re: "Conservatism" has to be more than just a defensive posture

PART II

It's a victimhood-addict populist fantasy to think that colleges can and should only offer majors that have high employment results. For lots of reasons. Chief among them:

1. Employment prospects change. Employment prospects were probably pretty limited for computer science majors in the 60s and early 70s. I guess those were "meaningless degrees" that we should have loaded up the pitchforks and torches and "seized" college's endowments to stop back then.

The internet and the availability of information alone has changed the demand for college degrees immensely in the past 25 years, and most of the degrees that are becoming extinct are not what you think they are. They are composed mostly of specific math and science degrees, with a healthy splash of classical languages and English Literature thrown in.

2. Employment prospects are not the only reason people choose a particular field of study. And in fact, if all college is supposed to be is a high-tech trade school, then I don't think we need to be supporting that with public funds anyway. We should all save the tax money and we should let businesses train applicants in their own schools and programs. Why are taxpayers paying for individuals to get better jobs (if that's the only reason colleges exist?). Those individuals need to be paying for themselves to get better jobs.

The conclusion is obvious. Colleges cannot and should not be responsible for the value of a degree to any particular student. The student has to determine that value themselves. They are the only entity who can.

Furthermore, colleges cannot and should not be responsible for a student's success after they graduate, regardless of their degree. They can't control how much the student studied vs partied in school, can't control how hard the graduate works at his or her job, gets along with people, whether he or she has addiction problems or not...I could go on, but the point is obvious...it's completely ridiculous to make the college responsible for a graduate's inability to pay loans back.

Again, the conclusion is obvious. Graduates have to be responsible for their own success. If they make poor choices (whether those choices are about choice of major or whether they involve doing things to alienate other workers at their jobs, or being habitually late, etc.), those choices have to be on them.

Trying to make anyone else responsible is simply absurd.

And all you have to do to stop lazy rivers and fancy buildings is stop issuing the loans. The simplest thing possible. Students aren't capable of making wise decisions about their majors? Then you need to stop giving them loan money to squander.

I'm not going to respond to all of your issue points, but I am going to address your moronic conclusion, trusting that this one example is sufficient to blow up your narrative.

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These are all.easy and obvious steps, but dumbass Reps and boomer-cons are too twisted up with their mental gymnastics and muh "conservative principles" that do nothing but hamstring them.

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Sure, taking someone else's money because some people don't feel like paying for the ride they took is easy. Why do you think the left has been after everyone else's money for over a hundred years now?

And sure, it's easy to get the average person on board with a mob. The average person is a slobbering moron when it comes to these topics.

Sure, that's exactly why the left wins so often...they appeal to populists just like you. People to whom it never occurs to hold the person actually responsible for something responsible for something. It's always someone else's fault.

"Let's get 'em!" Is always a crowd pleaser.

But then what? What happens when it's your money someone wants to "seize" to pay reparations instead of a university endowment? What happens when enough people to constitute a majority (or even a significant minority) decide that you, being a white male, do not deserve the same treatment under the law that minority citizens enjoy? What happens when you are the "'em" that the mob wants to get?

You can't cry "private property" or "personal responsibility" or "equal justice under the law" then.

Because those are "muh conservative principles"...you've already gone on record dooking on all of that. Adhering to principle is like understanding that you can't gorge yourself on candy and cake without consequences. Populism is just trying to grab as much candy and cake to shove in your mouth as possible, then blaming someone else when you get a stomachache from it and finally demanding that someone else pay for your diabetes when you give yourself that result over time.

(BTW, have you ever seen someone who was so dumb that he couldn't realize he was that dumb and instead was convinced that people much smarter than himself were the dumb ones? Here's a tip...you have. You just may not have realized which side of that scenario you were one).

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The whole point of engaging in politics is to produce good outcomes.

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You're just like the idiots on here the other day wanting prisons like the one in El Salvador. That's NOT the purpose of politics. We could reduce crime to near zero within one year. That would be a "good outcome" to many of you. Except that I guarantee you wouldn't want to live in this country if we did what was necessary to achieve it.

You can create policy without a foundation on principles or without regard for the potential unintended consequences and without regard for what happens when someone applies your precedent to another situation. The left has been doing it for a long time now. But it's not a good idea, or even a sustainably workable idea. The only reason the US hasn't already gone over the cliff yet is because there were some people around who didn't succumb to the mob mentality you're advocating for.

But that mob mentality is becoming more and more popular and pretty soon there will be no more adults in the room to stop the idiocy. I hope I'm no longer around to see it when it happens.