Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
i had an employee once who had a master's degree in some gender grievance studies thing, although i didn't know this at the time. apparently she did her paper on the oppressiveness of lipstick and i guess no one at estee lauder or revlon thought she was a good fit so she ended up doing classic women's work- sewing in my theatrical costume shop. i paid people fine but certainly not enough to service the debt on a completely useless ivy league master's.
one day she went to lunch with two of my young gals and when i got back from lunch, she was busy packing her stuff and accusing everyone in the shop of being racists! now, i ran a congenial family style business where everyone got along and i played peacemaker when they didn't. my employees were all women and homosexual men, as you'd expect and we had people from poland, russia, brazil, croatia, china, etc. it was a kind of united nations and many of the women had left totalitarian countries and were grateful for the freedom of the USA. suddenly hearing them being attacked as racists by a co-worker was beyond the pale.
i told her she could not talk to my good people like that and she insisted that she couldn't work with racists so i invited her to take her things and go.
after she left, the girls she had gone to lunch with explained what had happened. one of the gals- chris- was pretty curvy and she had been accosted by a homeless guy of hispanic origin on the way back from lunch. something like "hey chickie, nice tits"- the usual come on line that no woman can resist from a man who hasn't showered in a month!
chris took it with good humor and said to her companions "look, my new husband." that was it.
my master's degree in lipstick employee was also "latinX" (which wasn’t even a thing at the time) and took this as a slur against hispanic maleness.
notice that she didn't side with her abused "sister" as you might have expected an ivy league feminist to do. i call this "When Wokes Collide." which disenfranchised minority wins the mantle of victimhood today?
imagine my surprise when the next morning, she was sitting at her sewing machine as if nothing had happened and the room was pin drop quiet! i called her into the front fitting room.
"what happened?" i asked. "did you suddenly realize that your landlord wouldn't accept the old 'i can't work with racists' excuse for why you couldn't pay your rent? did it suddenly occur to you that unemployment wouldn't let you collect when you wrote down that you had plenty of work but just couldn't be around racists? no, no, you were very clear about your principles; you can't come back."
she cried and said i couldn't possibly understand. "what is it with you people? i'm a greek italian american woman who was ridiculed in grade school because i wore glasses and sucked in gym class! why do you all always think you have a stranglehold on suffering?"
she showed me a multi page gangsta rap ad for clothing in a fashion magazine. "look at the kind of offensive things your employees bring into work!" she said, missing the irony that it was HER magazine.
i thought the ad was pretty brilliant and said so. i also pointed out that all the black models who appeared on those pages said YES when their agents called about the job and they all cashed the checks. if they weren't offended, why should i be?
but more to the point, did she really expect me to stand at the door and rifle through everyone's bags and thumb through their reading material to make sure that there was nothing that might upset anyone? because i don't want to work in or own a place like that. i never saw her again and when her unemployment claim came in the mail, i rejected it.
i think about her often these days because her ilk seem to have infiltrated everywhere. i'm sure she is still paying off her useless and expensive degree with whatever menial work she can get. i would resent it bitterly if i am required to pay off her debt.
transferring student debt onto the tax payers without first cutting out the rot in universities is criminal. get rid of the $400,000 a year diversity deans, put all the "safe spaces" to good use, bring the tuition down to whatever i paid in 1972 adjusted for inflation.
universities now have become criminal organizations, copying the medical industrial complex model. we don't need any gender specialists; we need farmers and people who can do things with their hands. parents need to stop seeing college as an essential extension of childhood. take the money and have your kids learn a trade so they can make their way in the world. especially don't send your young adult children to any college that requires them to be vaccinated and boosted. right out of the gate, that's the wrong lesson.
the only way to stop this is to starve the beast. these places have endowments on which they should be able to run forever. don't give them a penny more!
The common arguments for & against loan forgiveness usually both overlook the ROOT CAUSE which is in the fact that most of these students should never have had to pay that much for the education to begin with and those who benefit from the loans are everyone but the students, generally speaking. This is one of the best summaries of the corrupt system: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/the-great-college-loan-swindle-124484/
- Dept of Ed, lending institutions and school admins all rake in on the arrangement
It’s the usual culprits fueled by greed and selfishness. Disappearing the debt is simply a band-aid. What needs disappearing is the gov/banker lending scheme.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
I LOVE your optimism. Skipping college and using our early 20s to build a family and a business was the best decision my husband and I ever made. Our now teenage kids know full well that if they want to go to college, they better have a damn good reason why it's necessary for them.
