I want to clarify and re-issue the challenge of my prior post. Imagine we have free higher education funded by a 3% income tax imposed upon everyone. This is apparently acceptable to the titans of free higher education on the internet. That is, higher education funded this way would qualify as sufficiently left-wing and decommodified and whatever else.
Now imagine we change the above system by creating something called the Didn’t Go To College Tax Credit (DGTCTC). The DGTCTC would be available to everyone who did not go to college. The amount of the DGTCTC would be equal to 3% of their incomes. For reasons still not clear to me, the titans of free higher education on the internet hate the DGTCTC. Somehow the existence of the DGTCTC makes tuition-free higher education no longer free and injustice is introduced into our higher education funding system.
At this point, the only disagreement that I have with the titans of free higher education is that I support the DGTCTC and they oppose it. This is the only thing the debate is about. I look forward to more developed explanations concerning why the DGTCTC is so bad. My position, as is hopefully clear by now, is that it is good because it furthers egalitarian distributive justice.
I also look forward to a developed explanation concerning why the DGTCTC is so bad that any system that includes it — for example the system Oregon may adopt — is flatly unacceptable, and why people who can’t stop crying about student debt should never tolerate a free higher education system with a DGTCTC (even though such a system would wipe out student debt).