Sunday, April 10, 2011

Atheist goes Political, vol. 4: Educational Expenses

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87sOK3igQZc

            I’ve been subscribed to xxxThePeachxxx for a while, and I usually like her vids and have a hard time finding aspects of them to disagree with, but in one video from a little while ago, I found a point of contention.  She made three videos addressing the subject of prostitution, and in those videos, she made a number of points I hadn’t considered previously.  Her argument, in each case, is that prostitution should be legal.  Afterall, there’s nothing necessarily illegal about consenting adults having sex and there’s nothing necessarily illegal about consenting adults exchanging money, so why does it suddenly become illegal when the two activities are combined?
            I understand making it illegal to sell tobacco and alcohol to people underage because it is illegal to give tobacco and alcohol to people underage.  I can understand making it a crime to have sex for money with someone only 15 years old, because it is a crime to have sex in general with someone only 15 years old.  I can understand making it a crime to have sex with someone for money against her will, because it is a crime to have sex with someone in general against her will.
            In every other case, activities that are a crime with money are also a crime without it.  Why the exception?  To borrow the immortal words of George Carlin, how can it be illegal to sell something it’s legal to give away?
            Additionally, when prostitution is legal, a prostitute who is assaulted by a client has the option to go to the police.  She cannot rely on the protection of the law if she, herself, is a criminal.  Instead, the best she can hope for is the protection of a pimp whose behavior is not governed by the same accountability mechanisms as a law enforcement agency.  This leaves her open to that pimp’s exploitation.
            Clearly, the Peach anticipated, perhaps from experience, finding herself dealing with people determined to equate all prostitution with human trafficking, and so was compelled, in each of the videos in question, to emphasize that she was referring to LEGAL, CONSENTING ADULTS.  She was, and so am I.
            Her main point in these videos I am hard-pressed to dispute, but in one, she made an adjacent point that I have a problem with.  She said that prostitution is always a choice; that there are always alternatives.  Clearly, she is convinced that this particular premise is well founded.  I, on the other hand, am convinced otherwise.  Here’s why.
            Consider two long-term trends in this country: First, every year, on average, it becomes just a little more difficult for the less educated to find work.  Every year, education becomes just a little more important to the work force.  Some years are exceptions but this is the overall trend.
            Second, every year, on average, education becomes just a little more expensive, and therefore, less available to the work force.  Increasingly more so, the only way to have work is by having education, the only way to have education is by having money, and the only way to have money is by having work.  With increasing frequency, one who has no work, no education, and no money, has no prospects for obtaining any combination of the three.
            With the increasing proliferation of this particular catch-22, with this particular trap snaring more and more people, with more and more people having fewer and fewer options, I am hard-pressed to see how one can say that there are always alternatives.  In order for this premise to be well founded, one would have to account for every situation which could arise.  Indeed, if such is the case, then why is the exploitation of a pimp a problem?
            If I’m right about this, though, it only strengthens her main point that prostitution should be legal.
            This dovetails with my next point about educational expenses.  Consider student A and student B.  Each wants to be an attorney and each begins college the same year, and after graduating from college, goes on to law school, and after three years, each graduates and passes the bar and is officially an attorney.  But student A was able to pay for the whole thing with grants and scholarships, while student B had to use loans instead.  Student B graduates with more than $100,000 in debt hanging over his head.
            Now they hit the job market and each finds abundant opportunities.  Each finds plenty of prospective employers or clients who would benefit from their services and who are willing to provide pretty generous compensation for them.  But Student B can’t work with most of them because the compensation they offer, however generous, is not enough to help him make progress on paying off his debt.  The only places that offer enough to help Student B make this progress are huge corporations.
            These huge corporations realize that, the less available they can make these grants and scholarships, the more they can replace them with loans, and the higher educational costs become, the fewer attorneys there will be like Student A (potential legal adversaries) and the more there will be like student B (allies in their pockets).  The more beginning attorneys they will have competing for jobs with them, which means the less they will have to pay to the ones they hire.  So they mount a campaign to steadily erode educational spending by arguing that it’s not fair to ask people who are already financially strapped to allow their hard-earned tax dollars to be used to pay for the educations of other people’s kids.  In this case, quality legal services become ever more available to the extremely wealthy and ever less available to the average Joe.
            A number of these huge corporations are credit card companies who take advantage of the low price of quality legal advice to add caveats to their credit applications of ways for them to tack on fees.  Suddenly, credit applications which were maybe a page and-a-half long are four pages long, then eight, then fifteen, then twenty, and packed with who knows how many excuses to tack on fees and countless legal traps for people who try to pay off their account and close it; legal traps written in such dense jargon that more than 99% of the people in this country have no hope whatsoever of understanding them, and therefore, no hope of seeing the traps or even of understanding them once they have fallen in.
            Now what if it’s accountants, instead?  Accountants who graduate with huge debt hanging over their heads are in the same situation.  That’s bad, because that too means accountants going, in droves, to the big corporations for work after they graduate, to help those corporations find ways to milk and game the system and con the little guy.  So too with scientists, engineers, doctors and economists.  So too with every variety of professional, which puts the big corporations ever more in a position to decide who moves up in the world.
            Debt is bondage; bondage to creditors and monied interests.  The more skilled, talented professionals we have in debt—in bondage—to the wealthy, the more of those skills and talents are reserved for their use, not our own.  The higher educational costs climb and the more grants and scholarships are replaced with loans, the more power and profit this takes away from the general public and allocates instead to the exploitation of the financial elite.  Debt is bad.  Debt is bondage to the direct detriment of those who have it, and to the indirect detriment of all those of us who aren’t wealthy enough to help them pay it off, and the more difficult it becomes for skilled professionals to start out debt free, the fewer of them are going to do it which means the more skills beholden to the whims of the very wealthy, who are, of course, going to use them to get even wealthier, to the indirect detriment of the rest of us.  That’s why educational spending is important.  That’s why the slippery slope of gradually-but-inexorably rising educational costs must be reversed.

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