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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34923 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, denying tens of millions of Americans the chance to get up to $20,000 of their debt erased.

The ruling, which matched expert predictions given the justices’ conservative majority, is a massive blow to borrowers who were promised loan forgiveness by the Biden administration last summer.

The 6-3 majority ruled that at least one of the six states that challenged the loan relief program had the proper legal footing, known as standing, to do so.

The high court said the president didn’t have the authority to cancel such a large amount of consumer debt without authorization from Congress and agreed the program would cause harm to the plaintiffs.

The amusing thing here to me is that we got two major SCOTUS rulings in two days that are, on the face of it, not directly related to each other in any obvious way (besides the fact that they both deal with the university system). One could conceivably support one ruling and oppose the other. The types of legal arguments used in both cases are certainly different. And yet we all know that the degree of correlation among the two issues is very high. If you support one of the rulings, you're very likely to support the other, and vice versa.

The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest? The group identity angle is obvious. AA tends to benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians. Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder. Whites and Asians tend to be richer than blacks and Hispanics. So, given a choice of "do you want a better chance of your kids getting into college, and do you also not want your tax dollars going to people who couldn't pay off their student loans", people would understandably answer "yes" to both - assuming you’re in the appropriate group and that is indeed the bargain that’s being offered to you. But perhaps that's uncharitable. Which is why I'm asking for alternative models.

Both are losses for the University Industrial Complex

"It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. Today, we have concluded that an instrumentality created by Missouri, governed by Missouri, and answerable to Missouri is indeed part of Missouri; that the words “waive or modify” do not mean “completely rewrite”; and that our precedent— old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy. We have employed the traditional tools of judicial decisionmaking in doing so. Reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis—in fact, at least three do. See post, p. ___ (KAGAN, J., dissenting). We do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country."

This is some "please clap" shit. Roberts, what the fuck are you doing?

Most people think Roberts cares a lot about preserving the institutional status of the court. It seems this is him trying to do that.

He's getting annoyed by the concern trolling/sneering about the conservative wing being judicial activists.

Yes, but the proper place to respond to that is not in the opinion of the most anticipated case of the year. If he's annoyed at the media being sneering concern trolls maybe he shouldn't cite The Washington Post elsewere in his opinion as if it's an authoritative government publication.

Why not? The attack he is responding to was the opener to Kagan’s dissent

As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution. If Congress wants to amend the amendment to say that organizations can discriminate based on race as long as it benefits blacks, they're welcome to try. If Congress wants to forgive student loan debts enough to actually include it in the budget, they're welcome to do that as well. If Congress wants to write actual legislation protecting abortion, they can do that. If they can't, then they shouldn't.

This is not a legal reason, but as far as student loans go, $10-20k is exactly the range lower middle class people should be able to pay off! They pay off cars in that range just fine, all the time. There are also various programs aimed at that demographic, like debt forgiveness for teachers and government workers. People around the poverty level don't need to make payments on federal loans anyway, on account of income based repayment plans. It doesn't prevent lenders from issuing auto loans or mortgages, and family size is taken into account.

The problem area seems to be those with high debt (which this wouldn't have made much of a dent in anyway), making nominally good money in extremely high cost of living areas, so that they really are struggling to pay rent on their small shared apartment, but looking at their income the financial institution expects them to pay down their loan, and this is too much of.a stretch. I don't feel too sorry for anyone struggling to make it in one of the most expensive cities in the world, though.

I think the non-legal reasons of this post are less reflective of some of these working peoples lives.

$10-20k is exactly the range lower middle class people should be able to pay off!

60% of Americans Now Living Paycheck to Paycheck and now have to make loan payments that will accrue in interest as they don't have the money to pay down the principle upfront. I believe it would have been significant for them.

The problem area seems to be those with high debt (which this wouldn't have made much of a dent in anyway)

20k is a significant sum of money for most working Americans but especially to young people just starting out with high debt accruing interest and a mid to low income. For every year they can't pay that 20k down at 5-8% interest, it's another 1k minimum added on top. A high debt(>60k) maximum repayment period is 30 years, so 20k early could turn into 50k-68k in total relief. The average student loan debt is currently $37,338 meaning for both the average and above average borrower, it would be significantly impactful.

They pay off cars in that range just fine, all the time

I'd say multimillionaires in the 1% are better able to pay off their doomed submarines. Didn't stop the government from granting Oceangate $447,000 in PPP Loans all forgiven by the American taxpayer, and not just for payroll but for things like mortgage interest, rent, utilities, supplier costs and expenses for operations. Bailouts for the rich, pull yourself up by your bootstraps for everyone else. Because they know how to work the system for mutual benefit.

For every year they can't pay that 20k down at 5-8% interest, it's another 1k minimum added on top. A high debt(>60k) maximum repayment period is 30 years

At an 8% interest rate (charged only to grad students) and 30 years of repayments, that's $146/month. ($167 at 20 years, and $242 at 10 years.) Undergrads pay 5%, which means it's $107/month. If college doesn't increase your income by $107-146/month post-tax, you shouldn't go.

https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/current-interest-rates/#best-rates

60% of Americans Now Living Paycheck to Paycheck

I do not believe this. Number one: it's survey data. Number two: the link states, "As of January 2023, 60% of United States adults, including more than four in 10 high-income consumers, live paycheck to paycheck"

What I take this to mean is that 40% of Americans will say they are living paycheck to paycheck on surveys regardless of how much money they make.

If you buy a House that is three times larger than the house your British equivalent buys and then get two massive SUVs that you use for all your transportation needs being broke is kind of expected. I work as a software engineer in Europe, and I can't really afford a massive house or a car. Yet, I am able to save 20% of my salary every month.

Hello fellow software engineer in Europe who can’t quite afford such things. What do you do with your savings?

What I take this to mean is that 40% of Americans will say they are living paycheck to paycheck on surveys regardless of how much money they make

That could be true, but that is also the least charitable interpretation of these people/families plight. As is the opinion that it is survey data thus unreliable.

More than half of Americans (58%) describe themselves as living paycheck to paycheck

Americans Rely on Credit Cards to Make Ends Meet As 64% Admit to Living Paycheck to Paycheck

two different surveys from 2023 for reproducibility, as all I see are surveys for paycheck to paycheck data. Full disclosure, on one of the surveys only about a 1/4 believe they would benefit from student debt forgiveness, 14% don't know. I actually don't doubt that they are living pay check to paycheck but perhaps the disagreement is that the phrase implies they aren't able to afford to put money away after rent,food,childcare,ect. at the most minimal level possible as opposed to where they live or currently spend? Zip codes would have been valuable to collect, as it is possible someone making 100k as a single person living in a rural area is misrepresenting themselves vs. a couple each making a 50k in a San Francisco type city where they work, struggling with rent and child care costs.

Alternatively, many people, as they make more money, use the opportunity to spend more money, instead of to be more fiscally secure.

This seems like the correct answer. The definition of paycheck-to-paycheck is extremely loose. All that needs to happen is that the household spend all the money. It’s useful to those who want to gin up support for welfare programs and wealth transfers because it sounds like poverty.

Additionally, many who would report themselves as paycheck-to-paycheck have assets and are saving money. A friend of mine describes himself as such while putting 30% of his money into an investment account each check. To him, that money does not count because it is not available for spending (by his self imposed rules).

