“So education is good for society right? Having people be more educated improves society right?”
“Correct.”
“So why do people have to pay for education? Why do we not reward people for completing school instead of making them pay money to complete school?”
“The school costs money to run!”
“So the tax dollars aren’t enough to support education?”
“Nope! Not with the way we allocate finances. We need to get more money from you to support schooling and have schools invest half of the tax dollars they get and money from you into hedge funds to support our debt and credit system! By placing you in debt at the same time we are even better able to service our economy!”
“What? doesn’t the economy exist to serve us? Not for us to serve the economy?”
“You serve the economy, the economy serves the people! We serve each other!”
“But… if helping people get educated improves society a lot, and the economy makes it difficult to become educated, isn’t it not doing very well for its purpose?”
“You serve the economy, the economy serves the people who are winning the current game of economy, and the motivation helps propel you far beyond what things like education and healthcare provide. The economy serves us by igniting the fire of creativity! Even better, due to the cyclical nature of recessions and inflation people who are winning the game of economy win even more over time and people who are losing get progressively worse off because they are not able to take advantage of the cycle! Talk about lighting a fire of motivation under you!”
“But… it sounds like the game of economy doesn’t coincide with improving society… it’s just about winning the game of economy then.”
“That’s lazy talk! Anyone can win the game of economy, you just need to work harder and you’ll see the results!”
“But… how does making it harder to access improvements benefit people?”
“If no one loses then no one wins! If no one wins… well… who cares about anything then! Nothing would ever get done!”
“But people are suffering and we have the means to provide these things.”
“Listen, I don’t want to be a cashier and I don’t think you want to either. Someone has to until a bright economist scales robotics and they really can’t win enough of a reward if there aren’t millions of cashiers to replace so it’s a win-win for everyone! We need cashiers and they wouldn’t contribute much otherwise anyways. This way cashiers can service us by doing what we don’t want to do and a bright young economist has extra motivation because of the extra financial reward to make cashiers irrelevant! Plus, there’s other bright young economists competing for the same crown which makes them try even harder to improve society for everyone! This is the beauty of the economy!”
“I get that these circumstances help motivations of the sort… but you talk about people who aren’t doing well in the economy as lesser and are certainly treating them like such already. The people who try to make the leaps to improve society, aren’t they limited strictly to people who were already winning the game in these circumstances meaning less people can try? How do we even know whether a lot of these problems that you’re saying are getting solved aren’t just symptoms of the economy in the first place?”
“You have a bright young mind, I’m sure you’ll do great in the economy, you’ll be a winner for sure! You see, by having winners be the only ones in position to be able to take risks there’s more chance to succeed! Because we know these people are already winners then we know we are having the right people do the right jobs! It’s a perfect system!”
“I don’t think I know if that’s really the truth. If people never get a fair chance, how can they ever be winners? When things like the internet come out, doesn’t the entire system change? What if the answers to improvement don’t directly correlate to what’s best for the economy anymore? If the system constantly reinforces itself how are we supposed to change it when the values stop making sense?”
“The system is perfect, you just need to try harder to win and you’ll understand. Just spend your whole life trying.”