what is the most horrible university degree?

So you are actually going to pretend that some people can actually achieve a sense of satisfaction just from learning? Even if that knowledge doesn't result in increased earnings? You are obviously totally out of touch with the current zeitgeist.

 

Ah, so you agree that Capitalism is ignorant.

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That's what I've spent my entire life doing. That's why I know plenty about things completely unrelated to my area of study. Because I enjoy it.

You're obviously out of touch with humanity.

 

What is the most horrible university degree? Heck that answer is easy. It is the degree that the taxpayer is left holding the bag for in student loads that will NEVER BE REPAID...

 

Learning can be very enjoyable and capitalism does not discourage that. You don’t need to spend much money to learn. But this topic is about opportunity costs. The role of universities would likely be much clearer to students if we lived in a free market. The government subsidizes the mentality that everybody should go to college, so universities have been artificially empowered to jack up tuition costs every semester to support numerous programs that have negative market value to students.

 

Philosophy degree may not have many real world applications, but it has lots of interesting things and concepts to study. And it teaches critical and logical thinking. So its not that bad. Most horrible degrees are those that lack both marketable skills and also scientific merit. Women or black studies and such. And theology is quite a pseudoscience, too.

 

Capitalism punishes you for going to college for something that doesn't profit a bourgeois employer by saddling you with crushing debt that you can't remove.

Tell that to six figure student loan debts.

All the "free market" means is that the wealthy get free range to (*)(*)(*)(*) all over everyone.

Or maybe we could destroy the system that makes this possible and operate institutions of higher learning for the purpose of bettering ourselves rather than for fattening the wallets of the ruling class.

 

No, scarcity punishes you. What do you propose to overcome that? Theft?

Sure, no problem.

It means that resources are acquired through voluntary exchange rather than violence.

Who gets to decide what is best for me?

 

Good line. I might steal it some day.



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Scarcity is an inherent element of Capitalism. If there is no scarcity, Capitalism will create false scarcity. Without scarcity, there is no profit to be made.

My point was that a higher education requires enslaving yourself to the debt system.

Under capitalism, there is no voluntary exchange. Consume or die. Serve the interests of the bourgeoisie or die. That's not a voluntary exchange. That's a mugging. Capitalism is theft.

Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie.

After capitalism, you do.

 

It's an element of life. We all have limited time to live, that's why opportunity costs are important to consider. That's also why it hurts to see a slug of my paycheck stolen by the government. The free market is simply people entering win-win arrangements through voluntary exchange. Now in a controlled economy, that's where you get artificial scarcity, e.g. Venezuela.

I know that was your point. Degrees aren’t the only way you can learn. And if you learn how to code you don’t need an expensive degree to have a nice career. Our government run education system has done a terrible job of preparing kids to think strategically. Also, a couple posts ago I explained to you why the inflation in tuition costs is the government’s fault.

Whatever you're calling capitalism is certainly not a free market.

 

There's enough resources on this earth for everyone. The problem is distribution. Capitalism distributes only to those the bourgeoisie deems worthy.

A college is an obvious way to learn. If you want to teach yourself, that's a completely different skillset. Not everyone can do that. I was competent in multiple programming languages at age 15, but few people share my obsessive drive to consume information.

Capitalism is defined by the capitalist mode of production. Your absurd dream of letting the wealthy do whatever they want somehow leading to them treat people with human decency has nothing to do with it.

 

Funny, the bourgeoisie never backs free market candidates. But socialism has at least 2 fatal flaws in the area of distribution. First is the obvious problem of economic calculation. Central planners are simply unable to make all economic calculations themselves. What should a ton of steel cost? If you want a money free economy, how do you know how much steel to produce? Any labor or resource that go to steel are directed away from other tasks. The second fatal flaw I can see is, what do you do on day #2, the day after you turn the USA into a socialist country? Lets say you somehow got the allocation of wealth just how you wanted it. The mass executions are over, the skulls have been cracked, and society is finally "fair". What about day #2? People will want to exchange goods. People will innovate. Before long, life won't look as fair to you. Do you set up a costly monitoring regime to watch all economic activity? Do you have another bloody reset?

It doesn't have to be a different skillset. Kids spend a massive percentage of their young lives in gov't schools. An overall lack of market awareness is not the free market's fault.

Again, the big dogs like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs weren't backing Ron Paul. Also, if people are too rotten to take care of each other, the last thing we need is an all-powerful socialist regime that is led by... people. I don't think I'm the one with the absurd dream. You have to solve socialisms very real problem of economic calculation, and you also need to explain how, at the same time, humans are too evil to be trusted in a free market but angelic enough to be trusted at the top of a socialist regime.

 

False consciousness is much more beneficial than skipping out on a few taxes.

There's also the fact that the bourgeoisie aren't a monolithic entity and the appearance otherwise are a result of material conditions rather than intentional collusion.

This is why workers' councils are established. The workers democratically communicate their needs and organize with other workers in order to ensure all needs are met.

You produce according to need, of course.

Establish workers councils and organize the syndicates/party/communes/whatever the main unit of society is. After that, you can work on identifying and fixing problems with productivity, innovating technologically, and improving quality of life.

Mass executions don't need to happen. If someone wages war against the working class, obviously you've got to fight back. But there's no need to kill people that aren't initiating violence.

People don't want to exchange goods. People want what the goods give them. People want a better quality of life. They want time to master the arts, places to go with their families, resources so they don't need to worry about starving, etc.

Communism is not averse to innovation. Innovation can happen anywhere. Communism just adds altruism into the mix rather than profit being the sole motive. The end result is that technology is accessible and exists to benefit all.

