Business Administration Degree - MSU - 1965

I graduated with a business degree from Michigan State University and about $300 in debt on a student loan.  The only loan I needed to fund my education.  No scholarship.  Tuition was just over $100 per quarter.  I lived in a house owned by my parents with 6 other renting guys.  Rent was $10 per week.

I took my degree and joined the navy for a career.  The value of the education was not so much what I had learned in college but that I had it in my hand and therefore when I took the oath I became an officer instead of an enlisted person.

Then I really started to learn something.

There is 1.3 trillion in student debt today.  Richard Wolff talks about the inequities of our economic system in his most recent monthly talk.  Student debt is one of those problems.

I recall from my economics courses that the future would require fewer people that would do more work.  Technology would do the work.  The professor asked:  What will those displaced by technology do?  The answer was that to absorb the change people would enter the workforce later and leave earlier.  It was a "benefit" of our technological age like a social dividend.  Entry to the workforce would be delayed by more young people entering college.  More people would retire earlier from the workforce.

I liked my economics courses the least.  I could never really grasp how the economic system worked.  There was nothing solid to build on.  I'm amazed that I graduated.  Multiple choice guessing perhaps.  I never would have known the answers otherwise.  I was not educated.  Not enough to ask the economic question:  "Where will the money come from for delayed entry and advanced exit?

I just sat there and listened to the lecture.  This was Michigan.  I was aware of the nature of unemployment and its problems.  The early 60's were however a time of relative prosperity.  The economic situation looked good then like it would continue unchanged.  Maybe the tv series "Happy Days" was popular then.  The situation was different.

If my economics professor had been Richard Wolf then he might have said that in this happy wonderland of the future where people had more time to do other things than work those other things would be funded by debt that would have otherwise been funded by a pay check.  Leisure time (time spent not employed) cost money.  By this definition I had a lot of leisure time until I was an adult.  A kid does not ask where the money comes from in the family.  They know where it does not come from if the father (that was different then too) did not work.  Mine always did.  They were Happy Days.  We finally had a color TV.  Maybe that is what everyone would do when the workforce shrank?

TV was free then.

If had been alert in economics class I would have seen that there was big money to be made in debt.  In fact I recall some of my classmates talking in my last year about the money they would make in Investment Banking.

One thing the econ professor got right was corporate globalization.  Perhaps there were a few hints given about who would do the work.  VW's were few then.  This was Michigan and anyone driving a foreign car was suspect.

The situation today is that debt is the means to support delayed entry into the work force, non participation in the workforce and early exit from the work force at a nominal retirement age.  Perhaps and age when contribution (savings in some manner) would cover the cost, not debt.  The collection of a debt owed the retiree. In some cases a bad debt or diminished debt.  Other creditors had to be satisfied.

A career in the business institution of debt would have paid more than a career in the navy.  Looking back I think:  What would I have done then if I knew what I know now.  Being motivated to do something for the world to protect it from the bad guys I would have chosen to fight against the forces of social injustice.  I recognized that social injustice was wrong then.  This was the early 60's.  Martin Luther King was a social justice leader.  I saw the military as a world wide social justice policeman.  I was born in 1943 when we were making the world safe for democracy.

While I can ask what would I have done then the best answer is that I wish I could have become one of the persons that I admire so greatly today.  I am proud of things I have done in my lifetime, the person I have become that has a personal past of things done that are consistent with my heroes of  today.  In comparison they were fewer and farther between and on a lesser scale.

In conclusion I could have done more.  I was shoveling the snow off the driveway of my older neighbor yesterday when her care giver arrived.  She remarked about what a good man I was to do that.  I replied as I sometimes do when caught doing something good that someone wants to compliment: "I was a real s.o.b. in my younger days and I am just trying to make up for it".

I really didn't do so bad as far as doing good goes...as far as I could see it then.  I could have done better but I did the best I could. I joined the navy at a delayed work force entry time.  Left the navy at 43 and did not work again.  I followed the course of employment time span suggested as the future by my econ professor.

I am one of those in the cohort of few that unbalance the distribution of the benefits of our society and its economic system.  We should all share more equally the dividend of our technology as a matter of social justice.

One of the best things I can do now to make up (and that is a debt owed) for what I coulda/shouda done is support Bernie Sanders.  Support anything and everything that balances the distribution of the means of distribution (a better monetary system structure incorporating blockchain) and a leveling of the playing field of life where everyone has the opportunity to play as best they can and be supported participate as benefactors of the social system scheme when they cannot without having to have that "support" come to them in the form of unreasonable debt which cannot be paid back or even serviced because the social structure does not provide the means to do it because it is extractive of its own population to serve the few rather than the common good of the many.

If wishes were fishes then beggars would ride. I wish Richard Wolff had been my econ professor back in the day.  However, he would not have been allowed to teach at MSU or probably any other university back in those days.

St. Timothy, my namesake admonishes:

Timothy 6:12......... "Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses".

I have fought a good fight.  I could have fought a better one.  It is not to late to fight that better one harder and finish closer to the best.