A 6 year old girl was cuffed, arrested, and charged with criminal assault for having a tantrum at school. This is part of a trend where childhood misbehavior is treated as a criminal matter. Meanwhile, other childhood behaviors are treated as symptoms of mental illness. Why are we doing this to our kids? Plus, Elizabeth Warren says the best way to fight a pandemic is to open our borders. And the House has just made lynching illegal. But wasn't it already illegal?
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Welcome to the show, friends, neighbors, colleagues, associates.
Today, we're gonna talk about what I call the criminalization of childhood, both the criminalization and the medicalization of childhood, which is happening in our school system.
We'll discuss that.
Also, I'm excited today to be canceling Elizabeth Warren, finally, and I'll explain why.
And we'll go over five headlines, several of them coronavirus-related, fun times, as always.
And in the news segment, we're also gonna talk about a bill that just passed Making lynching illegal on the federal level.
But wasn't it illegal already everywhere?
Yes, it was.
But, which of course is why this bill, though it sounds like something that nobody could possibly oppose, there are actually very good reasons to oppose it, and I'll explain that as well.
All of that coming up.
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Okay, so criminalization of childhood footage was released this week showing a police officer in Orlando walking into an elementary school and arresting a six-year-old girl.
The child, accused of having a tantrum and hitting her teachers, Had her hands zip-tied and was put in the back of a squad car as she was crying and trembling with fear and pleading to be given another chance.
Put in a squad car, taken to jail.
In fact, let me play for you the footage right now.
This is the footage of the actual arrest as it happens.
I think there's an important point to note here as you're watching this.
That it's not like the police came in and the young girl was in the middle of a hysterical freakout and she was hitting people.
No, by this point she had calmed down.
She was just sitting there.
And then they come in and cuff her.
So, watch this.
Help me!
Help me!
Please!
Please!
Help me!
Let's go.
Your grandmother can come pick you up, okay?
Oh, I was just... Oh, I just saw you!
Hi.
Come on, let's go.
No!
Please let me go!
Okay, come on.
You can tell me what happened in the car, okay?
I'll see you in the car, okay?
I don't want to go to the police car.
You don't want to?
No, please.
He has to.
No, please.
You have to.
That... You know the expression, makes my blood boil?
Well that, when I watch something like that, I can feel, I think I can literally feel my blood boiling within me.
And it just makes me very angry.
Maybe part of the reason might be that I have a six-year-old daughter myself.
And the idea that she could be arrested for anything at all is, first of all, simply ludicrous.
If you know anything about six-year-olds, if you've ever met one, then you should understand how ridiculous this is.
And my blood boils even more, because as I've been talking about this issue, I wrote something about it yesterday, I've been talking about it on social media, a fair number of people, maybe it won't surprise you, Defending the police officer.
Now, as we'll talk about in a minute, even his own police department doesn't defend him.
They fired him for this, and rightfully so.
But there are still people who I think are, when it comes down to it, such bootlickers of the state, you know, refuse to criticize police officers for any reason whatsoever, no matter what they do, that they'll even defend this.
Which his own bosses would not defend.
His police chief came out and was horrified by it.
And yet there are people that will say, you know, I saw some comments like, teach that spoiled brat a lesson.
Those kind of comments.
She's six.
You animal.
You beast.
I mean, she's six.
Do you understand what that means?
Now, the courageous cop valiantly defending society from ill-tempered first graders can be heard later on in the body cam footage bragging about the fact that this six-year-old that he arrested breaks his record for the youngest child that he's ever arrested.
There's no sense of seriousness here at all, just callous indifference for the child and to him it seems like it's just all a big joke.
Watch this.
She's eight, isn't she?
She's six?
Now she has broken the record.
Absolutely no concern from this guy about the trauma that the child suffered, and that is trauma, okay?
Yes, the word trauma is way overused.
College kids encountering opinions they don't like say they're traumatized.
That's not trauma.
Doing this to a child, that is actually literally traumatic.
Now, keep in mind, you know, he says he arrested a seven-year-old.
What was the reason he gave?
He said he arrested the seven-year-old because the seven-year-old, I guess, stole something and didn't think it was serious, and that's why he was arrested.
So he was teaching him a lesson.
Yeah, well, of course he didn't think it was serious.
He's seven.
Seven-year-olds don't think anything is serious.
Because they're seven.
Now, this girl was taken to a detention center where her mugshot was taken.
