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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

Most people consider anything they don't like to be a waste of public funds. After all, they pay for the government through taxes, so it should serve only their needs. People in America do not view the government as a source for public good, but merely a piggy bank from which they should be able to extract funds. Just look at the student loan forgiveness crowd. I'm perfectly happy paying my dues, but a lot of people have decided that they want the government to give them a load of free money instead of using it for something productive.

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Many countries don't have this boat anchor named "student loan" at all, so maybe the lesson here is that indenturing your people who actually want to study shouldn't be a must?

It's not a must.

Whether you're right or not is beside the argument he/she made, which I think is pretty strong: that many Americans think anything government does that doesn't directly benefit them is a waste. Personally I find this to be somewhat more true among folks who identify as conservatives but I also hear plenty of self-identified moderates and liberals complaining about the expenditure of tax dollars when it comes to the military and foreign influence or tax policy as it pertains to corporations and high earners.

Why not? Student loans are a good protection against brain drain. If you offer free university, there's a likelihood that people will take you up on it then move out of the country, thus wasting the money invested in educating that person. A student loan guarantees a good return on investment for people you educate. Admittedly, America solves this problem by charging income tax for citizens living abroad, but a loan is better in my view since you can't rescind it like you could a citizenship. I actually think the concept of student loans should be extended down to primary education. I also think it would be good to institute a similar system for medical debt.

The protection against that brain drain is to have a country worth staying in.

That is an excellent response. If you're afraid educating your citizens will cause them to realize their country is crap, then your country is crap.

And how do you make your country not crap? Well, it starts with educating people. But when you educate them, they leave. You've effectively been forced to subsidise the skilled workforce of another country and your own country is worse than it was to begin with. This is a stupid petty response that doesn't really make any sense and is also deeply and unnecessarily offensive to large parts of the world.

Some stay. And if the younger ones coming up find a lot of peers are also educated, they'll stay too, to work with them.

Yes, you lose some. But not all. And that's how you start.

Your arguments seem to rest on highly questionable assumptions like 'when you educate them, they leave'.

Care to post a source suggesting that education in isolation leads to people leaving in majority numbers?

Most countries that are the recipients of skilled migrants won't allow entrance without a university degree. Education is a precondition for this migration. That's why it's called "brain drain". If people aren't educated, it doesn't matter if they leave or not.

This in no way answers the question and is not a source of any kind that supports the argument you made.

This reminds me of an apocryphal business story: a bunch of managers were sitting around discussing a request to give more training to employees.

One manager asked, “What if we train them and they leave!?”

To which a more senior manager quipped, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

To have a country worth staying in, you need an educated population. Can't get money if you don't have money. And it's especially hard if all the money you invest goes down the toilet from other countries freeloading off your investment.

> medical debt

As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.

If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.

By "similar system", I am mainly considering one by which the debt doesn't actually have to be paid back by the individual. Generally my idea is that the debt is paid back by the country the person pays taxes in, though obviously this is not feasible at present.

Running away without paying the loan is a way better solution.

Y'all have the delulu American exceptionalism brain. People will leave if they don't like living here. A loan eill not stop them.

The international financial system makes it very hard to "run away" from a loan. Unless you are genuinely willing to become a wanted fugitive, you will end up having to pay.

There are a non-trivial numbers of absconders hiding in the US and the UK. The most famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijay_Mallya?useskin=vector

The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.

This reminds me of one of the propaganda points used in Soviet times to justify denying permission to emigrate to Soviet Jews in 1970-80s. Since they got free education courtesy of the state, they were supposed to stay and "work it off".

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