Comment by HideousKojima
9 days ago
>Why stop funding at the university level?
Among many other reasons:
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
> If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
>And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
Those at least serve a practical purpose to society as a whole, but even then I still would question taking other people's money by force to fund it.
What do you use to define “practical purpose”? There’s a saying that “science is necessary, but art is the reason why we live.”
If you dig deep enough, subjective experience is what we’re often trying to improve. Both science and art contribute to that.
> If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
Why is that immoral?
Because you're taking other people's money by threat of lethal force to pursue a 4 year party vacation and getting a degree in something useless while you're at it.
How does that make it immoral though?
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
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What are all of the things that you personally like that the government does that I might find offensive or bad?
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> Because you're taking other people's money by threat of lethal force
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
Fixed that for you.
Oscar Wilde said “a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Subsidizing also increases creates more utilization. You seem to be of the mind that more education is a bad thing. I’m not sure we all agree.