In two decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s US$ 400 billion vote buying student loan forgiveness scheme. Here is the full text [PDF] of the two decisions.
Here is U.S. President Biden’s remarks on the student debt forgiveness decision.
Biden says he will invoke something called the “Higher Education Act” (by which it appears he means the Higher Education Act of 1965, part of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programme), to find another back door to cancel student debt. This strategy was previously suggested by Native American legal sage Elizabeth Warren and her tribal council at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.
The entire student loan program should be eradicated. It is a cancer upon academia and American society at large.
I agree with dismantling federal student loans. Let private parties wishing to loan money to do so.
My take is the underpinning rationale for Biden’s persistence is this:
It’s hard to say who’s more at fault here:
Maybe some of these “educational” institutions should be liquidated for partial reimbursement to the students.
Then there is the poor advice from parents & teachers who grew up in an earlier age when a college education was a precious meal-ticket – but who have failed to recognize that the ground has shifted below their feet.
One aspect of this topic is the gender (can we still use that word?) of those indebted students. In earlier days, most of the students were male. Now the majority are female. And most of them are pursuing academic courses which have little monetary value. But the debts remain.
What does this do for the future of the family? Anti-male discrimination in employment means that a declining number of young men constitute good husband/provider material – and those males have to recognize that the plentiful graduate females come with a “reverse dowry” of massive student debt. The rational male graduate will eschew Western women and head to Asia or Russia for countries full of smart educated good-looking traditional women.
Since the “educational institutions” “educated” those who came up with the idea of student loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, a lien on the endowments of those institutions should pay off the student loans, starting with the Ivy League.
I do support incentive alignment. It seems that a whole generation of young people have had their futures sacrificed so that academics could raise an army for their socialist revolution.
Wish I could remember where – I vaguely recall long time ago reading a description a survivor wrote of his participation in one of those suicidal WWI attacks of massed infantry marching into German machine gun fire. His observation was something like – It took generations of going to church on Sunday to raise those young men who were willing to march into certain death.
Perhaps in a few more generations time, our descendants will have raised young men who are prepared to march into the halls of academia and expel the frauds? Indoctrinating the young can work both ways!
I’m not sure that’s the best example. The problem with such attacks was that there were few survivors and, for the most part, the attacks were totally futile. In the Battle of the Somme in 1916, British and French casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) were 614,105 with German casualties around the same. All of this was for an advance of 9.7 km by the British and French along a 26 km front, which had no strategic consequences whatsoever.
At least at present, academia is not defended by water-cooled machine guns with intersecting fields of fire and heavy artillery behind the front lines. Perhaps a wiser approach would be to strangle the legacy institutions before they decide to acquire such assets by developing free education resources and independent credentialing providers for those professions that require a fancy piece of paper.
Gregory Clark’s series of books demonstrates that rent-seeking has a genetic component that increases with each civilizational cycle. He doesn’t call it “rent-seeking” of course. A “march through the institutions” to accomplish anything but further rent-seeking is unrealistic precisely because the institutions select for people who socialize the cost of sustaining civilization off of themselves. The fact that I may be the only person to have consistently talked about “rent seeking” as both a public sector and private sector phenomenon is incredibly bad news for civilization as we know it. This has very deep roots in Africa and probably goes back to the CHLCA’s tendency toward gang formation as male intrasexual selection as discussed by E. O. Wilson in The Social Conquest of Earth.
It’s worth remembering where public education came from, when it was introduced by Maria Theresa in Austria [Britannica]:
Maria Theresa also introduced a system of public education. The motivation for this reform came from concern both that the Roman Catholic Church in Austria was no longer maintaining public morality properly and that certain changes in the 18th-century economy required that Austria provide a better-educated work force. It is often assumed that the great mass of the people in Austria at this time were serfs working on the lords’ lands, owing various work and money dues, and thus—while suffering oppression—at least forming a fairly stable society. In fact, by the late 18th century the vast majority of the rural population was made up of cottars, gardeners, and lodgers who owed minimal feudal duties and who depended on nonagricultural occupations for their survival. These people represented a proto-industrial work force, but they also represented an ignorant and potentially ill-disciplined rural population. Compulsory education was a method of instilling a good work ethic and a sense of morality in them. In 1774 Maria Theresa issued the General School Regulation for the Austrian lands, establishing a system of elementary schools, secondary schools, and normal schools to train teachers. The implementation of this regulation was difficult owing to a lack of teachers, resistance on the part of lords and peasants alike, and a shortage of funds. Despite these obstacles, however, 500 such schools had opened by 1780.
Back to the basics?
I wish I could remember the exact quote. My interpretation was that those futile attacks were exactly the best example of what the author was getting at.
What made young men willingly march into near-certain death? They knew that the attacks would be futile, because they had seen & heard of prior such assaults – but generations of going to church, singing “Rule Britannia”, and being pumped full of civilizational pride made them willingly go “over the top”. They knew they were lions led by asses. They knew they were going to their deaths for no good purpose. But they followed orders and went willingly anyway – because that is how a man (at least, an Englishman) was supposed to behave.
