April 25, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:09
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|---|---|
| Hi everybody, this is Van Molenieu from Free Domain. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| This is Thought Bites. | |
| Today, we're going to take a little chunk out of the problem of student loans. | |
| In America, it is a huge issue. | |
| default rates are through the roof, and the outstanding loans are staggering, and the quality of the education-slash-indoctrination-slash-anti-Western-brain-shredding Marxism that you're being exposed to is questionable at best. | |
| Actually, that's not quite true. | |
| The Marxism and indoctrination is very, very high quality, which means it will turn you into an anti-free market resentful employee who can't seem to get ahead because he or she hates the entire system that produces the wealth that allowed you to go to university in the first place. | |
| So the question is, when you want to talk about education, what is education for? | |
| What is the end purpose? | |
| If you don't know the end purpose of something, then you can't organize. | |
| If you don't know where you want to go in a car, then you can't organize your journey. | |
| If you don't know what the goal is. | |
| So the end destination is you can't organize anything. | |
| That leads up to it. | |
| So the question is, what is the goal of education? | |
| Now, there are two aspects to what education can provide to you. | |
| One is quantifiable, and the other is not quite as quantifiable. | |
| Who most requires education are customers. | |
| People who want to buy a house, they need people who are educated in designing and building houses. | |
| People who want to buy cars need people who are educated in the designing and building of cars. | |
| People who want to go to a mall, you understand how this all, you want a phone, people need to be educated in how to create and produce phones. | |
| So who requires Or, who is the end customer of education is whoever slaps down their money across a table and picks something up that you have produced. | |
| So the customer is the end goal. | |
| The satisfaction of the customer is the end goal of education. | |
| Now some wants are going to be constant food and shelter and some wants are going to be more transitory, particular music styles, fashion styles and so on. | |
| But basically it's the end customer who is the consumer and should determine the value. | |
| of the education. | |
| In other words, education should be valued according to free market principles. | |
| We'll get to the less quantifiable education in a sec, but if we understand that, then who represents the desires of the end customer? | |
| Well, the end customer isn't going to go out and hire an architect if they want a house. | |
| They're just going to go to some MLS listing, they buy a house or whatever, get a real estate agent, buy a house. | |
| So it is companies that need to hire people who have the educational expertise to satisfy their customers' needs. | |
| So given that, the end goal is to satisfy the customers' needs, but the person who judges those customer needs is a business, it should be businesses, of course, who pay for education. | |
| And I'm not talking about reading, writing, and arithmetic. | |
| I'm talking about all the higher education stuff, sort of post-high school. | |
| Which would be high school if we didn't waste so much time in the brain porridge of government education, but as it stands right now. | |
| So businesses, as proxy for the end value preferences of customers, are the ones who should pay for the education of the young. | |
| And because it is businesses who are consuming the education on behalf of the customers, Then it is businesses who should pay, and the way that they should pay is quite simple. | |
| If you need an engineer, then you should pay for that engineer to become educated, pay all their costs, maybe even their room and board, and in return, of course, they'll work for you in the summers, but all they do is they sign a piece of paper that says, if you pay for my education, I will work for you for X period of time after I graduate. | |
| And that way, Businesses are constantly recalibrating the demand that they foresee for engineers in the future. | |
| And people graduate from university with a guaranteed job for a certain number of years. | |
| And of course, you can always leave early, but then you're responsible for the cost of the education. | |
| You know, like if you cash in your cell phone upgrade early, you're responsible for the difference. | |
| So it's not like slavery or anything like that. | |
| It's certainly not the debt slavery. | |
| I was talking about this on Twitter and one woman posted a horrifying story about how her daughter graduated with a degree in Latin American Studies and she graduated $150,000 in debt. | |
| It's eight years later and that debt is now down to $140,000. | |
| And that's crippling because that means you can't get married. | |
| I mean, what sane guy is going to want to take on that kind of debt? | |
| And can you have a family? | |
| So, you know, the student debt at the moment is a way of Making sure that the smartest people have the fewest kids, which is really catastrophic for society as a whole. | |
| So yeah, businesses, on behalf of customers, should pay for the education of the young. | |
| And the young should then work for them for a certain amount of time or buy their way out of the contract if that's what they want. | |
| And that way you know that you have a job when you graduate and you also know that your skills are going to be in demand and businesses will be competing to give you the best salary and the best options if you're the brightest person graduating or among the top 50, 70 percent, whatever. | |
| I mean, it doesn't really matter, but there'll be a lot of competition for the brightest and best. | |
| Now, this of course means that businesses are not going to be funding a lot of Latin studies, or, you know, the lesbian dance literature, or whatever it is that's going on in schools. | |
| So this is good for students, this is good for businesses, this is good for society as a whole, because we have very scarce and precious resources in society. | |
| All human desires are infinite. | |
| All resources are finite. | |
| We've got to find a way to apply our scarce resources to maximum effect. | |
| Businesses on the hook for their own money are the best judges of that and that means we have a great calibration between need and supply and it's a wonderful thing. | |
| Now, there is another aspect of education That is not directly economically valuable but produces wiser and more well-rounded citizens. | |
| So you can study history, you can study certain aspects of philosophy and so on and you become like a good citizen in many ways and you become a well-rounded person, good conversationalist and so on. | |
| Now of course you can take that to YouTube. | |
| You can take that to podcasting. | |
| You can do what Dan Carlin has done. | |
| You can do what other people have done. | |
| You can do what I have done. | |
| I have a degree, a master's degree, in history, focusing on the history of philosophy, and I run the world's biggest philosophy show. | |
| So you can find a way to leverage that expertise that you have. | |
| But if you can't, then it's nice that you do it. | |
| But something that you study and pursue, that does not have direct economic value, It's called a hobby, and society should not be funding your hobbies. | |
| This is Stevan Molyneux from Free Domain. | |
| Thank you so much for watching and listening. | |
| This is ThoughtBytes. |
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