I want you to imagine that.
A mugshot of a six-year-old girl.
And she was officially brought up on charges of criminal assault for hitting somebody.
I want to reiterate again.
This is a six-year-old girl, taken to a jail, given a mugshot, brought up on charges of criminal assault.
To emphasize for the fifth time, she's six.
Now we should mention that this officer, Dennis Turner, apparently has a history of being a power-drunk scumbag.
He was investigated back in 2015 for tasing a man five times, even though the guy wasn't actively resisting, just kept tasing him anyway.
Eh, why not?
Might as well keep doing it.
And reportedly, he, the officer that is, was also arrested himself back in 1998 for aggravated assault of a child.
So maybe he has some kind of problem with children, I'm not sure.
Now Turner, as I said, has been fired for his actions at the school, but serious questions remain.
For instance, how did a callous incompetent like this guy, who's twice been put under investigation by his own department for abuse of force, how did he end up as a resource officer at an elementary school?
And more broadly, is it really a good idea to criminalize childhood misbehavior?
That's the fundamental question I want to ask.
This may be an extreme example of it, but grade schools all across the country have increasingly been treating discipline problems as legal infractions.
This is a trend that we are seeing.
With increasing regularity.
Kids who lack emotional maturity, not because there's something wrong with them, but because they're kids, now face the possibility of a criminal record for behavior that, you know, for our parents and grandparents would have simply landed them in detention.
But now we say, no, not detention, the detention center.
The criminalization of schoolyard bullying is another example.
There are many states across the country that have passed actual laws against bullying that affect even elementary schools.
So, a third grader who's bullying another third grader could be breaking the law now, and we're going to get the courts involved.
So, what you saw in the footage there is extreme, but not that extreme.
Here's the issue, though.
Children, especially in the elementary school ages, are not reasonable creatures.
They do not possess the psychological capacity to control themselves, their actions, to express their emotions the way that we can.
So that's why a six-year-old might freak out and cry and all these things.
It's because they don't have the wherewithal, they don't have the capacity to express themselves.
Yet.
I mean, they have some capacity for it, but not a fully developed capacity.
This, again, is not their fault.
It's just a natural facet of childhood.
We were all unreasonable and emotional children once.
All of us were.
Many of us still are.
Now, does this mean that misbehavior, disrespect, etc.
should be tolerated?
Or that disruptive children should be given free reign to do whatever they want?
No, of course not.
But, there's... See, to me, it seems like there's a lot of real estate in between letting a kid do whatever they want and arresting them and throwing them in jail.
It seems like there's a lot of room in between that we could explore.
Seems to me.
Now, if an adult hits another adult, that's assault.
When a six-year-old hits somebody, it's not assault any more than it's theft.
It's legal theft if a toddler steals a Barbie doll from her daycare center.
Does anyone think?
I mean, if we're putting six-year-olds in jail for hitting somebody, then is it that crazy to put a three- or four-year-old in jail for stealing a Barbie doll from the daycare center?
Bring them up on criminal charges of theft?
There's only a 2 or 3 year difference between the 3 or 4 year old and the 6 year old.
But this is a matter of culpability and we used to understand that children have very little of that.
Very little culpability that is.
In fact, a child's culpability is so negligible That even if that girl, even if she killed somebody, okay, let's, I mean, let's take the absolute worst case scenario we could possibly imagine, where this girl, rather than slapping somebody, which, by the way, there was no, no one went to the hospital, there was no injuries sustained, okay?
I mean, if you're seriously injured by getting slapped by a six-year-old girl, then you're like Mr. Glass in Unbreakable.
It's, that would be quite impressive.
So, there was no injuries, but let's just say, Absolute worst case scenario you could ever imagine.
Six-year-old girl somehow gets her hands on a gun, shoots somebody on purpose.
Even then, I would say it would be crazy to throw her in jail and charge her with a crime.
Why is that?
Because if a six-year-old girl is doing something like that, It is 100% guaranteed that her mind has been warped by severe, severe physical and emotional abuse at home.
And now she quite literally cannot control herself and doesn't know what she's doing.
That's a guarantee.
If you have a kid doing that, then you know that for a fact.
And in fact, even if she hasn't been abused, six-year-olds still don't really know what they're doing, and aren't actually capable of intentionally killing someone the way that we can, because they don't really understand what death is.
They don't understand the permanence of death, so they couldn't possibly appreciate what it actually means to kill somebody the way that you or I can.
