Student Loans, High College Costs, and Illegal Immigration: A Solution (Part Three: The Value of Work and its Threat to the Marxist Student-Loan Scam)

© P. A. Ritzer 2023

So, where does illegal immigration fit in?

Well, I guess I had better make answer to that question, since I asked you all to bear with me for the answer twelve years ago.  Argh.  The reasons it has taken so long are legion.  Not least among them is the maddening sense that it would take volumes to answer it, considering how deeply and widely the illegal-immigration cancer infects the United States of America and how it continues to metastasize in new and diverse ways daily.  Maddening!  Yes, it brings to mind the “maddened” Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, though I would hasten to make clear that I fall on the Thomas More side of that interview. So, this Part Three is the first of four more parts, the last of which will fall under a different title because, though it came out of the same research, it goes beyond the topic.    

So now, when the so-called Biden Administration, a.k.a. Barack Hussein Obama’s third term, has obliterated our southern border, let’s wrap this baby up since it is high time to shoo this monkey from my back.

In Part One I argued for the end of the federal student-loan program for several reasons not mutually exclusive of each other.  Government student loan (and, for that matter, grant) programs:

• artificially inflate the cost of college;

• artificially inflate and skew the college economy;

• artificially inflate and skew the nation’s economy;

• artificially skew the supply and demand for a college education so that colleges can charge far more than their services could demand in a natural economy;

• artificially skew the supply and demand for a college education in that far more people attend college than would naturally do so (especially given that the quality of the education offered at most colleges has been so corrupted and degraded);

• entrap college students in massive debt;

• make students beholden to government and corrupt politicians;

• thus, enhance the power of the elite class;

• incentivize students to vote for politicians who support the student-loan program;

• incentivize said politicians to support the student-loan program;

• incentivize and empower said politicians to confiscate more taxpayer money;

• flood colleges with money confiscated from taxpayers (over 60% of whom have not earned a college degree);

• thus force said taxpayers to be the lenders;

• and thus force said taxpayers to pick up the tab for defaults or cancellations, even if they have not earned a college degree themselves or have responsibly paid off their own student loans;

• potentially neutralize the talents and aspirations of those more talented and aspiring than the liberals in control;

• thus potentially neutralize with debt the most independent who pose a threat to liberal control;

• relegate students to cogs in the liberal machine that wastes talent and kills independence, aspirations, initiative, ambition, and entrepreneurialism;

• expand the role of federal government beyond its constitutional limits;

• thus threaten inalienable rights;

• insulate students from real-life experiences that would help them see through the ivory-tower liberalism in which the student-loan supporting politicians and academics seek to entrap them.

And now Joe Biden has again defied the Constitution and the Supreme Court to bail out student-loan borrowers and buy their votes with his SAVE Plan, that is estimated to cost taxpayers $276 billion. So the Democrats will have the taxpayers—over 60% of whom do not have a college degree and many of whom have already paid off their student loans—foot the bill of what he estimates to be 804,000 borrowers. Those generous Democrats.

In Part Two I pointed to Knute Rockne, of University of Notre Dame fame, as an example of one who, without government student loans:

• worked four years at the post office and saved his money to attend Notre Dame,

• worked at Notre Dame to graduate magna cum laude,

• worked at Notre Dame in the chemistry department, and

• worked as the head coach at Notre Dame to compile the highest winning percentage in college or professional football before he died in a plane crash at age 43.

Yes, he worked.  And about that he said, “The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for.”

This truth, validated by the life of the man who pronounced it, in addition to the reasons to terminate federal student loans enumerated above, must cause us to regard with deep suspicion those who would alienate us human beings—especially young college students in this case—from work.  We might well, and really should, question and consider exactly why some people in positions of power want to keep people, contrary to human nature, from working.  Could it be that they want young people, who would be working to earn money to pay for college, to get student loans instead and become dependent, entitled, elitist cogs in the machine they control, while they import another dependent class of illegal aliens to do the work.  And then, of course, there is created another class of dependents who are priced out of the labor market and onto the welfare rolls by illegal aliens happy to work for lower wages.  That’s a lot of dependents created.  And dependents depend upon benefactors.  And benefactors thereby gain control, and they gain power.  And how does all that comport with the concept of “just powers” derived from “the consent of the governed” integral to the foundational Declaration of Independence?  How just is such power when derived by corrupting the consent of the governed by doling out money confiscated from an increasingly lower percentage of the population to create such dependence and all that goes with it?  And how can a government with such unjust powers secure the God-given natural rights recognized in the founding of the United States of America?

So, rather than burdening college students, and the entire country, with government student-loan programs, with all their inherent evils listed above, I propose the previously customary practice that those students work to earn money to pay for their college educations, which will cost far less in a system not artificially inflated by government student loans.  (And that work includes earning privately funded scholarships, whether academic or athletic, which ought to reward those best suited to attend college in the first place.) In their young and inexperienced state, college students will need to work at jobs fitting that state, entry level jobs in most cases, jobs that we have been told Americans will not do.  There are several benefits to college-age young people working at such jobs, especially if those jobs require physical labor, which they often do.  By thus laboring, they would learn what so many of us have learned to make us better Americans.

Taking up work, especially physical labor—like the Carpenter from Nazareth and his fisherman apostles—toughens, strengthens, and hones body and mind; and connects body and soul; and disciplines the worker physically and mentally in ways too numerous to catalogue here.  Just one example of how work disciplines the worker is that it often requires us to do tasks we may not wish to do when we may not wish to do them.  We all, not just soldiers and athletes, need the discipline derived from work, so that we can rise to the level of humanity intended by our Creator and made unusually accessible, in this fallen world, by the foundation and structure of the constitutional republic of the United States of America.  That discipline makes us more responsible for our actions and therefore makes us better citizens.

