They’ll huff, and they’ll puff until they’ve blown the house down.
It’s the normal sort of behavior at the beginning of any new administration. The only things that change are the demands themselves and who makes them.
This time around, a bunch of people are demanding that all student loan debt be canceled. A hundred of them will go on a debt strike, “refusing to pay back their loans.” The initiative is called the Biden Jubilee 100: 100 strikers for Biden’s first 100 days.
It’s a little difficult to see the pressure being applied here. One hundred people not making monthly payments is hardly going to bring the people who print money to their knees. But there is reason to take the stories seriously. Who are these people, how much debt do they have, and why? Here are a few of the 100 debtors.
The chutzpah of Armen Henderson, who is very possibly still doing his medical residency, is admirable. Sure, it might be another few years before he’s fully qualified, but at that point, he will be on maybe $250,000 per year. And taxpayers should pay for his $600,000 training bills?
Shamell Bell owes $300,000 for her Ph.D. in culture and performance from UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance department. Sure, dance is fun and healthy — it’s even art at times — but what rational universe has people spending that amount on a doctorate in it?
Tiffany Konyen might have made a life error in running up $320,000 to get a job as a student fellow at a private university (one that has a “School of Consciousness and Transformation”), but I’m unconvinced the public should be paying for it.
Examples abound in the “debt collective’s” list, demonstrating exactly why we don’t have “free” college. Teaching someone costs money. Doing college means the loss of doing something else. There are significant expenses to it all, and therefore, it’s reasonable to have barriers to people borrowing resources on degrees with little chance of delivering a good return.
Of course, freedom and liberty mean that students can do what they like on their own dime, but it shouldn’t be done on ours. That is precisely why college costs should be charged — so that people have a reason to focus on the value of what they are doing.
Otherwise, we will ignore the lessons found in Milton Friedman’s strictures on the four ways to spend money: You can spend your own on yourself, your own on other people, that of others on yourself, or that of others on other people.
The reason to make adults pay for their own choices is so that they consider the choices they are making. Can you imagine what it would be like if the taxpayer had to carry the weight?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
