No. No. No.
I don't care if you have zero education. My point is, your remarks about economics are not correct. Okay. And that's not how my education came. Not even close.
Conservative does not refer to political or social. It is just the facts of economics.
I don't think conservatism is synonymous with economic fact. Economic fact doesn't require any particular position on the political compass; facts are just facts. Political philosophy drives what we
intend to do with those facts; it dictates which direction we intend to
take the economy.
As for your comments on philosophy economy and education, here are my two cents.
Would you agree that you and I, like all humans, did not ask to be born? That's probably a strange question, but think about it. Would you agree that you did not ask to arrive in this world, nor to have the parents that you had? Put another way, did you choose to exist in the twentieth century United States, with all the opportunities it provided you, as opposed to the 18th century England or any other time period or place in history?
I ask because, to my eyes, if you didn't choose these things, then the circumstances of your birth and childhood are beyond your control; children are born where they are born and when they are born and to which parents they are born, and it is a matter of chance whether they are born underprivileged or wealthy, black or white, male or female. So you and I, like all children, were at the mercy of fate to have lived our childhoods in the families we did. It is the will of the universe, or of God, or the result of whichever random event leads to conception and birth in whichever time and place.
I personally came from a poor Irish family, and that wasn't my choice. However, the way in which I utilized the hand I was dealt, as it were,
was my choice. But in order to make a choice at all, one must first be presented with options, then one must take one option over the others, yet even our options are not our own to present.
Before I went to university, I had the option of loaning many thousands of pounds out to pay for my tuition costs, or to stay home and forego an education. Those were my only options. I didn't dictate the options available to me, I simply chose one of the options with which I was presented. I made my own path but the direction in which it began was dictated by the conditions in which I must make my choices. More relevantly, my choices for education were dictated by what avenues were available to me to learn. The only two avenues were government loans, or no education. Those were my options. Now, the people who are in charge of students loans had a power in dictating which choices I had. Those in charge of the rates of those loans had absolute power over at what cost I got my education (and that cost could just have easily been too high for me to meet), and they still do have that power, for millions of other potential students from underprivileged backgrounds.
Who are those people? Well, David Cameron, the current UK Prime Minister, was educated at Eton, a privileged, conservative, private school. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (the man in charge of economic policy) George Osbourne, was also educated there. Both Cameron and Osbourne hold the position that student grants (income-assessed money to supplement loans, that is given to the underprivileged by the government so that they can access university) should be scrapped in the UK, and they believe that tuition fees should be more expensive than they currently are, and thus that kids from underprivelaged backgrounds should have to take out even more massive loans than I did, in order to fund their university educations.
Meanwhile, both of those men had their private school educations handed to them by rich parents, and had their university degrees paid for in full by the government at a time when UK education was predominantly publically funded.
Those two men, having had the affluent upbringing that they had, were presented with more theoretical options than I was. They went to a good school, had rich and relatively powerful parents, and thus could choose from an array of options unavailable to me. It seems to me, however, they they have chosen to utilize the experience of their privileged childhoods, the political opportunities afforded them, and the subsequent political and financial support of their people, to hurt those less well off than they are. It seems to me that they have chosen to wield that power, the power to dictate the educational options available to millions, by showing little empathy or compassion for those who were born into means less plentiful than theirs. The underprivileged
do not choose that. That is a choice those men have made
for the underprivileged.
You seem to think I was indoctrinated into a philosophy in my educational institution, simply because I was taught in a state school, and then in a UK university. But that's not the case. I came to believe in a certain philosophy because of the experiences I have had in the economic position in which I have lived for much of my life. It's got nothing to do with what I was taught from books by some liberal professor. I'm a lower-class boy from a poor family. I have the experiences of a lower-class boy from a poor family. I understand what it means to be a lower class boy from a poor family.
But these two men don't understand it. Their experience of "lower class" is watching it from afar in what is in relative terms extreme affluence. They don't have my experiences. They genuinely don't understand what it is to be poor. I am absolutely convinced, in the way that it is not possible to fully understand and appreciate being poor by reading The Road to Wigan Pier, neither is it possible for well off men to understand the thoughts and more importantly the feelings of being underprivileged and lacking options, simply by watching the poor from a position of comfort, by hearing tales which are given to them as abstracts -- by looking at studies and numbers, facts and figures -- and by making a superficial effort to understand it. You might protest that, but if these two men really made a concentrated, genuine effort to understand what being underprivileged feels like -- the fear, the anxiety, the desperation, the sense of subjugation at the hands of a system we never asked to be born into, the inequality -- then I am quite sure they would find ways and means to express such deep empathy for the most impoverished in society by implementing policies that are financially beneficial for them. Yet, they have done exactly the opposite; they have empowered and enriched the rich, and levied the monetary burdens of the economy on the poor. They've decided to make access to education even less affordable for those whose options are already severely limited. They want to make education practically inaccessible to the lower-class Irish lad who doesn't have two coins to rub together. And they delude themselves into thinking "it's good for the economy".
In reality, it's good for the rich, upper-income end of the economic spectrum. It drives the interests of the already deeply elitist British upper class. It's an unacceptable, blatant step towards making access to education a right only for the rich and I personally don't think educational access should be dependent on whether or not my parents and their parents were educated enough to earn enough money to pay for my tuition (a cost that is going to get more expensive the longer the conservative government stay in power).
If I, or anyone else, nomatter their economic background, is smart enough to gain entrance to university, they should be able to attend it. People shouldn't be penalized for being less wealthy than someone else. Neither should the unintelligent be treated like dogs bodies because they're less intelligent than someone else. But the British conservatives seem to disagree with this. That in and of itself tells me that those people are out of touch with the lower classes.
That's why I say beware a privileged politician. They don't care about the interests of the poor. And you, I suspect, haven't got the experiences sufficient to give a hoot either.
