Respectfully, I think you're misreading pantaloons, and seriously I only came here to get to type that phrase. Anyway: when pantaloons said "you can't have a c

Respectfully, I think you're misreading pantaloons, and seriously I only came here to get to type that phrase. Anyway: when pantaloons said "you can't have a competitive market for what should (ostensibly) be a free and universal service", they were making a normative claim that universal education is desirable, but a positive claim about how to achieve it: that "universal" and "competitive" are mutually exclusive qualities of any marketplace. That's the argument I was expanding on. I claim that it is very difficult to structure a competitive marketplace while also ensuring that everyone who needs some can get some. Thus if the goal is universal access to a good, affordable college education, your free market proposal is an incomplete strategy. You seem to be saying that government cannot ensure that everyone has access to a good, affordable college education ("the government can['t] guarantee that every buyer will find a seller"). That's a position I think might be hard to support. The government absolutely can pass a law that prevents scarcity -- which is to say, ensure that citizens have access to something the free market doesn't make enough of. It can, for example, provide universal access to high school. It can provide universal access to assault rifles for healthy young men during a war. It can provide universal access to school lunch. It can provide universal access to health care for people over 65. It could, if it chose to make that a priority, provide universal access to college education for those who need it. If you propose that "non-profit education is broken," and that the solution is for-profit education, then you need to either explain how for-profit education can provide universal access, or explain why universal access shouldn't be a goal.