I believe that liberty and equality will usher in a fraternity that will annihilate commercialism and the greed of gain. With the land and opportunity free, the laborer will no longer work for others, but supply his own needs with his labor. With the wonderful facilities for manufacturing, the immense aids inventive genius has placed at our disposal, but usurped by government agents, every man could be independent, and the fear of poverty would be unknown, the incentive to accumulate wealth for any other purpose than use would be gone. –Ross Winn

–How Will a Free Society Come, and How Will It Operate? by Celia B. Whitehead and Ross Winn,

The new American Airlines resulting from the deal would boast revenues of close to $40 billion and offer nearly 7,000 flights per day. The CEO of AMR, parent company of American Airlines, told Neil Cavuto on Thursday that he “think[s] this will actually enhance competition.” Clearly the corporate chieftain class either thinks we’re not paying attention, or regards our understanding of competition as very limited at best.

Interested observers should ask what makes such mergers possible and whether they are the results of legitimate, free market competition, or something else entirely. Market anarchists contend that global capitalism, exploiting labor and monopolizing natural wealth, is a phenomenon quite distinct from free and open competition, embracing all kinds of invasions and hindrances that a real free market system would not brook.

Airlines epitomize a system of big business cartelization that grows up out of huge cost barriers to potential market challengers created by legal and regulatory requirements. Politicians and CEOs would have us believe that many if not most of these cost barriers to market entry are inherent in certain businesses — the air travel industry among them.

Contrary to the rhetoric of “unbridled” markets, however, airlines are among the corporations most entangled in federal regulatory structures — and that’s just the way they like it. Even in such a restricted and regulated environment, economist Robert J. Carbaugh says, “Passengers flying at dominated airports typically pay about 40 percent more than do their counterparts flying at airports where competition is strong.” In air travel as in every other area of commerce and industry, full-blown competition, with all of that messy down-bidding for consumers, is the great enemy of ruling class dominance.

The competition advocated and envisioned by anarchists will see not only more firms competing against one another, but also competing against the kind of self-sufficiency and independence that results from equal access to capital. In contradistinction to capitalism, a system of monopolization made possible by the state, market anarchists hold that a freed market would be the deliverer of labor and of consumers.

Where today’s corporate leviathans like American Airlines (the largest airline in the world, assuming the merger’s success) can merge and acquire their way out of competition, a system that wasn’t rigged by the state would invariably find enterprising companies ready to undercut. Anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker predict that in the absence of state plutocratic maneuverings, competition would indeed be so fierce as to completely eliminate profit, price and cost meeting in a system of equal exchange.

However far-reaching the changes furnished by real competition, it is surely preferably to the present system of business-government collusion as represented by the airlines. Government doesn’t protect us from monopolists; it empowers them to eat us alive.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

In this essay, the individualist Anarchist writer Charles Johnson offers an analysis of the concrete mechanisms of capitalism, and of how the revolutionary potential of free economic relationships is diverted and deformed when markets are constrained to labor under bosses, monopoly and government. Johnson revisits, and updates, Benjamin Tucker’s classic “Four Monopolies” analysis of state capitalism, arguing that the case for Tucker’s free-market anticapitalism is stronger than ever, as we take into account not only the growth and retrenchment of the Land Monopoly, Money Monopoly, Patent Monopoly, and Protectionist Monopoly, but also the metastatic spread of state-capitalist monopolies into Agribusiness, Infrastructure, Utilities, Health Care, and Regulatory Protectionism.

For most of the twentieth century, American libertarians saw themselves, and were seen as, defenders of “capitalism.” Until nearly the end of the 20th century, anticapitalist anarchism was sidelined in political debate, and most simply ceased to be treat it as a live option; mean­while, most American libertarians, and nearly all of their opponents, seemed to agree that opposing state control of the economy meant defending business against the attacks of “big government.” The purpose and effect of laissez faire was simply to unleash existing forms of commerce from political restraints, and to produce something which would look, more or less, like business as usual, only more so: bigger, faster, stronger, and no longer held back by government from pushing the corporate business model to the hilt.

