It’s pretty much just me who sucks again. I TOTALLY spaced out on Stephen’s Monday post. Had a crazy prom-baseball opening day weekend and I just completely forgot to even check my email for it Monday morning. My apologies. – Your Queen ;-*
With a flood of candidates seeking notoriety to stand out amongst the leftist crowd jostling to see just who can express the most foolish leftist idea and pandering to the free stuff crowd, Elizabeth Warren stands out as the most prominent of irresponsible though not the most foolish overall. Thus, let us turn our attention to the other aspect of her previous proposal to view the foolishness from a different, if not broader, perspective.
As you know, she proposed forgiving student debt as a means of alleviating the increasing burden of such debt incurred to acquire less than profitable educations and indoctrinations in feminist, ethnic, and environmentalist studies, (well, pretty much any useless, politically driven, leftist curricula.) https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elizabeth-warren-its-time-to-end-the-failed-experiment-that-caused-the-student-debt-crisis-and-cancel-borrowers-debt-2019-04-22
We discussed the foolish and immoral aspects of the debt forgiveness drug being pushed on the American electorate last week, now let us turn our attention to the addictive nature of those leftist policies which cause such political junkies to become addicted to government largess in the first place.
The very first inroads into the socialist transformation of our nation’s politistructure (yes, I made up that word) was in the field of education, in particular the insistence upon public education on the pretense that it would improve society.
Only the state could be relied upon to faithfully see to it that each and every child received a proper education, and that because the state was providing the education every child, no matter how poor, how drunken, or how slothful their parents were would have a good chance at life and improving their future.
It was going to end poverty and inequality in America as education was the key to responsible citizenry. It was the way of the future, the Progressive movement of the turn of the century. No, not that century, the other one . . . around the 1900s. Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie built libraries all around the nation, filled them with books, and donated them to local communities on the condition that they were open to everyone, not just the rich.
As we all know, poverty was thus ended and everyone found meaningful and lucrative employment. Oh, wait, it had no effect on wealth or income inequality whatsoever.
What it did provide was for a massive increase in government spending, the scope of governmental powers, captured a large voting block for progressives, and provided a means to brainwash all the little urchins in the value of that state providing them with the free education . . . at their parent’s expense through taxes.
Those parents who used to have to provide for their children’s education and pay someone to teach them the three “r”; to read, write, and do arithmetic, or in the absence of such funds had to educate their own children, could now spend their hard earned money on more important things . . . like beer and liquor. At least until those other progressives like Carrie Nation and Susan B. Anthony brought about Prohibition.
As with all state funded industries, the bureaucracy began to grow and the cost of maintaining this industry started to increase. State industries are notorious for, as someone colloquially put it, “having too many chiefs and not enough indians”. Overhead expenses of always new buildings, more principles, superintendents, education boards, maintenance men, together with new programs of health and fitness education, athletic teams eventually grew into part of this new system.
At the start, government was small, so doubling the size of government was still not much of a burden to a prosperous capitalist society, and they promised that the new government industry would pay for itself in time, and with the newly formed Federal Reserve creating a continuing system of inflation which had not existed before, on the surface it looked like it was working, wages were increasing . . . nominally.
As the decades past, and world wars commenced and ended, it was seen that all of these newly minted high school graduates really needed something to do, and as they had just come back from fighting wars overseas, why not spend some of that “peace dividend” on expanding the state ran industry, lest people start to demand lower taxes.
Thus the government got into the business of funding “higher education”, and by “higher education” I mean post-secondary education not people going to college just to get high, that would come about a generation later.
Again, the theory was put forth that subsidizing the education of poor people, through both grants and cheap loans, would lead to increased prosperity and get rid of all that nasty wealth and income inequality . . . which had already been gotten rid of with the public primary and secondary education.
And it was just as effective this time as it was the first time. The money being spent continued to increase, the quality of the education provided continued to decrease, and the demands of the workplace for more degrees for the same jobs increased, the oversight bureaucracies increased, and public sector unions came about to protect the government workers from their government’s capitalist exploitation in their socialistic education system.
Of course, now it came about that you could no longer “read for the bar” to become a lawyer after having apprenticed under an admitted lawyer, but you had to go to law school after having obtained a bachelors degree. The same was true for medicine, that you now had to have the bachelors degree, gone to four years of medical school, and gone through a two year apprenticeship which they called interning.
All of this extra college incurred extra tuition costs, and extra costs to support yourself for almost a decade while you went to school, so naturally those extra costs get passed on to the lawyers’ and doctors’ customers thus legal and medical expenses become increasingly expensive in society. On the other hand, the doctors and lawyers are eventually making good money.
Which makes for great advertising for that state education industry that education leads to higher incomes and thus everyone needs more education. Never mind that the more the costs of education go up, the costs of everything else also goes up.
The state taking over the education industry worked so well, that progressive politicians decided to subsidize other aspects of society: retirement planning in the form of social security; medical care in the form of medicare, medicaid, and VA hospitals; federal landlords with HUD; child rearing assistance with child protective services; even poverty programs like welfare to alleviate all of that wealth and income inequality which was already eliminated with the free education.
Where the state could not politically create its own competition through the full or partial nationalization of industries, the politicians sought to run the industries indirectly through direct and indirect regulation in the name of safety, workers’ rights, price supports, or a dozen other excuses.
The one effect which was invariable was that the more the government “helped” the more the cost of every service and commodity increased, not just in nominal terms, but in real terms. The effect of government getting involved with the health care industry as part of the progressive “Great Society” has been that the costs of medical care have grown faster than nearly every other industry, with the possible exception of education, and for pretty much the same reason, the increasing burden of bureaucratic oversight.
The saving grace of our capitalist society is that we did actually experience improvements in technology and productivity which were greater than the costs imposed by the politicians through their “helping”.
In the end, the progressive politicians are offering to help mitigate the costs of education and healthcare which their own meddling caused to increase in the first place. At the same time the quality of those industries decline. The left offers solutions to problems they created in the first place. Every time they promise that more government will help lower prices, it increases those costs in real terms, so they turn around and offer more solutions of free stuff to those hurt by their previous help.
It is unfortunate, albeit conspiratorial in appearance, that the educational wherewithal to see what is happening has decreased so far that the average person does not see this given that the education industry was the first big progressive target. Just because I’m paranoid, it does not mean that the left is not intentionally dumbing down their minions.
