Chris Christie believes free Tuition would destroy America

Would it be worse than the destruction caused by our perpetual war? If educating people will destroy America, then let’s have a war on education, dropping as much money as we have on the Gulf War and see what happens…

Transcript via ABC This Week — Christie said Americans shouldn’t get a free education because:

“But the idea of free college for everybody, there’s nothing free in this world. We need to earn what we get.”

and

“That is a typical liberal approach. It is wrong,” he said. “If college graduates are going to reap the greater economic rewards and opportunities of earning a degree, then it seems fair for them to support the cost of the education they’re receiving.”

“False Equivalence*” much Chris?

• False equivalence is a logical fallacy which describes a situation where there is a logical and apparent equivalence, but when in fact there is none. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency.

• Exactly what does earning an education have to do with being able to afford to go college?
• How does one decide that merit and affordability or the ability to “earn” to go to college have to do with the necessity of getting higher education?
• Is this really the way you want to open your presidential bid? By declaring anyone who can’t afford to go to college doesn’t “deserve” to go unless they are willing to go into debt for the rest of their life?

• Surely you didn’t mean it. A whole lot of your electorate would like to go to college and not get so much debt they’ll have no chance of ever paying it off.
• Any president worth his salt would be looking at the idea with all the seriousness of any other infrastructure investment in the future of a country he was going to be presiding over, possibly for four to eight years. Perhaps the most serious and effective infrastructure investment a president could possibly support.

Education has the unique capability unmatched by any other investment, best described with this example: which of the following has the most reach over time, a gun, a dollar, or an idea?

• A gun — while a gun can support the axiom that “might makes right” ultimately might rarely stops empires from crashing and burning when they run out of places to conquer, people to subordinate, or the infrastructure to maintain said empire.
• A dollar — unfortunately, a dollar is never worth more than the sum of its parts. You can separate it and parse it out among a group but even when money is unlimited, there has to be someplace to spend said money and if there is no infrastucture in place, money has no true value. It is a symbol of a good and smart empire’s physical existence and intelligent management of its services and people.
• An idea — an idea is the most potent of the three. You cannot kill an idea whose time has come. You can slow it down, you can put it off, but once it reaches the world, that idea returns, again and again. An idea can be shared, it can be shared equally without losing value.

An idea is the only aspect here that can become greater by sharing and extrapolating it. Ideas are iterative and recursive, they can be reused and re-examined for quality and potential as time passes.

Good ideas can be a never ending resource for a society and thus any society capable of creating members who can expand on ideas developed in it, stands to create the most good for the society at large. What other investment has the potential to affect every aspect of your culture the way education does?

• Education affects choice. People with education have the power to make choices for themselves based on what will hopefully be a quality education. Their potential for a wider array of working opportunities and earning potential increases with the level of their education.
• Education affects policy. It affects how people decide the rules which will govern the behavior of people, local governments and corporate entities whose money has an inordinate effect on society. Education might make the influences of agencies such as ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) less powerful since an educated populace might not accept their findings without investigating them first.
• Education influences how people spend money. When people are better educated, they make different choices on where they spend their money, particularly as far as who they vote for and why they do so.
• Educated people ask questions and are harder to manipulate to vote against their own best interests. People may want to know why perpetual war seems to be the norm in the United States or why People of Color have twice the unemployment rates that Whites do. Or maybe why bank executives known to be engaging in illegal activities like money laundering, say — HSBC, don’t end up doing more time in prison than anyone else who might be stealing something far less lucrative, like a loaf of bread.

Sorry Mr. Christie, equating merit with the ability to afford college when there are nations all over the world giving education away as an investment in their country’s future sounds like a plan whose time has come.

Personally, I enjoyed the perspective of a man who responded to Christie’s perspective with a degree of clarity rarely mentioned in the public sphere:

Dan Hagen says:

• People wander around small Midwestern towns shooting through the walls of houses for fun. Americans shoot other Americans dead because they didn’t show sufficient “team spirit.”
• Congressmen suggest that we should launch a nuclear first strike against Iran.
• Wars are permanent, but no one particularly cares. The middle class is dying, but no one particularly cares. Wall Street bankers steal trillions with fraud, but no one particularly cares.
• Humanity has wrecked the world climate, and you might care about that, but don’t worry, you won’t hear anything about it on the TV news weather report.
• The drone-flying, spy-camming, internet-bugged American police state can know when you have a bowel movement, but the American voters cannot know what a presidential candidate pays — or doesn’t pay — in income taxes.
• But beware of free college tuition, because THAT would destroy America!