This was almost a complete reversal from the attitude of traditional libertarians like Benjamin Tucker, an attitude which we might call ‘free-market anti-capitalism.’ Tucker was one of the best-known defenders of free markets in nineteenth-century America. . . Yet he repeatedly described his views as a form of “Anarchistic Socialism.” . . . What could “social­ism” mean for a radical, free-market individualist like Tucker? Certainly not govern­ment control of industry. Rather, what Tucker was pointing out was his opposition to actually-existing capitalist business practices, and his support for workers’ control over the conditions of their own labor – the control denied by the Four Monopolies and the artificial inequalities of wealth and bargaining power they fostered. For Tucker, then, a libertarian politics meant an attack on economic privilege – by removing the political privileges that propped it up, and dismantling monopolies by exposing them to competition from below. . . .

The crises laid at the feet of laissez faire are the crises of markets that are nothing if not fettered. When critics confront us with corporate malfeasance, structural poverty, or socioeconomic marginalization, we should be clear that market principles do not require defending big business at all costs, and that much of what our critics condemn results from government regulation and legal privileges. As a model for analyzing the political edge of corporate power and defending markets from the bottom up, we twenty-first-century libertarians might look to our nineteenth-century roots—to the insights of the American individualists, especially their most talented exponent, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939), editor of the free-market anarchist journal Liberty.

Conventional textbook treatments portray the American Gilded Age as one of relentless exploitation and economic laissez faire. But Tucker argued that the stereotypical features of capitalism in his day were products not of the market form, but of markets deformed by political privileges. Tucker did not use this terminology, but for the sake of analysis we might delineate four patterns of deformation that especially concerned him: captive markets, ratchet effects, concentration of ownership, and insulation of incumbents.

Types of Distortion

Captive Markets. Legal mandates and government monopolies produce captive markets in which customers are artificially locked in to particular services or sellers that they wouldn’t otherwise patronize because political requirements enforce the demand. For example, the car insurance market is shaped by laws requiring insurance and regulating the minimum service that must be purchased. Captive markets legally guarantee privileged companies access to a steady stock of customers, corralled by the threat of fines and arrest.

Ratchet Effects. Legal burdens, price distortions, and captive markets combine to ratchet up fixed costs of living far higher than would prevail in freed markets. To get by, people are constrained by the necessity of covering these persistent, inflexible costs—by selling labor, buying insurance, taking on debt—under artificially rigid circumstances. Ratchets keep many chasing the next paycheck, creating permanent states of financial crisis for the poor.

Concentration. Confiscation, regressive redistribution, and legal monopolies deprive workers of resources while concentrating wealth and economic control within a politically favored business class. Struggling to cover ratcheted fixed costs, workers are dispossessed of the means to make an independent living and enter markets where ownership of land, capital, and key resources are legally concentrated in the hands of a few. Workers therefore depend on relationships with bosses and corporations far more than in freed markets, deforming economic activity into hierarchical relationships and confining rental economies.

Insulation. Captive markets and bailouts protect big players, while legal monopolies, regulatory barriers, and anticompetitive subsidies inhibit substitutes and competition from below. Government support props up big businesses, stifling the market and social pressures that might otherwise be brought to bear. Insulated businesses can treat employees and consumers with far less consideration or restraint; meanwhile, intervention shuts out alternative solutions by blocking smaller, grassroots, or informal competitors.

Tucker’s Big Four

We can, then, turn to Tucker’s central idea: In “State Socialism and Anarchism” (1888), Tucker argued that “Four Monopolies” fundamentally shaped the Gilded Age economy—four central areas of economic activity where government ratchets, concentration, and insulation came together to deform markets into “class monopolies,” regressively reshaping all markets as the effects rippled outward.

The Land Monopoly. Land titles in nineteenth-century America had nothing to do with free markets. All unoccupied land was claimed by government, whose military seized land from Indians, Mexicans, and independent “squatters.” Government ownership and preferential grants monopolized access, excluding free homesteading. (The “Homestead Act,” which supposedly opened Western lands to homesteading, really imposed rigid legal limits on homesteaders that only certain medium-sized commercial farmers could effectively meet. Smaller farms and nonfarmers were excluded.) Tucker identified this concentration of land titles in elite hands as a “land monopoly,” creating a class of privileged landlords by depriving workers of market opportunities to gain freeholds and escape rent.

Since 1888 the land monopoly has dramatically expanded. Governments worldwide have nationalized oil, natural gas, and water resources; in the United States mining rights and fossil fuel exploration are largely accessed through government licenses, due to government’s ownership of 50 percent of the American West. The cost of land is ratcheted and ownership concentrated through zoning codes, eminent domain, municipal “development” rackets, and local policies to keep real estate prices permanently rising. Freed land markets would feature more individual and widely dispersed ownership; land would be less expensive and more often held free and clear; vacant land would be more readily open to homesteading; and titles would be based as easily on sweat equity as on leveraged cash exchanges. Many people would no longer need to rent; those who chose to rent would find that competition had dramatically improved the prices and conditions available on the market.

