Whiskey:
What’s the endgame? Even if your description of the situation were correct, so what?
One open secret I know about state colleges and universities is that they vastly prefer “international students” over students from their own state. Why? Foreign students pay a higher tab, which helps the university budget in the short term. This, of course, leads to reduced funding for state colleges and universities, which make college administrators even more desperate for short-term cash. Meanwhile, foreign students finagle ways to stay here, bring their families over, and set up ethnic enclaves with no intention to assimilate.
It state colleges and universities simply changed their funding formulas, this problem would go away. (Presently, states give appropriations to public universities and then set lower tuition for state residents. Instead, states could give tuition credits to state residents so that equalized tuition rates don’t bias college recruitment away from the local constituency.) The biggest enemy to such a reform is bureaucratic inertia. When a crisis is evident to everybody else, affluent people will fail to see a problem because it doesn’t directly affect their lives. The problem isn’t malice from the leisure class, but rather sheer obliviousness.
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Bertolt Brecht, a German Communist playwright, wrote this poem in the aftermath of the failed East German uprising of 1953.
Are there are affluent capitalists and leftists who seek population replacement as a means to advance their short-term interests? Yes! It has been that way for a very long time. Besides, using an exotic servant as a house ornament is a highly effective form of conspicuous consumption. What they don’t realize is that supposedly “compliant” replacements never stay compliant. Celtic mercenaries didn’t stay loyal to Carthage, German mercenaries didn’t stay loyal to Rome, and Turkish Mameluks didn’t stay loyal to the Arab Ayyubid Dynasty in Egypt. The “leisure class” is typically so oblivious to the world around them that they usually don’t know how bad things can get until it is too late.
I think the “leisure class” rarely acts with any intent to undermine their own societies. Instead, their selfishness, laziness, and utter obliviousness shield them from the consequences of their own actions. Poor people often assume that the rich are malicious, seeking to torment the poor with their latest nutty experiments, when rich people are merely exhibiting ignorance of the consequences of their own actions.
