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Buchanan and Devletoglou suggested an overhaul of higher education aimed at bringing the student movement to heel. At the time, California had proposed a master plan of universal free higher education across its system. But the authors of Academia in Anarchy argued that the proposal suffered from a lack of basic economics — meaning not simply economic calculation, but Buchanan’s conception of economics as an all-encompassing moral and behavioral philosophy. “Almost alone among social scientists,” they wrote, “the economist brings with him a model of human behavior which allows predictions about human action.”

Treating education as a “free good” meant that those who received it had no incentive to value it, and thus spent their years at university behaving as “man-children” playing a “psychedelic game.” Buchanan and Devletoglou recommended a student-loan system. “The scarcity value of a university education would at least be brought home to the student,”

In a twist that would become characteristic of later libertarian arguments, with softer echoes among technocratic liberals like Buttigieg, economically disciplining students was a matter of social justice for society at large. Free tuition that was intended to provide a path of mobility for less-fortunate citizens, especially racial minorities who suffered from centuries of accumulated exclusion, was actually a “gift to the gifted” — “a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich” — with the “poor taxpayer” cleverly but dubiously painted by Buchanan and Devletoglou as working-class citizens excluded from higher education.

As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

the focus of politics is now on an American troop withdrawal. It has been forgotten that during the Soleimani strike a senior member of Popular Mobilizations Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was also killed. This political group holds the second-largest bloc in parliament. A week earlier, a U.S. air strike on several of their bases killed 25 of their members leading to the attack on the American embassy. They have publicly stated that their revenge on the United States will be fierce and forthcoming.

Democratic transitions demand political stability.