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by dmix 2042 days ago
Just like school tuition. The more gov subsidized debt that can't be bankrupted the more admins they keep hiring and the bigger the cost/shit rolls down hill.

Combine that with a culture that overvalues all university diplomas as equal, while disregarding the economic opportunities of at least half of them are almost nil, and you have a great recipe for massive failure for a big percentage of the young population.

The half baked social programs always do this. Same with how rent control in NYC and Toronto in the 1970s ended up significantly reducing the supply of low-income housing because it stopped incentivizing developers from building cheap houses in cities that had it (they just went elsewhere) while also ghettoizing a bunch of neighbourhoods because there was zero incentive to maintain buildings (which led to mass arsons in places like harlem).

If you're going to socialize it either go all the way and nationalize it/fully fund it or find a way that doesn't fuck the citizens over (like these glorified schemes to hand money over to politicially-connected middlemen like big pharma and diploma mills). OR in most cases just let the market do it's job. Like letting generic drug makers take over markets way sooner, without the multitude of government protection rackets that protect big pharma (including FDAs giant backlog). Meanwhile (social) media blames capitalism for every expensive drug or tuition price... like it actually makes sense for ANY market to charge a working class person $1000/pill.

These flaws seem so obvious to me but are repeated in so many western countries, not just the US. While blame goes in so many randomly misguided directions. Often heavily greased by the people who benefit from these schemes.