Which is hilarious mental accounting.

In which case, I too, live paycheck-to-paycheck. After paying for housing, utilities, food, bills, miscellaneous expenses, and putting the rest into brokerage accounts, I also have nothing leftover. Hmph! Weird.

I can actually relate to your friend. After the brief dopamine hit of buying some ETFs wears off each time I get paid, there's post-purchase-clarity and a general feeling of, "ugh, now I have to wagecuck for another whole pay-cycle to have more money to throw at the stock market." In that sense, it does feel irrationally like living paycheck-to-paycheck, even if it's hardly a central example of the concept (to say the least).

Good for him, though. It would probably be better for most people's financial health to have an attitude like your friend, to treat savings/investments as a recurring, necessary expense and rigidly put money into savings/investment accounts rather than consooming it all away.

Of course, PPP loans were created because government was preventing people from working and the PPP loans were designed to keep businesses afloat to pay their employees.

Student loan forgiveness is totally the same thing…

designed to keep businesses afloat to pay their employees

My example was a business that did not need the PPP loan to keep the business afloat but got that money anyway. It was to juxtapose the above poster arguing why aid isn't needed for these working class people because they have been able to buy cars before, while rich people allow other rich people to benefit from government subsidies even though they have been and are currently able to finance their submarines. Even if not all of rich people directly benefit from the bailout, they support their fellow rich people, and in turn will get support in the future, unlike you and I unfortunately.

to pay their employees

I think you may have skimmed over the comment too fast so I will relink it. things like mortgage interest, rent, utilities, supplier costs and expenses for operations. They payed a privately owned company, so a guy as he owns that company, for much more than his employees.

The deal was “we will give you this loan if you don’t fire your employees.” Quid pro quo.

It was also done quick and dirty as it was thought needed to prevent mass layoffs. Also PPP isn’t the first of many.

Whether it was a good policy or executed correctly is entirely different compared to your point about welfare for the rich but not the poor.

As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution.

This doesn't seem right. The student loan case hinged on the wording of a statute, not a reading of the Constitution. See page 12 of the opinion:

The Secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not. We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to “waive or modify” existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.

As for the affirmative action case, it is definitely not based on a literal reading of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If it were, it would be a much shorter opinion. The opinion is instead all about whether the affirmative action regimes satisfy strict scrutiny:

Any exception to the Constitution’s demand for equal protection must survive a daunting two-step examination known in our cases as “strict scrutiny.” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U. S. 200, 227 (1995). Under that standard we ask, first, whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 326 (2003). Second, if so, we ask whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored”—meaning “necessary”—to achieve that interest. Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 570 U. S. 297, 311–312 (2013) (Fisher I ) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Moreover, had the decision been based on a simple literal reading of "equal protection," then the footnote re military academies would make no sense:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

The student loan case hinged on the wording of a statute, not a reading of the Constitution.

This is hilarious, because I just saw the front page of NYT with a Biden quote on the student loan case ruling: "I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution."

Of course, I happen to totally agree with you that this case was statutory interpretation. If anything, I'm just noticing that this is one of those moments where Biden says something that, had Trump made a similar mistake, it would have been front page news... not because they're cheering on what he said, but because they're aghast about how he could be so ignorant and wrong about this obvious thing (that is a technical little detail, really), and how it must mean that he has no idea what is going on and is therefore incapable to hold office under the 25th Amendment.

As for the affirmative action case,

I think you're nitpicking here. @Gaashk's comment that it's a literal reading of the Constitution is probably correct. Your quote from the opinion about

Any exception to the Constitution’s demand for equal protection...

is pretty easily understood as saying, "Whelp, a literal reading of the Constitution is that you can't do this. That said, there might be an exception to the literal reading of the Constitution." And sure, they spent most of their time on figuring out whether or not there was an exception for this case, but the result of finding that there isn't an exception is that you just go back to the default of a literal reading of the Constitution.

Your quote from the opinion about "Any exception to the Constitution’s demand for equal protection..." is pretty easily understood as saying, "Whelp, a literal reading of the Constitution is that you can't do this. That said, there might be an exception to the literal reading of the Constitution."

I would say that it might be misunderstood as saying that, but only by someone who has no actual understanding of the issue. After all, if taken literally, the Equal Protection clause would invalidate all laws, because all laws treat some groups differently than others. "No trucks allowed in tunnel" discrimates against truck drivers, and "people under 16 can't get a driver's license" discrimates against those under 16. That's why courts have said that the Equal Protection Clause is not meant literally: "Statutes create many classifications which do not deny equal protection; it is only "invidious discrimination" which offends the Constitution." Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 US 726, 732 (1963) [citing Williamson v. Lee Optical Co., 348 U. S. 483, 488-489 (1955) and Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas Co., 220 U. S. 61, 78-79 (1911)).

And, more generally, no justice employs a literal interpretation of the Constitution, nor have any in recent memory, except maybe Justice Black, though the only provision I know of in which he employed literal interpretation was re the free speech clause.

After all, if taken literally, the Equal Protection clause would invalidate all laws, because all laws treat some groups differently than others.

EPC doesn't say that, tho. Like, on its face. Nowhere in the literal words of the clause does it say that the laws cannot make any distinctions for any reason between people.

I think I'm coming around to Barrett's concurrence that sometimes, if you try hard enough to be a moron when reading something, you'll miss the most reasonable interpretation of the literal text. Having a modicum of context informs how you read so that you don't add in things when you're claiming that it's a literal reading.

Yes, it does say that. That is the literal meaning of "equal protection." See Ten Broek, Jacobus, and Joseph Tussman. "The equal protection of the laws." California Law Review 37 (1949): 341, 343 ["Here, then, is a paradox: The equal protection of the laws is a 'pledge of the protection of equal laws.' But laws may classify. And 'the very idea of classification is that of inequality. . . .'" (ellipsis in original)].

But that is exactly why no one interprets the Constitution using the literal meaning of words. "Congress shall make no law" does not mean "no law," and "speech" covers more than literal speech.

Sorry that they struggle to read in the California Law Review. (They try extra hard to read like morons.)

But try. Try in your own words to explain how "equal protection of the laws" means "no possible categorization in laws" means "no laws". It doesn't. It's not there. Clearly, the context, in Barrett's words, is that there are laws. So, given that there are laws, and you're trying to read this sentence about laws literally, please proceed to explain exactly how your literal reading implies that there are no valid laws. What "protection" would these not valid laws be providing?

I think the quote from the law review article makes that clear.

More comments

As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution.

This doesn't seem right. The student loan case hinged on the wording of a statute, not a reading of the Constitution.

Moreover, to the extent that involved broader things (major questions), that's usually against a literal reading. (I suppose Barrett tried to argue the opposite. I'm not sure that I'm convinced, in this case.)

Wasn’t the justification supposed to be that this was pandemic-specific? I.e. the whole economy contracted, and people with the reasonable expectation of paying it suddenly couldn’t. $20k was never supposed to make the difference for med school.

I’m not sure that it actually was targeting extreme COLA like the Bay Area, either. More a general buyout for people who tried to get their first job in 2020.

I also object to the claim that both these cases were prima facie unconstitutional. See the dissents for legitimate arguments!

