Students are incredibly naive. When I taught the university Intro to Econ class, I used to tell my students I could end poverty overnight, if that really is their goal. They all nodded yes, that was good thing. At the time, a family of 4 making less than $13000/year was considered “poor”. So, what you do is gather all of the people who make $13000 or less, line them up, and shoot them.
Their eyes would go about as big as hub caps.
After the shock wore off, I would ask them: How long do you think it would take before the person making $13001 started bitching that they were the poorest person in the land? We would them discuss the dangers of having everyone making the same income regardless of productive contributions to society and how/why such a system has been tried (New Harmony, Walden, Owensville, etc.) in the past and always failed in the long run.
Trust me, being a conservative economist in a university setting means lots of lunches alone.
I recall an article about the tiny minority of conservative professors given tenure. One outspoken board member in the article said: Instead of examining if they shouldn’t have been given tenure, examine how the system failed. Right wingers should have been weeded out and if necessary sabotaged before they reached the tenure vote. That’s how it is supposed to work.
Amen! I taught project management courses at an extremely liberal Big Ten University for 6 years until I was booted for the crime of being a conservative. The only professors that would talk to me were Mormons, and that was only in Secret.