It means that people without money can never progress and the rich get richer!

Tessa Schlesinger

Apr 19·7 min read

There is so much I could have done with my life if I had had the money to pay for courses, but I never had that sort of money and I still don’t. An income of a few hundred dollars per month means that every last penny is spent on rent and food. There are many people in the same boat. There simply is no discretionary income, and there is no way out because one needs skills to be able to earn income.

Student Debt

Right now, there are millions of Americans who have their lives permanently hampered by massive student debt. They were caught in a catch-22 situation. If they didn’t go to college, they would have been stuck in low-wage jobs. If they did go to college, a large percentage of their income would be allocated to paying off their student loan. Either way, they don’t have much in terms of quality of life.

Writing Courses and How-to-make-money Courses

Someone just told me about someone else who paid a good few hundred to learn how to make money on Medium. So he wrote one story each day and earned $2 per day. Let me tell you a secret. No matter how many times you write a day or how few times you write per year, it has nothing to do with how much money you make as a writer, and I have been writing and published for 60 years. I should know.

If people are really making that much money from what they are doing, then they can afford to tell people how to do it without charging for it. The bottom line is that they aren’t making that much money from what they are doing. That is why they are running courses and charging you for it — so that they can make more money. I will also tell you that you will learn nothing of worth from those stories. Why do I say that? Because the reason they made money was specific to their situation and skills at that time. It cannot be duplicated.

The Reason You’re Poor is Our Economic System That Permits Profiteering by the Rich

We are all living in a time where the particular economic system in America and the UK is user-unfriendly. It only works if you’re already rich, or if you have access to money through parents and friends. Then you make money by underpaying others and over-charging on products.

Take Apple, for instance.

They make more profit than any other electronic hardware producer, yet they sell fewer products. The reason that happens is that they have a higher mark-up on their products. Do they use different hardware components? Nope. They all buy from Foconn in Taiwan. Foxconn pay their workers so little money and work them such long hours that their workers commit suicide.

Don’t kid yourself about people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. They both came from very priviledged and well-connected backgrounds.

Paying for Educational Courses Run by Supposedly Successful People

Dont buy them. They are not going to tell you anything that you can’t read elsewhere without paying. Yes, there are people who have been successful on Medium and Shopify and Hubpages and Youtube and Ebay and Esty, etc. There are a multiplicity of reasons for that, and there are many of them that you can’t duplicate. Let me give you some of those reasons. They also don’t tell you how those components factored into their success. I’m not sure that they even realize them.

1. They joined the site early.
2. They got lucky with one product or story that they had no idea would go viral. Consequently, they became known, and people always tend to go back to those with whom they have connected previously in a positive manner.
3. They had some help from someone else. Let me tell you a story about that. Someone I know was given free accommodation if they would do a particular course. These hosts were adamant that if she did this year long course, she would find work, even if she didn’t have the necessary background. So she did. It was really difficult, but passed the courses and received the certificates/diplomas/whatever. She then spent six months looking for work and couldn’t find it. She eventually asked the lady who insisted that she would find work how she found a job. “Oh, I couldn’t find a job so I begged my uncle to employ me in his company, and that is where I still am. I have been working for him for 10 years.” People who run these ‘success story’ courses have a remarkable habit of not telling you all the details.
4. They had a strong following on another site and used that to become successful elsewhere.

There are so many things these people don’t tell you, but believe me, the chances of your duplicating them are precisely zilch.

Why It’s Unethical to Charge People for Education or Skills

Ethics are rules that are based on ensuring the greater good for the greater number over the longer period of time. Unethical actions are those which prevent the growth and goodness of others. When one prevents others from accruing the knowledge they need to succeed, then one is being unethical.

Education and skills are a vital part of income-earning. Charging people fees (college) is unethical, especially when one then spends a lifetime paying them off. Likewise, companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and other computer giants who invent langagues and software, sell them to business, and then charge workers thousands to learn them are unethical. It should be illegal to charge anyone to learn something.

I have spent a the past 30 years wanting to learn some things, but I can’t, because I can’t afford them. When I wanted to go to university in my 20s in South Africa and realized I would have to pay for it, I didn’t go any further. I could barely pay for rent and food. How the hell was I expected to pay for university? In Germany, where I relocated five days ago, university is free. Of course, you have to qualify academically in order to be accepted. It’s also a fact of life that ignorance is a by-product of a lack of education, so unless one had parents or some other source of information, one will make poor decisions because one doesn’t know any better. I made poor decisions for most of my life as I lived in a country where necessary information wasn’t available.

So How Do You Make Money?

Let me rephrase that. How do you make money without having sufficient capital to make it? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s possible. You either need skills (and you needed money in order to attain those skills) or you need money in order to pay for people with those skills. Alternatively, you need to be a liar and a conman.

I once read about this glorious Christian millionaire and how God blessed him financially. He was in property. Then I read how he started. He was a drug runner and he made a lot of money running drugs. Then he became a Christian and he invested that money in property. Note that he did not give his ill-gotten gains away to the poor and then start again.

Anyway, this is my opinion. Please feel free to pay for a course, but do come back and update me. Tell me if you actually made the money you expected to make after doing the course. Also feel free to share with others what you learned. That way you will be doing good!

Teaching is a Noble Profession

There are those who contribute to the elevation of mankind, and there are those who don’t. Teaching is probably right there at the top — besides good parenting. The input that we all receive from those who teach us what we need to know is vital. Without them, we wouldn’t do very well.

One of the reasons that governments started using taxes to pay for education for all its citizens at the end of the 19th century was to ensure that citizens had the skills to improve life for everybody else in the country. Indeed, there is a direct correlation between successful countries where citizens are highly educated and unsuccessful countries where citizens have little access to good education.

Good teachers should be well paid, of course, and in some countries, like Finland, they are right at the top of the food chain. So they should be. However, teachers don’t charge their students. Collectively, we have agreed to pay tax so that services that are essential to all are attainable even when we are poor. It’s called a level playing field.

Nobody should have to pay to learn the skills and gain the data they need in order to make a living. What do you think?

If you’re up to it, I would be very grateful if you could buy me a cup of Coffee at Ko-fi.