The Money Monopoly. For Tucker the most damaging of the Big Four was the Money Monopoly, “the privilege given by the government to certain individuals . . . holding certain kinds of property, of issuing the circulating medium,” politically manipulating the money supply, prohibiting alternative currencies, and cartelizing banking, money, and credit. Tucker saw that monetary control not only secured monopoly profits for insulated banks, but also concentrated economic ownership throughout the economy, favoring the large, established businesses that large, established banks preferred to deal with.

Tucker identified the Money Monopoly as an economic force in 1888—before the Fed and fiat currency, the FDIC, Fannie, Freddie, the IMF, or trillion-dollar bailouts to banks “too big to fail.” Today regulatory cartels and political mandates have also captured insurance, alongside credit, savings, and investment, as a Money Monopoly stronghold, forcing workers into rigged markets while shutting out noncorporate, grassroots forms of mutual aid.

Ideas and Extortion

The Patent Monopoly. Tucker condemned monopolies protected by patents and copyrights—“protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort . . . a reward enormously in excess of . . . their services.” Since copying an idea does not deprive the inventor of the idea, or any tangible property she had before, “intellectual property” meant only a legal monopoly against competitors who could imitate or duplicate the monopolists’ products at lower cost.

“Intellectual property” (IP) has grown vigorously since 1888, as media, technology, and scientific innovation made control over the information economy a linchpin of corporate power. Monopoly profits on IP are the effective business model of Fortune 500 companies like GE, Monsanto, Microsoft, and Disney, which demand virtually unlimited legal power to insulate themselves from competition. Copyright terms quadrupled in length, while massive, synchronized expansions of intellectual protectionism became standard features of neoliberal “free trade” “agreements” like NAFTA and KORUS FTA (United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement). In a freed market such business models would fall—and with them, the ratcheted costs consumers pay for access to culture, medicine, and technology.

The Protectionist Monopoly. Tucker identified the protectionist tariff as a monopoly in the sense that it insulated politically favored domestic producers from foreign competition, and thus ratcheted up daily costs for consumers.

With the rise of multinational corporations and neoliberal trade agreements, tariffs have declined over the years. But the specific legal mechanism was less important to Tucker than the purpose of controlling trade to insulate domestic incumbents. In 1888 that meant the tariff. In 2011, it means a vast network of political controls used to manage the “balance of trade”: export subsidies, manipulation of exchange rates, and multigovernment agencies like the World Bank and IMF.

Metastatic Monopolization

Tucker’s Big Four have only grown more pervasive since the 1880s. But the past century has also seen the metastatic proliferation of government regulatory bodies intended to restructure new transactions and capture new markets. Among today’s Many Monopolies, five are especially pervasive:

The Agribusiness Monopoly encompasses the New Deal system of U.S. Department of Agriculture cartels, surplus buy-ups, subsidized irrigation, export subsidies, and similar measures ratcheting up prices, distorting production toward subsidized crops, and concentrating agricultural activity in large-scale, capital-intensive monoculture. These, inevitably enacted in the name of “small farmers,” invariably benefit large factory farms and agribusiness conglomerates like ADM and Tyson.

The Infrastructure Monopoly includes physical and communications infrastructure. Governments build roads, railways, and airports through eminent domain and tax subsidies, and impose cartelizing regulations on most mass transit. Restricted entry secures monopoly profits for insulated carriers; confiscating money and property to subsidize long-distance transportation and shipping creates tax-supported business opportunities for agribusiness, big-box chain retailers, and other businesses dependent on long-haul trucking. Incumbent telecommunications and media companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon accumulate empires by cartelizing bandwidth; control of broadcast frequencies is concentrated through the FCC’s political allocation; and ownership of telephone, cable, and fiber-optic bandwidth is concentrated through local monopoly concessions for each medium.

The Utility Monopoly grants control over electricity, water, and natural gas to massive, centralized producers through comprehensive planning, subsidies, and regional monopolies. Household generation, polycentric neighborhood systems, or off-the-grid alternatives are crowded out or regulated to death.