Putting off creating a real plan to bring free college education to everyone who wants one, and continuing to promote profit over education, is placing education in the unenviable position of becoming a wall to progress rather than the doorway to it.

Preventing your nation’s members from seeking higher education by making education unaffordable allows other nations to increase the educational divide between their next generations and ours.

This nation throws money at perpetual warfare, the concept the United States should stay in military conflicts with other nations in one form or another since World War II, as if it was the only way to ensure prosperity for the United States.

What if there were another way. If there was ever a thing I thought we should be having a war against, rather than the $1 trillion failed War on Drugs, The War on Poverty or the War Against <Insert Country or Faction here> we should be having a war on Education.

We should dedicate the energy and effort we spend on keeping defense contractors, the beneficiaries of the military/intelligence industrial complex in overpriced hammers and failed theoretical multi-billion dollar aircraft and instead, drop an army of teachers, arts and crafts programs, after-school activities, music training, shop classes, vocational advocacy, and apprenticeships across the nation. Let’s employ 3 million highly paid, highly dedicated, well-resourced teachers onto a nation hungry for education and reap some lasting benefits from government spending.

Why not invest in returning trees to our environment, finding sustainable ways of keeping our country in energy without having to go to war with other nations for their resources. This could be a legacy the Republican party could use to return to the White House and really make a significant dent in the issues of this nation.

But we know that’s never gonna happen. Because illiteracy is simply more profitable than giving people the power of choice. Illiterate people have fewer choices and realistically, that is what the Grand Old Party wants. A populace too stupid to realize they are being taken to the cleaners.

But Chris, if that is your agenda, then be a man and just say so. This conversation about merit is at best specious and dishonest. The government spends money on whatever it deems in the national interests. Making war seems to be our only national priority.

Our military is mind-bogglingly big.

• The Pentagon employs 3 million people, 800,000 more than Walmart.
• The Pentagon’s 2012 budget was 47 percent biggerthan Walmart’s.
• Serving 9.6 million people, the Pentagon and Veterans Administration together constitute the nation’s largest healthcare provider.
• 70 percent of the value of the federal government’s $1.8 trillion in property, land, and equipment belongs to the Pentagon.
• Los Angeles could fit into the land managed by the Pentagon 93 times. The Army uses more than twice as much building space as all the offices in New York City.
• The Pentagon holds more than 80 percent of the federal government’s inventories, including $6.8 billion of excess, obsolete, or unserviceable stuff.

REF: “The Budget Deal Is a Big Win for the Pentagon.” Motherjones.com. N.p. Web. 15 Jun. 2015. <http://www.motherjones.com/>

You, like any other Republican today, has no interest in sharing the wealth and you know like I do, if enough educated people existed, your party would have been dead two or three decades ago as your antiquated memes would have faded into history along with child labor, the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, Civil Rights, and slavery.

Anti-intellectualism has been the core concept to the Republican Party for generations. You are just towing the party line, but if I have anything to say about it, you won’t be towing it to the White House. The world is changing Mr. Christie. Isn’t it about time America started changing too?

Shift Happens 2014:

Did you know?

As a prolific writer of speculative fiction, scientific, technical and cultural commentary from his office in Hayward, California, Thaddeus’ speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He has published two books, ‘Hayward’s Reach’ (2011), a collection of short stories and ‘Broken Glass’ (2013) an urban fantasy novella starring his favorite paranormal investigator, Clifford Engram.

Thaddeus works as a writer and editor for two magazines, the Good Men Project, a social men’s magazine as well as for Krypton Radio, a sci-fi enthusiast media station and website. He is also a freelance journalist for Polygon.com and Panel & Frame magazine. Thaddeus is the co-founder of Futura Science Fiction Magazine and one of the founding members of the Afrosurreal Writers Workshop in Oakland.