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Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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"?
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).
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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.
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.
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