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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Nothing is “free”. Sometimes the costs are hidden from most people.

It’s like immigration. If you say, “anyone who comes here can’t be kicked out and you instantly get access to healthcare, food stamps, and free housing” then your maximum payout is the entire planet and you are bankrupt once people realize this.

For public college to be free, I want to limit access, like happens in Europe. Sure college can be free… to the top N people in the state, with N being decided by the payers (i.e. democratic electorate).

Otherwise it’s just wasted money as we delay adulthood for a huge number of people who have no business getting degrees.

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Honest question, do you have a college degree, and do you think the majority of the population being generally educated is actually a bad thing?

I can understand the reaction to the cost, and many people work outside of the degree they majored in, but I do value the general education of the population. It’s been a remarkably uplifting force in society, if you look back over history.

I also wonder what that means for the competition between nations, it seems like the countries that I think are doing well really lean in to general education of their populations.

I came to college a different way, I went into the Marines first and only attended college after that. I didn’t live in the dorm and didn’t have a traditional college experience, but I am glad every day that I didn’t just have engineering classes.

We are talking about taking something that individuals pay for, that costs about $40k in total at affordable schools, and making it totally free for as many people who want it.

If additional people want to pay beyond the cap, wonderful. But I don’t see how the financials make any sense otherwise.

I'm just going to default to the: how do you think other countries do it?

I'm really tired of being told "we can't afford to give healthcare" "we can't afford to give higher education" "we can't afford early childcare" "we can't afford maturity leave" "we can't afford guaranteed sick/vacation"

Of course we can. The powers at be don't want that because it levels the playing field, costs them some money, and ultimately makes them less powerful.

A number of other countries do it by separating students into different tracks bound for university, the trades, or unskilled labor, respectively, already while they are schoolchildren. Public universities are free or nearly so, but the system ensures that only a portion of society is directed to them. Those who didn't get on the university track while still at school may be able to gain a public university education later as adults, but the process is complicated enough that many are discouraged, or in some countries they turn to private universities that are not free.

I’m sick of people saying we can afford everything! We really, truly can’t. We have the largest peace time deficit of all time - we are running deficits the size of WW2 when no emergency exists!

The good part is that all of this will sort itself out. Economic gravity will hit and democracy will sort out who pays the bill.

could you answer those questions I asked you?

On this thread I prefer to debate in the abstract rather than let emotions into it.

Emotionally speaking my friend’s kid has muscular dystrophy and it’s extremely sad and heart wrenching to watch what was formerly an active toddler degrade into wheel chair bound pain and suffering, leading to a death around 30 years old. I wish society would put unlimited funds into solving this disease because I personally see how devastating it is to my friend’s family and the child himself.

However in an argument about where to allocate scarce resources, putting all of our money into solving that is probably not what most people would choose.

Similarly I don’t think unlimited free education to every 18 year old is a good choice, despite emotional pleas.

but that education would allow more people to do research on muscular dystrophy and other problems.

if we want to solve the worlds problems we need more people with the capacity to work on them. only education is capable of doing that.

That answers the question. You’ve got a college degree, probably for a lot less than kids today are faced with paying, you’re probably quite successful and yet… it’s just not enough right. The most important thing is that you keep as much wealth as you can. The broader concerns of what’s good for society, that shouldn’t come into play. You got yours, how do you stay there if not by keeping the rest down and not contributing

When you don’t like someone’s arguments, attack the source!

I like to use rhetoric to debate topics, ideally with facts and statistics. Attacking someone else personally, or making up a lot of stuff about them, is a very weak line of attack (for me at least) when trying to push your point forwards.

This is an anonymous Internet forum so I don’t have a degree, I was raised by a single mother and an abusive uncle who beat me with a belt when I asked for more eggs at breakfast. What difference does it make?

education is good compared to sitting on your hands for four years. it's not necessarily good compared to all the other things a person could have done in that time or the other ways those resources could have been used.

personally, I don't think that giving every 18yo a full ride to study whatever they feel like for four years is a great use of public funds. I would rather see targeted funding to fill in demonstrable gaps in the labor force.

> Sometimes the costs are hidden from most people. [..] It’s like immigration

The costs of immigration are not hidden, nor are its benefits. Financially speaking and from the point of view of the state, immigrant are net negative in the first couple of years - and then they are net positive for the rest of their lives. Immigration exists because market demand for workforce exists... I always find hilarious that it is the most free market advocates who tend to ignore that.

I’m an open borders guy but the “sanctuary city” I live in seemed to never consider the costs of such sanctuary.