Regulatory Protectionism

Regulatory Protectionism may be the most widely dispersed of the Many Monopolies. Like Tucker’s Protectionist Monopoly, it concentrates and insulates incumbent providers by creating hurdles for would-be competitors. Established businesses stifle competition from below by lobbying for regulatory red tape, extortionist fees, and complex licensing for everything from taxi-driving to hairdressing. Industry standards, which would otherwise be set by social convention and market experimentation, are removed from competition and determined by political pull. High compliance costs insulate incumbents who can afford them from competitors who cannot, shutting the poor out of entrepreneurial opportunities and independent livelihoods.

The Health Care Monopoly is a ripple effect of other monopolies but merits special notice because of the all-consuming growth of the medical sector and because health care and insurance so profoundly shape decisions about jobs, money, and financial planning. The central economic fact of health care is a crippling ratchet effect. Patent monopolies ratchet up drug costs and insulate profits for Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. The FDA and medical licensing provide a form of regulatory protectionism, constraining the supply of doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals, concentrating profits and further ratcheting costs. A medical need can become a catastrophic cost, effectively requiring comprehensive insurance. Workers once got insurance through fraternal mutual-aid societies, but money monopolies have now thoroughly corporatized the insurance market through subsidies, mandates, and regulatory control. Workers now are tethered to their employers by the cost of insurance “benefits,” while facing the persistent danger of lost coverage, denied claims, and crippling debt.

Tucker’s analysis of the Four Monopolies controlling the Gilded Age economy, supplemented with the new Big Five that our own era has introduced, goes a long way toward showing why existing markets work the way they work and fail for the people they fail for. It may also inspire some objections from today’s libertarians.

The Many Monopolies deform markets toward stereotypically “capitalistic” business, but government intervenes in more than one direction. What about regulations or welfare programs to benefit poor people, or constraints on large, consolidated firms? These exist, but do not necessarily achieve their supposed aims. As shown in Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism, the Progressive regulatory structure and antitrust law, far from curbing big business, form the core of regulatory protectionism, cartelizing and insulating big business. There are also issues of priority and scale. While I object to SBA loans or TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) as much as any free-marketeer, in this age of trillion-dollar bank bailouts, even when government puts fingers on both sides of the scale, one finger is pushing harder than the other.

What about the explanations market economists offer for corporate firms’ greater efficiency, based on division of labor, economies of scale, or gains from trade? Wouldn’t large corporations outcompete smaller rivals, even without subsidies and monopolies?

But Tucker didn’t reject the division of labor, gains from trade, or large-scale production. Rather he suggested labor, trade, and scale organized along different lines. Independent contracting, co-ops, and worker-managed shops are forms of specialization and trade no less than centralized firms. Scale can be internalized through central management, or externalized through polycentric trade. A corporate economy is only one among many possibilities for dividing labor and exchanging values. The question is whether it predominates because of economic forces that would persist in markets free of structural privilege, or because of predicaments that would dissipate when competitors are free to offer alternatives with less centralization, less management, and more trade and entrepreneurial independence for ordinary workers.

If Tucker’s analysis proves anything, it proves there are many places in economic life where ordinary people are given a hard shove toward spending money they’d rather not spend with trading partners they wouldn’t otherwise keep. The most pervasive, far-reaching government interventions foster economic concentration, commercialization, hyperthyroidal scale, and the consolidated hierarchy needed to manage it—not because they grow naturally in market economies but because they grow out of control in the hothouse of socialized costs and inhibited competition.

The Belt and the Bones

For most of the twentieth century American libertarians were seen as defenders of “capitalism” (though see Clarence Carson’s doubts about that word in the 1985 Freeman article “Capitalism: Yes and No”). Most libertarians, and nearly all their opponents, seemed to agree that libertarianism meant defending business against the attacks of “big government,” and the purpose of laissez faire was to unleash existing forms of commerce from political restraints.

This was almost a complete reversal from the attitude of traditional libertarians like Tucker, which we might call “free-market anti-capitalism.” He was one of the best-known defenders of free markets in nineteenth-century America, happily summarizing his economic principles as “Absolute Free Trade . . . laissez-faire the universal rule.” For Tucker, then, libertarianism meant an attack on economic privilege by removing the political privileges that propped it up, dismantling monopolies by exposing them to competition from below.

