Circle of
lifewageslavery*oligarchs
Unless you live in a country with free education. Or borrow from a credit union. Or work as a contractor. Other that that, very Spot On.
If you’re living in country with free education you borrow money from poor people to get education to make rich people richer and make poor people poorer. Taxes are regresive.
Civilized countries offer the poor far more in benefits than they would take in taxes such as the obvious health care and higher education, but housing, food allowances, and even preschool are available without the BS you have to put up with in the US to access such social safety net benefits if they’re even available at all. There’s a huge difference between the poor paying a little into a system that they can access without undue burden vs the US where they pay taxes and get nowhere near the benefits civilized countries offer.
Who are you making rich if you are self-employed? And how is you working making poor people poorer?
Where I’m from taxes are progressive…
They don’t even borrow their money to you, they were granted the right to print that money.
Don’t forget they raise the cost every year to match what it’s gonna cost to keep you on the whole wheel in case you get ahead
Under capitalism the people are a natural resource to be exploited for wealth, just like minerals, wood, and arable land.
The clue is in the term “Human Resources”. I can’t believe people just accept the existence of this phrase.
Agreed, but please remember that this is the same under fascism and communism.
Yeah. And “human capital” is another one that just makes my skin crawl.
FWIW, there are a bunch of folks trying to shift the practice over to “People Ops”, while refering to employees as actual people, which is way better. As a bonus, this gives the formerly called HR people a more meaningful scope for their work.
That said, the name or the idea does’t keep some from whitewashing or running with PeopleOps as a kind of virtue signal. Consider this article that minces all of this together while making it sound normal: https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/articles/rise-of-people-ops/
The final conclusion of capitalism is one solitary person holding all money. Like some crazy real life form of monopoly.
That’s because the game was specifically meant to show people what capitalism does.
The wealthiest own like 87% of the stock market, which both parties refer to as “the economy”…
So while I get how the thought of a general strike where we stop working is attractive.
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities. Leave them holding the bag on capitalism.
I’ve always thought the push for “average” Americans to get into stocks was just another way for wealth to trickle up. You’re not savvy for buying what Nancy Pelosi bought a month ago, you’re just pumping her numbers so she makes more when she sells.
The only way to win is not to play, but enough people need to refuse to play for it to work
The wealthiest own like 87% of the stock market, which both parties refer to as “the economy”…
First, the stock market only represents publicly traded companies. Privately held companies aren’t on stock exchanges. If you own stock in privately held companies there are usually very strict rules about how and when, and to whom you can sell. Its not a quick thing.
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities. Leave them holding the bag on capitalism.
The non-rich selling all their stock would likely help the rich. Here’s why: The rich use brokerages that monitor the stock market in realtime and can trade faster. As soon as a sell off would begin, the brokerages would get in and sell most of what they had first, meaning the non-rich would get a fraction of the value of the stocks they are selling. As soon as the selling of the non-rich ended, the rich would come back into the market and buy up the same assets they had before (and more) for a fraction of the price.
Wouldn’t this require that we’re all selling off at the same time?
Wouldn’t this require that we’re all selling off at the same time?
Yes, which is another impossibility. However I was giving OP the benefit of the doubt.
It was a travesty that pensions were largely replaced with 401ks in the 80’s in the US (curious if a similar thing happened elsewhere in the world), effectively forcing participation in the stock market to have any chance at retirement.
They found another way to shore up the continuation and capitulation to capitalism while boosting their share prices at the sane time.
What an absolute con.
Well, to be fair pensions werent like cash reserves, they were investment funds.
Which is a different issue all together.
But that’s how Bernie Madoff got so much, in addition to wealthy individuals he scammed the pension funds of major cities.
Shit didn’t get fucked up overnight, it was a slow progression. Which is why we can’t just roll back 50 years and pretend it’s solved, shit will just fuck up again.
Edit:
And even when it was a cash reserve, it was basically tied to the stock of that company.
If they went bankrupt, no pension.
So say you got a Walmart pension, it was dependant on Walmart existing till you died. If a major player was dethroned, it meant a bunch of people losing pensions. So there was still a lot of institutional momentum even back then
Which is why we can’t just roll back 50 years and pretend it’s solved, shit will just fuck up again.
Capitalism
Thankfully, my employer still has pensions. For how much longer? Hopefully a long time.