> I always find hilarious that it is the most free market advocates who tend to ignore that.

A lot of free market advocates don't seem to understand how markets work.

One of the main ways you grow an economy is to add people to it. You are adding jobs, by both creating labor supply and demand for goods and services. It's really very simple. The economy is made of people, stupid!

Require immigrants to be self-sustaining at some minimum amount. Have a job ready or otherwise prove the ability to pay for your housing (someone willing to board you).

Otherwise, instantly applying government handouts to someone without any skills - language or otherwise - and often with kids and disabled relatives - makes the idea of unlimited open immigration a daunting cost.

Open immigration is obviously incompatible with a society that has open social benefits, but the United States currently has neither.

> Require immigrants to be self-sustaining at some minimum amount. Have a job ready or otherwise prove the ability to pay for your housing (someone willing to board you).

These are the sorts of arguments which get trotted out for only certain kinds of immigrants.

Where I live in Chicagoland, Eastern European immigrants (Poles especially) face a lot of the same kinds of issues. Lots of signs and documents are printed in English, Spanish and Polish around here. They just try like hell to get here, however they can (often illegally, via visa overstays, just like immigrants from Latin America). But for reasons I will leave as an exercise for the reader, nobody around here is advocating these sorts of rules to be applied to Poles.

I used to live in a town that was 49% Latino (really, Mexican was most of that). You will find that most of those folks would pass this test you suggest. Most people are not moving to a country where they have no job and no place to stay - there's always some community of friends and family they are connected with where they can land and get on their feet. Obviously! You'd have to be mad to move your whole family to a place where you have no job and no place to stay. If that option seems attractive to you, then probably conditions in your country of origin are so bad that you really should be a refugee.

That’s fine - let’s codify it then. The law says you have to have that situation, or you can’t come to the US. I’d support it.

Legal work/family visa holders already have this check:

https://www.usa.gov/visas

Are you suggesting changes to the visitor visas?

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...

What you propose doesn't make sense for visitor visas.

What exactly are you suggesting, and what problem do you think it is going to solve?

Furthermore, if you accept that it's not really that much of a problem and a "Trust but Verify" type of situation, why bother given the risk of unequal/selective enforcement?

The problem is we have hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants streaming across the border with no plan, so they sleep in shelters and on the street in NYC. We can’t kick them out because they have the right to see a judge which often takes over 6 months. Who will feed and clothe and shelter and care for them? Taxpayers, which is why NYC is begging for a federal bailout.

The legal immigration system should be reformed and made easier. But the illegal system we have is a joke and disaster.

What you are wanting will not fix that.

Having a more organized system, where people can apply and receive residency and the chance for citizenship if they prove various skills and income and housing abilities, seems very reasonable to me. And then the illegal immigrants get deported immediately. This sounds very possible to me, and far more fair to legal immigrants.

> Immigration exists because market demand for workforce exists

The massive wave of migration the US is seeing from (say) Venezuela is due to market demand in the US? Are you sure there isn't a bigger factor driving this?

Arbitrage, it is not just for hedge funds.

And by now, everyone south of the Mediterranean, or south of the Rio Grande, knows that North America and the EU are not the land of milk and honey. They know what to expect, the price to pay to build a better life.

Half of my friends here are sub-saharan Africans, most of whom came illegally, a bunch of which came on the dreaded pneumatic boats through Libya, Morocco and Turkey. One thing is certain: they know an opportunity when they see it and they'll hang on to it. They left their friends, their family, their weather and their food behind - they work to make the adventure worth that.

Most fun is that, in practice and not in theory, the French government recognizes that: come illegally, work hard illegally, prove that you don't depend on the state for survival and, in practice, you'll have residency within about five years. It is unwritten and cannot be expressed openly for fear of a xenophobic backlash, but that is administrative reality in France.

I could wax lyrical about "land of opportunity" but yes, it is about working to achieve potential, in conditions they don't find on their home market.

You're conflating "perceived quality of life" with "actual demand in the job market". That's the distinction I was trying to make. I don't get the impression the migrants necessarily know (or have much opportunity to care if so) anything about the job markets at their destinations. They often don't even know where they'll finally end up, let alone what kinds of jobs they'll end up having to take -- or, as many discover, be left unable to take and have to end up on the streets. They just know where they don't want to be (in an impoverished country, in the middle of immediate threats to their lives, etc.), and they know they won't have the same problems they had back home irrespective of whether/how they earn an income, so they solve that part and worry about the rest later.

