Kelley Walker:
> oh bullshit. enough people ripped off the middle class welfare system that
> it costs money.
Certainly, but the money is trivial. The government creates and destroys money like magic; it would take a serious destruction of wealth to overcome this magic and have any significant effect on anything -- certainly the petty thievery of student loan defaulters would not do it.
> it happened frequently when i first started taking part
> time college courses. i know a guy who was a perpetual grad student, had
> been working on it for 15 years. he got out the max stud loan every
> year-but he didn'tneed it. he was getting research assistantships which
> amounted to dusting the books in the faculty lounge. so, he invested it
> back when the interest on loans was far lower than that which could be
> yielded from money market CDs. i know of several people who declared
> financial independence from their parents just so they could get their
> state college tuitions paid for, even though their parents were paying for
> car, clothes, apt and food. add up the number of times these things
> happen, combine it with the reagan era and you get punitive measures that
> harm the poor.
" ... _and_ the Reagan area...." Heh. (Emphasis mine) Where there is a giant thief, why consider the tiny thieves? They do what they see the big one do.
> ring ring
> [ strategies for keeping square with the bushwazee....]
> ...
> no matter what benevolent and wonderous utopia we live in in the future, we
> are going to have to have some measures of deservingness.
I don't think so. I think the choice is between freedom and communism, on the one hand, and war, property, class and slavery on the other. But I don't think the latter is really a choice, because as the technologies of death and destruction advance, and as increasing powers of production destabilize and volatilize social relations, it is almost certain that human beings will not be able to play war any more without annihilating themselves. "Formerly, Man could not do as he desired. Now, he can do as he desires, and he must change his desires, or perish." But actually, we have to recover our desires from the Man.
Time is running out. Think radically.
> if educations are free in the future, why should we foot the bill for the
> students who go to college and fuck around and flunk out of most of their
> courses--or is it all going to magically change and no one will do such a
> thing? << i actually have hopes in that regard. but the only way that kind
> of consciousness will come about is when people start recogniziing how they
> are interdependent. that is, they will choose and prefer not to fuck around
> because they will see the value in learning for the sake of learning, they
> will recognize that the entire community is paying for education for all,
> not some abstract faceless "state". marx wanted us to understand how
> production was socialized so we could see our interdependence for precisely
> this reason!
>
> the point,is that talk of how "the state" will provide free this or that is
> just plain ridiculous. doug recently said, "education should be free". and
> i replied: but it's NOT free and can't be free. such language obfuscates
> the fact that salaries are paid, materials are requisitioned, etc. public
> schools aren't free and were the notion extended to college, then college
> wouldn't be free. instead, the costs of educating people are spread across
> the _entire_ population rather than being born by the individual student
> and his or her family. when we use the language "the state should provide
> ____" couching it in these terms makes it seem as if no one pays except
> some abstract thing called the state, as if the _____ provided has no
> costs, as if no salaries are paid, no materials need be purchased, etc. it
> is disingenuous on our part to use such language.
Under conditions of peace, freedom and communism, learning and knowledge would be free and education would be abolished.