Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

There's a compelling & pervasive mythology in this country that every person must go to college, and there's' not much stipulation about what they learn. This narrative plays well into the educational industrial complex & the political machinations appeal to the socialist mentality & ambitions of students. Therefore, government felt compelled to distort traditional Market Forces by guaranteeing any student who wanted a loan, and going to the anti-Constitutional extreme of suspending their Right to bankruptcy. Now students who normally wouldn't have been able to get a loan without that bizarre exception are lured into having their life & career scarred by the naive exchange of a questionable education for a mountain of debt. The result is that tuition has gone up 1,100% since 1978, and 40 million students, almost 70% of graduates, owe $1.2 trillion. In fact, $200,000 in student debt at graduation is not uncommon: that's a repayment of $1,500 a month, about 40% of entry-level take-home pay, and because the loans have high interest rates, the amount owed is compounding wildly.

Also, violating Free Market forces has influenced the cost of an education. The is partly through a lack of an adversarial relationship: students who by definition don't yet have wisdom are agreeing to lifelong servitude in exchange for exaggerated promises & misleading advice, and are artificially driving up the cost of college by increasing demand for the limited number of seats in brick-n-mortar didactic teaching institutions. And the educational industrial complex exploits its position via rent-seeking, gate-keeping, job pretension & degree inflation. Combined with tenure, public employee unions & ridiculous restrictions & morals, those institutions can't be pressured to change, so they fester & metastasize into the economy writ large.

Worse, lots of "students" live off their student loans & never had any intention of getting a degree but simply work the system like people are wont to do if not scrutinized. However, unlike credit card abusers, these young people cannot declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is in the Constitution for an important reason: because Fascists use debt as a way to control the masses. And they're the only loans that can't be refinanced: so that 9% interest is forever. The whole Student Loan shtick was a cynical ploy to create indentured servants.