The pandemic is why federal loans have been deferred entirely these past three years, and I suppose that makes sense. I am not really against either the pandemic deferral, or pretty low income adjusted payments. I'm not even completely against a bill, by congress, reforming loans going forward and forgiving some (even all!) loans to people below some income threshold who probably shouldn't have been issued them.

Sure, it was not unanimous, and the dissenting judges are not puppets or stupid or anything like that. But the question was about what the theory is behind conservative jurisprudence, and conservatives do think that it's overstepping and wrong.

See also: this unanimous decision vacating a different attack on the Plan. I was actually really confused at first because I thought this was the one everyone was talking about, but no. That would be Biden v. Nebraska.

Several commenters argue that conservative justices must be more principled, or perhaps more correct, than liberal ones. I’d like to introduce them to the various posters downthread railing at how the court was too soft on AA or abortion. From this, I conclude that law is nontrivial, that constitutional scholarship is not one-sided, and that even one’s enemies are putting actual effort into justifying their positions. As it should be.

With that out of the way—good decision. Logically correct. I am not particularly impressed with Barrett’s concurrence, which reads like apologetics. The dissent is also not particularly exciting, unlike the last case.

I hope it will be more broadly applied to executive-branch abuses of the separation of powers.

...even one’s enemies are putting actual effort into justifying their positions.

Some are! As I noted below, I find Kagan's dissent in Biden v. Nebraska compelling. This didn't surprise me much, because I generally enjoy listening to Kagan in oral arguments and find her writing clear and persuasive. I can see why she and Scalia were dear friends.

On the other hand, I really don't see KBJ as a good-faith actor. Her dissent in the SFFA case is genuinely bad and reads like something that I would expect from an avowed Kendi enthusiast. The tone even reads like a Twitter clapback. I'm not saying she's stupid, but she makes genuinely stupid arguments and displays an absurd level of epistemic helplessness regarding "experts" when it's convenient.

Are you thinking of Scalia's long friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsberg? I wasn't aware of him being close to Elena Kagan.

(That said, I agree that Justice Kagan is both quite intelligent and a good writer.)

It was both of them! One source here.

After she was sworn in, Kagan told Scalia about how she had invited herself to one of his hunting trips.

"He thought it was so funny, he was on the floor laughing," she remembered.

Scalia took Kagan to his gun club and began teaching her gun safety and how to shoot. After he declared her ready, the two began taking hunting trips together, which is when they began to bond. Birds in Virginia, deer in Wyoming, duck in Mississippi — over the years, the justices traveled, hunted and got to know each other better.

"He was as generous and warm and funny as a person could be. I just so appreciate all the time I got to spend with him," she said. "I miss him a lot."

It’s interesting that every liberal who ever got to know Scalia as a person seemed to like him and see him as wise even if often wrong.

Ah! I was unaware--thanks for the link.

I need to read that dissent more carefully, then. I got the impression it was “we think y’all were just wrong” rather than a more subtle “this is a complicated balance, and you overvalued part.” See Sotomayor’s SFFA dissent, which had some real zingers, but was a pretty thorough argument on the premise of a “compelling interest.”

I also remember being pretty impressed by Kavanaugh on other cases. He has pleasantly surprised me for professionalism.

Edit: I’m seeing the part about MOHELA and Missouri’s standing now. I see what you mean.

Yeah the dissent… you should really read it. See attached

/images/16881732841037276.webp

Umm no, actually poor people mostly don’t have student loans. Biden’s plan mostly benefited upper working class people with tech school loans(because the amount won’t wipe out an entire university degree) or degree holders who started at community college(who, granted, might be poorer than average), plus college dropouts who are probably richer than the typical non-college population. And opposition to AA is more about the principle of it being legal to discriminate against white men and only white men- most of the people strongly opposed do not seriously expect it to affect their chances of college admissions in general, because they’re not going to Harvard anyways(almost no one does).

because the amount won’t wipe out an entire university degree

That doesn't mean people with university loans don't benefit. If you have 50k in loans and that gets knocked down to 40k you essentially just got a free 10k

Sure, in the abstract. But 20% off your debt is very different from 50% or forgiveness.

but it's still significantly more than 0%

the principle of it being legal to discriminate against white men and only white men

And Asian men, surely?

Motteizeans and republican research teams are the only people who remember that AA works against them.

The entire Harvard case was specifically about Asians.

Because (the equivalent of)Republican research teams were the ones that got it going, yes.

Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions

Yes. The conservatives on the court thing that the government should adhere to the constitution more strictly than the liberals on the court.

I got what I wanted out of the student loan decision, but I don't understand how you can read the opinion and dissent and come away with the impression that it was decided on strict constitutionalism.

A final point about fair-reading textualism. Although some judges diverge from it through purposivism or consequentialism, others (less commonly, to be sure) can diverge from it by “strict constructionism”—a hyperliteral brand of textualism that we equally reject.

  • A. Scalia and B. Garner, Reading Law (2012)

In the textualist tradition/method of interpretation, words are given their original public meaning, which refers to the meaning a reasonable, intelligent, but not necessarily legally proficient,reader would get from the statute at the time of its enactment. This obviously flows from the text, but equally obviously, it is strongly influenced by the history, structure, and context of the provisions being referenced. This is because the meaning of words, in common parlance, is strongly dependent upon the context in which they are written or spoken.

Turning to the particular case in front of the Court, the majority essentially held that the words "modify" and "waive", when most naturally read, only allow for modest adjustments, additions, or changes, not completely transformative ones akin to what the Department of Education was claiming the HEROES Act allowed it to do with respect to the student loan debt cancellation. With regard to this, I am in near-complete agreement with Roberts's opinion. There was, of course, a certain back-and-forth between the majority and the dissent with regard to the relevance, validity, and importance of the Major Questions Doctrine to this case (and Justice Barrett framed her entire concurrence around responding to Justice Kagan's dissent on these points); nevertheless, the MQD categorically did not supply the fundamental basis for the decision. Rather, for those Justices who agree with it, it merely represented another (secondary) point in its favor.

Now, the discussion about the standing of the states suing the Department (particularly Missouri) does seem significantly more suspect, and, at least from my perspective, the dissent has the better of that argument (which, of course, would mean that the lawsuit would be dismissed entirely). Nevertheless, it's clear that this doesn't have much of anything to do with "textualism" versus "strict constructionism"; rather, it is a decision regarding a jurisprudential doctrine (standing) that flows from the (textually vague and unhelpful) words "the judicial Power of the United States" in Article 3 of the Constitution. The Court has traditionally interpreted that by looking at precedent and at the common law that influenced the thinking and decision-making of the Framers of the Constitution.

Our Standing doctrine isn’t compelled by the constitution or its history.

It is the crazy idea that Congress or the Executive could harm everyone equally by a million dollars and no one can sue (because the harm is general) yet if the same convenes or executive harm a single actor by one dollar, then such person could sue since it was a special harm.

Corporate law provides a better system.

While the majority rests it not on constitutionalism but their textual interpretation of the statue, they do cite the major questions doctrine to buttress their opinion.

Barrett gives an interesting but I think ultimately wrong concurrence. I do think the major questions doctrine is a variant of constitutional avoidance substantive canon. It is a second best resuscitation of the ancient but sadly neglected non delegation doctrine.