None of that is necessary.

How do those three sentences connect? I'm too baffled at how disjointed that paragraph is to respond to it.

Humans are not inherently evil. The material conditions created by capitalism, however, result in cruelty. Groupthink and the belief that you need to be a cutthroat to stay ahead create reckless destruction. This mentality takes hold in all of society and all of the sudden, everyone is too busy trying to survive to be kind.

 

Worker's Councils?

How about Loafer's Councils?

I would be willing to join a Loafer's Council.

As it turns out, we at Local 69 of the International Brotherhood of Slackers, Malingerers and Goof-offs all need Lamborghinis, fillet minion, and plenty of beer.

When can you get it delivered?

 

There is a lot more seperating free market candidates from Democrat/Republicans than lower taxes.

Yes, the various worker groups whose demands are unified until they actually achieve the socialism they fought for. Then they actually have to decide, among each other, whose needs are more important. All this in a scenario where the Party holds a monopoly of power and nobody is free to defy them, or else it isn't communism. Surely this democratic process would be lily white with no hint of self serving corruption.

Which is measured by...? Should raw materials go to an iPhone or laptop? Neither may be "necessary".

Heaven forbid people choose to fix any problem through voluntary exchange, because further down below in your post you have determined that people shouldn't want to do that.

What does it mean to wage war on the working class? Can I grow food and exchange it for silver without being killed?

Exchanging goods is how we deal with scarcity and the division of labor. If I don't want to associate with your councils, it sounds like I would be in danger. In your system we still have to work. Exchange is what makes this labor voluntary. I have to work to eat, and the Party decides what I get in return for my work. But maybe my neighbor can offer me something that I like more. Maybe my neighbor wants something that the Party hasn't determined there is a need for. Is this not where socialism gets violent?

Well it sounds like worker groups decide what they need, and people are discouraged from operating outside those boundaries.

We can't just overlook all the mass murders that communist regimes have commited.

Learning to code is cheap, and there is a shortage of capable programmers in the job market. The government has decided that it's their responsibility to train our kids, and many kids are opting to get expensive degrees that have negative market value.

Again, we can't just overlook all the mass murder that communist regimes have commited. Horrible people are attracted to positions of political power. Governments are better at destruction than any other institution.

The free market doesn't mean you have to be cutthroat, it means you have to make somebody else happy in order to do well for yourself.

 

Knowledge does have value, in and of itself, quite apart from its utility; however, its value often does not transcend its cost.
When that cost is thrust upon others, its value does not even justify its cost.

 

The actual problem these days is the fact too many people are educated beyond their intelligence. A college degree does not insure practical knowledge.

 

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OK, well its the same thing, isn't it? UNLESS you're contending that "there is no difference whatsoever in the relative usefulness, to an individual or society, in what degree is pursued", AND you are contending that "it is never appropriate to pursue knowledge for its utility", then I can't see any problem with discouraging a specific pursuit of knowledge based on its utility. If you think its flawed, then the onus is on you to explain just how it is flawed.

Just a guess here, but I think that the mistake here is your conflation of degree and knowledge. The two are not the same, nor are they pursued for the same reasons. If they were, you'd find a lot more people just reading books rather than going to classes.

 

My point was that people falsely believing that they're making a difference is a good way to make sure that the current system retains power.

You're assuming an autocratic party. And after capitalism, there's no need to prioritize everyone. Industry is more efficient when you focus on putting out quality resources rather than maximizing profit margins.

That's a question for the workers councils to address.

There is no voluntary exchange under capitalism.

Basically, if you violently resist the new order, you'll be dealt with as an enemy combatant. If you simply grumble and gripe, you'll just get a lot of dirty looks.

If your neighbor has better resources, that points to a flaw in distribution that needs to be addressed.

It's direct democracy. If you don't want to participate in democracy, your opinion doesn't matter.

Attributing all natural deaths due to famine to the government is intellectually dishonest. Once you take those numbers out, you'll find that the main causes of wrongful death were Yezhov's purges in the USSR (Yezhov would later be executed for his crimes), The cultural revolution in the PRC (The Chinese Communist Party would later admit that this went a lot further than they meant it to), and Pol Pot's mass killings (Pol Pot was stopped by Vietnamese communists. Capitalist countries were happy to sit by and watch.)

I'm not an authoritarian communist at all, but come on, a lot of the hate surrounding the USSR and PRC is just propaganda.

Having a solid understanding of the mathematical theory of computation is always beneficial in programming. An accredited course in Comp Sci is helpful in that regard.

That's why we need transparency.

The USSR and PRC fell into corruption and abandoned the marxist principles that they were founded on. Modern communists analyze them to learn from their mistakes.

And do to that, you need to have the highest profit margin. You need to cut one more corner; run one more ad; halve one more paycheck than the other guy.

 

One thing we know, is regardless of the degree, educated people are better off than uneducated people. That's been proven for years. In fact, it's getting worse for the uneducated.

 

I am obviously being sarcastic! And I don't actually actually think it is possible to apply educational criteria to Economic systems.

 

I know, I just like poking fun.

 

You hit the nail! The only way to leverage worthless degrees in things like "black studies" and subjects like that is to continue on to get a Doctorate degree in it and then get a cushy job teaching this crap in some college or university.

 

A degree is less and less representative of an education and more and more representative of a pattern of bad judgment every year.

I grant you that kids today need at least two years of university just to remediate what we learned in high school, but even that is far more representative of the bad judgment of educators than education.

The problem is that, by the time these kids graduate, far too much of what they know just isn't so.

 

I'm assuming you're being sarcastic. Learning and truly understanding something gives me a huge sense of satisfaction.