This election season, a hot topic of debate has been the concept of socialism, largely due to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders' campaign for the presidency. The idea of socialism has been tossed around for decades (even centuries), but here is my opinion on the matter.
People who support socialism like to call it distributing wealth or sharing, but why should I have to share what I earn? Yes, I am a college student, so I do know about student loans, but I also realize that it is not the government's responsibility to pay them. The government -- well, tax-payers -- already gives every kid the opportunity to go to school from kindergarten to 12th grade for free, because everyone pays that tax money for public school regardless of whether or not they have children who attend. Most people are roughly 18 years old when they graduate high school, and by then, a student can get a job and pay for community college for the first two years of college. Yes, I realize that sometimes community college is not the dream, but it is an affordable education for someone who cannot afford an expensive four-year university for all four years.
It also is not mandatory for someone to go to their expensive dream college when they do not want to major in something that will pay off the loans in the next 40 years, or ever in some cases. I realize that people want to choose a certain major, even if the available careers for that major do not pay well, but that might mean going to a slightly cheaper school. There is no reason to go into a career field that pays $30,000 gross annually when the student loans from that dream school are $300,000, and quite frankly, people who sign the paper for student loans should not be protesting them when they knew exactly what they were signing up for.
I also do not have a problem with the “1 percenters.” There are several millionaires and even billionaires who have made all their money by themselves, so no, I am not jealous of that, nor do I feel entitled to have any of it. As a college student, I am realizing just how hard I and everyone else has to work to earn a good living, so I do not want to get a good job after working hard in school just to get taxed astronomically to pay for someone else who did not work as hard.
Finally, people can call socialism whatever they want, and they can even try to call it democratic socialism, but at the end of the day, a saying comes to my mind: “Socialism is great, until you run out of other people's money.”