I think any purported grant of authority to the secretary to unilaterally without any APA strictures and without review of his or her decision abolish student loans whenever there is an emergency is such an extreme delegation that it may not pass constitutional muster. The major questions doctrine instead of confronting that issue head on says “we are going to make a congress be very explicit about this delegation so we will let them ultimately do it but only if we are sure Congress really wants to delegate that authority.”

I think any reasonable reading of the HEREOS act leads to that outcome.

Standing is a different matter, but I think our standing jurisprudence is all fucked; it allows law suits in situations it shouldn’t and doesn’t in others. Any situation where a taxpayer is alleging something is ultra vires should result in standing. At minimum, any congressmen should have standing.

I appreciate your sentiment on standing, but can’t help but think of the Public Citizens review. Is it right to empower everyone, all the time, with a pull-cord to halt the government?

…maybe, especially for hardline minarchists. But it’s not very practical, and it’s definitely not what the founders intended. Legal systems depend on skin in the game, and I’m not sure merely being a citizen is enough.

Well, the private law has it in derivative law suits so they manage.

I’m talking about ultra vires actions; not any action done by the government (of which the vast majority are clearly not ultra vires. I would cabin standing where the action at hand is not being challenged on ultra vires grounds but on the application therefore to real harms with real skin in the game; not the sierra club.

So I don’t think my view of standing fundamentally would overwhelm the court system but would shift what is brought.

As a second best, I would allow any congressmen to sue at any time on an ultra vires theory.

It was decided based on the major questions doctrine, or so Roberts said and Barrett concurred on. I haven't read the dissent yet, and I've only skimmed the concurrence, but it appears Barrett's concurrence goes into some great detail on how the major questions doctrine promotes more strict adherence to the constitution (than the dissenters would have) but not actual literalism. I presume the dissenters disagree.

If you accept the major questions doctrine, I think the case was clear. The HEROES act may have been bigger than a mousehole, but full student loan forgiveness was a LOT bigger than an elephant.

Barrett's concurrence

My reading of Barrett's concurrence is that MQD is not about strict adherence to the Constitution, but about actually coming to the best reading of the text of the statute. She gives examples like

imagine that a grocer instructs a clerk to "go to the orchard and buy apples for the store." Though this grant of apple-purchasing authority sounds unqualified, a reasonable clerk would know that there are limits. For example, if the grocer usually keeps 200 apples on hand, the clerk does not have actual authority to buy 1,000—the grocer would have spoken more directly if she meant to authorize such an out-of-the-ordinary purchase. A clerk who disregards context and stretches the words to their fullest will not have a job for long.

This is consistent with how we communicate conversationally. Consider a parent who hires a babysitter to watch her young children over the weekend. As she walks out the door, the parent hands the babysitter her credit card and says: "Make sure the kids have fun." Emboldened, the babysitter takes the kids on a road trip to an amusement park, where they spend two days on rollercoasters and one night in a hotel. Was the babysitter's trip consistent with the parent's instruction? Maybe in a literal sense, because the instruction was open-ended. But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent's instruction? Highly doubtful. In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park….

The idea is that you just mentally have some sense of the scope of the text in context, and understanding that scope leads you to the best interpretation of the text. I'm not sure I'm convinced, nor precisely how it doesn't lurch folks back into the morass of divining meaning out of legislative history, but that's what I think it is.

The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?

In practice, I think things like party affiliation are the driving factors behind the correlation. But I also think there's a rather simple "underlying principle" that ties both decisions together.

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you find an intelligent person who's fluent in English but totally ignorant of American history and law. You hand this person a copy of the US Constitution and have him read it carefully. Then you ask him to answer two questions based on his understanding of the plain text of the document:

  1. Does the Constitution allow the government to treat people differently based on their race?

  2. Does the Constitution allow the president to spend money without congress's approval?

The answer to both questions is clearly "no" if you're just reading the text of the document without bringing any external knowledge or biases to bear. In order to answer anything other than "no" to both questions, you either need to come up with complicated interpretive arguments or you need to just not care about the text of the Constitution.

So I think a rather simple underlying principle unifying both decisions is: "the plain text of the Constitution is binding."

But the president isn't spending money in this case. He's just not collecting money back. Those are different. Moreover, Biden v. Nebraska wasn't ruled upon on constitutional grounds, and the affirmative action case involved Harvard, a private actor, where the Constitution only applied because of Title VI (and further, the probably incorrect precedent that the phrase in Title VI is just supposed to be a summary of the equal protection clause)

I would liked to have seen this argument made. I believe the executive does have the power to collect or not on debt. This was Bernie’s argument when he was running for President. That said, the Biden camp did not make this argument. I think it’s likely the argument would have lost anyway, but I think it’s still the better argument.

But the president isn't spending money in this case. He's just not collecting money back.

Your accountant is now giving you the stink eye. Forgiving debt is spending unless you're talking strictly about cash flow, and the government does not operate on a pure cash flow basis.

Indeed as far as the IRS is concerned if someone forgives my debt I have income (except for certain exceptions).

Oh, the effect is of course the same.

the affirmative action case involved Harvard, a private actor

It's not the Constitution that's being read based on its actual text, it's the rest of the antidiscrimination laws.

It's also true that literally, the text of the Constitution allows private discrimination, but it's a "your rules, fairly" sort of thing. Forbidding private discrimination, but fairly, doesn't really follow the Constitution, but it's closer than forbidding private discrimination with an exception for Asians.

It's not the Constitution that's being read based on its actual text, it's the rest of the antidiscrimination laws.

Well, mostly. Except for Gorsuch's opinion (and Thomas's agreement), they were ruling under the presumption that part of the antidiscrimination laws were a summary for the equal protection clause. That is, they were ruling as if title VI said "Yeah, those things that the states can't do under the 14th amendment? Federally funded universities can't do those either." I think Gorsuch and Thomas are correct that that reading is incorrect, but the opinion of the court doesn't challenge that precedent.

But yes, I agree on your overall point that these cases are not really about the constitution (although I imagine that this, involving an interpretation of the equal protection clause, will have constitutional repercussions), that was why I'd said that in the first place.

It's not the Constitution that's being read based on its actual text, it's the rest of the antidiscrimination laws.

Man, I now want to go back and frame Title VI as being a "public accommodations law". Sotomayor spent basically the entire 303 dissent just cheerleading "public accommodations laws" and how they're the best things ever, rather than engaging with the First Amendment arguments. Would be funny to port all those blessings onto the other case. "Yeah, Harvard, just like motels, has to be equally willing to provide accommodations, regardless of race. They can use other features, like whether they have enough money to pay, whether they're wearing shoes or a shirt... but they can't use race." I mean, universities aren't exactly motels, but neither are website designers.

So you do think it was obvious in the UNC case?

I am much more sympathetic to Gorsuch’s statutory argument though I would get rid of the statute he relied upon.

And federally funded universities under Title VI.

Title VI applies.

The equal protection clause is taken to apply because it is (probably wrongly) held that a portion of the Title VI is a summary of the equal protection clause, and universities must meet that standard if they want federal funds.

Here's the relevant bit of Title VI:

No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

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Sotomayor did make a decent argument that it was an isolated demand for rigor. I don’t know that she convinced me, but it was plausible, at least.

I’m not sure if you get the UNC ruling without incorporation, which I would definitely describe as non-obvious.

It wasn't about incorporation, it was about federal funding and Title VI, I believe?

Right! My mistake.

Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder.