The only way to win is not to play
Not “playing” the stock market is a loss by default. Your money WILL devalue over time, your savings account WILL NOT keep up with inflation, and if you don’t invest in stocks or have some other special financial backing/windfall, you WILL retire many years later (if at all) than you would have if you invested in stocks properly.
Though, you need to be very careful with your definition of “playing”. As an individual/retail investor, buying individual stocks and trying to time ups and downs is not the way to go. If you manage to not lose any money that way, you’re very very likely to make less money than if you had bought a broad market ETF like the S&P 500. In general, “playing” is bad and simply buying and holding boring funds for 30+ years can 10x your money by the time you retire, if you start young. Market up? Good, buy more! Market down 50%? It’s on sale, buy more! Auto-investing is your friend. This is backed by solid math and like the entire history of the stock market.
The thing is, the rich make the rules. They want you to invest in ETFs like that because they can use your money to play their little games, inflate their wealth, and stay on top. As long as you do that, they’ll make sure you make solid and consistent (over the long-term) returns, because it benefits them financially and anything else would lead to a societal collapse.
Trying to beat them at their own game by buying/selling individual stocks is a losing battle. They can see your incoming trades and act on them before your order goes through. If you find a big mistake they made, like GME, they’ll simply change the rules and steal your money. It doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, nobody can stop them. They literally make the market.
Your money WILL devalue over time
Yes, that’s why as much as politicians say they hate inflation, it’s necessary for capitalism.
Otherwise people just shove their money under a mattress and the “inverted funnel system” collapses.
But inflation isn’t inevitable just because capitalism needs it to maintain the machine.
Quick edit:
What you’re doing is like back before we had laws as a society, saying we can’t outlaw crime and murder, because the people who don’t agree will kill us and steal all our stuff…
We’re talking about a drastic change to society, it ain’t just a tweak. You can’t use bits of the old system that are gonna be gone for a rationale to preserve the old system.
If we get rid of capitalism, we get rid of forced inflation that only exists to prop up capitalism…
Well, sure, if we’re talking about complete overhauls, money doesn’t technically need to exist at all.
I just thought it dangerous to spread the idea that you win the stock market by not playing, because that is demonstrably false and will lead to some very poor outcomes if followed in a realistic sense. I agree that an ideal society may very well not have a stock market, but for the love of god, please don’t try to be the change you want to see in this instance.
Inflation is necessary for a lot more than just capitalism. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, not trading money for goods and services.
It’s really important to understand that money =/= capitalism. That is a widely held misconception that is very effective at stunting societal and economic progress, at least in the US.
For example, inflation encourages people to spend money on innovation and progress rather than simply hoarding wealth, regardless of if an oligarch owns the profits or if the workers do. Yes, there can be other/better motivators for progress than just money, but you can see how it can be beneficial in economic systems other than just capitalism.
I don’t think you’ll find any reputable/knowledgable people that hate all inflation. It’s a widely agreed fact that a little inflation is good for everyone. Politicians/economists are say they don’t like high inflation. It’s better to target something like 2% yoy.
money doesn’t technically need to exist at all.
There is no better way to facilitate trade than to break down ‘value’ into granular units that can be traded directly–that’s essentially what money is, a unit of measurement for value.
Barter sucks the moment you need something from someone who has nothing you need that’s of at least similar value.
Otherwise people just shove their money under a mattress and the “inverted funnel system” collapses.
It’s actually because people would have to accept pay cuts from time to time, or companies would have to fire wholesale all or their people in a short time.
Also, rents would have to go down, debit could explode overnight… I’m not sure if people having a reason to invest is even an important enough reason to register.
Either way, none of that has any relation to capitalism, unless you count “any society that uses money” as “capitalism”.
What about bonds or precious metals - would those represent a better return than sticks?
deleted by creator
Idk, there are some pretty cool sticks out there
The stick of truth!
Oh yeah! Give me a wild ass staff looking stick over a bar of gold any day.
No.
Bonds are safe and good for reducing risk if your time horizon (aka the amount of time until you expect to use the money) is short. They aren’t good for long-term or chasing even moderate returns. For example, if you want to retire next year and don’t want to delay things if the stock market happens to crash before then, bonds are an option. That’s why retirement funds tend to shift more into bonds the closer they get to the target date, but it’s a tradeoff of growth for a more reliable retirement date.
