Spend the noon hour at your local 7-11, Town Pump, Pump & Pantry, or similar quick-grocer, and you’ll see the entire colorful array of working-class Americans on whose labor we rely on supplying our every need.  

A pair of road-crew workers in a truck marked with a state DOT logo arrives. They hastily exit their truck, shedding their reflective vests and clothing layers as they head inside. They are followed by three members of an apparent roofing crew, some of whom still wear the safety harness used to prevent multi-story falls. A woman in a DQ uniform exits the store with her fountain drink and a giant burrito. She’s evidently tired of her employer’s lunch menu. A burly, middle-aged man whose uniform shirt sports a nametag reading, “Russ,” rushes past the DQ lady to get back to his truck. A van marked with the logo of a janitorial service pulls up and burps out its crew of four men in matching coveralls.

They waste no time getting into the store. The noon-hour business is brisk here at the Town Pump.  

But guess who you DON’T see? You don’t see the “office” crowd whose college degrees ensured work in air-conditioned comfort.     

Nope, this “lunch-spot” is where you find the blue-collar workers who literally make the world go ‘round. Landscapers, stone masons, construction workers, flooring contractors, glaziers, painters, etc. All will be seen taking their quick midday break, grabbing a soda or a Red Bull to wash down the brat, burrito, or burger they’ll heat in the store’s microwave and eat in the truck on the way back to the worksite. They’re in a hurry. Their lunch break is short, and the line is always too long. And the price of their meager meal just keeps going up.

These are the people to whom Biden just shifted the repayment burden for $300 billion in student-loan debt. The beneficiaries of this wealth transfer signed for, received, used, and benefited from the loans they now abandon. The colleges and universities they attended clearly benefited… The involvement of government in guaranteeing a steady stream of funding to these institutions SO PERVERTS the incentives, that no one bothers MEASURING the outcomes generated by their “services.” And that perversion of incentives is now very much more entrenched.

Were this act a ONE-time event designed to address some unavoidable calamity, it would still be entirely unjust. Using the force of law to bestow favor on those preferred by the party in power is IMMORAL.  

Amazingly, some will credit the administration with “generosity” for “forgiving” student debt. These fools fail to realize that because the MONEY WAS, INDEED SPENT, it’s not possible to simply “cancel” the debt. It can ONLY be transferred from those who spent it TO others, who did not. But this action will cause yet more harm.

The goal of forcing taxpayers to cover the college loans incurred by this group of privileged students is to set the stage and establish the precedent for TAXPAYER–PAID “college for all.”

This will ensure that the self-appointed elites of the Leftist Governing Class have the same OFFICIAL CONTROL over higher education that they now exercise over public K-12 education.   

Alexander Fraser Tytler observed of democracy, “It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.” Tytler was right, of course. When it becomes “legal” for any government to make direct monetary distributions to citizens (for other than purchased goods or contracted services required by government), the temptation for politicians and bureaucrats to PURCHASE POLITICAL CAPITAL with your earnings is simply too great to resist. This is especially so when such pandering can be disguised as a virtue from which the taxpayer will benefit at no cost!

In discussing the folly of governments’ perennial attempts to “achieve fairness” via forcible re-distribution of its citizens’ earnings, Milton Friedman once remarked, “The real joke is that you become convinced that your neighbor is being forced to pay, while he thinks the same.” 

It has never been more obvious than it is today. The power of the US Federal government must be drastically reduced. And if we’re to avoid the economic and social collapse made inevitable by replacing sound governance with political pandering, we’d better take meaningful action soon!

Image: AP