesn’t exist in this or any other capitalist country. How can I say that? Because we have government regulation. Every capitalist country has some degree of government regulation, and there isn’t an industry that’s untouched by it.

To continue with the airline industry example, yes, price regulation has ended. But after 9/11, it was replaced with a who slew of other kind of regulations that affected airline practices, affected and continues to affect airline customer experience, and undeniably affect the bottom line. People don’t fly as much as they otherwise might. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s also something the airlines can’t directly do a thing about, and thus in order to stay solvent they have to cut amenities.

It sucks, but it isn’t an unencumbered free market.

This is not to say I’m against government regulations – I wrote my economics thesis on environmental regulations and the use of emissions trading to meet said regulations – but simply to say that we don’t have a true free market. Period. And I don’t think we should, but equally, we cannot judge what an unencumbered free market can accomplish when it doesn’t exist.

Maybe I’m just cynical.  Maybe I’m a product of my midwestern middle class upbringing, where money was was tight – or at least tighter than my classmates – and when I went off to college, a major part of my major-choosing decision was based on the consideration of what would help me find employment in after graduation.  This was expected, even if it was for the most part unspoken (my brother quadruple majored in accounting, finance, and two other business fields whose names escape me, and my sister, like me, has a degree in economics); if I had majored in what I loved rather than in what I hoped would get me a job, I would have a degree in East Asian history, not one in financial economics.  For the most part I don’t regret my choice; it allows me to understand at least some of the economic disaster we’re in now, and its a great help at work, but let’s face it:  if the history department had been as diligent as the economics department in providing students with examples and contacts for post-graduation employment, it’s pretty damn likely I would have dropped econ like a hot potato.  But they didn’t, and this was unfortunately the way most of the humanities departments worked – they didn’t give the students or the prospective students much of an idea of what they could do with their degree once they finished it.

And while finding out what you love and enlightenment and self-actualization are all extremely important parts of education, so is employability.  And employability – especially for those who come from strained financial circumstances, or even those like me who just had to weather times that were more difficult than my classmates – this is a huge deal.  Huge.    It’s a major worry, and it’s not necessarily about doing what you’re “supposed” to do by getting a job and a house and a car and 2.5 kids.  It’s about being able to live comfortably.  And living comfortably is almost as big a deal for me as any sense of enlightenment is.

So if you want to reform society and education so that the education is more important than the end product, have at it.  I hate No Child Left Behind just as much as the next child of two teachers, and I think we’ll be far better off if more of an emphasis is placed on learning and less on testing.  But while we’re doing this, we can’t forget that what happens after college is still important.  And it still needs to be part of education too.