Precious metals are just plain bad. https://www.macrotrends.net/2608/gold-price-vs-stock-market-100-year-chart
The stock market even outperforms real estate in the long term. Afaik, generally speaking, there isn’t an option out there that beats broad market ETFs. Optimal investing, statistically, is basically as simple as regularly dumping money into the same fund every year, no matter what. The earlier you start the better, since compounding returns can mean that 5 - 10 years makes a big difference once you hit retirement age.
It’s imperfect, but this helps get the point across. It’s an investing game based on real market data. https://buildyourstax.com/
Thanks for the info. I suspected metals were like storing cash under your mattress but didn’t know much about bonds.
Basically unless we are part of the stock market, we’re fucked. And if the stock investment turns bad, we’re fucked.
Makes sense why so much wealth is now in property, especially in dense urban areas.
Kinda. Though, it’s more optimistic than that. The beauty of broad market funds is that the entire stock market doesn’t go to zero or crash forever like an individual company/industry might. Short of the country ceasing to exist, the market is virtually guaranteed to recover eventually. That’s why if you regularly invest no matter what and don’t try to time the ups and downs, you always come out on top in the long run. Just look at 2008 or covid. You may be down 50% this year, but 5 or 10 years later, odds are you’ll be up a good amount. Long-term investing is easy that way. Gets more difficult if the market crashes right before you were planning to retire and now you have to work 5 extra years because your portfolio wasn’t hedged. Hence the bonds and other low-risk investments.
You can’t put all of your money into the market, becuase if the market crashes and you lose your job (because the market crashed), the last thing you want to do is sell your stocks when they’re at their lowest point. So the general rule is to keep 3 to 6 months of expenses in a savings account. Then other large purchases like a house or car can be accounted for in savings/other less risky investments too.
Real estate is generally a bad investment for your average joe. Primary residence is good tho, if your living there for about 5+ years, but that’s because it’s an investment AND a thing you get use out of.
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities
Isn’t not being rich means you don’t have stocks and already can’t buy the necessities? Or is it just me?
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities.
I think this is going in the wrong direction, because A) nobody cares about how much you’ve got in your 401k when 87% of the market is controlled by six guys and B) its the bare necessities that are skyrocketing in price, not the luxuries.
I’ve always thought the push for “average” Americans to get into stocks was just another way for wealth to trickle up.
It was a way of back-dooring a tax carve out for the mega-rich. Mitt Romney’s Roth IRA was worth $100M when he ran for office in 2012. Consider how somebody turns $4000/year in deposits into $100M in assets over 30 years and you can see the corrupt nature of our financial system clear as day.
The only way to win is not to play
The appeal of a general strike, I think, is misplaced. It fixates on the goods and services that make life in the US comfortable while neglecting the speculative assets that make wealth in the US grow exponentially.
Better than a general strike would be a debt strike. If you could convince 10M people to refuse to make a credit card payment in a given month, that would rock the fuck out of the capitalist class. If you could convince a union of service sector workers stretching from Walmart to McDonalds to simply refuse to collect payment for sold merchandise for a day, that would terrify the banking sector.
Because so much of this system is ultimately built on credit, not real material assets. So much is built on the theory of compounded interest, not materialist value. Wealth is, at its core, a promise of future income on rent. Attack the mechanisms by which people collect their rents and you can liberate the general population from an unnecessary expense rather than threatening them with a sudden onset of material insecurity.
Serfdom reinvented
Show what they know. I’ve been highly inefficient at it.
This ought to keep you busy enough until you die, right?
If you are ever stuggling in life, you can always
shopliftsurprise civil asset forfeiture items from a corporate chain store. 😉But you run the risk of ~~ incarceration~~ surprise litteral slavery
Not a meme
All of us serve the same masters
Slavery by any other name
So dramatic! If you didn’t want to be enslaved why did you walk right into the enslavement machine, designed specifically to ensnare you an make you a slave?
I hope this is a joke but I actually didn’t. I dropped out bc I refused to take a loan out
Hope I’m not thinking too abstractly here:
If you’re an individual with only their bare hands in a society that doesn’t need manual labor, not even necessarily a capitalist society, then that society would have to give you something (education) in order for you to give back to society. Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
“The rich get richer” through things like stock buybacks are their own issue. I just don’t get the implication this is a genuine multi-layer representation of an issue.
Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
I disagree that all relationships between humans must be transactional, which is what you’re implying here.
Not all relationships are transactional: any relationship you have with family and friends is free and clear. We should take care of all of our people to an extent. Feed the hungry, house the homeless who want housed, provide basic income to everyone, etc.