So a six-year-old kills someone even in that case.
Yeah, you might have to take them to a facility to protect themselves and others.
But the goal there would be to treat them.
To treat the very severe psychological and emotional problems that they clearly have.
The goal is not to put them in a jumpsuit and throw them in the clink.
That's not what we do with six-year-olds.
Or at least we didn't used to.
But we're not just criminalizing childhood.
See, this issue goes even deeper than that.
Where childhood is not criminalized, it's medicalized.
And that's why over 7 million children in this country have been placed on psychiatric medication for mental disorders.
7 million children.
You actually think there are 7 million children in this country that are mentally ill?
7 million kids?
Mentally ill?
Well, we know that's not the case because half of those cases of kids that are on psychiatric drugs have a quote-unquote ADHD.
All in all, about 6 million children, over half of them under the age of 11, have been diagnosed with this phantom disorder of ADHD.
Now, as I've argued extensively elsewhere, and I won't get into the whole spiel again, but the ADHD diagnosis turns normal childhood behavior Into symptoms of mental illness.
Now, it may be true that these behaviors, a child who fidgets a lot, can't pay attention, has a lot of energy, you know, can't do busy work at all, that may be inconvenient, it may be difficult to deal with, but that doesn't mean that it's a symptom of a disorder.
Doesn't mean that the child is mentally ill.
If the school system's proper functioning depends on drugging millions of kids, if you're telling me that's the only way that this will work is if we drug these kids, then I would say it's the system that's disordered, not the kids.
The sickness is not in our kids, but in our attitude towards them and our expectations of them.
If millions of nine-year-old boys have a lot of trouble and seem incapable of sitting at their desk for eight hours a day performing busywork and regurgitating information onto Scantron sheets, well then maybe we should consider the possibility that this is not a very good way of educating nine-year-old boys.
Or we could keep shoving drugs in their face or sending them to jail until they shape up.
You know, that's one option.
No, our children are not mentally disordered.
They aren't criminals.
And this generation of children, not very different from any other generation before them.
I know we like to say, oh, kids today are so much worse.
Back in my day, we didn't act this way.
Well, you know what?
If you go back through history, literally every single generation of adults has said that about the current generation of kids.
Their contemporary generation of kids.
Maybe we should consider the possibility that this whole thing of, back in my day, people didn't do this.
Maybe we should consider the possibility that this is an illusion.
It's not actually like that.
That actually back in your day when you were a kid you were doing the same stuff.
You just don't remember it now.
Or you have a romantic view of your own behavior as a kid.
No, you were a little brat too.
It's just that you could be a little brat without getting drugs shoved in your mouth.
Or have the possibility of getting your mug shot taken at the age of six down at the juvenile detention center.
No, see, you were given space to be a kid.
You were allowed to make the mistake of acting your age when you were a child.
You were allowed to do that.
But no, our kids today, we don't let them.
Here's the thing.
It, here's the thing, and I say this again, because anytime I talk about this kind of
thing, what I'm told is, well, what do you expect the schools to do?
What can they do?
This is the only choice they have.
Well, if that's the case, then tear down the system.
Then tear down the entire system.
The system is broken.
Fundamentally.
And it needs to be destroyed completely and rebuilt from the ground up.
If you're telling me this is the only way the system works, is to drug kids, to criminalize them, to throw them in jail, to arrest them, to give them criminal records, To treat them for mental illnesses, to treat them like they're crazy, like they're psychotic, just because they're normal kids?
If you're telling me that's the only way that the system can function, then there are serious, serious problems with the system.
And what I would say is, if we can't tear down the entire system, which is what I would like to see happen, because I think our entire way of educating kids, our entire approach, is completely wrong, in my view.
But, if we can't do that, then at a minimum, if you're a parent like me with young kids, get your kids the hell out of this system.
Before your kids are destroyed by it.
Because they will be.
Alright.
Moving on.
Let's check in with some news.
Here are five headlines worth knowing about.
Number one, Pope Francis yesterday suggested during his general audience in St.
Peter's Square that we give up trolling for Lent.
So if you're thinking of, you know, if you haven't thought of something to give up for Lent yet, he said that now would be a good time to give up trolling the Internet.
Look, here's the thing.
I believe in making sacrifices for Len.
I think it's a good practice, certainly, but some sacrifices are just too much.
You have to be realistic.
