Can Republicans criticize anything without invoking the Soviet Union?
At The Corner, Sen. Lamar Alexander criticizes a new law that cuts private banks out as middlemen in the student loan process. He's wrong on a lot of the particulars, but the conclusion of his argument is really perplexing: “It changes the kind of country we live in more than it changes American education,” Alexander concludes. “The American system of higher education has become the best in the world because of choice and competition . Unlike K-12, we give money to students and let them choose among schools, having the choice of private lenders or government lenders. That’s been the case for 20 years. Having no choice, and the government running it all, looks more like a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything. In most of those countries, they’ve been falling over themselves to reject their state-controlled authoritarian universities, which are much worse than ours, and move toward the American model which emphasizes