BUT
Society is transactional. If you want to get something you need to give something. Why? Go find a libertarian. Ask them what services they use they don’t want to pay for and they will give you a list. Then ask them what services they DO use they are paying extra for and wait for the stunned silence.
Why can’t you get anything for free? Because everybody saying “oh no don’t be transactional!” is on the take. Please prove me wrong and tell me about all the social services and general good doing you do with no strings attached. If you push a religious viewpoint, those are strings attached.
Everybody wants something, barely anyone just wants to give something. Ergo you give a promise to work, a promise to teach, a promise to give back, because otherwise MOST people only take. Call me a pessimist, but I’m waiting for the first libertarian who wants to pick and choose what they pay for so they can contribute to what matters, and not get something for nothing.
EDIT:
To put a finer point on it, why should you WANT to take without giving something back? That is a gross violation of the reciprocity principle which is basically a bedrock of society in general.
Society is transactional. If you want to get something you need to give something. Why? Go find a libertarian. Ask them what services they use they don’t want to pay for and they will give you a list. Then ask them what services they DO use they are paying extra for and wait for the stunned silence.
Society isn’t strictly transactional either. That is a big part of the reason why libertarianism is such a fundamentally flawed, swiss cheese ideology.
To give you a gigantic counterexample: when social security started nobody had paid a dime into it. The first seniors to receive social security received it directly from the people that were working and paying into it. The same kind of thing happens today. Despite ignorant insistence that social security should be a “bank account” of some sort, it is not. Today’s seniors receive their checks from today’s tax payers.
Please prove me wrong and tell me about all the social services and general good doing you do with no strings attached.
The idea that altruism isn’t simply rare but completely non-existent is simply…incorrect. There are multitudes of examples of it throughout history and if you look closely enough those continue into the present.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that humans are mostly good – like Penn Gillette-style libertarians often do when their arguments are pressed upon. But I wouldn’t say they’re all inherently selfish goblins either. In large parts, we are on top of the food chain because of our ability to cooperate with each other. Evidence of the cooperative spirit of humanity is all around you if you look closely enough.
(As I type my reply into an open-source browser on a decentralized platform on an open-source OS.)
That’s the thing, I don’t mean between two humans. I mean between a human, and all the rest of society, which is why I phrased it that way.
Society gives a person an education, and expects that person to do something meaningful in return. It might not be the same two people in that transaction, which is similar to how we pay taxes for benefits we might not personally see.
Society invests in the education of its people, and the return is a general benefit to society from its people being more educated. It is not necessary for every single individual to give something tangible and obvious back in order for society to benefit from an educated populace. If you apply the criterion that every individual must give something back, it always turns into a requirement that they give back something tangible, usually money or labour, and the next step is to abolish education in philosophy, the arts, and possibly the more theoretical or exploratory parts of science. The result of this is an impoverished society, not an enriched one.
For it to be a good deal for society to pay for education there only needs to be on balance a benefit to society. That leaves room for the arts and all kinds of human curiosity and creativity that doesn’t yield an immediate tangible benefit. We contribute together, not individually, and some contributions are very indirect. Still, societies benefit from the arts, philosophy, and people with curiosity. And this system can tolerate some people not contributing anything much at all. The investment is in quality of life for the society as a whole.
I don’t know that it’s even conditional. I think we owe society something just anyway. If my neighbor’s house is on fire, I should help how I can: contribute to putting out the fire (actually fighting the fire, calling someone who can), and I should help my neighbor deal with the aftermath (clothes and food and shelter and maybe assistance with paperwork, rebuilding, etc.).
So it’s not transactional, but an underlying permanent obligation to other humans to at least do a baseline amount of good.
I like your point earlier. However, I think what you’re missing is that not everything HAS to be transactional, and that humans can have value outside of what they offer society. Existential value is tragically overlooked.
If you and I are looking at a tree, you might see cubic board feet (I am picking on you here, because you selected the transactional view point earlier), while I would argue that the fact that the tree exists is enough and that if we reap benefits (beauty, oxygen, habitat value for other critters) from its continued existence, that’s great! Let’s plant more trees.
Again, abstract, but worth considering :)
So you don’t have to be skilled as long as you’re good looking.
I think there’s something to that.
We have models after all.
Society gives a person an education
Does it?