Thanks, you are the only person I have read that correctly states the inflation happens when the loan is given. You never mention that the pay off is supposed to be burned that’s why the forgiveness is anti-deflationary. Nonetheless keep stacking and I look forward to reading more of your articles.
You lost me at the assumption that Bitcoin would become the global banking reserve currency. I've read that the federal government has plans to create their own digital currency to replace cash and have greater control over all of us by the end of this year. Biden signed a bill to move us in this direction back in March, and another article I read points to Dec 13th as a date that this shift will happen. Wouldn't Bitcoin become irrelevant or worthless at this point if the feds can just make it illegal?
Complex financial instruments, US tax forms. everything has gotten complicated. 7 years of secondary education does not helpe but I feel for those only with high school trying not to get taken advantage of. We need to go back to simplicity of bills, laws. Science, reasoning, financial instruments. The powers want to convince us that our laws and systems are unmamageable and democratic principles have failed.. release criminals, allow aliens in, safety last,wars, crisis after crisis for distraction for the masses. Why would they do these things all at the same time globally? Recent substack article addressed this question.
1. Make student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy
2. Require the educational institution to hold at least 50% of the debt taken on by each student
loans for uneconomical degrees, gone. loans not based on merit, gone. bloated administrations, gone. New country club facilities, gone. 6 year bachelors, gone. Party schools, gone.
Most universities would need to compete to provide the best value to well qualified responsible students who will earn an income to easily handle the loan...or go bankrupt themselves.
The worst Depressions and Recessions occurred when the money supply was inadequate to meet demand. This resulted in Deflation. If you think inflation is bad, imagine all your hard assets declining in value. You cant sell them. Nobody wants to buy anything in a deflationary market.
The problem this country faces is not an increase in the money supply, its the fact that every dollar created carries 1 dollar of debt that is subject to compound interest. So the debt obligation is greater than the money supply since money is not created to pay the interest (except for the rich who may borrow more money to carryover loans that become due (principal + interest)
Furthermore, almost all loans are required to be backed by collateral. If you don't have collateral you cant take out a loan, with the possible exception of student loans although some might argue the student is the collateral. They owe a debt that can not be escaped by bankruptcy like guys like Trump have done many times in a fashion that preserves his personal wealth
This leads to the even bigger problem, that is the equitable distribution of money that is created. Its mostly in the hands of the wealthy and little of it ends up on Main St in the productive economy or building/repairing infrastructure. As such its not a main driver of inflation on Main St. since the rich can only buy so many pizzas and beer, or goods on Amazon. It can of course cause asset inflation (real estate and stocks) and be used to invest overseas.
Obviously the limited relief of student loan debt wont change anything. Universities and students alike will expect this to be the norm with the former hiking rates and students taking out more loans. It might even fuel inflation as those ex-students who are not having a problem paying back the dent might just spend the 10,000 dollars on Main St.
I've really appreciated all you've written on bitcoin and read through the long book you made available on your website...very helpful! thanks!
a question for you: what do you make of Martin Armstrong pointing out that the idea that a particular fellow Satoshi would have single-handedly developed a system and then bowed isn't entirely credible. He thinks it was developed by behind the scenes powers that be, who likely want to use the tracking power it offers to eventually digitize all money. I really like the philosophy of btc, but the point he makes is difficult to reconcile.
How likely is it that BTC would be adopted as global reserve currency...?
I’m sure people have reasons to believe in this possibility, but there are very powerful interests that (one would assume) would not allow this to happen.
Would be interested to hear the thinking backing likelihood of adoption. Seems sketchy at best.
I met someone at Bitcoin Miami '22, he owned an auto body shop in Philadelphia. Never went to college, just built up business year by year till it sustained his lifestyle. Every time I hear story about debt forgiveness I wonder what he must think of it.
So, Mathew, you are saying that having a limited amount of currency, of a type like bitcoin, could solve many social problems and government corruption? It makes sense to me as far as stopping the vicious cycle of printing unlimited amounts of money via MMT, modern monetary theory, that is self-serving to those in Washington. Excellent post, thanks again!
i had an employee once who had a master's degree in some gender grievance studies thing, although i didn't know this at the time. apparently she did her paper on the oppressiveness of lipstick and i guess no one at estee lauder or revlon thought she was a good fit so she ended up doing classic women's work- sewing in my theatrical costume shop. i paid people fine but certainly not enough to service the debt on a completely useless ivy league master's.