Not necessarily. It benefits the poorer half of the upper part of the social ladder (those who pursue expensive post-secondary education)

Regardless, why do you insist that there be some sort of "theory of everything" that explains both decisions? The affirmative action case is a 14th Amendment issue. The student loan case is about separation of powers and the limits on administrative agencies' power to interpret acts of Congress. There is not a lot of overlap between those areas of jurisprudence. Why would you expect one principle to explain voting on both cases?

Wouldn’t it be the kinds of students who took on debt for a mostly useless degree. People who study something useful like tech, science, finance, or business tend to do okay. They (provided they actually do the work and put in effort on getting themselves ready for employment) tend to get good jobs after college and thus, with a bit of frugality in the early years, pay off their loans fairly quickly. The ones who study useless (from an employment standpoint) majors in art, literature, history, or social science tend to get lower paid work and thus struggle to pay down the loans.

Which is what’s always been galling about student loan forgiveness. It essentially removes the market forces that push people away from poor decisions. College for the right students is a net benefit to that student and society at large, especially if you can push them to useful arts and sciences. By removing the market from the equation, you end up removing incentives for unprepared students to choose skilled trades over university, and pushing good students to choose fun-sounding avocations over useful arts an science. Essentially these students are spending 100K of other people’s money over a lifetime to take a four year vacation before going on to do low level work.

I'm opposed to student loan forgiveness, but I'm one of the people who would have benefited from it. So maybe I can provide some light on who would benefit.

I have a bit over $10,000 in student debt that I acquired getting an MBA (I went through undergrad debt free, got the MBA because my work wanted me to and was willing to pay for a third of the cost). My wife has over $20,000 in student loan debt, and started out with almost $80,000 in debt. She got that pursuing a career as a licensed professional (I won't say what profession because I don't really need to, but you need a masters degree, you need to get licensed, and the average one of these makes around $65,000 a year and the really successful ones make about twice that).

Between the two of us we bring in around ~$125,000 per year. So we're not poor by any means. We have a house, two cars, can afford to go on vacation, etc. We will definitely be able to pay off the debt over time without falling into penury. If forgiveness had gone through, the main result would be getting it all paid off faster so we could free up that money for other expenses: savings, home improvements, luxuries, that sort of thing.

I think our case isn't that unusual. There are a lot of people who, like my wife, paid way too much for a degree that gets them an income well above the median.

Why do people take on such debt if it’s mostly useless?

The job market often demands a college degree. Depending on who you ask, this is the changing economy, an intentional grift, or maybe just too good to check. Regardless, 40 to 60 percent of jobs are asking for a degree, and they can’t all be quants and engineers.

There is friction between what employers are asking and what they’re willing to pay. The market is clearly messed up. I kind of want to blame lenders for this! They have every incentive to inflate the supply of college degrees by giving out bad loans. But I can’t elide the responsibility of the borrower.

How much of this is obvious to the average high-school grad? His teachers will tell him higher education is worth it, because their whole circle has it. His parents and especially grandparents will say the same, since back in their day, it was more of a class marker, more of a road to success. Getting one of those top 20% jobs was an excellent prospect. And, for obvious prestige reasons, employers are all acting like they’re still the top 20%. We are giving teenagers every reason to think a degree buys them more than it does.

The job market, the availability of loans, and social sensibilities formed in the 1960s are all distorting the cost-benefit analysis.

Now, I don’t think loan forgiveness actually addresses this. Maybe indirectly, if lenders start to be much more careful about who they’ll take on, contracting the supply. I find this very unlikely, since there are government pressures to do the exact opposite.

The situation only improves when the cost-benefit becomes more obvious. We may be starting to see this with fewer jobs demanding a degree. Or that effect might exist only in thinkpieces. It could also happen if manufacturing magically comes back to the States. Maybe as the population ages, parents will get a more clear view of the job market. But it’s a race to the bottom. No one wants to be the last one without a degree.

I mean I’m not going to expect an 18 year old to make perfect decisions, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s asking too much for the rest of the family to come alongside this college student and insist that they come up with something approaching a real, thought out business plan for post college life and how college generally and the specific degree they want to get has a reasonable ROÍ and is something that given their actual talents and skills is a realistic plan.

I will however blame the government, because they created the mess with making college loans nondischargable at bankruptcy. I kinda get the argument that since you can’t exactly repossess an education and students generally don’t have many assets upon graduation that a lot of people might take the degree, declare bankruptcy and run. However, by doing that, it heavily incentivized loan grantors and schools to give loans and admissions spots to people who any fool could tell them wouldn’t be paying off the loan. Some because they’re simply not capable of learning high level skills offered by a rigorous job-training degree. Some because they’re completely unserious about the entire process and will spend more time chasing members of the opposite sex than studying. Still others because they’re studying things that are quite frankly useless fluff that no employer needs skilled labor to do. If loans were discharged at bankruptcy, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. Schools wouldn’t be wasting space on kids who are so far behind that they’re taking basic algebra and basic writing courses. Those seats won’t pay off, better to give it to a worthy kid who will be able to pay after he gets hired. Loan officers won’t give approvals to people who want to study useless stuff because French literature majors work at Starbucks and everybody knows it.

That’s a healthier equilibrium, sure. It’s just got a lot of points of divergence.

Ultimately, it’s teenagers or maybe their parents taking on unwise debt. But there are numerous forces telling them it’s totally worth it. Even their own families, generalizing from “back in my day” when you could work summers and get out debt free.

I don’t think useless degrees disappear if the parents wise up. I think companies are still going to push them as a discriminator and to keep up on the signaling treadmill. And I know lenders will still push them, because they don’t care if the kids succeed as long as they pay off their debt first.

The most effective way to do this is probably to pull back on the lenders. They are clearing a market which shouldn’t be clearing. This will cut supply, forcing more families to recognize that the debt wouldn’t be worth it.

I don’t think useless degrees disappear if the parents wise up. I think companies are still going to push them as a discriminator and to keep up on the signaling treadmill

I think parents have mostly wised up and push their kids to do two years at the local community college, transfer to a nearby four year, keep the debt minimal, and major in a practical degree.

This is all good advice unless you can get into Harvard or have a full ride somewhere. But, 18 year olds are legal adults who have teenager priorities.

I actually think they would dry up as it becomes obvious that they simply don’t pay. As it becomes obvious just how much debt you’ll take on — basically people are buying a houseful of debt for a degree — eventually those markets will change when it becomes more clear that some programs have very low post-grad employment rates and still owe a lifetime of debt.

And I’m not sure that employers are still taking “any old degree from any university.” They’ve likely been burned often enough on vanity degree holders with huge egos and little knowledge or work ethic to speak of. These types of things employers are sensitive to simply because bad hires make them less competitive in business. If you’ve got ten bad people on a team of fifty, they’re not only not performing themselves, but often slow down everything around them as other, productive people, need to fix their mistakes or deal with their drama.

I do see a potential market for College Level learning apps, or paid zoom courses, or even just guided readings where people with interest in a subject can pay $50 to study it with a phd guiding things. Especially in literature or history or the like where there’s no field trips or labs, you can probably get much the same level of interaction as you’d get in a classroom but at pretty low fractions of the cost. Books and video and the internet are cheap. Zoom allows for the creation of virtual classrooms. Apps allow for basic self testing and feedback.

