Why Don't The Citizens Of xxx Ever Learn?

I met a very nice young man the other day who works for the San Diego Unified School District. SD Unified, like most local government institutions, is going through the first wave of self-inflicted budget crises. I'd do the standard link-and-excerpt bit here, but my source is the Union-Tribune and it seems they're having a bit of bother managing a safe website these days,

Mainstream Media Fail.

In any case, the school district is laying off about 1,000 people because their pensions are eating them alive. To avoid being called racistsexisthomophobes, we gave the teachers everything they wanted a few years back and now we're firing teachers as the bills come due. I would say this serves everyone right, but if my young friend is any guide, we're not learning from the event, so it's just a dark cloud with no silver lining.

If you've ever wondered why socialism lives on or why Argentinians have never learned to stop hitting themselves on the head with the hammer of social justice fascism - Peronism - this is the perfect example. The young man is watching friends lose their jobs and has no idea why. Not only that, he's not very curious about it. He had some vague notion that there was corruption involved somewhere or "bad investments," but the whole thing was pretty uninteresting to him.

Math is hard.

People of faith prefer to stick with their faith. They don't go looking to become apostates. If the Pope or the Imam or the Teachers' Union President says something, then that's good enough. Getting over the resistance to changing a belief system requires a lot of disruption. If it requires math or learning new skills like budgeting, you can pretty much forget it for most people.

Noting that this is becoming a tl;dr post, I'll try to wrap it up.

The young man is a standard prole. He has faith in the progressive religion and "knows" his positions are morally right. When teachers, who care only about children and have the most important jobs in the Universe because the youth are the future tell them that the Democrats are kind and Republicans are greedy and evil, they ingest their catechism without critical thought and go back to their lives.

The fact that the progressivism has sold us all into debt slavery cannot pierce the bubble of faith encasing this fellow in a warm feeling of moral righteousness. Even if he loses his job because of debt loads inflicted on us all by the left, it's doubtful he'll ever do the hard work of learning how and why it happened. He has his progressive religion and it gives his life meaning and value even when things fall to pieces because of it.

And that, my friends, happening on a large scale, is how the wheels of compound interest mathematics can repeatedly grind the citizens of Argentina, Venezuela and California like grist without said citizens ever learning and changing their minds.

Related: The "Repeal and Replace" of Obamacare is similar religious insanity. It should just be "Repeal." We're $20T deep in debt slavery at the national level. We have no money for promising still more temporary benefits.