I didn’t realize until now that The Onion leans toward the delusions of collectivism — (left, new liberal, socialist; choose your flag). Inasmuch as I read a clip from it perhaps only a couple times a year I hadn’t looked at it enough to notice. Plainly, though, it struggles to deliver satire as effortlessly as does The Babylon Bee. Maybe the subjects that lend themselves so easily to the mission of The Bee are too dear to the heart of The Onion. (I italicize their names as if they are genuine newspapers, as I was taught to do in high school English in the 1960s.)
A link in another source led me to a slide show at The Onion, dated August 29, “Americans Explain Why They Oppose Canceling Student Debt.” One of the Americans, identified (fictitiously of course) as Sloane Gutierrez sarcastically spouts: “In the Bible, Jesus says to never forgive.” The rest of the piece, straining to be humorous, presents sadistic “Americans” taking pleasure in the suffering of those who borrow for college and who are then expected to repay their loans.
What’s next? Perhaps colleges will be invited simply to send tuition bills to the President from now on?
It struck me at last what has bothered me since the inane idea of student loan debt “forgiveness” came up a few of years ago, on the heals of President Soetoro’s bail-outs: Yes, collectivists, of course Jesus counseled us all to forgive. He also admonished us against theft. But a central tenet of collectivist politics is language manipulation. This proposed bail-out of student loans isn’t forgiveness. As one well-circulated cartoon recently put it: You borrowed money. Pay it back. Debt crisis solved.
A loan is settled in either of two ways: It is paid back according to the original contract or as otherwise negotiated between the borrower and the lender, or it is written off such that the lender incurs a loss. When you don’t repay the lender, as when you compel the lender’s “forgiveness,” that’s theft. If this strong-arm overreach of executive duty is implemented, Biden’s student-loan-borrowing “community” will be stealing from those who will bear the cost — those who will ultimately fork over the money or who will pay more dearly in a world where there is nothing to buy even if you have money.
Another American in The Onion’s slide show, an aromatherapist, scolds us, the unforgiving: “Students who agreed to take on the debt should have known that they would be heading into several recessions and a pandemic after graduation.” Yeah, and I should have known I’d be heading into the Vietnam war, the energy crisis, Watergate, and every other catastrophe that has occurred in the decades since I signed for my first college loan. I’m no aromatherapist so maybe I’m not qualified to respond, but no one offered to buy my vote during my military service and my remaining college years, when payments were merely deferred, nor during the ten years after I graduated. I was thirty seven when my student debt was fully repaid — by me.
Borrowers, hear me. I’m not the one from whom you’ve borrowed, so even if I wanted to write it off for you, I can’t. The lender of student loans isn’t the federal government, either. Nor is it the banks through whose hands the money in question slurps along like wet cement, assuring that some sludge from it sticks to the banks’ palms. The lenders are the people not yet born who will inherit our national debt and who will be excavating our landfills by hand in search of morsels to sustain their pitiless existence, perhaps only a little beyond my own lifetime.
It’s their money and their way of life which will be sacrificed to fund Biden’s student loan “forgiveness.” They are the lenders. By wiping out your current debt Joe Biden merely wants to borrow from our descendants, yours and mine, to buy votes. Never mind that it ought to be downright illegal. Is there not another crisis more in need of attention than this?
Let us trust… er… wrong word; let us fantasize that Congress will rebuke The Big Guy and invoke its own authority over the funds in question, or let us wish that a watchdog group might drag the issue before a federal judge. (I can’t sue to stop it, since no individual has access to a federal court any longer). Will Rogers once commented: “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” Sadly, since there is no limit to the federal government’s present liberty to tax and borrow, we are getting all the government that government can conceive for itself. Our elected representatives now frankly admit that no one alive today will have to pay a cent toward what it will cost to actually begin reducing our national debt, which currently approaches $100,000 per citizen or a quarter million dollars per taxpayer. That burden is our gift to our grandchildren; we love them that much.
Albert Jay Nock 