Bill Maher on the progressive dystopia (June 12, 2022)

June 12, 2022. Listen to Bill Maher on the college scam and equality of outcomes. And meanwhile, is the entire population becoming gay?

I used to think of Maher as a liberal Democrat. And while he is socially liberal, he is much more of a libertarian than a progressive. His distaste for the manifestations of and fascination with wokeness among his one-time fellow travelers has surfaced of late, probably as much out of trying to pull the progressives back to the middle than to laud libertarians or progressives.

The "college scam" highlights the obvious: Wanting to forgive debt for those who prosper after college by making those without debt or without those college incomes pay for the foolishness and the chicanery of college tuition loans. Simply, the outstanding debt should all be charged back to the colleges who fleeced these students. Colleges today demand an open pocketbook from students, alums, states and business to allow them to pursue their own twisted ideas of academic freedom. My take is that colleges, realizing that their excesses were putting them in the irrelevant zone, decided to exchange their educational mission for one of social engineering. In effect, since they can't justify their economic value or return on investment, shift to proclaiming their role and effectiveness at correcting the social injustices of the world, many of which they are responsible for themselves. Their greatest social injustice is to charge excessive amounts for worthless degrees and majors to students who seek not an education or a marketable set of skills that would directly benefit both the graduate and society, leaving an outstanding debt, diminished prospects for paying off that debt with useful employment, and an even greater sense of entitlement for more free or subsumed stuff, starting with loan forgiveness.

Maher also lauds the meritocracy and, much like Jordan Peterson, he acknowledges that outcomes can not and never will be "equitably" distributed, if only because talent is not equitably distributed, nor is the work ethic that activates that talent. If 10% -- or even one percent -- of all performing artists earn 99% of all the income from their services, that is more a fact of life, a demonstration of merit, than a social injustice.