Dude and Val, I echo your advice on the ignore feature. I side-stepped my own rule to the thread’s detriment. Now, users will have to wade through an infinite regress of vacuous quotes, self-appointed editorializations with no reference to reality, false victim narratives, and obtuse questions that could be answered by even the most cursory reading of the resources requested, or previous posts.

As for the topic at hand, fundamentally, unwillingness to even consider some role for public financing of post-secondary education—where merit and need support it—boils down to prejudice and a naked desire to subvert those who are vulnerable for self-aggrandizement. It’s the robber baron mentality of the 21st century. As long as a class of people (economically disadvantaged minors) can be discounted and dehumanized through insistent denial of their different childhood conditions, made economically and/or socially inadequate for reasons almost entirely out of their control, the morally depraved will continue to perpetuate these cancerous narratives.

If the poor can be said to remain poor simply because they’re “too lazy” to buck up and accept indentured servitude, and be categorically written off as behaving like “entitled” spendthrifts—so the narrative goes—then we can save money for ourselves and our own elite families while superciliously purporting to be Superior Humans for the luck of the social draw from which we benefited.

Fast forward 30 years, and people who espouse under-investment in human capital will be lamenting the lack of a tax base with which to fund their retirement activities, and to support those institutions they take for granted. Privilege and self-interest are rarely self-aware; how else could one justify such societally irrational behaviour?

What is to give light must endure burning.