This furthers the huge amount of resources society puts into the positional good known as education. If you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
> healthcare
This is a bottomless pit. A gov can spend almost arbitrarily large amounts of money on this (easily orders of magnitude more than total GDP), so you'll need to put a limit on it in some way.
if you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
not true. the US is the fourth highest country in number of students with tertiary education. notably europe (eg germany which has always had free universities) has only half as many students (and those even include trade-schools, which are absolutely relevant for work)
what possibly drives irrelevant higher education is high unemployment. if there are lots of applicants to choose from, you may tend to choose the higher educated ones. reduce unemployment and demand for lesser educated people should rise.
healthcare: This is a bottomless pit
literally ever country in the world spends less on healthcare than the US.
the limit on spending comes from insurance and governments not allowing exploitation by healthcare providers.
If “education” is considered a “positional good” then it’s not an “education” in the sense I meant it above and in the sense that it’s meant when considering societal wellbeing.
To see it that way you’d either have to have too little or too much of it. I doubt you’ve had so little education that you see no real value in it. So I guess you’ve been privileged with so much of it that the marginal cost of more education for you doesn’t provide any further value. Fair enough - for you.
Education in the normal sense of the word is valuable in itself, regardless of the value other people place in it. If that’s not your experience you’re very much doing it wrong and should stop.
This furthers the huge amount of resources society puts into the positional good known as education. If you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
> healthcare
This is a bottomless pit. A gov can spend almost arbitrarily large amounts of money on this (easily orders of magnitude more than total GDP), so you'll need to put a limit on it in some way.