I do see a potential market for College Level learning apps, or paid zoom courses, or even just guided readings where people with interest in a subject can pay $50 to study it with a phd guiding things.

If YouTube has taught me anything, this does already exist, you can subscribe to watch digital classes from experts. I think it's CuriosityStream and Skillshare that offer this.

Online courses for people "with interest in the subject' can only satisfy interest in the subject; they're no good as signals to employers.

It essentially removes the market forces that push people away from poor decisions.

That's basically the raison d'être of leftism.

That's basically the raison d'être of leftism.

Can you imagine replacing the sentence above this with something else uncharitable and bad?

Can you imagine a leftist replying with "That's basically the raison d'être of conservativism"?

Can you imagine yourself getting indignant at that and clicking the report button?

I knew you could.

Don't do this.

It's a somewhat well known view popularized by Arnold Kling that liberals are against markets, and conservatives are against liberals.

Liberals aren't leftists. Generally liberals and conservatives are both very in favor of markets.

You know, I'm sorry to have to do this since you just complained about people writing "pages and pages arguing about the rules", but, there's a substantive philosophical issue here that is worth discussing.

Can you explain why you think my comment is uncharitable? Because I certainly don't think it's uncharitable.

Let me be perfectly clear: I myself think we should remove market forces that push people away from poor decisions. That is something that I assent to. It seems strange to say that it's uncharitable for me to ascribe position X to someone else, when I myself hold position X as well. Obviously I don't think that X is anything derogatory in that case.

Of course, I don't hold the position with absolutely no qualifications. Mainly the qualifications come in terms of feasibility. We can't simply will the market away. We're stuck with it, and we're stuck with the fact that it picks winners and losers. That brings me into disagreement with certain leftists. But the underlying principle, the idea that human life should not be subject to the cold impersonal forces of the neoliberal market, is something that I agree with them on.

To elaborate further, "we should remove the market forces that push people away from poor decisions" does not entail "we should remove all standards for judging decisions and we should remove all punishments whatsoever". Some decisions are indeed poor and some decisions deserve consequences. I just generally don't want "market forces" to be playing the judge and doling out the punishments. If I had to sum up the alternative in a few words, I would prefer to replace "market forces" with something like "general comportment with what is virtuous".

It seems to me that the only way that someone could judge my comment to be uncharitable is if they either 1) misread it (e.g. they thought that it was implying that there should never be any consequences for anything whatsoever; which I just said is incorrect), or 2) they're so enmeshed in market ideology that they think the idea that it could even be desirable for people to live lives that are free of market competition is a priori absurd; they think it's an obviously mad position, and ascribing it to anyone is tantamount to calling them mad. But I don't think it's a mad position, and I don't think I'm mad either.

Frankly, I think this is a good illustration that the determination of what is "charitable" or "uncharitable" is inextricably tied up with one's own ideological position.

Can you explain why you think my comment is uncharitable? Because I certainly don't think it's uncharitable.

How many leftists do you think would agree with you that their reason d'etre is to "remove the market forces that push people away from poor decisions"?

Frankly, I think this is a good illustration that the determination of what is "charitable" or "uncharitable" is inextricably tied up with one's own ideological position.

It's very tedious to go through another round of "You modded this comment because you disagree with it." I no longer bother trying to disabuse people of whatever assumptions they make about my ideological positions.

Re the first question, judge by actions not words. Democrats support raising the minimum wage. Democrats support wealth transfers. Democrats support subsidies to numerous industries (eg education, green). Democrats support very intrusive anti discrimination laws predicated on disparate impact. Democrats support extensive mandatory maternity leave laws. Democrats support nationalized health care. Democrats support banning goods they determine are bads (eg gas stoves). Democrats believe in highly progressive taxes. Democrats believe in a robust industrial policy (see Biden’s activities).

How many leftists do you think would agree with you that their reason d'etre is to "remove the market forces that push people away from poor decisions"?

If we're talking about economic leftists in the sense of classical Marxists/anarchists? All of them. It's an anti-market ideology. Read Marx, read Adorno, read Marcuse, read any classical Marxist thinker. They are anti-market and therefore they are anti markets doing anything, let alone "punishing people for bad decisions". This is all pretty explicit, it's not a secret.

Now granted there's been a lot of slippage of the word "leftist" over the years (including in my own history of the usage of the word) and it's come to describe a lot of people who are economically liberal rather than Marxist - people who actually support markets and think they should continue. These people might not agree with my original comment. Fair enough; I could have been more precise and narrowed down my claim to only describe Marxism rather than what is today known as "leftism" as a whole. But honestly even then I think the distinction is somewhat moot in this case. Even a technically-economically-liberal LGBT activist, say, who doesn't really care about classical Marxism, is still not going to be in favor of using markets as a tool to punish people. They're going to agree with the basic principle.

"You modded this comment because you disagree with it."

That's simply not what I said. What I did say is that determinations of uncharitability are made (in part) on the basis of what readings and positions are counted as inherently "insulting", or "beyond the pale". You can personally disagree with something, but you won't perceive it as uncharitable unless you also perceive it as either a naked attack, or outside the Overton window.

Why would you expect one principle to explain voting on both cases?

I think that is the central point @Primaprimaprima is making - there isn't an obvious reason that these should be tightly correlated, but if we poll people, we're going to find a strong correlation of opinions that isn't obviously driven by correlation in the merits of the cases.

I don’t think that’s true. I think most people regardless of political affiliation would intuitively think the Court was correct in the first one and wouldn’t know in the second.

I do think if people thought the first case was wrong they’d be a democrat.

Conservatives happen to be skeptical of 1) affirmative action; and 2) the administrative state. There is no underlying principle; it is just happenstance, and in fact it is driven by the merits of the cases. Each is consistent with a conservative principle, just not the same one.

If the question is why conservatives have the specific constellation of principles that they do, that is a good question. But I don't think OP's framing is helpful in finding an answer thereto.

But I don't think OP's framing is helpful in finding an answer thereto.

Can you suggest a more helpful framing?

Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?

The quickest and imo most accurate answer is that it's teams, not principles holding the two groups of support together.

But for a more effortful reconciliation, I don't think you need to go all in on race or bare economics. Support or opposition to both rulings can cleave rather nicely into a broader philosophical disagreement of social responsibility and the purpose of education for democratic equality & social efficiency. The argument for both is a collectivist view that goes:

Education is a public good, which should provide broad social benefits. Universities and the government should maintain the right to press on the scale to ensure democratically available and efficient outcomes.

In other words, both are united by a philosophy of social responsibility to both sides of the college as a public good bargain: "access" and "outcomes".

The anti-side of both is one about individual / meritocratic fairness. In both cases someone is getting to skip the benefits line, not based on personal merit, but on a collectivist effort to balance some measure. Education is a private good, and proper democratic access is one of equal, unbiased cost/availability, not collective equal access.

EDIT: Other replies below are even more parsimonious about a dichotomy between clear interpretation of existing rules and activist creep. But the most parsimonious in terms of popular opinion, remains teams.

Education is a public good, which should provide broad social benefits. Universities and the government should maintain the right to press on the scale to ensure democratically available and efficient outcomes.