Thus work, and the discipline that goes into it and derives from it, teaches us the value of work itself, and of time, and money.  And it tempers our desire for things, when we must work to earn the money to pay for them.  Thus we learn, along with temperance, the delayed gratification so necessary for healthy development, as the lack thereof in our current culture makes so apparent.  Work also provides experiences and teaches skills and practices that broaden one’s knowledge and understanding.  And that understanding should include appreciation, empathy, patience, and respect for those who labor in ways that we may not, which contributes to the human communion that will be fully realized in paradise.  On the other hand, if we are spoiled by student loans and other programs that alienate us from work, and the discipline that goes into it and derives from it, we can too easily slide into pride and division through the dehumanizing concupiscence bequeathed to us by our original parents.     

Work also helps the worker discern his vocation, that work to which he is called to best suit his abilities and wholesome inclinations.  That discernment could make the worker realize that college may not be the right choice for him or her, which could prove to be a real threat to the elitist control exercised in the government student-loan programs.  On the other hand, doing work that one may not enjoy could raise the value of college for the worker.

I am reminded of the summer I hauled brick and mortar for brick layers.  Now you have to understand that there was an early context for this work experience.  When I was three or four years old, I remember feeling a sudden terror at the idea that all the bricks in a wall had been laid one at a time by a brick layer.  I was horrified by the imagined monotony of such drudgery.  Lest any brick layer take offense, I experienced a similar terror at a young age at the prospect of no less than heaven itself that compelled me from my bed one night to express to my mother my sudden consternation at the possibility of eternal boredom.  She had no such concern, given her trust in God, which did provide some comfort, and I had far less concern after I reasoned that mine, when one got right down to it, was little more than the relatively common fear of the unknown.  (And it should be noted that that same fear can hinder people from stepping out and taking a chance on a job that might be good for them.)

But back to heaven and brick laying.  Though, as of this writing, I do not know heaven, brick laying is another story.  I came to know brick laying, or at least the hod-carrying end of it, well enough one summer to know that I did not wish to know it any longer, though I have great respect for those who do.  Revisiting the experience here, I can all but feel the scraping and bruising of my spine on the frame of the scaffold as I dashed along the boards through its openings, laden with mortar or bricks, to make sure the brick layers’ supplies never ran out.  Consequently, having heeded the advice of one of my fellow laborers, I sometimes found motivation to keep applying myself to the chafing demands of academic life when my eyes would fall upon the brick kept on the shelf above my desk for just that purpose.

Work also teaches the humility essential to living an authentic human life.  One of the jobs I had during my high-school years was cleaning the stadium and field house at the local university after games.  Among my fellow high-school workers I was singled out to clean the bathrooms at the field house.  This selection was considered an honor, as it meant that I worked after every game rather than waited for my turn in the rotation of crews.  And that meant that I made more money.  It was good money at the time.  But, of course, it meant scrubbing toilets.  That made me a servant to every person who used those toilets during the game, cleaning up after them in their basest bodily functions.  Picking, with gloved hands, cigarette butts out of urinals does wonders to keep one from thinking too highly of himself.  And memories of such jobs can help keep one’s ego in check when he rises to jobs that tempt him to pride, one of the deadly sins.  Everyone should scrub toilets at least some time during his or her life.  It is one of the reasons we required our kids to clean a bathroom every week while they were growing up.

And in that vein, I remember a friend, a legal immigrant who ended up being very successful in his own business, saying he did not believe in unemployment in the United States. Everywhere he had lived, he said, he was able to find jobs in the want ads in the newspaper (remember those?). He said that if he ever lost his job, he would bag groceries. That was the very attitude that all but assured his well-earned success.

And, of course, if college students without federal student loans would be working at these jobs the politicians tell us Americans just won’t do, with all the many benefits listed above, then there would be no reason to claim that we need illegal aliens to fill said jobs.  Thus could the cancelling of the government student-loan programs help solve, at least partially if not altogether, three major issues that politicians say need to be solved: the high cost of a college education, student-loan debt, and illegal immigration.  That should make politicians really happy, right?

No.  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that ending the government student-loan programs would not have these benefits, but it’s that the politicians who support things like government student loans and illegal immigration do not want these problems solved.  They may say that they want to help people, and they may actually believe that, deluded as some of them appear to be.  But what is really at play here is making people think that they are helping them, getting the accolades for having done so, but in reality making more people dependent on government and thus on those who orchestrate it.  Thereby those who orchestrate it gain more control and power, with all the advantages that come with them, and more support to stay in power and rule over those whose affection and loyalty they buy with money they confiscate from fewer and fewer taxpayers, who may well see through the politicians’ wiles but whose dwindling numbers afford them less power to oppose the schemes they are forced to support with the taxes confiscated from them.

In addition, colleges, through the student-loan programs, are enabled to sate their Marxist greed and comfortably support specious fields of study by jacking up the cost of college to sop up all that student-loan largesse at the cost of the students and the taxpayers.  Thus these institutions are incentivized to support those politicians who will continue to guarantee that largesse, lovely Marxist elitists that they are, academics and politicians alike.  Students are incentivized to support these politicians because loans are all but indispensable to pay for the exorbitant cost of college in the artificially inflated system to which the loans have mightily contributed.

Where does illegal immigration fit in? Bear with me one more time; we finally get to it in Part Four.

(To be continued in Part Four)

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

© P. A. Ritzer 2023