We realize that everybody and his brother is posting
something about Saint Patrick, the Irish, green beer, and corned beef and
cabbage today. We’ll leave that to the
amateurs. Today we’re going to look at
something more truly Irish than having a party once a year to celebrate yet
another holiday that would utterly baffle the person it’s named for.
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| Product of monkish superstition. |
We’re referring, of course, to advanced education. You can’t get any more Irish than that. At a time when people all over Europe were
forgetting that there was such a thing as a book, Irish monks were going out
teaching people to read and write.
Practically the whole of Ireland was turned into an institution of
higher learning. At a time when the
British were running around naked and painting themselves blue, students from
all over Europe went to Ireland to study.
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| Wrong period, but you get the idea. |
One commentator recorded that he saw seven ships in one day
sailing up the River Shannon carrying students to one of the great monasteries. Ireland became known as “the Land of Saints
and Scholars.” (And they could do it
again by being the first country to adopt Capital Homesteading before the
Centennial of the 1916 Easter Rebellion . . . but that’s another posting for
another day.)
What brought this up was the reposting of a FaceBook comment
from March 11 of last year. Somebody
made the insightful (sarcasm) remark that (and this is exactly as the comment
appeared),
“People
just join the military because there too dumb to go to college . . .”
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| 1899 U.S.M.C. Uniforms |
The first person to comment was someone whose photo
indicated either that he had a real great Halloween costume, or he was a United
States Marine. He only wrote a single
word: “They’re.”
First, of course, there are one or two people who join the various
branches of the service who do, in fact, have college degrees. In many cases, the military has paid for
their schooling. The idea is that the
armed forces of the United States will have an active duty and reserve officer
corps of people who have demonstrated the ability to perform complex tasks at
some level of competency.
As a military under the control of and subject to the civil
power, today’s military leaders have to function under the sometimes mindless
restrictions imposed by politicians and government bureaucrats (can you say
“Rules of Engagement”?). Politicians and
bureaucrats often have as much idea about how to use the military effectively
as academics have about the true purpose of an education.
People in the military also have something that a lot of
other college graduates don’t have: a job.
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| For this I went to college? |
We are not in favor of attending a university as job
training. That, frankly, is the way
things are (at least for now), but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Given the accelerating pace at which
advancing technology is replacing human labor in the production process, the
jobs for which people are presumably being trained often do not even exist by
the time they graduate — or even before they apply to college.
We’ve addressed the problem of technology replacing human
labor more times than we care to count on this blog. We’ll just give the solution. As Louis Kelso said, “If the machine wants
our job, let’s buy it.” Not the job, the
machine. That way it doesn’t matter
whether you generate income by selling your labor so others can produce, or by
selling the goods and services your machine produces. You get the income either way.
No, the issue today is relative dumbness. Are people who go to college and enter the
non-military unemployment line, sorry, the job market inherently smarter than
people who go into the military right after high school without going to
college?
Let's compare in dollar terms. Rock-bottom pay for anyone in the military is $1,417.00 per
month, or $17,004.00 per year (the $4.00 is probably a rounding “gimme”). The rock-bottom pay for a college graduate
without a job is $-0-. The
Too-Dumb-To-Go-To-College military recruit is, evidently, $17,004.00 smarter
than an unemployed college graduate.
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| Too dumb to go to college. |
Now let’s look at the cost.
The military pays you to join and have a guaranteed job for life if you
don’t screw up and are halfway competent.
You have to pay to go to college, where you can graduate if you learn to
take tests and suck up to professors and get good grades by telling them what
they want to hear. Exactly how smart are
you to go to college, spend $250,000.00, and not have a job?
Relative Financial IQs, prorated over four years:
Dumb military recruit: $ 68,016.00
Smart college graduate: ($250,000.00)
Difference: $318,016.00
The lowest paid military recruit has a Relative Financial IQ
318,016 points higher than an unemployed college graduate.
Yup. People just join
the military because they’re, excuse me, there
too dumb to go to college.
#30#