The Many Monopolies are pervasive and fundamentally shape the everyday reality of the corporatist economy. So why then have not only the opponents but also the advocates of free markets so often missed Tucker’s analysis, with Progressives constantly laying the blame for inequality, exploitation, and corporate power on “unregulated markets,” while “pro-capitalist” libertarians respond by making excuses for the economic status quo? Paradoxically, it may be that Tucker’s approach is forgotten partly because of the very depth and pervasiveness of the problems it identifies.

The interventions twentieth-century libertarians were most likely to identify and oppose—progressive taxes, welfare, environmental regulations—are surface interventions, economically speaking. While aiming to reform or restrain the corporate state-capitalist economy, they take its basic features—concentration, insulation, ratcheted costs, and corporate power—for granted, attempting only to contain their most unsightly downstream effects. Countervailing “Progressive” regulations are like a belt put on capitalism. A man may need a belt or he may look better without, but his body remains the same with or without the restraint.

The political means that consolidate the Many Monopolies do more than interfere in the outcomes of preexisting market structures. State-capitalist privileges shape basic patterns of ownership, access, and cost for essential goods and factors of production. They fundamentally restructure markets, inventing the class structures of ownership, ratcheted costs, and inhibited competition that produce wage labor, rent, and the corporate economy we face. These primary interventions are no belt for state capitalism to wear or take off; they are its very bones. Without them, what’s left is not a different look for the same body—it’s a totally different organism.

Because you wear a belt on the surface, it’s easy to see and easy to imagine how you might look without it. Twentieth-century libertarians rightly condemned how the belt was hitched by government coercion—but rarely noticed that however much the anti-business belt constrains the state capitalist economy’s natural shape, without the belt it is still a political product shaped by intervention to its pro-business bones. The Monopolies that create capitalists, landlords, and financiers and uphold corporate power are so deeply embedded in the existing economy, so entrenched in consensus politics, it is easy to mistake them for business as usual in a market society.

We might say—with apologies to Shulamith Firestone—that the political economy of state capitalism is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear to be a superficial set of interventions, a problem that can be solved by a few legal reforms, perhaps the elimination of the occasional bailout or export subsidy, while preserving intact the basic recognizable patterns of the corporate economy. But there is something deeper, and more pervasive, at stake. A fully freed market means liberating essential command posts in the economy from State control, to be reclaimed for market and social entrepreneurship. The market that would emerge would look profoundly different from anything we have now. That so profound a change cannot easily fit into traditional categories of thought—for example “libertarian” or “left-wing,” “laissez-faire” or “socialist,” “entrepreneurial” or “anti-capitalist”—is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: Radically free markets burst through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolutionary, we would use it.

Myself, I have yet to see students getting rich off of the system.  I see students who have unexpected medical emergencies, family problems, and worst yet: administrations who callously tack on unexpected fees.  Where does all the money to pay for this come from?  Well, unless you have rich parents, student loans are probably the answer, and those student loan debts are just getting worse.

The bigger part of the story is not being told.  That untold story is probably the most important piece for the general public to understand.  Many of those in-the-know see the crisis as so deep-seeded that they believe a full repudiation of the debt is a necessary component of any overhaul to the higher education system.

When I think of arguments for student debt jubilee, I think of the necessity (supposed) of a college education.  There is immense societal pressures put on people to get a higher education.  Both political parties and their bureaucrats assert the necessity of a well-trained workforce to compete within the abusive global economic system.  In order to do that we have to throw large numbers of highly skilled workers (i.e. worker bees) at the competition.

I talk often with professors who are upset with the current student aid system.  I am told of “the old days” when student workers were paid damned good wages, tuition was relatively low, and student loan interest rates allowed students the ability to sock some extra cash away to be used for emergencies.

And guess what?  Student loan default rate weren’t as bad then as they are now.

A great deal of research has shown that people used to be able to move upward in corporations and government, facilitated in part by internal educational programs.  Anecdotally, a friend’s dad moved up to the higher ranks of the VA despite having no college degree, something my generation will probably never be permitted to do.  Professional workplaces that used to hire from within have cut these education programs.  These workplaces then require university credentials/degrees in order to land simple entry level jobs or move up one rung of the professional ladder.  This then justifies keeping wages down while paying the upper level executives more (I mean, hey, the execs have an MBA, right?!  Credentials!).

In other words professional workplaces have externalized their costs onto society.  The barrier-to-entry (time lost at work, time spent hitting the books, and cost for tuition) for even low-skilled, low-paying jobs has increased.

