Student Loan Forgiveness and Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Bruce Fenton, host of the Satoshi Roundtable and a current candidate for the US Senate.
The so-called “student loan forgiveness” promised by President Joe Biden is not only the death of sound economic policy in the United States, it is the death of accountability for many Americans.
The loan forgiveness plan shifts wages and wealth from workers to debtors. This type of agreement violates the trade-off that people have in decision-making processes where decisions have consequences. In this case, we now have people whose decisions don’t have consequences and others who paid off their loans having to pay for those who didn’t. This is deeply unfair and useless in a moral economic system.
Many mistake care or compassion for bad economic policy. It is not caring or compassionate to help fuel a system that burdens young people with a lifetime of debt and then charges other people for the so-called “forgiveness” of that debt. Taking money from one person to pay for another person’s debt is completely immoral and violates the rights of those who are forced to pay.
The problems with government intervention in education
As with many public projects and policies, this has unintended consequences. The cycle over the past couple of decades of rising tuition costs combined with increasing government intervention in the tuition purchasing process has led to far higher costs for higher education. The easy money and easy access for students has meant that schools are far less constrained by market forces on pricing. This causes tuition fees to skyrocket radically, as we have seen in recent years. School fees are much higher now due to easy access to cheap credit.
Unfortunately, this helps the students little to nothing. Students are burdened with much higher debt and degrees that are increasingly useless.
Another interesting side-effect of this state involvement in education is the natural tendency for the academics who depend on state paychecks to be more pro-government.
In recent years, we have seen a massive expansion in left-dominated universities, while the left, on the other hand, seems to be handing out ever-larger prizes to their constituency in academia. It seems to me that academia has now become extremely partisan, with most institutions of higher learning and most institutions of secondary learning completely dominated by one political party, and often the more extreme wings of that party.
Bad money at the root
This kind of problem is only available in a fiat world. Bad money is the root of it. In a world without broken fiat, tuition would be far cheaper and colleges would have to compete far harder. Students would have more responsibility for their debt and would be more likely to make better decisions.
The biggest victims of this scam are the students. Students are taught that something is for nothing, that decisions do not have consequences and that the world owes them something. Some universities go so far as to convince students that hobby education is worth going into debt for. Personally, I love hobbies – there are many excellent and truly wonderful and valuable degrees that are essentially hobbies – with no real world market value. There is nothing wrong with this, and there is nothing wrong with anyone deciding to take these courses. But if you enter a field that is not profitable, then it is not someone else’s responsibility to pay for it.
I happen to like comics, but it’s certainly not my moral right to tell someone else they have to work to pay for me to go to comics school. Even if it’s a major that will guarantee me a high salary, it’s still not a person’s right to demand that someone else pay for their education.
In general, we need more accountability. We need accountability from students and their parents. We need accountability from academic institutions that have abused students and saddled them with debt for worthless degrees. We need accountability from politicians who continually devalue and debase our currency and steal from workers’ wages for cronyism. And we need accountability from the media and others who support the system.
At the end of the day, we all have to be responsible to ourselves for our money and for our own decisions. Ultimately, we should also keep that accountability to ourselves and never expect anyone else to pay for our decisions, bad or good.
This is a guest post by Bruce Fenton. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
