Not-from-the-Onion Quotation of the Day… Donald Boudreaux

… is from this enlightening essay by the great Amity Shlaes; the woman quoted just below is a student at Harvard University, one of several of who recently walked out of Greg Mankiw’s EC10 course:

“I’m someone who lives below the poverty line, my family’s extremely poor.  And having a class like this that promotes gaining at the expense of millions of people disturbs me and bothers me at my core,” freshman Amanda Bradley told National Public Radio.

There you have it, folks!  In today’s America, even some poor Americans – people who admit to living “below the poverty line” – are enrolled at Harvard University.

(I wonder if Ms. Amanda Bradley is aware of the irony of her lament.)

Don Boudreaux November 15, 2011 at 10:33 pm

Daniel: You do not find it ironic that someone who can afford to spend time attending college complains about being “extremely poor”? No one who attends college – whether it be Harvard or Northwest South Dakota Community College – is “extremely poor” by any sensible definition of that term. That this young woman attends Harvard – even if on a full-paid scholarship – only reinforces the fact.

This young woman is oblivious to the enormous wealth she and her family have that allows her to spend time into her twenties reading books and studying (and also, in her case, pontificating in Harvard Square about how hard her life is).

She is not “extremely poor” – or even “poor” in any absolute sense – given that her family can afford to allow her to take time away from helping the family in order to pursue collegiate studies. She’s astonishingly rich. And the fact that she can identify a handful of other people who are even more astonishingly rich than she is does absolutely nothing to render her assessment of her material state correct (although it does reveal that her knowledge of history or of the plain meaning of words (or both) is appallingly deficient).

From Cafe Hayek.