And if we give up trolling, what exactly are we supposed to do with our time?
You tell people not to troll, next thing you know, everyone's doing heroin, because those are really the only two options that I can think of.
By the way, speaking of the Pope, as a Catholic, I am pleading with the Pope during this time of the coronavirus.
To finally get rid of the sign of peace during Mass?
Now, if you're not a Catholic, maybe you're not familiar, that's the part of the service, about two-thirds of the way through, where, randomly, the congregants are required to exchange awkward and perfunctory greetings with the people around them.
So we take a break from the sacred moment, take a break in the middle of the service, to exchange forced pleasantries with our neighbors immediately around us.
Which, of course, makes no sense.
It's a very silly and pointless ritual, in my view.
And also a great way to spread illness.
So maybe, with the possibility of a pandemic, this would be a good catalyst for getting rid of that.
And if you've got to do it... Look, you go to... There are many other churches.
You go to Protestant churches.
Many times, and I've been to plenty of those churches, in many cases there, they'll do a greeting type of thing before the service starts.
Now, okay, that can make sense.
Why are we doing it in the middle, randomly?
It makes no sense.
Number two, Donald Trump, speaking of the coronavirus, held a press conference with Mike Pence and the CDC last night to talk about the virus, and President Trump was Taking an approach of essentially downplaying it, this is a little bit of what he had to say.
Because of all we've done, the risk to the American people remains very low.
We have the greatest experts in the world, really in the world, right here.
People that are called upon by other countries when things like this happen.
We're ready to adapt and we're ready to do whatever we have to as the disease spreads, if it spreads.
As most of you know, the The level that we've had in our country is very low, and those people are getting better.
We think that, in almost all cases, they're — the better are getting.
We have a total of 15.
We took in some from Japan.
You heard about that, because they're American citizens and they're in quarantine.
And they're getting better, too.
But we felt we had an obligation to do that.
It could have been as many as 42.
We found that we were, it was just an obligation we felt that we had.
We could have left them and that would have been very bad.
Very bad, I think.
American people.
Honestly, I can't quite figure this out because it seems to me that the coronavirus is a perfect example of why we need strong borders, why we need to control who comes in here.
In fact, we'll talk more about this in a minute when we're canceling Elizabeth Warren.
So it's something that touches on that.
It also touches on the need to not be so reliant on foreign manufacturing because if there's a pandemic and major disruptions and we're reliant on China for all of our goods, that's a problem.
So that would be an angle, a perfect angle, for President Trump to take on this.
Given that those are two issues that he's talking about all the time.
Instead, he's gone the angle of saying that, you know, this is no big deal, don't worry about it.
I understand not wanting to foment a panic.
I'm all about that.
I also believe there's no reason to panic and we should be panicking.
But, you don't want to err on the side of appearing lackadaisical and unconcerned.
Number three, related to the previous item, Trump put Mike Pence in charge of heading up the coronavirus response and this move has provoked the expected reaction.
Here's what AOC had to say.
She tweeted, Mike Pence literally does not believe in science.
It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic.
This decision could cost people their lives.
Pence's past decisions already have.
Speaking of science, of not believing in science, Alexandria, just a quick question, quick science question.
You know, since you say he denies science and you believe in science.
So, quick science question.
Can men get pregnant?
I mean, as someone who believes in science, I'd be interested to hear your answer on that.
Number four, the House yesterday voted 410 to 4 to pass a bill making lynching a federal hate crime.
Now, of course, it was already illegal everywhere in the country to lynch somebody.
If you lynched someone prior to this bill, even if you had lynched someone anywhere, you'd be going to jail for probably the rest of your life, if not facing the death penalty, as you would deserve.
So this bill doesn't make lynching illegal.
But it does make it a federal crime, which means that, rather arbitrarily, this one particular method of murder will be a federal matter, whereas other methods are not.
So, if you, for example, are trying to decide how to kill somebody, and you decide, okay, I'm going to stab them, or beat them to death, or shoot them, well, the feds have no interest in that.
If you lynch them, okay, now the feds are interested.
Does that actually make sense?
The person is just as dead either way.
Does it make sense to arbitrarily say, okay, well, this kind of murder, that's, but this over here, no.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
But then the whole category of hate crime is itself absurd and also makes no sense.
The hate crime designation does two things.
Number one, it puts the government in the position of trying to read the mind of a criminal.
