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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

> Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.

Well yeah, because us "adults" don't wanna pay the state and local taxes necessary to keep public universities affordable.

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Why is this downvoted? In the European nations (with the notable exception of Britain), university is free or nearly so.

It's not 'free' it's paid for through taxes.

Good point. The rich need to pay taxes, else there is civilization only for the rich. Consider Alabama, a lowtax state, thanks to the 1901 constitution that the landowners and industrialists wrote to protect their wealth and look what shape the state is in.

It is free to the person that receives it.

Imagine I bake and give you a cake, it's still a "free cake" even though I've put the work into baking it and other people have put the work into harvesting the ingredients and bringing them to me.

No it isn't, presumably that person will graduate and go on to have a career where they are paid a salary and pay taxes on that salary. How is paying higher taxes for one's entire working life different than making payments on a loan with lower taxes?

It may be free but fewer people attend university in European countries (apart from wealthy Luxembourg) than in the US. So essentially, the “free” university is a tax on everyone that mostly benefits the rich. I don’t think Americans want that.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS?end=2...

Our government spends more money on education in both a relative and an absolute sense than the European average.

Attitudes such as this are the problem. Civilization has a cost, that cost is paid with taxes.

Edit: I didn’t pickup in the sarcasm. Mea culpa.

The guy was agreeing with you.

You know I sarcasm-quoted "adults" to indicate the immaturity of not paying for civilization-upkeep costs, right?

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