Creation Ex Nihilo

Marx famously thought that capitalism was the engine which drove the creation of class differences in society. Simply spread out the capital, he said, and the class differences would disappear.

Now, Marx was a raving lunatic, a man who never held a job in his life. He was a man who was, in fact, incapable of holding a job. His wife and whose wife and children nearly starved to death because of his incredible incompetence. But, as historians like to point out, personal peccadilloes really aren't relevant to the importance of a man's insights.

This is why no one listens to historians anymore.

In any case, as Lincoln might have said, but didn't, for the last forty years American government has been engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this economy, or any economy conceived on socialism can long endure. That is to say, it has been trying as hard as it can to "spread the wealth around a little bit", become Robin Hood, take from the rich and give to the poor, spend other people's money because they can't be trusted with it, etc.

As part of this important and selfless work, the government takes tax money and loans it to students so they can go to college. The selflessness of this generosity is enough to make one weep.

Unfortunately, as commentators are beginning to realize, the inherent generosity of an essentially socialistic program has actually helped to create the very classes that socialism is supposed to destroy.

...the tuition-scholarship relationship to the higher-versus-lower-school choice constitutes an allocation matrix that uniformly funnels wealthy applicants to the higher school, securing the attendant advantages, while people with less financial means divide between higher and lower. Multiply this out by tens of thousands of like decisions each year and the effect is large. The pricing structure of law schools thereby helps the wealthy in America further consolidate their grip on elite legal positions.

And, of course, tuition has been sky-rocketing precisely because federal aid is so ubiquitous. Indeed, the increase in college tuition tracks precisely with the increase in available federal college aid. These two numbers have tracked identically together for the last thirty-five years.

Now, this increase in federal aid has come at no small cost to the United States. In the last three years, the increase in aid has contributed no less than $504 billion to the US national debt. And that's just the last three years.

Worse, the increase in federal aid doesn't just create the very class differences that the program is meant to eradicate, it adds injury to insult. Because those student loans cannot be avoided apart from avoiding college entirely, nor can they be gotten rid of through normal relief mechanisms (e.g., Chapter 11), they constitute an enormous additional tax burden on the aspiring graduate.

To sum up: the federal college student loan program artificially raises college tuitions. Because of the radically increased tuition, poor students cannot possibly work enough to make up the tuition cost of a high-ranking school on their own. The enormous cost difference between the tuition of a "high-ranking" school versus a "low-ranking" school stratifies society into different educational classes based on wealth.

Those who take out the loans necessary to avoid being forced into a lower social class will now be TAXED AT A PREMIUM for daring to attempt to enter the upper class.

America, the society famous for having virtually no permanent social classes, has now got a government which creates permanent social classes out of nothing.

Well, that's not entirely true.

Those permanent social classes are created out of your tax dollars.

The government is now in the business of creating a class system, and the people who run the government are, of course, the upper class.