That’s a problem with universities. Turns out when you give away other people’s money in such a way, it allows the charges to escalate unreasonably.
That's a problem with the right-wing. Turns out that when you make people pay for significant and expensive infrastructure that they would rather use without paying for it at all, they get all snitty about the payment model not precisely accounting their individual use and submitting them with an individual itemised invoice.
The fact is that the broad infrastructure that is provided by government is the fundamental difference between being able to be healthy and wealthy, and living in a third world shit-hole where only a tiny number of kleptocrats can have any kind of modern healthcare - and they have to pay to import doctors*, because their countries don't produce their own.
The degree to which an individual is responsible for the cost of providing such broad infrastructure as universities and medical schools (that is, the degree to which they benefit personally from the government funding of broad infrastructure, of which higher education is but a minuscule part) is very difficult to calculate.
So it is impractical to invoice everyone an itemised and detailed account for the stuff they used. This does not, however, make ot impossible to estimate who is benefitting most from this spending. One pretty good proxy measure is to simply look at earnings. Those who earn most income, likely are benefitting most from the existence of government, and of all the myriad infrastructural gubbins that we know is there, but can't specifically account back to an individual user.
Who is the
ultimate user of educating doctors? Well, everybody. But you can't get rich if half your workforce are off sick.
Who is the
ultimate user of a strong military? Well, everybody. But you stand to have more stuff looted from you when the Canadians invade if you have more stuff to begin with.
Dividing up the cost of broad infrastructure - of government services - roughly proportional to income, as taxes, seems to me like an excellent way to pay for these things. It is about as fair and equitable as it is possible to achieve without such absurdly detailed accounting that the overhead of paying accountants would represent the overwhelming majority of all national expenditure.
But of course, there will be those who would like this stuff for nothing (or who demand, absurdly, that they not pay for it unless they specifically and personally asked for it), And those folks will try to characterise this essential difference between the first world and the third, as "giving away other people's money".
It's a very stupid and selfish characterisation of paying for infrastructure.
Indeed, it depends on the insane notion that money is an individually owned commodity, which it is not - money itself is an infrastructural service. You can have your own money, of course; But good luck getting anyone else to accept it as payment for anything. If you want people to accept money, it probably needs to be backed by a government or a bank. Emily Lake Dollars or Bilby Dollars are probably worthless, but US Dollars and Australian Dollars are not.
In the USA, the vast majority of money is in the form of US Dollars. They aren't
your money; They are the Federal Reserve Bank's money, and you can use them (or not) as defined by the Federal Government of which the Reserve Bank is a part. A hundred dollar bill in your wallet is essentially a government service; Take away the government service characteristic, and what's left has the same value as Monopoly money. One of the terms and conditions of your use of US money is that you remit a portion of the money that you handle to the IRS. That's not taking
your money; It's requiring you to use
their money in accordance with their rules for its use.
The problem that you are mischaracterising as "giv[ing] away other people's money" is, insofar as it exists at all, in fact a problem due to inadequately overseeing the bureacracy that funds education. If money is being diverted from its purpose, as defined in law, then that's a problem quite different and separate from "giv[ing] away other people's money". If government officials are derelict in their duty to obtain good value for the money they spend on your behalf, then that needs to be addressed.
But whinging about the existence of government spending at all, is at best pointless, and at worst counterproductive, as it helps government employees to conceal inefficiency, corruption, and graft, behind a smoke-screen of "It's not my money so I needn't care if it is wasted, despite the avoidance of such waste being a central competency of my job".
* Of course, there are plenty of doctors born in the third world who practice in the countries of their birth - but the good ones, as used as personal physician to His Majestic Excellency, Grand President and Supreme Ruler For Life, General Wonthelastcoup, all imported their education as doctors from other countries. Even if the good General employs doctors born locally, it's a shoo-in that they went abroad to study, and in the hugely unlikely event that they went to a local medical school, the textbooks and teachers were assuredly imports.
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