one day she went to lunch with two of my young gals and when i got back from lunch, she was busy packing her stuff and accusing everyone in the shop of being racists! now, i ran a congenial family style business where everyone got along and i played peacemaker when they didn't. my employees were all women and homosexual men, as you'd expect and we had people from poland, russia, brazil, croatia, china, etc. it was a kind of united nations and many of the women had left totalitarian countries and were grateful for the freedom of the USA. suddenly hearing them being attacked as racists by a co-worker was beyond the pale.
i told her she could not talk to my good people like that and she insisted that she couldn't work with racists so i invited her to take her things and go.
after she left, the girls she had gone to lunch with explained what had happened. one of the gals- chris- was pretty curvy and she had been accosted by a homeless guy of hispanic origin on the way back from lunch. something like "hey chickie, nice tits"- the usual come on line that no woman can resist from a man who hasn't showered in a month!
chris took it with good humor and said to her companions "look, my new husband." that was it.
my master's degree in lipstick employee was also "latinX" (which wasn’t even a thing at the time) and took this as a slur against hispanic maleness.
notice that she didn't side with her abused "sister" as you might have expected an ivy league feminist to do. i call this "When Wokes Collide." which disenfranchised minority wins the mantle of victimhood today?
imagine my surprise when the next morning, she was sitting at her sewing machine as if nothing had happened and the room was pin drop quiet! i called her into the front fitting room.
"what happened?" i asked. "did you suddenly realize that your landlord wouldn't accept the old 'i can't work with racists' excuse for why you couldn't pay your rent? did it suddenly occur to you that unemployment wouldn't let you collect when you wrote down that you had plenty of work but just couldn't be around racists? no, no, you were very clear about your principles; you can't come back."
she cried and said i couldn't possibly understand. "what is it with you people? i'm a greek italian american woman who was ridiculed in grade school because i wore glasses and sucked in gym class! why do you all always think you have a stranglehold on suffering?"
she showed me a multi page gangsta rap ad for clothing in a fashion magazine. "look at the kind of offensive things your employees bring into work!" she said, missing the irony that it was HER magazine.
i thought the ad was pretty brilliant and said so. i also pointed out that all the black models who appeared on those pages said YES when their agents called about the job and they all cashed the checks. if they weren't offended, why should i be?
but more to the point, did she really expect me to stand at the door and rifle through everyone's bags and thumb through their reading material to make sure that there was nothing that might upset anyone? because i don't want to work in or own a place like that. i never saw her again and when her unemployment claim came in the mail, i rejected it.
i think about her often these days because her ilk seem to have infiltrated everywhere. i'm sure she is still paying off her useless and expensive degree with whatever menial work she can get. i would resent it bitterly if i am required to pay off her debt.
transferring student debt onto the tax payers without first cutting out the rot in universities is criminal. get rid of the $400,000 a year diversity deans, put all the "safe spaces" to good use, bring the tuition down to whatever i paid in 1972 adjusted for inflation.
universities now have become criminal organizations, copying the medical industrial complex model. we don't need any gender specialists; we need farmers and people who can do things with their hands. parents need to stop seeing college as an essential extension of childhood. take the money and have your kids learn a trade so they can make their way in the world. especially don't send your young adult children to any college that requires them to be vaccinated and boosted. right out of the gate, that's the wrong lesson.
the only way to stop this is to starve the beast. these places have endowments on which they should be able to run forever. don't give them a penny more!
The common arguments for & against loan forgiveness usually both overlook the ROOT CAUSE which is in the fact that most of these students should never have had to pay that much for the education to begin with and those who benefit from the loans are everyone but the students, generally speaking. This is one of the best summaries of the corrupt system: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/the-great-college-loan-swindle-124484/
In a nutshell:
- Student Loan bankruptcy protections were all but completely eliminated by 1998 fostering the drive to lend more and more *at interest of course (https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/history-of-student-loans-bankruptcy-discharge)
- Tuitions then increased dramatically, thereby “requiring” more student aid AKA loans. This is even more pronounced at private colleges which increased tuitions offset the Fed aid/grants (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/8/12/9130157/financial-aid-tuition-bennett-hypothesis)
- Dept of Ed, lending institutions and school admins all rake in on the arrangement
It’s the usual culprits fueled by greed and selfishness. Disappearing the debt is simply a band-aid. What needs disappearing is the gov/banker lending scheme.
I LOVE your optimism. Skipping college and using our early 20s to build a family and a business was the best decision my husband and I ever made. Our now teenage kids know full well that if they want to go to college, they better have a damn good reason why it's necessary for them.