The government determines whether that person was hateful, whether they had hate in their heart when they committed the crime, which of course is actually impossible to determine, because you can't read somebody's mind.
And then, number two, the hate crime designation declares that crimes that are motivated by hatred are somehow automatically worse than crimes motivated by other things.
But why would that be the case?
You know, a person may murder out of hatred, Or they may do it out of jealousy, or anger, or greed, or indifference.
Are those other variants of murder not as bad somehow?
I don't see why that would be the case.
Take on one hand a man who kills another man because he wants to steal his wallet.
And then consider a man who kills another man because he hates him for his race, the color of his skin.
Is the second man worse than the first?
Is he more dangerous?
No.
On both counts, I would say no.
I don't think so.
I think they're equally evil, and they're equally as dangerous.
And the victim, again, is just as dead in both cases.
And while in the second case, the victim is dead because of the color of their skin, in the first, he's dead because the killer valued the $25 in his wallet more than his own life.
Is that better?
How so?
Why would it be?
And you can't say that hate crimes terrorize communities in special ways which justify the federal involvement.
I mean, they do terrorize communities, but communities are also terrorized by criminals who murder for money.
Many communities all over the country live in fear over people like that.
And you can't say that hate crimes inspire others in a special way.
They, that is, inspire copycats.
And so maybe you would say, well, they inspire copycats and that's why you need the feds involved.
They might inspire copycats, but again, other kinds of murder also do that.
Somebody pointed out yesterday when we were talking about this, someone pointed out, compare the Columbine kids, the Columbine killers, to Dylann Roof.
Now the latter was a hate crime, the former was not.
Which one of those do you think inspired more copycats?
I think very clearly the Columbine killers did.
They inspired a whole generation of school shooters.
Wasn't a hate crime, though.
You know, what they were doing, they were doing was just a crime of indifference and a crime of sort of general disdain for the human race.
I don't see why that should be treated with less seriousness than we treat a crime motivated by hatred.
All right.
Well, usually I do five, but I guess that's all I had.
I had four headlines.
Now, before we move on to canceling somebody, Wanted to give a shout out to all of our Daily Wire members.
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Now, time for your daily cancellation.
And today I'm very excited to be cancelling Elizabeth Warren.
Of course, there's a whole buffet of reasons.
There's a cornucopia of cancellable things that she has done and said when it comes to Elizabeth Warren.
But here's the latest.
I want to talk to you about this, because just tonight, President Trump detailed the administration's response to the spread of the coronavirus, and I want to tell you what it includes.
It includes stopping non-U.S.
citizens from coming to the U.S.
from China, screening people coming into the country from infected areas, quarantining those infected, and developing a vaccine.
Do you think that response is sufficient, Senator?
No.
But let's start because this really is serious, and we have a lot to talk about here.
We know that with any virus that develops, the most vulnerable will be our children, seniors, people with compromised immune systems who are undergoing treatment.
So this one, this one is tough.
So the way I think about this is first we think about allocation, kind of our overall approach.
I'm going to be introducing a plan tomorrow.
To take every dime that the president is now spending on his racist wall at our southern border and divert it to work on the coronavirus.
Okay, a few problems here, a few things.
First of all, a wall cannot be racist.
Can we get that clear?
Walls are physical objects.
They are barriers.
They are not racist.
They can't be because they're walls.
The walls in this room that I'm sitting in right now.
They have really no feelings, no prejudice.
They have no opinion of anyone's race.
I've never met a racist wall in my life.
I've never met a sexist wall, a homophobic wall.
I have met a few walls that, frankly, were a bit transphobic.
So I think transphobia can be a problem in the wall community.
But other than that, I don't think it's something we have to worry about.
Second thing.
More importantly, perhaps.
We're talking about a pandemic.
We're talking about a disease that potentially could sweep through the world across the globe like a forest fire.
Worst case scenario, of course.
And your solution is... Your solution is to make our borders more porous?
That's your solution?
That's the way you address a pandemic?
Your way to meet the pandemic head-on is to not enforce our borders.
Open borders.
So, your first thought when you hear, oh, pandemic, well, okay, we gotta open up the borders, that's the first thing we have to do.
That's like saying your plan for combating obesity is to give out Arby's coupons.
It really makes no sense.
Now, of course, this is what I was saying before, and this should be Trump's messaging.
And he should be damned happy, by the way, that I'm not cancelling him right now for not having this messaging.