Old post of mine at the old place, but I want to reiterate my objection to referring to education as a public good:

On student debt forgiveness, I'm seeing the emergence of a new framing that seems almost completely nonsensical to me. In a recent Voxsplainer, this quote is included from a policy person:

“What’s attractive about student debt cancellation in this moment is that in addition to righting a policy wrong — which is the decision to make the cost of college an individual burden when I would say it’s a public good — is that it can help stimulate the economy at a moment when we need economic stimulus. And it has significant racial equity implications as well,” said Suzanne Kahn, director of education, jobs, and power at the Roosevelt Institute and an advocate for complete federal student debt cancellation. It’s also something Biden could try to do independently of Congress, which is attractive since stimulus talks have stalled out.

I want to emphasize the use of "public good" there - this doesn't mean something that's good for the public, this is a specific economic term used deliberately. The meaning is:

In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.

...

Non-rivalrous: accessible by all whilst one's usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.[8]

...

Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.

This is not at all what university educations look like. Not only are degrees both rivalrous and excludable, they're also positional goods that convey signaling benefit to their recipients. To make them non-rivalrous and non-excludable would substantially remove their value to the individuals receiving them. We can imagine a world that looks like that, where Harvard offers all of its classes online to anyone that would like to take them and anyone that signs up and passes receives that Harvard degree, but that looks nothing like the world we actually live in.

From my perspective, student loan forgiveness would be one of the worst policies in American history. It would:

  • Reward irresponsible people that had no plan to pay debts freely entered into.

  • Reward universities that conferred expensive degrees that don't have an actual return on the investment.

  • Reify moral hazard and perverse incentives related to the above.

  • Continue to inflate college costs due to the expectation that no one actually has to pay for anything.

  • Further the class/social war by explicitly choosing to extract from non-university labor to reward the formally educated.

Almost all of the upsides seem to me to be incredibly short term and ignore normal human reactions. To me, the justifications all look like sophistry in service of smash-and-grab politics.

As an addendum to the above, even if I were to take a less formal definition of "public good" as just meaning something that has positive externalities, I would need an explanation for why the value of an education isn't primarily captured by the educated individual and instead accrues more broadly. Sure, there is going to be surplus value from some educations, but it's going to be pretty hard for me to understand how a Harvard-educated attorney or financier isn't actually capturing the majority of the economic value produced by their skills.

I think there’s a problem in the sense that not all education has positive effects. Which is something that’s almost always missing from such debates. I can teach everyone Swahili — that’s education, but it doesn’t really give much of a positive externality. It probably would end up being a net negative if the public were paying for it. Having science, math, and logic literate voters is a set of positive externalities in the sense that they’re at least likely to be able to understand science and make sound decisions on science and technology. Having lots of people with good science and engineering skills means being able to invent new technologies that the public generally benefits from.

I’ve less of a problem with paying for genuinely useful education. Science, tech, finance, mathematics, computing, that kind of stuff. I get the need to create engineers. Where the entire thing gets silly is when it’s stuff that really doesn’t create value to the rest of society. French literature is useless as a skill. What’s the actual benefit to the rest of society that you’ve read Proust? Or speak Latin?

And I think most people wrongly believe degrees represent human capital (with the idea that human capital creates spillover benefits which is an empirical question always just assumed in these discussions) whereas I believe education is more a signaling and therefore more akin to Tulips in Holland.

Old post of mine at the old place, but I want to reiterate my objection to referring to education as a public good:

Particular College education, but primary education is a public good, and I think the people is support of affirmative action take the same framing and extend a position of what college ought to be. Even if not economically a true public good, college as part of education collectively as a public good, not in the "benefits the public way", but in a way that is somewhat more abstract.

(tbc this isn't actually my opinion)

Suppose one claims that water should be a public good, in the technical sense. In economics, "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous." However, particular water fountains and taps can't themselves be accessed non-rivalrous or excludable due to their limited availability adn disproportionate desirability or pressure. One solution could be truly truly treat water fountains themselves as public goods with completely even lotteries for access.

Another solution could be to maintain that 1. water is a public good, that 2. access to particular water fountains isn't, and yet that 3. laissez-faire access to water fountains collectively leaves access to the public good unfulfilled. They could make an argument that targeted affirmative access to water fountains is a tool for keeping the water publicly accessible, while allowing the specific taps to be excludably regulated in their availability.

I'm not saying this is correct or has no holes in it, but it is a way of squaring the abstract concept of education as a public good with universities not being so, without resorting to a 'good for the public' definition.

I think that if we buy this argument, the solution would be for the government to directly run its own public supply with 0 or controlled nonprofit tuition costs, the same as they do with the water supply and public schools, not subsidize the costs of private universities. If the government just says "every college student gets $50k towards their tuition" and applies this equally to all schools, then the long term result is that all colleges raise their tuition by almost $50k, because that's where the new market equilibrium lies.

If instead the government has its own free universities, then all of the fancy ones need to offer a better product with cheap enough tuition in order compete.

You can't just subsidize profit-maximizing companies and naively expect them to divert all of the extra money towards the customers. That's like trickle down economics fallacies but worse.

If instead the government has its own free universities, then all of the fancy ones need to offer a better product with cheap enough tuition in order compete.

This wouldn't work either.

Adding a free college option means that a college education is the new high school education. Students will have to waste 4 (or more) years in another poorly-run government institution or be forever marked as suitable for only the lowest employment.

Billions of person-years, and trillions of dollars, will be wasted by low IQ people struggling over book reports while the labor shortage gets even worse.

We need to stop spending government money on positional goods, and yes that means drastically reducing existing spending on post-secondary education:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good

In countries with government provided free higher education there is a contest for limited number of places in specific programs. In Russia people who get free college are generally smarter than those who pay for it.

The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation?

Sure - enthusiasm for merit, markets, and personal responsibility. I think it's entirely consistent to think that university admissions should be governed primarily by actual merit without respect to racial constituency or other patronage, while also thinking that people should pay for the debts they incurred. To the extent that the debts are unmanageable, that seems like a problem caused by policies that are (again) about patronage for universities, funneling government subsidies and questionable loans into them. My modest proposal is that private universities should be free to admit who they want, but should no longer benefit from any government subsidies and be required to backstop student loans as the actual guarantor. My wager is that any concerns with program quality and admissions would sort themselves out in short order.

Perhaps even more consistently, I just actually think that's the law. The 14th Amendment and CRA seem pretty clear and explicit about not allowing government racial preferences outside of a few narrow areas subject to strict scrutiny. Likewise, I don't buy the claim that declaring an "emergency" allows the executive branch to do literally anything it likes with student loans.

On the other hand if college is based on merit it shouldn't be expensive. Pay to play isn't a great way to select the best. Colleges could very will be more like monasteries where people go to live a simple life in order to focus on higher pursuits. Certain degrees may require expensive equipment, but most degrees should be low cost. A simple dorm to live in, some food and access to great intellectuals could be provided for far less than 50k per year. If anything, a spartan lifestyle would be more in tune with the ideals of a college.

College isn't expensive for people of merit with low incomes. Here, check out Harvard's financial aid calculator. For a quick example, I punched in a household income of $75K with $200K in savings/investments, which should line up with a typical American household decently. The total cost for tuition and room and board is $83K per year... but Harvard covers $80K of it! The student is only on the hook for $3500 per year and they can even cover that with on campus term-work. That's a pretty damned good deal!

