First, occupy your mind

You're not helping.

While I have a lot of sympathy for the outrage that is being expressed by the Occupy Wall Street movement, outrage alone is not enough. Outrage alone can be dangerous if not correctly focused. Just standing up for what you believe in is not necessarily a virtue. The most important thing is what you believe in, or even better, what you can know to be true and what you can prove about the real world. The sense that young people in the so-called “United States” have that they are being screwed is totally understandable and justified. But who is screwing you, how are they doing it, and what is the proper response?

Young people are getting it from every direction. College costs are sky high. Job prospects for meaningful employment are low. The economy sucks. The hurdles to starting your own business are huge and practically insurmountable, particularly for the young who lack the startup capital. To add insult to injury, you are then taxed on what income you can earn in order to pay for the retirement benefits and doctor bills of the richest generation to ever exist on planet earth. The very generation that grew rich from the post-war boom has not only used the government to prevent you from competing with them, they now want you to be taxed to pay into the unsustainable “Social Security” and medicare scams that they benefit from, but you never will. The powerful and well-connected are destroying the economy and gaming the system to get bailouts while everywhere you turn is yet another scheme to trap you in debt slavery. No wonder you are pissed.

Student loans in particular are an insidious trap for the young. From the time you enter the government school system as a kid, the unionized government indoctrinators that call themselves “teachers” fill your head with propaganda telling you that you must go to college in order to achieve any success in life. This propaganda has artificially raised the demand for so-called “higher education” to the point where almost every high school graduate in the so-called “United States” expects to go to college.

The idea that all people deserve a college degree, and that a college degree is the key to financial success goes back to the post-WWII GI Bill that provided one year of “free” college to every returning WWII vet. It also has roots in various collectivist and egalitarian ideologies that are always popular among the elite intellectual class. The very same class that — coincidentally — stands to benefit from government subsidies and increased demand for their product. Is it really surprising that a group of people that sell a certain product are also the people screaming the loudest that this product is a “human right” that must be guaranteed to all by government? Imagine the reaction if McDonald’s were to declare the same about hamburgers.

College prices have always been artificially high due to the fact that most colleges and universities are public institutions and thus shielded from market competition. Even nominally private schools receive grants and subsidies from the government. Since most people cannot afford to pay the already inflated $25,000 – $40,000 (or more) per year to attend a college or university there needs to be a way to finance this supposed ticket to financial freedom that everyone has a “right” to. So naturally the all-wise and friendly government must intervene to offer financial aid, loan guarantees and grants to people that have been convinced that they must seek a college degree.

These loans then have the effect of further raising the demand for “education” by shielding students from the immediate cost, and guaranteeing that tuition will be paid. This in turn has the inevitable effect of further inflating the already inflated price of “education” and thus requiring more people to go into debt to pay for it. It is a vicious cycle and a classic bubble. After all, if you were a businessperson providing a product or service to the market and all your potential customers had been relentlessly indoctrinated for 12 years to believe that they absolutely had to buy what you are selling, and were then given guaranteed loans to pay for it, you would naturally raise your prices. You would be a fool not to. When consumers are shielded from costs, their demand rises. When something is subsidized, the price rises. This is just basic economics. Only an economics professor with multiple college degrees would tell you different.

On the other side of the coin, the quality and service offered by the educational establishment has necessarily gone down. After all, if everyone goes to college naturally standards will have to drop. Not all students have the same capabilities. In order to accommodate the influx of students coming into the system on financial aid and loans, the quality and standards must go down. More faculty must be brought on to deal with the extra load, so naturally their quality will go down. And when a student’s financial aid is linked to performance, this creates a perverse incentive for the institution to lower standards to keep the aid dollars flowing. This process was also at work in the now infamous Atlanta cheating scandal.

These subsidies and guarantees shield the “education” providers from any meaningful feedback from their customers. This naturally reduces their incentive to actually produce anything worthwhile. Instead of meeting the market demand of customers, many college professors take their tenured paycheck and study some obscure academic topic that is of personal interest to them. They leave the actual teaching and interacting with students to graduate teaching assistants. Why work, when you have guaranteed income? Why please customers when you have tenure and can’t be fired? The students themselves don’t particularly care since they are shielded from the costs  — for a short time at least — and many of  them are only there because of the financial aid in the first place. The predictable result of all this is that the price of a Bachelor’s degree has exploded while the value has plummeted.

As a result many young people find themselves in a situation today where they are deep in debt and all they have to show for it is a worthless piece of paper. Many of you have probably spent 4 years studying at a college and are only qualified to be a server at Starbucks. That sucks. You were tricked. You were hoodwinked. You were bamboozled. You were sucked into a system before you were old enough to really understand what was going on. That bogus loan was effectively shoved down your throat at a young age before you understood all the implications. So who really did this to you? Who is really screwing you? Is it Starbucks and Walmart? Is it the free market? Is it capitalism? No, it is the corrupt, self-interested and entrenched government/educational industrial complex that has benefited enormously by putting you into debt slavery and forcing you to buy their products.

Occupy your mind first. Education does not have to be synonymous with college. It can be as free or expensive as you make it. You have the tools and resources to educate yourself and learn useful skills right at your fingertips. You can teach yourself all kinds of useful and marketable skills. I taught myself computer programming and all I had to do was buy a few books. You can even teach yourself economics and philosophy without paying anyone a dime if you have the personal motivation to do so. And if you don’t have that motivation, why would you go into debt slavery to pretend to have it at a college?

So rather than making loud and obnoxious demands to further expand government and get more free handouts at the expense of other people and future generations, focus your rage where it properly belongs. Be angry at the government. Be angry at the educational establishment. Be angry at the people that forced you into a state indoctrination center as a child and mentally tortured you for 12 years. Be angry at the people that violently stole your childhood. Be angry at the “teachers” and parents that told you  you would be nothing without a piece of paper saying you spent a certain number of hours in a stifling lecture hall listening to a bunch of overpaid Marxist blowhards peddle their BS social theories.

Raising taxes, increasing government, destroying what is left of the free market and creating more regulations and violent controls is not going to solve your problems or make you free. Being angry at some nebulous notion of “greed” leads nowhere and makes you an easy pawn for someone else’s power agenda. If you want to get back at the people that screwed you, just stop paying back your bogus loans. You didn’t get what you paid for anyway. Stop participating with the government and asking them for handouts and bailouts. Stop getting involved in useless political campaigns that drain your energy, your wallet and empower old and corrupt politicians. The government put you in this spot. They will not be your savior.