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Glass

2nd January 2011, 10:32 PM

from the Market-ticker link. (http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=176272)

New Year's Musings - Pt 2

From Part 1....

How did we ever put ourselves as a nation, and as a people, in a position where everything has become a privilege that used to be a right, and everything that has been your right to aspire to has become your right to have, even when the only way to acquire it is to steal it from someone else?

Part 1 dealt with, via just a couple of small examples, the first half.

This will be the second.

Let's start with college. Desiring to attend college is an aspiration. Having the right to attend college doesn't exist. With that "right" would have to come the money to do so. Our own President said (during the campaign):

“We need to put a college education within reach of every American. That's the best investment we can make in our future. I'll create a new and fully refundable tax credit worth $4,000 for tuition and fees every year, which will cover two thirds of the tuition at the average public college or university. I'll also simplify the financial aid application process so that we don't have a million students who aren't applying for aid because it's too difficult. I will start by eliminating the current student aid form altogether - we'll use tax data instead.”

Within the reach of every American. And how did he propose to do this? By stealing the money from other people.

The paper goes on to cite the "rising cost of college" as a problem - and it is. But notice what's missing - any sort of analysis on exactly why the cost of college is rising so fast.

When I was of age to attend college in the early 1980s you could go to a community college for about $1,000 a semester for tuition and fees. I know, because I did. I took two classes (half a load) my Senior year at a community college, as I needed only two more high school credits to graduate. The total tuition was about $500, and the cost of books another $150 or so.

Why is it so damned expensive now?

Simple: The government.

First, we had the government create a special class of debt - debt that is almost-impossible to discharge via bankruptcy. This made it profitable for government-tit-sucking lenders such as Sallie Mae, along with private firms, to sell students nearly unlimited amounts of money irrespective of their ability to pay it back later. We thus have people coming out of college with degrees in things like "Women's Studies" with no reasonable path forward to earn a high wage - and $100,000 or more in debt that they cannot get rid of.

Since the lenders will lend unlimited amounts of money (due to the fact that you are an effective slave to that debt) what used to be a cinder-block dormitory with a couple of almost-cot-style beds, a built-in formica desk for two along one wall, a dial telephone and a shower and toilet shared with the room next to yours (or down the hall as a communal bathroom and shower) has now become a condominium-style living experience. High-speed Internet, plush carpeting instead of inexpensive linoleum, nice wall treatments instead of painted cinderblock and other trappings of luxury adorn the living spaces. Dramatically-expensive buildings and other "upgrades" have been performed to the university environment everywhere else as well, all, of course, financed by the students who are given nearly-unlimited amounts of money to attend.

College costs have expanded as they have not because the quality of education has gone up (and those who would like to argue otherwise can begin with the college-educated engineers that put men on the moon in the 1960s) but rather because the "free money" folks invaded college campuses and destroyed the marketplace for education, replacing it with a model of outright theft and debt slavery. Your "right" to a college education was literally stolen from others and from yourself via this change in model.

If you're a Senior in High School this year remember well: ANY student loan is, with damn few exceptions, non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. If you can't pay they can and will add fees and costs that in many cases will instantly double your debt, then hound you literally until death, seizing tax refunds and anything else they can get their claws into until you either pay or die. The only way to win this game is not to play.

There is nobody willing to talk about the fact that parents enable this behavior by filling out FAFSA paperwork either!

Each and every parent who does so is contributing to the financial **** of their son or daughter. Welcome to the machine Junior - you were shoveled into that wood chipper feet first courtesy of dear old Mom and Dad who didn't tell you what they were doing to you.

You were induced to get them to fill out that form without proper and clear disclosure of what it means and what any debt you take on as a consequence - that is, that you will not be able to use bankruptcy to avoid payment if in fact you go bust due to inability to find a job that pays enough to service the obligation.

Make damn sure you remember who did this to you when Mom and Dad are old, infirm, and broke right along with you and they're screaming like harpies about how horrible things are.....

Which brings me to my next subject..... Health Care.

We had a very viable health care system in the 1960s and 1970s. I know, because I grew up in it. My parents wrote checks - typically for $50 or less - to go to the doctor for things like the flu, annual checkups and similar. The doc actually spent some time with you too, rather than the 30 seconds you get today. Health was an aspiration - you aspired to be healthy, and if you worked at it, you might be. But there were no guarantees.

If you wanted to you could buy insurance - true insurance - against catastrophe. That is, a policy to cover you against unlikely disasters that could strike you and which you were not prepared to cover on your own. You got billed and submitted the bill for reimbursement, just like you did with a car that got wrecked or your house that caught fire. If you fell down the stairs and broke your leg, the insurance would cover it. Guess what - when I was a kid I did and it did. But things that everyone knew were likely to happen - the flu, a checkup, this or that routine lab test - you bought out of your own pocket. You thus had a great incentive not to be a fat slob (lest you get heart disease or diabetes) and not to screw anything that walked (lest you get a venereal disease or get pregnant) and when you got older you either had saved up money for all the grandiose medical things you'd like to try to eek out another year or two of life or you dealt with your mortality and died with dignity a year or two earlier than you otherwise might - often at home in the care of your family and your hand in theirs, instead of being hooked up to 20 different machines in something reminiscent of Daybreakers all going "beep beep" at the appointed time.

Then came the government and made health care a right, instead of an aspiration. That is, you had a right to treatment if you were having a heart attack. This was true even if the condition was voluntarily-created - for example, if your heart attack came about because you weigh 450lbs and "Super Sized" yourself of your own volition. It also applied to anyone who decided to have a baby - an act that, with few exceptions, results from entirely voluntary acts nine months earlier.

