Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.
What's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security.
Public education is largely a scam to put 'original sin' of debt of children to society so when they grow up there is some plausible explanation that "we're a society" and they must feed into the pyramid scheme.
I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.
Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.
Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.
If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.
But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
This isn’t about free market vs single payer healthcare. These kids are from poor countries. Unless you’re arguing for rich countries to offer literal worldwide healthcare.
> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to
We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.
Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.
> This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels.
This is neither here nor there. As I said, temptations can arise that make things more attractive to certain people given their conditioning and the habituation of their desires. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we can refuse to indulge even strong desires. To the degree that we are in possession of our wits, we are culpable.
> If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history
I have no idea how this is supposed to follow, or even what this means.