People educate each other. In a capitalist society, that may be based upon relationships between strangers that are primarily motivated by money. But even within a very capitalist society, people have other motivations, and we learn a lot of things by observing other people do a thing. They don’t necessarily have to be instructing us for us to get an education from them.
Yes, our current societal structure is largely transactional relationships between strangers for money. However, even within that society there are free educational programs and people willing to teach each other various skills just because they enjoy doing it.
Well I can’t speak for you, but if I have the choice between the two, I’ll take the brain surgeon that went to medical school over the one who learned brain surgery from the internet and people who like to perform surgery on brains for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Credentials are just a shortcut to trust in a stranger’s abilities. Broadly speaking someone who jumped through all of the societal hoops may be more trustworthy, but like all heuristics and facsimiles it fails sometimes as well. There have been well-credentialed, seemingly qualified surgeons from prestigious institutions that wound up being some combination of evil and incompetent, and landed people in the hospital or the morgue because credentialism is not foolproof.
Relatedly, credentials are really what the institutions consistently provide – not education – and they are a large part of the reason people attend them in the first place.
You’re mainly paying for a degree, not abilities and not an education.
Having both a Degree (almost 2 Degrees, since I went to Uni to get one and then changed to a different one half-way, so I’m an EE with part of a Physics Degree) and at the same time being massivelly self-taught because of being a Generalist (to the point that in my career I went down the route of working in that which I learned by myself and did for fun as a kid - computer programming - which was not the focus of either of those degrees), it has been my experience that certain things - mainly the fundamentals - are close to impossible to learn by yourself in a hands on way.
Further, discovering by yourself the best way do something complex enough to require an actual Process is really just going through the same pains of trying stuff out or limping along doing it in a seriously sub-optimal way as countless people in the Past who battled the damned thing until somebody discovered the best ways of doing it, and worst, you’re unlikely to by yourself figure out the best way of doing it even after years of doing it, especially as discovering new ways of doing things is a different process from actually doing the work - you have to actually take time out from doing the work to try new stuff out with the expectation that you might do a lot of wrong things as you try new approaches all the while not producing any useable results.
(No matter what, to learn new ways of doing things, you’re going to have to take time out of doing work to do the learning - because it’s pretty hard to figure out or just try out new ways of doing something without making mistakes and mistakes aren’t a valid product of your work - and if you have to dedicate time for learning the most efficient way is to learn from somebody else, which means either a mentor or a teacher)
It’s not by chance that even before Formal Education was a thing there was already the whole Master + Apprentices way of people learning complex domains (such as Blacksmithing).
Even with the Internet it’s still immensely hard to learn by yourself complex subjects because:
- Plenty of things you don’t know, you don’t even know that you don’t know them - in other words you’re not even aware they exist - so you won’t go looking for them.
- Most of what’s out there is shit for learning. Formats such as Youtube optimize for Entertainment, not Learning, so you’ll be fed by the algorthm countless loud dog and pony shows pretending to explain you things, all with about as much dept as a puddle, whilst the handful of properly deep explanations of things are algorithmed-away because they’re too long and boring.
- Worst, the most experienced domain specialists seldom have the time or the inclination to make posts explaining certain things, worse so for videos (and from experience I can tell you making a good Youtube video is a lot more complex than it seems until you try it). Further what you tend to see is countless posts and videos of people who learned just enough about a subject to think that they know tons about it (and thus can explain it to others) without actually knowing tons about it - in other words, people at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve. In other words, most such “teachers” are just slightly less newbie than you.
Last but not least, you’re not going to figure out the Fundamentals by yourself. No matter how genial you are IQ-wise you’re not going to, for example, rediscover by yourself the various Advanced Mathematics domains, because that stuff took centuries to figure out by the most intelligent people around, often whose only job was to discover things.
So yeah, some things can only be learned from somebody else, the bulk of what you have to learn is much faster to learn from somebody else than by yourself, and since Formal Education with professional teachers is way more efficient a process than apprenticing under a Master (plus it is way broader in what you end up learning, though less deep than learning from a master/mentor) that’s pretty much all that’s available.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains, but it’s pretty hard to find yourself in a position were you get a Mentor and as one who often is one in my area, I can tell you I wouldn’t waste my time mentoring somebody who doesn’t even know the basics (for example, because they shunned formal education) when I could be mentoring somebody ready to directly learn the advanced stuff I know which is what’s worth me spending some time teaching.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains
I agree. I’m not against formal education at all, but was instead giving a counterexample. It is possible to become educated almost solely through formal education despite that perhaps not being the primary goal of the institutions you attend.