Lots of state universities offer scholarships for top percentiles from all in-state high schools in order to improve their diversity and provide opportunity for kids that aren't coming from the best backgrounds. Despite my aversion to the naked racial preferences exercised in some admissions offices, I actually think this kind of program is great, as it gathers up the best from each area, affording a good chance in life to kids from ghettos and farms. If you wind up at UT-Austin after coming out of a rough neighborhood in Houston or Nowheresville, West Texas, that's a pretty good way to go.

So, yeah, I agree, but we actually already do that.

Texas also has a program to allow community college students to finish in demand majors at commuter schools at community college prices, iirc. I’ve spoken to people who’ve done it for nursing and my sister applied but didn’t get in for teaching. Both had substantial strings attached(my sister would have had to agree to teach at a ghetto school for 3 years, and those nurses had to work at a rural hospital for a certain period of time) and difficult admissions requirements.

One side of the court is applying legal reasoning to the facts to reach their decision. The other side is picking a winner and tailoring their legal reasoning to reach it. You decide which side is which.

@The_Nybbler, @Nantafiria, @orangecat, @arjin_ferman, @Primaprimaprima...

I'm sorry to report: it's not this place, it's the world.

Yeah, maybe. This entire subthread seems to be both a reflection of the current state of the Motte and the current state of the world.

I'm not modding anyone in particular here (meaning, no mod notes have gone on anyone's account, despite reports flying right and left), just observing a few things, which you can take for whatever it's worth (likely nothing):

  1. Yes, @The_Nybbler's incessant one-note doomerism "Doesn't matter, nothing changes, rules are all fake and gay and they're gonna keep stomping on my face forever, whatever you post, I'm just gonna say The Left won dooooooooooom!" is tedious and annoying. Even if you think this is true, consider contributing... something else? Anything else?

  2. @Nantafiria - stop with the "no u" bullshit. You may feel understandably backed into a corner, being one of the few outspoken leftists left, but if you believe this place has "gone to the dogs" and engaging with people like adults is no longer worthwhile, then it seems like a healthier response would be to just leave instead of seeing how annoying you can be before you get banned.

  3. @Primaprimaprima - I don't think we have ever followed the rules "to the letter." This is a frequent source of grief from people who want to rules lawyer us ("You must mod every rule exactly as written and you cannot mod anything that isn't breaking a rule exactly as written, and I will write pages and pages arguing about exactly what the rule as written mean...")

So no, you don't have to argue everything from first principles every time, but you also can't start with ground-level assumptions like "As we all know, wokes suck."

This thread, generally, is bad because no one is actually arguing anything, you're just exchanging dunks and rimshots back and forth.

"Your side bad!"

"No yours."

And if that's all you have left, well, why are you even here?

My two cents. The official mod statement here is: knock it off and write gooder, all of you.

Your mod warning might be right, but this post is an example of being a bad mod. You mocked three users to various degrees of uncharitability and antagonism and then warned them when you could have just warned them. And I'm not saying you need to be a robot or in deference to other posters all the time, just you know, mod comment gooder.

seeing how annoying you can be before you get banned.

That's not why I'm here, but fuck you and the horse you rode in on, too? The fuck?

That's not why I'm here, but fuck you and the horse you rode in on, too? The fuck?

And yet you post this? How am I supposed to respond to this? Do you expect anything other than a ban? Is this supposed to be some sort of very clever gambit to see if I will ban you so you can then complain about being banned even though you claim not be trying to get banned?

All I can say is: "As you wish." Banned for a week.

Under a Democratic SCOTUS, the team looks out for the team. Under a Republican SCOTUS, it's just the opposite.

Do you ever get tired of posting one-liners that are all heat and no light? No charity, no forethought, nothing but war to the knife.

I mean, are they wrong?

There point seems pretty obvious and we've recently seen a lot of talk about activist judges, etc.

Perhaps you don't like uncomfortable things being pointed out?

Whether they are wrong or not, it's clearly low quality as it doesn't contain any argument or evidence. It also violates the rules for boo outgroup and speaking plainly.

no u

Nah. Believe what you will, this place has gone to the dogs enough as-is.

I'm sorry to report: it's not this place, it's the world.

We had a conversation about steelmanning here recently, and our resident Russian pointed out profoundly "I can steelman Russian nationalism, but I cannot redeem it". Aside from the fact that the kind of people who lament the lack of charity here never seem to lament the lack of charity towards ideas that are unpopular in the mainstream, I have to ask: is the point to show charity to the point we have to invent things that don't exist in the world we actually inhabit?

You don't have to invent things whole cloth, but starting with a position that isn't maximally inflammatory and unkind is a good start as well as sorely lacking.

How much of the same pattern do we have to see repeated over and over, before we can say that it is, in fact, a pattern?

From the OP:

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

Figure something a pattern all you want, there are people who disagree with you. Calling them names is against the letter and spirit of this thread.

More comments

I mean, are they wrong?

I think so, yeah. When I read the Biden v Nebraska decision, I actually don't think either side is completely full of shit, just picking the winner and then figuring out how to get there. The side that I agree with actually seems like they have thinner legal reasoning, to me. The affirmative action case seems entirely straightforward and I think the dissent is absolute garbage, but the difference between the two cases might just be that I think Kagan is a lucid, clear, humorous writer while Sotomayor and (especially) KBJ are absolute hacks.

Sotomayor and KBJ make the best argument for the court to strike down affirmative action.

If there is blatant culture warring in this thread that isn't being modded, that's a mod problem.

Everyone's problem, I'd say.

I agree that everyone is negatively impacted by it. The only viable solution is a change in mod behavior. So long as people are allowed to take passing potshots at their outgroup they will continue to do so.

It's a biased take sure, but most political takes are... There's a point and it not overly insulting.

Is this really the level for a 'boo outgroup' ban?

It may be charitable to attempt to find a "reasonable" explanation for tribal behavior, but it won't get you closer to the truth. The point I was making, sardonically, is that it looks like tribal behavior because it IS tribal behavior.

I didn't interpret your comment as sarcastic, considering that @Jiro, @guajalote, and @jeroboam all made the exact same point. It would be weird if you were all being sarcastic. Clearly this is a framing that some people actually believe in.

Yes, obviously some people believe their side is following the legal reasoning to reach a conclusion and the other side is picking a winner. I think in this case that's wrong, but not as wrong as believing that both sides are following the legal reasoning to reach a conclusion. I think in these cases both sides picked the outcome first. I happen to think the legal reasoning is better on the conservative side in these cases, but I don't believe the justices weren't results motivated. Probably the weakest bit of reasoning in the recent "tribal" decisions is not in an education decision but in the gay wedding site case, not in the main holding (which is ironclad, IMO) but the granting of standing.

Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?

"The law/the Constitution actually means what it says. Stop trying to twist it for policy reasons."

Seems eminently fair that people should not be bailed out for their poor life decisions. Hopefully market pressure will simply continue to reduce demand for fluff majors like sociology, gender studies, communication etc.

Except Biden’s student loan program was not mostly bailing out PhD’s in sociology because the amount of debt forgiveness was a drop in the bucket on the scale of debt from grad school.

Parents basement studies majors would go from being unable to pay the note on a $150,000 debt to being unable to pay the loan on a $130,000 debt. This is not a substantial change.

Instead Biden’s bailout was most helpful to people with small amounts of student debt- either funding what’s leftover from their scholarship, or tech school, or community college plus podunk state, or whatever.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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