Universities are playing this game too.  Universities are paying their administrators loads of money while holding campus wages down.  In a public forum, President Hogan of the University of Illinois stated without remorse that while it was difficult to keep staff wages down, he had to pay administration the best money possible to get the best talent possible; I guess that logic doesn’t carry over to support staff and professors.  By the way, President Hogan makes over $620k a year for living in central Illinois, good work if you can get it.

Have a glance at the University of California system’s administrator pay packages.  The statewide board of trustees has drastically cut educational programs in the humanities and raised tuition.  How did the UC Administration cope?  They got fat raises (read here and here).

Administrators also give out sweetheart contracts to their university-business inner circles.  Just try to get a copy of your local university’s vendor contract and watch their reaction as they attempt to keep you from what is by all measures public information.  Part of the reason universities were so reluctant to enter into fair trade certified buying programs for university apparel is the reluctance to open the books to the general public.  Their desire to milk the system means more overhead for others to pay in the form of blood, sweat and tears.

Have no doubt about it, the student loan venders are making bank off of this downward spiral.  These same lenders were the recipients of the $7 TRILLION + no-strings-attached bailout package from the Federal Reserve at the tail end of the Bush Jr. Administration.  The same folks who bailed them out are the same folks who are under the weight of crushing student loan debt, yet do they get any benefits for keeping the filthy rich safely cloistered in the 1%?

One would think that with all the rhetoric used by university administrators extolling their service orientation toward the student populace that they would come out swinging on behalf of students with crippling debt.  That is until one realizes that universities are now heavily reliant on their endowments.  Guess who manages the endowment funds?  That’s right, many of the same people who also divvy out student loans.  You take away the student loan cash cow, and you severely hit the capacity of endowments to provide a bloated return on investment.

Administrators have the students in a vice, but big finance has university administrators in an even bigger vice.

Governments and businesses collude to further emphasize the necessity of a college education at these corrupted universities, then they turn around and gut their funding.  These bloated universities then externalize their costs; instead of cutting administrative benefit packages, administrators increase tuition costs and pat themselves on the backs for these new revenue sources by giving themselves even more generous compensation.  More overhead for other to pay.  More student loan debt.

[If you want a taste of how university admins network, read this article about that dirtbag chancellor from UC Davis and her efforts to help limit liberty on campuses (and here).  It becomes obvious that this is not a chain of random events, but a coordinated effort by internationally connected university administrators. Oh, and the Chancellor’s previous gig was also at the University of Illinois].

Long story short, the average person is heavily pressured into getting a hollow vocational degree at bloated costs from universities colluding with crony capitalists, trying to further inculcate creeping authoritarian principles into curriculums the world over.  Furthermore, a “basic” higher education is not enough; now you need an advanced degree to compete with the glut of job applicants with high school diplomas and bachelors degrees.

The Europeans were much smarter.  Many Europeans countries provide either low or no-cost tuition to enhance their consensus capitalist systems.  It provided a remarkable illusion of fairness.  But look at Denmark, where they have a large number of highly educated youth… the job market is glutted!  The mindset of such a large group of people with a higher degree is that the last thing they want to do is settle for a lesser job, so you end up with a great deal of new social issues from a generation sold a false bill of goods but are as of yet unwilling to admit that reality.

As for me?  I have significant student loan debt as well.  I will continue to pay my debt, and I won’t actively stand out and picket to have my own debt waived (I have other issues that are more pressing, personally)  But in my mind, these students have the higher ground in this debate, particularly considering the industrial bailouts we have seen over the last few decades given to people who were never truly in need (airlines, the banks, the car companies, etc.).

If the debt is ever waived, we will all be better off for it.  And I will gladly accept jubilee and not feel one ounce of remorse for being coerced into this system of manufactured privilege.

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First Steps To Fixing The Student Loan Crisis By Cutting University Costs

-Fundamental reworking of university boards of trustees from appointee-governed to user-governed systems

-Simple, accessible database of administrator compensation at all institutions of higher learning receiving public monies

-Public forums and user-governed committees overseeing hiring and compensation packages for non-departmental administrators

-Simple, accessible database of university contracts

-Public forums and user-governed committees overseeing university contract negotiations

-Reorienting university sports programs to serve as revenue generators for academics

-Convert university dorms and family housing to cooperatively-owned residential property

Cross-posted at http://taylorkeith.tumblr.com/post/13738136643/the-student-loan-debt-system