Richard Vedder is an economist, historian, author, and columnist. He is a professor emeritus of economics at Ohio University and senior fellow at The Independent Institute. Who have just published his latest book called Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.

In our discussion, I mentioned the fact that the number of hours of minimum-wage working required to fund a year at university has skyrocketed since the 1960s:

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There was an interesting little aside in an

episode of South Park a few years back, but if you live in the UK, you may not

have caught it, because that episode of South Park, the cartoon with

eight-year-old Colorado boys who seem to know too much and too little about

life was never shown in the UK. The episode had a poorly-drawn caricature of

the actor Tom Cruise, who improbably shows up at the house of one of the boys,

gets offended, hides in the boy’s wardrobe and won’t come out.

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You get the impression that the writers are

trying to make a point.

But don’t make that point in England.

American libel laws started out very

similar to the ones in England, but they have diverged radically, and that

change has become such a part of the culture in the US that it’s hard for many

people grasp the difference. The main change came about from a case in the US

called New

York Times v O’Sullivan. I don’t want to go deep into the legality, but

basically, in 1964, the New York Times published a piece on policing civil

rights demonstrations in Alabama which contained some inaccuracies, and the Montgomery

police commissioner LB Sullivan considered that constituted a libel against

him.

He sued for libel. In the UK that would be

a slam-dunk.