But the message is, this is why we need to be able to control who comes into the country.
This is precisely why.
So Warren's position here is incoherent, reckless, dangerous, stupid, and she's cancelled.
She's cancelled times ten.
Times infinity, as my kids would say.
Alright, let's move on quickly before we wrap things up to some emails.
mattwalshowe at gmail.com mattwalshowe at gmail.com is the email address.
This is from Maria, says, Esteemed Mr. Walsh, I would like to thank you profusely for writing your incredible, thought-provoking, genuine book.
Which is a church of cowards right here.
Forget Shakespeare.
This needs to be required reading for all the West.
Also, I must say, your book came at the most opportune time.
I'm currently a high school student, and not only was your book the reason I didn't pay attention all day today, but much less do my homework, but more importantly, your book is immensely beneficial in the writing of my argument as to whether America can truly claim to be a Christian nation, and it proved as an instrumental source for the sermon I will soon give to my youth group.
God is not convenient fitting your faith into your lifestyle versus making faith a lifestyle.
Not only was your book instructive, but also hilarious, although honestly, considering you wrote it, I don't know why I'm surprised.
I know that the appreciation of a teenager isn't much, but for what it counts, I think you did an absolutely phenomenal job.
This book stated what we all need to hear, the unpopular truth.
God bless you and your family.
Well, Maria, thank you for that, and of course your check will soon be in the mail.
You did your part.
Thank you.
From, um... Let's see here.
From Ryan says, I'd like to hear your response to this counterpoint.
You said a bachelor's degree only tells that the person could pay for college or was willing to take out a loan.
Seldom is the situation such that you only know their level of degree though.
Generally on a resume, you know their major, their GPA, and of course the school.
If you know someone had a marketing degree from Yale and a 4.0, are you really willing to say you still know nothing about them aside from the fact that they have a degree?
Well, Ryan, of course, a 4.0 GPA and a marketing degree from one of the top schools in the world would tell you something as an employer, of course.
But those are additional bits of information.
My point was that the simple fact that a person has a degree, that fact alone, just that, they have a degree, tells me nothing.
Tells me absolutely nothing about the person.
So if you tell me that Bob Smith has a college degree, and that's all you tell me, I know nothing about Bob Smith.
He could be dumb.
He could be smart.
He could be lazy.
He could be hardworking.
He could be anything.
I don't know anything about him just by the fact that he has a college degree.
And this is why a college degree, in and of itself, shouldn't be a prerequisite for many of these jobs.
Because instead, the individual merits and experience of the individual applicants should be what we consider.
So imagine that.
Revolutionary idea.
Someone's applying for a job.
Why don't you look at them specifically and see what they bring to the table?
Now, if you consider Bob Smith's individual merits and experiences, you might discover that he has a college degree, he has a 4.0, all that other stuff.
And obviously now you know you have on your hands a very promising candidate for pretty much any entry-level job anywhere.
But if you're willing to look at the specifics of Bob, then if you've got Jim over here, who has no college degree, why don't you look at his specifics?
Because what if Jim has no degree, but he's 23, he's been working at the same retailer since he was 18, started as a part-time cashier, now he's an assistant store manager, he's been climbing up the ladder of success, being promoted.
What does that tell you about him?
It tells you he's a hard worker, he has management experience, he's reliable, he can work with people, he has at least some skills in sales probably.
It tells you many things about him.
And Jim, too, would be a very promising candidate for an entry-level position at pretty much any company.
But with the way things work now, Jim's resume goes directly in the trash just because he doesn't have that piece of paper.
Even though he has all that experience and all of that skill.
It goes right in the trash.
Even though he would probably be a better candidate for the job than 90% of the college graduates who are coming in the door for interviews.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Finally, from Josh, says, Matt, on your show you argued that we should lay some of the blame for student debt at the feet of universities who charge a fortune in tuition because they can, and employers who require degrees for no reason other than what you term laziness.
A bit of history and economics show why both of these are bad arguments.
Historically, these practices by universities and employers are the result of increasing demand for and acquisition of college degrees.
They're the result rather than the cause of the problem.
Economics explains the phenomenon in both cases.
The first principle is simply supply and demand.
A corollary of this principle is that price is at bottom a mechanism by which goods are rationed among all possible buyers.
So, universities charge more because there are more dollars chasing fewer degrees, and there has to be some method of reaching an equilibrium where the number of buyers matches the number of things to be bought.