That is the kind of attitude which cannot be instilled in the mass of the population in only one election cycle, or even in only one generation. It is a much longer-term process than that. And it is difficult for us human beings to understand anything that takes longer than a single human lifetime.
Of course, that was merely my interpretation of that half-remembered quote.
Wouldn’t everybody, not least the combatants, be much better off if we bred this out of young men or, better still, never indoctrinated them in it? Willing to throw your life away on a futile cause for made-up abstract concepts such as king, country, flag, and anthem is the very quintessence of collectivism—it is to value the God-given life of the individual as nothing compared to socially constructed fictions invented, for the most part, by those who do not do the fighting and dying in their name. It is the same kind of fiction and obedience which tyrants, from antiquity to the present day, use to justify enslaving, starving, and murdering “the masses” (the ultimate in de-humanising terminology) to the end of building their heaven on Earth (for the slavers, thieves, and murderers).
Would not just the fighting men in the field but hundreds of millions of others, many yet to be born later in the 20th century, have had incomparably better lives if these men, seen by their “betters” as cogs in an industrial killing machine, in mid-1915 (link is to the eponymous book), once the true nature and futility of the war became apparent, refused to fight their peers on the other side of no man’s land and then, if necessary, turned their arms on the senior commanders, politicians, and crowned heads who so callously squandered their precious lives?
The following is a quote from my review of 1915.
And all of the British troops who endured these appalling conditions were volunteers—conscription did not begin in Britain until 1916. With the Regular Army having been largely wiped out in the battles of 1914, the trenches were increasingly filled with Territorial troops who volunteered for service in France, units from around the Empire: India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and as the year progressed, Kitchener’s “New Army” of volunteer recruits rushed through training and thrown headlong into the killing machine. The mindset that motivated these volunteers and the conclusions drawn from their sacrifice set the stage for the even greater subsequent horrors of the twentieth century.
Why? Because they accepted as given that their lives were, in essence, the property of the state which governed the territory in which they happened to live, and that the rulers of that state, solely on the authority of having been elected by a small majority of the voters in an era when suffrage was far from universal, had every right to order them to kill or be killed by subjects of other states with which they had no personal quarrel. (The latter point was starkly illustrated when, at Christmas 1914, British and German troops declared an impromptu cease-fire, fraternised, and played football matches in no man’s land before, the holiday behind them, returning to the trenches to resume killing one another for King and Kaiser.) This was a widely shared notion, but the first year of the Great War demonstrated that the populations of the countries on both sides really believed it, and would charge to almost certain death even after being told by Lord Kitchener himself on the parade ground, “that our attack was in the nature of a sacrifice to help the main offensive which was to be launched ‘elsewhere’ ” (p. 493). That individuals would accept their rôle as property of the state was a lesson which the all-encompassing states of the twentieth century, both tyrannical and more or less democratic, would take to heart, and would manifest itself not only in conscription and total war, but also in expropriation, confiscatory taxation, and arbitrary regulation of every aspect of subjects’ lives. Once you accept that the state is within its rights to order you to charge massed machine guns with a rifle and bayonet, you’re unlikely to quibble over lesser matters.
Further, the mobilisation of the economy under government direction for total war was taken as evidence that central planning of an industrial economy was not only feasible but more efficient than the market. Unfortunately, few observed that there is a big difference between consuming capital to build the means of destruction over a limited period of time and creating new wealth and products in a productive economy. And finally, governments learnt that control of mass media could mould the beliefs of their subjects as the rulers wished: the comical Fritz with which British troops fraternised at Christmas 1914 had become the detested Boche whose trenches they shelled continuously on Christmas Day a year later (p. 588).
It is not those imbued with willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective that will march into its strongholds and destroy its pillars. It is individuals, who bow to no “superior” and visit death and destruction on those would enslave themselves, their families, and their peers, who will bring down the entire corrupt palaces of the slavers.
Absolutely agree!
Sadly, we humans are herd animals. And in anything beyond a hunter-gatherer economy, we are highly dependent on each other in the herd – to keep the lights on, to keep the food moving from farm to table, to make the clothes on our backs.
In the early 20th Century, the herd was full of civiizational confidence and was ready to march into machine gun fire. Today, young people (especially young women) are indoctrinated to sit on their asses, whine, and wait for Big Bureaucracy to take care of them. Maybe at some point in the future, it will be possible to indoctrinate a future generation to think of themselves as individuals cooperating with other individuals for their mutual benefit, rather than as obedient followers … or am I being too optimistic?
Perhaps the fate of such countries that send their best to be killed is to die themselves?
We’ll see.
The slogan, “May The Best Win” inspires in you a feeling of nobility.
You also feel concern.
Best at what?
Win what?
These are fair questions about what is “fair”.
You can only love your adversary – love your enemy – when these questions are answered.
To achieve that love you demand mutual agreement.
In reaching such agreements, you and your enemies Create a culture: Cultivating that which you can agree is Good.