The Young Turks

In Texas private school teachers don't get paid shit.  They usually are only part time employees with little or no benefits.  Often the pay is hourly.  The job is completely unregulated, no teaching license required, and generally employees people who aren't licensed or only want a part-time job.

It is probably different in other states, but in Texas, being a public school teacher vs private is like the difference between a street walker and a call girl.

i don't capitalize because i tend to think and type very fast---capitalization slows me down sufficiently that my train of thought suffers. i reserve capitalization and markup for more formal communication, and not for blog posts.

back to the matter at hand.

it is something of a shame that we are even discussing what makes a good citizen in a modern democratic society.

a person is clearly born knowing nothing about societal complexity, but slowly learns a combination of (a) facts, and (b) meta-skills (i.e. learning how to learn) over time. they are helped in this by their parents (primarily), siblings (secondarily), close family and friends (as they grow into adulthood).

modern societies are simply too complex for someone to learn these facts and skills entirely on their own esp. if their formative years were wasted.

however, solving that problem requires other draconian steps that leebruls will either oppose outright (e.g. placing emphasis on stable 2-parent homes, encouraging well-educated, well-off couples to have/adopt children while discouraging/preventing ignorant, criminal, indigent human apes from fucking, forcibly removing children from environments that do not provide them the proper care and education needed for modern society, etc. are all considered anathema in the leebrul canon), or else requires that we allow for some people to suffer the consequences of their ways---either via direct suffering or by allowing their children to suffer.

there are no two ways about it. one can presumably imagine an ideal utopic world where there is no crime or criminality, every good thing is available as a free lunch, and we are all one big happy family.

the real world (much beloved of the reality based community) is one where humans interact with differing levels of kinship (with more emphasis on those "closer" to us than with those "farther" away), and where almost every decision involves a tradeoff in the utilization of a scare resource (time, money, natural resource, etc.).

while i do feel some vague sympathy for a person who did not have the advantage of a good home and proper education, i don't consider it a level of sympathy sufficiently high that some portion of my taxes go to bailing out a vast agglomeration of debt forgiveness (some small part of which may actually benefit a well-deserving individual while the rest of it goes to simply encouraging whiny spendthrifts to continue their profligate lifestyle).

in more concrete terms, yes, school curricula should include financial awareness, economic awareness, and basic arithmetic numeracy as part of what is taught in each and every grade level. i would go even further and say that schools should fail students who do not pass these courses with a sufficiently high grade---but of course, leebruls will oppose such measures and trot out various pablums (racism, multi-generational societal/cultural problems, poverty, etc.) as reasons why someone thoroughly ill-equipped to survive and flourish in modern society should still be allowed to finish school and unleash themselves onto the adult world. and then these same leebruls will complain about credit card companies preying on those too stupid to understand compound interest.

you cannot have one without the other. i am all in favor of extremely strong primary/high school curricular emphasis on mathematics, economics, and finance, _provided_ anyone failing these courses is not allowed to advance through the grades. otherwise, it is just more wasted resources---the children who pass these courses are presumably those who come from good homes where they would have learnt these things anyway, and those failing these courses are the ones who need the knowledge the most and the ones who will suffer the most later on.

and it is a big "if".

i don't support a tax-payer bailout of credit card companies, but i suspect this will eventually happen because of the deep leebrul concern for "what about the children" who might suffer, or other such crap.

i agree that credit card companies and debtors should be allowed to work out their disputes amongst themselves, as long as you also agree that if a credit card company wants to send bounty hunters after a debtor, you will not oppose that behavior.

the moment you start placing restrictions on the terms of the contract that a lender asks a borrower to sign, and the moment you start placing restrictions on the methods the lender can use to recover bad loans, you also agree (implicitly, never mind what the fuck you think or want) that lenders will use whatever power they have to rewrite the laws to their advantage.

i have stated repeatedly that i have no sympathy for lenders or borrowers---apparently, you conveniently forgot to read those passages not in tune with your sense of (in)justice.

leebruls have no qualms about writing laws to prevent lenders from engaging in certain types of behaviors, all in the name of protecting the poor, innocent borrower, and then turn around and complain when the legal machinery is used by the lenders to their advantage. welcome to the desert of the real.