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Interesting ideas as always.
The first important topic that RP brings up is that Medicare and Education are not Rights.
This is a bit muddled though because he doesn't mean all education, he means post secondary education.
The second thing that is important to note is that he doesn't want to bar those without means from going to post secondary but feels that bank loans will fill the gap if the government steps back.
I think he's got some good points here. Although he doesn't explicitly say it there is some minimum amount of education which should be 100% state financed, which I agree with. High school seems like a good watershed point here, as it has been for decades. A high school education provides the literacy and numaracy required for communicating with one another and standardization across states, or ideally countries, expands the number of people who can communicate with each other. Without some measure of consistency norms of communication will diverge faster than they are already and vocabularies will shift and change until new dielects / languages are formed.
Sure this might take generations or even centuries but there are significant social and economic benifits to maintaining some amount of linguistic consistency. The same is true with math. Science does quite well with the established conventions, part of the reason international scientific work exists. But without training "=" might not mean the same thing in all areas. (I actually read an article about this recently, mentioning how some groups view an "=" sign meaning something other than what it actually means)
I'm thinking that a significant amount of this discussion is spured by the high levels of loan deliquency that are begining to be problematic. It's probably not all that far fetched to say that government money should not be going to people who enrol in 'for profit' post secondary schools. These are the people who tend to have the highest deliquency rates. This is probably because they didn't do any cost benifit analysis of education. Although good post secondary education helps people earn more, poor education doesn't. Unfortunately the conventional wisdom that "education" is good is about the most that vast sections of society can really hold on to.
On a higher level his clip begins a debate that is going to have to be had accross the western world as budgets and debts are strained.
What are a persons rights?
In Canada we have a charter of rights and freedoms (which I'm not exactly well read about). What really needs to be understood is how many of these things are utopian and how many are actually things that we, as members of advanced nations, can really guarantee for our populations.
Clean water, shelter, waste disposal, access to electricity, and political stability are pretty standard. Post secondary education and state of the art medical care are quite different.
Could we really afford to guarentee all people the chance to live in a vegitative state indefinately if life prolonging technology got to that point? It seems reasonable that imunizations and emergency medical care can be provided though.
This is a pretty difficult moral debate, especially as the demographics of countries with the highest levels of life prolonging medical technology shift.
PS. RP - Saying "inflation didn't exist" when he was young is on the batshit crazy 80% side. He was born, and has lived through, some of the most significant instances of inflation recorded (see my other thread for this). The facts show that inflation really began around the 16th century. This was a big motivation for Adam Smith's writing as he spent a large portion of "The Wealth of Nations" exploring the possibility that an absolute store of value existed (he tried to say labour was the base, unchanging measure of value).
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