I'm against student loan forgiveness, not because I'm against giving the money out... but because I'm against giving it out only to student loan debtors. Here's the idea... give everyone equally a #UBI and let the people with student loans repay it from there. I'm ok with limiting interest rates too, and rolling back capitalization of back interest... totally fine with that. But if we're creating money out of thin air and giving it to anyone, it should 100% be equally distributed.
@dlakelan I'm totally for free education for everyone. That you even have to think about paying back loans for your education sounds completely bonkers to me. (Written by someone with a degree that did not cost them any money, apart from normal costs of living.)
If I were to revamp the US educational system, K-12 would become K-10 then people would have UBI and what we call "city colleges" or "community colleges" would be very low cost as they are today. I would still charge tuition typical for the University of California or Cal State Univ. systems at the bachelor degree program level, but you'd only really be doing that for 2 years instead of 4... and Masters, MD, PhD, and other professional degrees would require tuition
sufficient to cover the cost of operating the educational environment...
Research would be focused less on university organizations and more on research nonprofits. Of course you could mix them, but our current system makes Universities a system for capturing govt rents and education quality is a 3rd or 4th priority.
@dlakelan 🤷 I do not have an opinion about any details of the US higher education system. I'm German. The three digit tuition I had to pay was mostly for a public transport ticket. And I could pay that from my salary of a student job I had on the side. If I had to take a loan, I would never have studied.
A huge huge huge part of why we have such a non-functional economy with wealth inequality so high is because banks create money but they give it almost exclusively to rich people. In this graph you can see commercial debt, CPI adjusted, per capita, through time. Repeatedly we give brand newly created money (aka Loans) to business owners, they fuck shit up, then we bail them out again, it's an amplifying oscillation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1lz5V
When you create money and give it to rich people, rich people buy up capital assets with it, consolidating businesses, stuff like "private equity firms". These seek out short term financial gains rather than long term real asset gains.
Here's mortgage asset level per capita CPI adjusted... To get mortgage loans you have to be wealthy... So again wealthy people buy up houses, which we aren't constructing much anymore either.
Commodity money (ie. gold or silver or whatever) needed banks because you needed a fucking fortress to actually keep people from running away with the gold bars. But we don't need that anymore with fiat money. Fiat money is money not something as money it's just serving the money function, and the bank vault is largely pointless, the function that banks serve is pretty much third party accountants. They're also serving this outdated function of "deciding who to loan to".
A vast fraction of the best things we can produce in society are public goods. Ignoring the bullshit we have developed in terms of copyright and patent law... Think of movies, books, music, the linux kernel, Arduinos, Julialang, Python, Jupyter, Geogebra, public education, public concerts, YouTube videos about science and history and economics... These are all non-rivalrous... we can all consume them together once created. So we should be funding them by creating money as grants.
No bank should be saying "well, how much do you imagine you can charge for your public YouTube video on traveling flames Mr Steve Mould? (https://youtu.be/SqhXQUzVMlQ?si=IvbHaw-SSZ3-cYsq) The answer is, fuck charging for that. And fuck "advertiser supported", just PAY STEVE TO MAKE THIS GREAT CONTENT AND LET EVERYONE WATCH IT. And get Google out of the middle of it. And simply "print" the money to provide the grant to get him to do it (ie. manufacture it out of thin air) the same way we "printed" the money for GWOT.
That's been my rant for the day and now I'm tagging @economics@a.gup.pe at the tail end of this rant... If you're interested in the question of funding public goods via "printing" money and whether we should have banks involved in money creation at all, and student loan forgiveness and all that, you'll want to click and read from the beginning. thanks for coming to my TED talk.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
I mean, if you have a commodity money? Fiat money is 100% seigniorage, you're turning worthless bits in a computer into money. Fiat money is what we want because it doesn't use up gold or silver or platinum or copper or whatever else. It's using memory to perform the function of memory.
The absolute key to reciprocity and cooperation is memory. If you woke up every morning forgetting entirely who everyone was or what they'd done in the past, and with no recordkeeping, you'd never be able to work together. Money is a part of an intricate global memory system that allows us to cooperate without ever even having met 99.99999% of all people.
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