It’s no surprise that New York Times writer David Leonhardt praises Obama’s proposal that community college should be free in his piece “The Roots of Obama’s Ambitious College Plan.”

He falls for the idea that because universal and free high school has been “successful” it follows that the country would be even better off if we made more years of education free and available to almost any student. Naturally, it doesn’t occur to him that the reason why huge numbers of high school graduates today lack even the rudimentary English and math skills that used to be expected of sixth graders is that we have made education universal and free, so long as you sit in government classrooms. There is no better way of ruining anything than to turn it over to government to run and make it “free” so that the patrons don’t have to spend their own money.

This plan isn’t ambitious; it’s absurd, the sort of absurdity that stems from naive collectivistic beliefs.

Leonhardt writes that success today depends “vastly more on knowledge than it used to.” Actually, no, but whatever knowledge people need, they will get it much faster and less expensively if they aren’t lured into the trap of “free” government schooling.