Why I Love Judge Posner

Do you know what I would love to see? A Judge Judy-style show, with Posner presiding over intellectual disputes. “Well, Your Honor, Susan Sontag’s writings clearly–” “You are out of order! This is a court of intellect, not of poseurs!”
Posner displays the succinctness and mental toughness that has made him and his intellectual pose a hero to millions hundreds in this response to comments on a recent post on the Becker-Posner blog about student loans.

It is [contended] that there are external benefits from the study of certain subjects in college, such as English literature and other of the humanities (philosophy, classics, etc.), that would be lost without subsidized student loans. I disagree with this argument for subsidized loans, on several grounds. First, while there may be some external benefits to the study of the humanities, although I’d like to see the evidence or even the argument, I imagine that they are exhausted at a lower level than is generated by subsidization. [Emphasis added]

Judge Posner has ruled!
See also Posner’s thoughts on television and culture at the bottom of this Reason interview:

Reason: You’ve said that if people were forced to stop watching TV, it’s not as if they would turn to reading philosophy.
Posner: Sweden has very, very bad TV. They have only a few channels, poor reception, government channels. It’s only on a few hours at night, I think. It’s really incomplete. So I asked a friend of mine, a Swedish economist, what Swedes do. Do they read more? He said no. They don’t read more. What they do, in contrast to America, is more family socializing. They draw with each other. Family socializing, family conversation takes place, usually on an extremely low plane. Americans probably are better informed than they would be if they had no television, because then they would just be talking to each other.