Harvard, for instance, is a fantastic place to learn things despite the fact that it is also practically a hedge fund, a gatekeeping organization, and several other things that are unrelated to educating people.
I consider myself an autodidact but I have a degree and without getting one likely would not have rounded out my background knowledge in computer science.
I didn’t say anything about credentials. This is about a proper education for the job.
Would you really go to a brain surgeon that didn’t go to medical school?
You made an argument that because someone went to medical school that they’re more trustworthy…and again broad strokes, sure. You are relying on their credentials though. You cannot possibly conduct a thorough enough background check to know if they are skilled enough to conduct your surgery.
While this is generally more reliable than say…taking their word for it, it also is possible for credentialed people to slip through the cracks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch
I have nothing against universities, but the largely for-profit educational system in America is not the only way formal education can ever possibly work. There are universities in other countries that don’t rely on cronyism, nepotism, discrimination, and wealth to qualify who gets into the programs.
Do you also believe you have a debt to your parents that needs to be repaid?
Legally, no. Morally? Probably. I try to take care of my parents, and make their lives easier where I can, when I can, to try to at least somewhat alleviate how I’ve made their lives harder at earlier stages in life.
My parents will never make up for forcing me to exist on earth. I pay a terrible price each day so they could have their precious dopamine hit.
Next time smoke, inject, injest, or boof methamphetamines and leave me the fuck out of it.
Like exasperation said, I feel I owe it to them to make considerate Christmas gifts, call often to socialize with them even if some days I’d rather be playing video games, etc.
And, some people probably don’t feel that obligation because their parents didn’t respect them or help them grow up well.
Otoh, there’s always work digging ditches or nursing. Most people would prefer nursing in that scenario. Extend this metaphor to whatever job we’re short of and make that education free until we’re not short of it anymore.
I mean that’s the problem, whichever country you want to do this in, the world has started automating its hole-digging. Not sure why you’re using nursing as an example, since that’s a very specialized field that needs a lot of student loans to get into. Traveling nurses are in high demand.
That’s exactly why I bring up nursing. It’s expensive to learn and society needs a lot more nurses.
A good, free education is to the benefit of society.
You do not incur a debt for the 12 years of school you’re already mandated to receive, because that education makes society better. You become a better, more productive adult as a result of it.
But now we find that that education is not enough. Most people are not graduating high school with the necessary skills and knowledge to become that fully functioning adult. So, it is too society’s benefit to extend that education.
This should not be transactional. We the people provide the education, and we the people benefit.
Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
Most advanced countries will give you all of your formal education for free or with a heavily subsidized cost.
It usually don’t create an obligation, or some kind of moral one. Managers have this joke (that for some reason they never think about) where they are deciding of they’ll train their employees, and one asks “what if we train them and they leave?”, so the other respond “what if we don’t train them and they don’t?”. State payed education is just that, but at a society level, and for everything the society expects from people instead of just work.
Fuck that, I never asked to be born. Send the bill to my parents.
expecting a return
It’s called taxes. In many normal places, some people qualify (based on secondary education grades or other things like military service) to receive free higher education (basically sponsored by the government) that is paid off later over the years by taxes or contributions to the GDP.
I guess I take issue with the fact that you can’t realistically opt out. Maybe if you are a wilderness survivalist type then maybe you can go do a Thoreau or Davy Crocket or whatever and just build a log cabin in the woods somewhere. But that’s very rare these days, and society is moving forward so fast that tens of millions of people are being left behind because they lack the technical skills to thrive in a modern economy, and the survival skills to thrive in an old school agrarian economy. When that many people are left behind, it becomes a major social problem that’ll come home to roost eventually.
There are sci-fi depictions of perfect utopias where automation has maintained so much of modern life that people need neither learn nor contribute. But, not only would I be somewhat opposed to going in such a lethargic direction, we’re also a very long way from that sort of utopia, and we’d need more educated people to handle it.
I certainly don’t claim that the current pattern of “No one can afford medical school, no one can become a doctor, and thus no one can AFFORD a doctor” is a good one. But the work needed to invest in giving the world more doctors is still an investment, be it monetary or otherwise. Medical schools do not purely operate out of the goodness of their heart; they expect to work within a system (and be given their own means for survival).
Ah no, educated citizens is to the advantage of the society. Not in working power but in not falling back to a totalist system with low living standards.
