Yes, the old sage ranting “it’s all crap” or “we have lost our way” is a bit of a cliché, but I honestly have more than just my own experience and opinions…I have evidence.

Maybe it’s just a matter of opinion when I say standards have fallen…perhaps my memory (and my old tests) paint an incorrect picture of the reality of higher education decades ago. Perhaps riots against free speech have always been common on campus, and I just don’t remember them. Perhaps the minimal pay for the teachers and incredible pay for the administrators has always been how it worked and I just never noticed.

But, gentle reader, I promise you, the campus restrooms I went to in the past did not have tampons in them. I go to men’s bathrooms exclusively…and I really think I would have noticed if such things were there.

Today, men’s rooms on campuses have tampons in them. I’m serious. The purpose of higher education is supposed to be about education and research…and not about providing feminine hygiene products to everyone. It’s not just one campus, either, as I’ve covered this new front in the social justice war before.

Seriously, we’ve lost our way. I want to focus on another campus which has abandoned higher education in favor of social justice feel-gooder-ism (note: this is not the same as DO-gooder-ism), because what’s going on here is such a great experiment of socialist policies. Yes, knowledgeable people can predict the outcome, because all such experiments have turned our poorly (much like with gravity), but for educational purposes, there’s little harm in doing it again.

Let’s go off to yet another campus, to see how this doomed plan is working out:

College’s Plan to Offer Tampons in Both Men’s and Women’s Bathrooms is a Fiasco Due to Rampant Looting

Seriously, how did none of the Vice Presidents of Tampon Supply and Diversity not see this coming? You’re in a men’s restroom, there’s a bowl of somewhat valuable things there…why not grab a handful, at the very least, and give them to your girlfriend? It’s not like you’ll be denying anyone else in the room something they’d want/need. I don’t condone theft, mind you but why should this resource just sit there and rot for the cause of Social Justice?

I really want to point out how the tampon fiascos are merely another case study in why social programs fail. The whole “we’re doing nice things for everyone, and everyone will play nice because we mean well” is such a beautiful concept, but the reality of how the real world works is far sadder.

Greed, and inefficient use of resources, has taken over at U of Rochester, but at least it’s hilarious:

Just over 11,000 students attend Rochester University. But in the first two weeks of its Pads and Tampons Initiative, the university has gone through nearly 16,000 tampons and pads—in large part because people keep grabbing them in bulk, sometimes along with the baskets they’re stored in, the student newspaper reported.

–you know, normal thinking people, upon seeing the rapid theft of goods, would stop supplying the goods. Not socialists, of course, because they’re just spending someone else’s money.

Almost 50% more feminine hygiene products have been taken than there are students, a huge amount for two weeks.

This is one of many serious problems with socialism: you make it free, then everyone wants it, everyone takes as much as possible. Eventually it becomes an entitlement, just one more straw that eventually breaks the entire economic system. Honest, whole books have described how socialism eventually fails, in detail (warning: not a light read).

The initiative hasn’t even lasted a month, and already the university has burned through more than half of their $5,000 budget for menstrual products.

–When the money runs out, I’ll be shocked, shocked, when the people responsible for this initiative refuse to drain their own bank accounts to keep it going. I mean, they honestly believe this is a worthy cause, so of course they’ll spend their own money on it, right?

Like every other social program, economic predictions of the costs involved are always off by a huge margin. Again, it’s basic economic principle (too bad such is never taught in the schools), but if you lower the price then it increases demand, which reduces supply which should in turn increase the price, lowering demand…but that last step doesn’t happen because the price isn’t paid by the actual user.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about health care, higher education, or, well, tampons, it always plays out the same. The effects are insidious, not just to those in the system, but to those outside of “the protection” the system offers (do keep in mind, the students, male and female, are eventually paying for those “free” tampons, even if they don’t understand exactly how…).

It’s the same thing in health care—those insured by our byzantine system are sort-of protected, but the ones without the protection? They get obliterated by a ridiculously expensive system.

Both health care and higher education have been warped by feel-gooder actions. Will the Tampon Socialism Experiment play out differently? Let’s see:

Last week, one member of the Students’ Association made an “emergency run” to a local store and “bought them out of pads and tampons, to the tune of nearly $1,200,” the Campus Times reported.

I humbly ask the reader to read between the lines in the above action. The store shelves were cleaned out of the “free good.” Imagine a non-college student, in desperate need of a tampon, who, responsibly, went down to the store to get the desired item.

It’s not there, it’s gone…and now she’s been hurt by the socialist tampon system. For insult to injury, you can bet the store (and all stores near campus) will raise their prices on these products…or not stock them at all, seeing as they’re “free” in the campus restrooms, further harming the people not being helped by the Tampon Experiment.

It’s sad that there’s nobody on campus with enough knowledge to use the empirical evidence as a demonstration of how all socialist programs function.

And I’m telling you, higher education was never supposed to be about tampons anyway…

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