How did government make health care a right? They stole the money from everyone else by shoving a gun in everyone's face. Suddenly an aspirin - a three cent pill - cost $30 if given to you in a hospital. Why? Because government forced that hospital under penalty of law to deliver a baby where the expectant mother had no money whatsoever - that is, she voluntarily consented to sex, then spent nine straight months spending every nickel she acquired instead of saving it to pay for the delivery. When she was unable to pay, you got charged - so she could have her kid in a hospital, instead of taking a higher risk of injury or death by having that child at home, outside of medical supervision. If Ms. Mom-to-be decided to drink, smoke, do drugs (and may do and did) or just had bad luck that "routine" delivery suddenly became a two-week stay in the NICU for the infant and that $200,000+ bill got charged to the public as well! That which happened for literal thousands of years before the invention of modern medicine all on our own, and that which happens among the animal kingdom every day in millions of cases without a single trained professional within miles suddenly became the right to steal from others.

What's worse is that this "right" wasn't extended only to American Citizens, it was extended to anyone who could get here to this nation! That, of course, led women who were 8-1/2 months pregnant and couldn't extort free medical care for their delivery from their own governments to come here instead. And they do and did - by the millions - from Mexico.

So now a "routine" birth costs $20,000 - instead of a couple of grand, tops. And since "every life is sacred" if something does go wrong that child is entitled to suckle off the people to the tune of, in many cases, more than $1 million - before its first year of life. Whether the couple who were responsible for creating that life have any money is immaterial - that which we used to aspire to - the best health we could acquire under our present circumstance - has become a right extracted at gunpoint from others, even if the pickle we find ourselves in medically occurred as a consequence of our own actions.

It's even worse when it comes to our time to grow old and die. We all do, you know. It's part of the human condition - we begin dying when we're born. For some people it is a longer journey than others, but the end point never changes - no matter what we try to do about it.

That doesn't stop people from trying to bargain for just one more day. Many people - perhaps most - are distinctly uncomfortable with the fact that they're mortal. Yet mortality is essential to evolution and in fact survival of the human race. If we did not die we would eventually consume the entire surface of the earth and starve to death instead - so we'd die anyway, and it would likely be far more unpleasant than it is now.

But our quest to turn aspirations for a long and healthy life into rights simply means that we bankrupt ourselves - literally bankrupt everyone, and the nation as a whole - instead of simply accepting that there are odds on all human events on a daily basis, and if you roll a "snake eyes" your time here on this earth has ended.

There's nothing wrong with trying to influence the dice with your own resources. There is something distinctly evil - in fact Satanic - when you influence the odds inherent in life by stealing money from others in order to selfishly change the dice roll that determines whether you draw another day's breath. Yet that is exactly what we have demanded of our government, and what our government has acceded to and put into force of law.

Is there more?

You bet.

A place to live? It was an aspiration to own a home. Then it became "an ownership society." Remember that? How did we do it? Fraud. Who's gone to jail among the banksters and government employees involved? Nobody.

Something to eat? Again, it was aspirational. If you didn't have food there were private charities, many of them religious, that ran soup kitchens and other similar programs. Then we introduced "food stamps" - literally coupons. But that was "damaging to people's self-esteem", so now we issue things that look and behave exactly like credit cards - so nobody knows you're robbing at gunpoint your fellow citizen in the checkout line for that cart full of groceries. More than forty three million Americans in point of fact do exactly that. People point to this as "one in seven" - nope. Remember, only adults get food stamps (and often feed kids in the same household.) There are 238.7 million non-institutionalized (that is, not-in-prison) members of the adult population according to the BLS. The real number of persons on food stamps is one in 5.55, or 18%.

We are having an economic "recovery" when nearly 20% of our adult population that is not in prison is on food stamps? Like hell.

There's much more, but the bottom line remains the same - we have turned this nation from a land of opportunity into a land where equality of result is part of our lexicon.

Yet equality of result is impossible. It is a fact that humans have a bell curve. Some are more intelligent, some less. Some are stronger, some weaker. Some have one set of skills, some another, and some are simply short-stacked in that department as a whole.

Our nation was founded on equality of opportunity - the right to aspire, not the right to achieve. That is, not everyone who tries to succeed will do so. Some will fail. Not everyone who wants that last breath can have it - some simply cannot.

Flattening the bell curve that exists in all human endeavors and endowments can only be done be stepping on the rights of others. You can only turn an aspiration into a right by stealing that which you want from someone else. In attempting to flatten that curve you inherently lose collectively in the outcome, because the process of theft and conversion breeds resentment and provides a strong disincentive to those who are better at what they do to produce at their potential. History says that all such experiments in that sort of collectivism, if not abandoned, fail with disastrous results for nearly all members of society. That is, in trying to prevent those few on the lowest end of the bell curve from having a bad outcome, we instead guarantee a bad outcome to 80% of the population instead of accepting that 10 or 20%, if we honor the natural distribution of abilities and outcomes, must fail.

If you accept that life is full of aspirations but rights are limited to the pursuit, but not the guarantee, of happiness then you stop stepping on other people's heads in an attempt to keep your own above water. You instead choose to endeavor, when the water is rising, to acquire, either by trade or scavenging, the materials to build a boat. In doing so you accept that you may fail and drown - but if you succeed, that success is yours, and your endeavor to achieve it does not damage others.

The earliest colonists that came over on The Mayflower figured it out in time and changed their model of "everything is a right" to those rights declared ultimately in The Declaration of Independence - leaving everything else as an aspiration.

Will we change in time as the Colonists did, or we will we undergo what The Soviets were consigned to?

That is the question.