Thanks, you are the only person I have read that correctly states the inflation happens when the loan is given. You never mention that the pay off is supposed to be burned that’s why the forgiveness is anti-deflationary. Nonetheless keep stacking and I look forward to reading more of your articles.
According to Robert Barnes this is completely illegal, unless passed by Congress. But due to the standing doctrine nobody really can sue.
Debt forgiveness is like another "minimum wage increase" nonsense. The college educated who believe in free lunch.
You lost me at the assumption that Bitcoin would become the global banking reserve currency. I've read that the federal government has plans to create their own digital currency to replace cash and have greater control over all of us by the end of this year. Biden signed a bill to move us in this direction back in March, and another article I read points to Dec 13th as a date that this shift will happen. Wouldn't Bitcoin become irrelevant or worthless at this point if the feds can just make it illegal?
Complex financial instruments, US tax forms. everything has gotten complicated. 7 years of secondary education does not helpe but I feel for those only with high school trying not to get taken advantage of. We need to go back to simplicity of bills, laws. Science, reasoning, financial instruments. The powers want to convince us that our laws and systems are unmamageable and democratic principles have failed.. release criminals, allow aliens in, safety last,wars, crisis after crisis for distraction for the masses. Why would they do these things all at the same time globally? Recent substack article addressed this question.
I'd rather see this problem fixed head on:
1. Make student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy
2. Require the educational institution to hold at least 50% of the debt taken on by each student
loans for uneconomical degrees, gone. loans not based on merit, gone. bloated administrations, gone. New country club facilities, gone. 6 year bachelors, gone. Party schools, gone.
Most universities would need to compete to provide the best value to well qualified responsible students who will earn an income to easily handle the loan...or go bankrupt themselves.
The worst Depressions and Recessions occurred when the money supply was inadequate to meet demand. This resulted in Deflation. If you think inflation is bad, imagine all your hard assets declining in value. You cant sell them. Nobody wants to buy anything in a deflationary market.
The problem this country faces is not an increase in the money supply, its the fact that every dollar created carries 1 dollar of debt that is subject to compound interest. So the debt obligation is greater than the money supply since money is not created to pay the interest (except for the rich who may borrow more money to carryover loans that become due (principal + interest)
Furthermore, almost all loans are required to be backed by collateral. If you don't have collateral you cant take out a loan, with the possible exception of student loans although some might argue the student is the collateral. They owe a debt that can not be escaped by bankruptcy like guys like Trump have done many times in a fashion that preserves his personal wealth
This leads to the even bigger problem, that is the equitable distribution of money that is created. Its mostly in the hands of the wealthy and little of it ends up on Main St in the productive economy or building/repairing infrastructure. As such its not a main driver of inflation on Main St. since the rich can only buy so many pizzas and beer, or goods on Amazon. It can of course cause asset inflation (real estate and stocks) and be used to invest overseas.
Obviously the limited relief of student loan debt wont change anything. Universities and students alike will expect this to be the norm with the former hiking rates and students taking out more loans. It might even fuel inflation as those ex-students who are not having a problem paying back the dent might just spend the 10,000 dollars on Main St.
I've really appreciated all you've written on bitcoin and read through the long book you made available on your website...very helpful! thanks!
a question for you: what do you make of Martin Armstrong pointing out that the idea that a particular fellow Satoshi would have single-handedly developed a system and then bowed isn't entirely credible. He thinks it was developed by behind the scenes powers that be, who likely want to use the tracking power it offers to eventually digitize all money. I really like the philosophy of btc, but the point he makes is difficult to reconcile.
How likely is it that BTC would be adopted as global reserve currency...?
I’m sure people have reasons to believe in this possibility, but there are very powerful interests that (one would assume) would not allow this to happen.
Would be interested to hear the thinking backing likelihood of adoption. Seems sketchy at best.
But wouldn't Bitcoin be simply nationalized by a central bank digital currency ("for everyone's good"). Bitcoin and the rest seem to be sitting ducks.
I met someone at Bitcoin Miami '22, he owned an auto body shop in Philadelphia. Never went to college, just built up business year by year till it sustained his lifestyle. Every time I hear story about debt forgiveness I wonder what he must think of it.
So, Mathew, you are saying that having a limited amount of currency, of a type like bitcoin, could solve many social problems and government corruption? It makes sense to me as far as stopping the vicious cycle of printing unlimited amounts of money via MMT, modern monetary theory, that is self-serving to those in Washington. Excellent post, thanks again!
Do you ever wonder if Bitcoin was created to lure people away from fiat so when all the CBDBs are in place they can just make Bitcoin illegal?