Whenever I talk with a free-market professor about the silliness of subsidized, cartelized, bureaucratized academia and how it devalues and stifles their work, it reminds me of the (apocryphal?) statement made by F.A. Hayek near the end of his life.
Supposedly, he said, “I might be an anarchist if I were a younger man.”
He was too old, too tired, and had already fought hard enough for his ideas and didn’t feel up to the challenge of taking them to their logical conclusion.
C’mon profs. Don’t undersell yourselves and settle for a drip of government cheese and classrooms full of unwilling customers. I believe in your ability to crush it in the open market; maybe you should too!
After all, being an intellectual outside of academia has never been easier.