So in reality, universities are just responding to market forces.
The only reason prices are so high is that ultimately the government has made it unnaturally easy to get funding for college, this artificially increasing demand, which in turn In the case of employers, the phenomenon is similar, except
that the degree is the price of getting the job.
You say this is due to laziness, but I think this is an unwarranted assumption on your
part.
True, a person with no degree but some work experience might be a better fit, but not
necessarily.
Thus, employers still have to consider all applicants, and narrowing the pool by increasing
the requirements is not laziness, but rather a cost-saving measure.
The man hours required to sort through a list of applicants represent an opportunity cost
to the employer, which it's perfectly reasonable to try to avoid.
I think you're also ignoring the fact that many employers have alternate requirements, such as A, possess a degree, or B, have a certain amount of experience.
Furthermore, I'm sure that in most cases, even if an applicant lacks a degree, he could still potentially get the job if he can show that he has a history of relevant experience that would be worth more than degree.
Okay, well Josh, I think all you've done here is explain why universities and companies can get away with doing what they're doing.
It doesn't prove that it must be this way, that they must do it this way.
The cost of a degree has risen by 100%.
100% since I was born in 1986.
You know, the average cost of a degree.
Tuition rates are increasing eight times faster than wages.
This is exorbitant.
Grotesque.
Obviously.
The degree is worth at this point a fraction of what it costs to obtain.
And almost nobody who walks in the door of a college can actually afford the degree that they're getting.
Now, you say that market forces explain it.
Yes, they explain how the universities are able to get away with bilking people like this, but it doesn't explain why they need to or have to.
I get that they can.
I understand that.
They don't have to, though.
They don't need to do this.
They could charge half of what they charge.
They could charge a quarter of what they charge.
They could do that.
There's no reason why they can't.
Now, you say this is a way of rationing the goods, but as you point out yourself, The government has made it so that they can charge whatever they want because the loans are dished out like candy.
So this isn't really a way of rationing anything.
This is just a way for the universities to take advantage of the situation.
I don't see it as rationing.
Everybody gets a degree.
It's just that they're charged a lot more, they have to pay a lot more in the end.
How is that rationing?
Also, there are other ways of rationing the degrees.
There are other barriers of entry.
Grade point average, exams, test scores, so on and so forth.
It's not as though, you know, if tuition was cheaper, the universities would have to throw open their doors and any old person can wander in.
They can still control who they give admittance to.
But they could do it based on something other than the person's willingness to plunge themselves into three decades of crushing debt.
That's my point.
As for employers, you say that narrowing the pool by disqualifying non-college grads is a cost-saving measure.
Well, even if that's true, I would say that not all cost-saving measures are automatically right or good.
You know?
And this is one that isn't.
But it's actually not a cost-saving measure.
Because you're ruling out many candidates who could potentially be better, more effective, more reliable employees.
You're limiting at the very start your pool of candidates only to those who are likely to have very little real-world work experience.
Because they've been in college this whole time.
So you're limiting yourself only to them.
Which means that they're probably going to need more training in the end, and maybe less reliable in a working environment.
And all of that will cost you money in the long run.
So no, I don't think it actually is a cost-saving measure.
I think if they took a more hands-on approach to their own hiring practices, and they were willing to actually assess the merits of the people that come in, yes, it may be a little bit more effort in the short run.
But I think in the long run, you save money.
Why don't they do it?
Well, I go back to laziness.
I think it's just, it's just easier to do it this way.
It's also just what everybody does.
And so you figure if you're a company, this is what people do.
And so this is how it is.
And so this is what I'm going to do.
It's a lack of imagination also.
And also I think there's an element of many of these employers, the people that are in these HR departments and so on, they all have college degrees.
And so I think there's a little bit of a snobbery to it.
And also I think they don't want to start, if all these employers with college degrees start hiring people without college degrees, now they've devalued their own college degree and they don't want to do that.
So there's selfishness too.
So I think it's snobbishness, I think it's selfishness, I think it's laziness, I think it's a lack of imagination in so many cases.
And that is why we have $1.5 trillion in debt.
All right, but thank you for that counter-argument.
Very, very interesting arguments put forward.
We'll leave it there.
Thanks everybody for watching.
Thanks for listening.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Supervising Producer Robert Sterling, Technical Producer Austin Stevens, Editor Danny D'Amico, Audio Mixer Robin Fenderson.
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