“When the government intervenes to provide goods, such as higher education, to supplement the free market and produce more of the positive externalities said to flow from them, the result won’t be all on the plus side of the ledger,” George Leef writes. “Government provision and subsidization also results in ‘public bads.’ The most obvious bad is the squandering of resources. Once the government undertakes to provide anything, it is apt to overdo it, diverting scarce resources from other uses that would have been more beneficial.”