What Big Government Does Right

If it weren't for the Land-Grant college system, there would be no public colleges and universities in Kentucky at all.

Erik Loomis at Laywers, Guns and Money:

Charlie Pierce for today’s internet win with his celebration of the Morrill Act, signed by President Lincoln in 1862. The Morrill Act effectively created a national system of public higher education through the land-grant colleges. As only Charlie can put it:

What both of these acts did was to commit the government of the United States — which is to say, the people of the United States — to a program of public education and private land ownership. It increased the aspirational demands of a great number of people on their national government, and it injected into the culture and politics of the nation a sense that upward mobility was possible, and that it was important to the government of the United States, which is to say, to the people of the United States. It became a duty for all of us to ensure the benefits of an education to our fellow citizens because, through that, we would make this a better country. It is impossible to think of the history of America west of, say, the Berkshires, without the notion of land-grant colleges and universities. It is something out of our history to be very proud.

It is also something to remember in these days in which we are told, relentlessly, the fairy tale of individual American initiative and FREEEEEDOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM! as though some plucky “entrepreneur” woke up in Seward one day and thought, “Think I’ll start me the University Of Nebraska today.” It is also something to remember in these days when the notion of “public lands” in the first place is under assault as a restriction on the essential constitutional freedom of oil derricks. So here’s to the Morrill Act and the Homestead Act, and happy birthday. Maybe when you’re all dressing up like Civil War soldiers this year and marching into fake battle along Antietam Creek, you should give a thought to the 150th anniversary of a couple of things that made the war worth fighting.

Read the whole thing.