Orderlies, kitchen help, cleaners, gardeners, construction laborers, nannies... Those hard jobs here are just not staffed without migrant labor. The scarcity is such that the government avert their eyes from all the illegal work: those industries would dysfunction otherwise. Immigration policy does not follow economic logic but the political requirement to cater to xenophobia.

I've traveled in 25 African countries. Everyone and his dog has an Android in his pocket with varying amounts of data access. Yes, some in small towns still entertain illusions, but they are not the ones who travel most. Those are the ones with sufficient education, family connections, friends, motivation and money to make an informed bet and quickly integrate. The goat herder in rural Mali has no idea about Paris but the urban student in Dakar most definitely knows.

And that is the surprising part: desire to migrate follows a bell curve: as people becomes richer and better educated, desire to migrate grows, until sufficient development has been obtained and then, witness Mexico, desire to migrate declines.

> to the top N people in the state, with N being decided by the payers (i.e. democratic electorate).

I don't know how it works in the EU, but one issue I see with that it has the danger of permanently locking people who grow up with worse early/middle/high school education into their socioeconomic status, i.e. it would prevent social mobility for those with less resources. Unless public schooling standards prior to college are also improved, limiting higher education to "top N%" students ensures entrenched socioeconomic inequity. I think there is already enough class-based discontent, and making it worse via limiting (one of the few) means of social mobility wouldn't help, I think.

In many (most?) EU contries, kids are evaluated and steered into vocational/trades or college-bound tracks at about middle-school age. College/university education may be free or close to it, but not everyone can go. EU approaches to education are more likely to lock you into your socieoeconmic status than those in the USA, where if you are smart but poor you will have schools falling over themselves to recruit you so their enrollment stats for "underserved" students look better.

are you sure? how many poor people in the US do actually get into college? i doubt that the number of poor european students that fail to qualify for college is higher than the number of poor students in the US that fail to qualify there. but i don't think we can find a good answer without looking at statistics.

You could do top N% (round up) of each high school in the state as a first approximation and capture a lot of socioeconomic diversity, since there's (at least currently) a lot of clustering of poor kids at some schools rich kids at others.

You've also got to have a second option. If you don't qualify for the state school scholarship based on high school grades or maybe alternate qualifiers like test scores, then community college is still an option, and when you graduate from that with an approved program, it should qualify you for state school. Maybe something something GI bill, although dangling college as a hook to get people into the military feels icky to me somehow.

It's telling that people aren't willing to contend with the corollary of "free education" and "free healthcare": limited capacity.

Edit: I should probably mention that I'm generally in favor of state-funded education, for a variety of reasons.

Healthcare capacity in the US is a function of your ability to pay for it. We contend with limited supply today, we just kick the limited supply to groups of people who by and large aren't posting on this website.

Yes... I agree. I'm not sure what your point is?

When I've heard this argument advanced before, it's had the subtext that "limited capacity is not a problem today but becomes one in other contexts"

I made the assumption that's what you were hinting at.

Ah, I see. No, my point is rather that countries with public education/healthcare/etc have historically restricted access to these services in some reasonable way. For instance, you can only pursue one degree on the state's dime in France. Or, you can't access public healthcare if you are not a legal immigrant. Things like that.

Why does it work in other countries? I know we have a larger population, but surely that applies just as much to our ability to scale up supply as it does to the inherent increase in demand?

The United States is uniquely bad at covering the costs of health care and education, compared to its economic peers. Why is that?

>Why does it work in other countries?

Of course it works in other countries; public education, like public healthcare, is an extremely good idea. This having been said, there are currently heated debates in most of Western Europe about the economic feasibility of educating every citizen to a post-secondary level, let alone every immigrant. Moreover, in France (the European country I know best), you are generally permitted to obtain one state-funded degree, and not two. The point here is simply that a discussion of publicly-funded higher education has to be accompanied by some discussion of limitations.

We definitely need a complete overhaul of the US health system, but we don't just "have a larger population". The largest countries in Europe by population (after Russia) are Turkey and Germany with with 85M and 84M, respectively. The US has 331M. That is almost ~4x!

When we say it works in other countries, most of the time we are referring to Europe. And most countries in Europe are tiny in comparison. The US is the 3rd largest country by population.

This is not to say that the US problems are unsolvable, but they will definitely require unique solutions.

Sure, I agree that they will require unique solutions, but the general trend of economies of scale providing efficiency benefits suggests to me that the biggest problems are political rather than logistical.

Public universities in the US do have admission requirements and yearly admission limits. I'm not sure where this idea that they don't comes from.

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