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Achieving debt-free public higher education is an important goal for society as a whole and the left in particular. Education is a human right, and anyone who is willing and able should be able to attend an institution of higher education irrespective of their ability to pay for it. Public disinvestment in education needs to be challenged, because changing the very nature of higher education and exacerbating inequality even further is more than a budgetary matter.

Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, is a remarkable investigation into the historical relationship between postwar liberalism and the growth of mass incarceration. Through a detailed analysis of several key Democratic crime bills, she demonstrates how the ideology of liberalism played a role in the growth of the carceral state. And though Murakawa isn't fully convincing that liberal law and order was necessary for mass incarceration, she makes a strong case that liberalism is unlikely to undo the prison state.

Arizona has sold its state capitol. Government budgets are contracting, especially when it comes to services and goods essential for the poor. A quarter of a million state and local government workers have been cut in the past year alone. Conservatives look to privatize and voucherize what remains of the Great Society and New Deal.

The California student movement has a slogan that goes, "Behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops." And no one embodies that connection more than the Ronald Reagan of the 1960s. Elected governor of California in 1966 after running a scorched-earth campaign against the University of California, Reagan vowed to "clean up that mess in Berkeley," warned audiences of "sexual orgies so vile that I cannot describe them to you," complained that outside agitators were bringing left-wing subversion into the university, and railed against spoiled children of privilege skipping their classes to go to protests. He also ran on an anti-tax platform and promised to put the state's finances in order by "throw[ing] the bums off welfare." But it was the University of California at Berkeley that provided the most useful political foil, crystallizing all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance.

The California Student movement has a slogan that goes, "Behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops." And no one embodies that connection more than the Ronald Reagan of the 1960s. When Reagan assumed office, he immediately set about doing exactly what he had promised. He cut state funding for higher education, laid the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model, and called in the National Guard to crush student protest, which it did with unprecedented severity. But he was only able to do this because he had already successfully shifted the political debate over the meaning and purpose of public higher education in America. It's important to remember this chapter in California history because it may, in retrospect, have signaled the beginning of the end of public higher education in the United States as we'd known it. Adapted from the source document.

Preface -- Introduction -- The current rules -- More market power, less competition -- The growth of the financial sector -- The "shareholder revolution", the rise of ceo pay, and the squeezing of workers -- Lower taxes for the wealthy -- The end of full-employment monetary policy -- The stifling of worker voice -- The sinking floor of labor standards -- Racial discrimination -- Gender discrimination -- Rewriting the rules -- Make markets competitive -- Fix the financial sector -- Incentivize long-term business growth -- Rebalance the tax and transfer system -- Make full employment the goal -- Empower workers -- Expand access to labor markets and opportunities for advancement -- Expand economic security and opportunity -- Appendix: overview of recent -- Inequality trends -- Acknowledgments -- Endnotes