Outlawing derivatives and loan sharking pull money out of the financier-swindlers’ pockets. Or, rather, keep more from flowing in.
Letting students be defaulted on and voided gets Sallie Mae off our backs. And it diminishes the incentive to pull this crap on the next generation.
Training med students, half of whom are turned away by med schools, might help the middle class not shrink relative to the economy.
Oh, wait, what were we talking about?
The point is not to find a use for a Soc degree, that’s a sunk cost. The point is not to throw someone massively into debt for pre-grad education & then shut him out of grad school, shut him out of the job market, and then blame him for “making a decision as an adult” when everybody knows he got on this ride as a youth and was told by society he needed that degree.
Oh, but society doesn’t exist, right? We are all sea turtles, no parents, no peers, no schools, no authorities, no property–oh, wait, we have a society after all.
So, what is the solution? Make higher education free? Or, if someone chooses badly, to just wave away their debt and let them have a do-over? Lets say that you have nailed the problem on the head here…what’s your solution to this?
As far as creating jobs, first thing: we need to get rid of the Barack Obama types telling us we need more education to find work, and then making us pay an inflated price for it. Oh, there it is AGAIN!
We need progressive taxes and redistribution of wealth. That can be public works, or if you’re really libertarian, a generous (>10% of *per capita *GDP) negative income tax, and people can stimulate the economy as independent actors.
To get out of a demand collapse, either will do. But the only way education saves us is by giving us the economic understanding to collectively change the system.
So what was the point? Not that you need to answer for Evil Captor. Perhaps we should wait until he comes back and answers for himself. He decried the situation where folks with 8 years of post-secondary education were flipping burgers.
I guess I would ask 2 questions:
Just what percent of 8-year college people are we talking about?
Do we prevent them from studying “worthless” subjects? Do we use government money to try and utilize their skill, even though the market can’t find a user for it? What do we do, and why do we do it?
I don’t see any reason to prevent people from studying sociology, and it’s not useless.
I actually agree somewhat with Mr. Moto here.
It’s not just the “underwater basket weaving” courses that have become more expensive relative to inflation. It’s all of it. It doesn’t have to be this way.
And don’t you think the massive government intrusion into the market (in terms of student loan guarantees, for one thing) is a significant contributing factor to the rising cost of tuition? If everyone is getting poorer, or just treading water, how can an industry get away with raising prices higher than inflation? This is exactly the sort of thing that the government should stay out of. Directing money into particular areas is bound to cause a rise in price the same way that the mortgage deduction raises the price of homes.
And in fact, there is a larger societal problem. Our health care costs are too much for many Americans. College is a frivolity to the richer, and a necessity paid for by giant debt to the poorer.
All of this comes back to a unified underlying cause:
The distribution of wealth has changed. The stepping stones to success, the protection from harm, are being pulled away.
Is this good or bad?
If you believe in the process ethic, and not the result, you claim, “not enough information.”
But if the process was always result-oriented (“educate the masses,” “a rising tide to lift all boats”) then surely results are a way to judge.
Is it* good*, as a result, to push the middle-income American into debt and poverty?
I don’t care about “massive government intrusion into the market” any more than I care about “massive government intrusion into the transport network.”
I care about results for the common person, not some fantastical idea of a perfect, elegant, consensual, natural economy.
You don’t care about the evident results of the system?
_
Of course I care what caused the problem. But when you use words like, “massive government intrusion into the free market,” you’re making some big assumptions about the correlation between freedom and success. You imply that you think the problem is something other than poverty and lack of opportunity. That the problem is process and not result.
I don’t think the main problem #OWS is facing is that they are somehow prevented by the state from purchasing things. We do not lack a free market. We lack a good demand base.
If something is broken, and you want to fix it, it helps to know why it’s broken. You can wrap duct tape around your leaking pipe, and that will “fix” things for awhile. But if you have a giant tree sending roots into your pipe, you have to stop the roots from getting there.
Maybe we do need to allow student loans to be forgivable through bankruptcy just like other debt. Then the banks, and the government that guarantees those loans, won’t hand them out willy nilly like 0% down mortgages were handed out just a few years ago.
That still isn’t going to help our hapless Sociology major get a job, but maybe it will make him think twice about going to college and/or majoring in Sociology in the first place. It moves us toward a market evaluation of the worth of college instead of a distorted one where banks can hand out money without worrying if it can be paid back or not.
And since I have called out student loan guarantees four times now, you know I think that government intrusion was ill-advised, and I have called to reverse it.
Reverse student loan guarantees. End them. Forgive the debts.
I don’t care about some larger theory of “gubmint bad.”
I don’t think we have sufficiently defined the problem.
Proletarian? What are we, in 1917 Russia?
Possibly. Again, let’s define what the problem is and go from there.
ETA: It’s one thing to change bankruptcy laws and quite another to call for writing off the debt. It’s not like the repayment of that debt is going to come out of Mr. CEO’s salary. It will come out of increased cost levied on the rest of us.
That would basically eliminate the student loan industry. It is very easy for a graduating student to just declare bankruptcy and wipe out his student loans. The student is young, hasn’t accumulated much baggage, and the bankruptcy would be a wise move, considering that in a few years the bankruptcy will not be counted against him in financial matters.
The student loan people are not stupid. If they see that provision eliminated, the requirements for student loans will immediately tighten up. Either the student will have to show some collateral or parents will have to co-sign the loans (like they did before the no-wiping-of-loan-in-bankruptcy provision) etc.
So if the alternative isn’t death, there isn’t coercion. I guess that makes you more moderate than some, who don’t think starvation is sufficient to count as coercion.
It isn’t free because we are all under pressures which are coercive. Now there are those whack jobs who throw up their hands and say the government is not to intervene at all to restrict the market, because that is restrictive of freedom.
Or there are the majority of people who say it is beneficial, from both a moral and an pure economic level, that we allow the government to take some actions to reduce that degree of coercion. Through such measures as minimum wage laws and centralized unemployment insurance. While we accept we cannot remove all coercion, we think there are benefits to the government reducing it.
There are benefits to society for decisions having real consequences. But there are also benefits for society and the individual for moderating those consequences. It isn’t that complicated to understand.
And yet you refuse to see how capitalism and capitalists benefited from segregation. Segregation led to less powerful unions. A white-dominated union that placed a value on excluding black workers could be brought to accept lower wages than a fully unified union would. The threat of bringing in cheaper black workers would also be beneficial to the employers.
To deny the importance of economics and capitalism to institutionalized racism is to fail to understand economics, capitalism, or political and social ideas.
Yes. It is by coercion. No problem with that. Even crazy right wing libertarians are fine with government coercion when they view the goal as important enough. Most normal, intelligent people think that the the government may take coercive actions restricting economic freedom if the benefits in the form of other freedoms (because normal, intelligent people recognize other types of freedom exist and have import) are sufficiently great.
