Washington Monument Syndrome - Ivy League Edition

As certain as the sun rises, doomsayers predict disaster every time a federal money spigot gets turned off. Just as each federal government "shutdown" due to some funding bill being delayed (the scare quotes denote that the government doesn't really shut down - all the important stuff goes on) is met with "we have to close the parks and national monuments and other Good Things (see: Washington Monument Syndrome)," Trump's freezing of taxpayer funds flowing to Harvard University has been met with "life saving cancer research will be halted" and "people will die."

I recently addressed the dissonance in Harvard's assertions of free speech, independence, and academic liberty while accepting billions in taxpayer dollars. The entitlement to those bales of Other People's Money is now being swathed in the most noble of blankets - the saving of human life itself. That Washington Monument Syndrome is also dubbed "the firemen first principle" should come as no surprise. Politicians routinely play on our fears in order to keep us from questioning their motives, policing their actions, and clawing back some of the tax dollars they take from us at the business end of a gun.

Consider the mindset that would actually go through with closing monuments, furloughing firefighters, and halting cancer research in order to preserve bureaucracies, fiefdoms, handouts to rent-seekers and favored constituencies, and in this iteration DEI efforts, Jew-hatred, "critical" and "studies" programs, and other endeavors that have nothing to do with saving lives or providing the public with access to popular public spaces.

The true immorality lies with those who'd rather cut the important stuff in order to preserve the "fat" than reallocate cashflows toward that important stuff.

Let's say that federal funds flowing to Harvard for life-saving research discontinued, for a reason that's "not-Trump." Wouldn't reallocating funds from less important pursuits in order to continue them be the only moral path? Wouldn't failure to do so constitute an abdication of the high principles that Harvard's Best-and-Brightest purport to embrace?

Milton Friedman famously noted that "none of us are greedy. It's only the other fellow who's greedy." When it comes to politics and Other People's Money, it's only the other fellow who's immoral and who hates humanity. DOGE's revelations about tax dollars being funneled to terrorist groups and anti-American organizations was met with outrage... at being exposed. Defenders of the status quo - and people who automatically hate anything Trump-related - choose to play Washington Monument Syndrome rather than support it. Harvard's President would rather keep his campus's DEI programs and Hamas-loving ways than fund cancer research.

Keep that in mind as this kerfuffle unfolds.