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Comment by foobarchu | Hacker News Reader

I think its interesting to apply the sentiment to other things.

Would a state funded levee system be a "fuck you" to people who lost homes in the flood that prompted them? It's being paid from their taxes, after all.

Is the chicken pox vaccine a "fuck you" to people who had it when they were young before it was available?

Are surgery advances a "fuck you" to people who previously got an amputation?

Was the introduction of the GI Bill a "fuck you" to everyone who served in the armed forces being it? After all, veterans pay taxes.

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No, it's all just zero-empathy privileged people who don't want to share.

Yeah, I'm so privileged that I took on debt to go to university for a difficult subject and had to work and make lifestyle sacrifices to pay it back rather than voting for someone to give me a free ride.

Regardless of whether it would work well, the proposal is to help people who are suffering inside a horrifically broken system, not to give indiscrminate free rides to people who haven't even made the decision yet. The notion that massive tragedy is OK if the fault can be placed with the victims under the argument that they demonstrated financial incompetence is simply antithetical to civilization. Otherwise, why not ignore anything that can be placed under the umbrella of personal responsibility? High suicide rates? Who cares, it was ultimately the dead's decision. Don't look into it.

The idea that people deserve this and it's not fair to those who already made it through seems like a purely emotional reaction, and an extremely reductionist one, considering the dramatic complexity of higher education's actual value and how much risk is "worth it".

How is overspending on college any different than overspending on anything else? Is the guy who drives around in the BMW he can't afford "tragic"?

It's absolutely possible to pick an economically viable major, go to community college, go to a trade school... It's also absolutely viable to take on loans and pay them off through hard work. How important is that degree to you? If it's very important then expect to sacrifice, almost everyone else is.

I know so many peers with degrees of varying quality that spend their money on international travel, eating out almost every night, living in the most expensive cities in the world yet they complain about their student debt constantly. Now they're presenting themselves as true victims and acting like anyone who doesn't support this bail out is a hateful wretch.

I'm sorry but I worked hard and made good decisions and I absolutely expect the same level of competence from my fellow citizens. People make dumb decisions all of the time and you have to learn the hard way that your life is your's and there's no fairy godmother that will come waive your poor choices away.

Well, perhaps there could be. You just sound determined to never even countenance the possibility that things could be different.

MAGA, amirite?

Well, I don't think there can be a fairy godmother. Someone has to pay for all of this.

I do want things to be different though, and it starts with people taking on a lot more personal responsibility. Our whole society needs to reintegrate that concept into who we are and how we're raised. A lot of people are very quick to blame others for their mistakes and look to them to fix their problems.

> The notion that massive tragedy is OK if the fault can be placed with the victims under the argument that they demonstrated financial incompetence is simply antithetical to civilization.

It is, however that may be, fundamental to the modern conservative position on a wide range of issues.

> Otherwise, why not ignore anything that can be placed under the umbrella of personal responsibility?

That is, indeed, the point of the argument. (It is, of course, less consistently applied to corporations and the investor class because “job creators”, but still...)

> The idea that people deserve this and it's not fair to those who already made it through seems like a purely emotional reaction,

It's not, it's cynically manipulating emotional reactions. The motivation is more coldly considered defense of the privileged position of the already successful than any kind of emotional reaction.

Apples and oranges. Most of those things aren't fungible like money is. There's no moral hazard involved with someone receiving a new elective surgery. There's no opportunity cost to someone not receiving a non-existent vaccine.

GI bill is a disingenuous comparison because those people made pretty tremendous personal sacrifices in service of the country.

The hypothetical levee system and the GI bill are both very much the same situation, involving taxes assisting someone else. Why should citizens who lost property in a flood be responsible for ensuring that others in the future don't?

Why is the GI bill comparison disingenuous? The veterans who served before the introduction of the GI bill made exactly the same sacrifices as those who were eligible for it, and yet their taxes sponsored it. The fact that one group was put in personal danger doesn't make the comparison invalid.

Some would argue that the levee system creates moral hazard by incentivizing development in dangerous areas.

And the GI bill comparison is disingenuous because it's disgusting to compare the millennial English literature major whining about being unemployable to men who fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

>And the GI bill comparison is disingenuous because it's disgusting to compare the millennial English literature major whining about being unemployable to men who fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

Sorry, is it still "disgusting" to compare those English majors "whining" to American war criminals that murdered 2 dozen Iraqi civilians [1] and then faced no real punishment? Why do they get to reap the benefits of the G.I. bill? That isn't even getting into the dozens, maybe hundreds of war crimes committed by American soldiers that then get to go home and go to college for free. Why do my tax dollars have to pay for some overgrown manchild with the emotional intelligence of an alligator snapping turtle to go to college because he couldn't make it in any other field than killing people? Explain to me why I should support and reward murderers.

By your logic, the GI Bill incentivizes young people going to fight in jingoistic US wars (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, and hey look, maybe Iran) and somehow you think that people studying English literature is more morally hazardous?

See how easy it is to derail the discussion when you aren't interested in actually talking about the topic at hand?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre

>It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

That's precisely the comparison. You can't remove something from the argument space simply because it was a worse situation, that's a textbook logical fallacy. The thing being compared here has nothing to do with the sacrifices of soldiers, and everything to do with a specific proposal: a group of people being asked to contribute to the greater good via a benefit they were not able to have.

By the way, reducing this to "millenial english literature majors whining about being unemployable" simply makes people stop listening to you, because you clearly haven't been listening to them. Insulting, belittling, and making assumptions will always harm your point.

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