Agree with this. Perhaps the silver lining is that it could incentivize educators to opt-out of the state education system in favor of more entrepreneurial avenues? Like, private tutoring, teaching online classes, workshops, apprenticeships, etc.
A lot of good educators do this. And that's part of the problem. Private tutoring and online classes don't reach the masses of students. I mean, if we want to deliberately exclude the majority of the population from being able to receive an education, then sure, let's go this way.
If you think college teachers should be well paid, it means you think college education is worth a lot. If you think it's worth a lot, then it means it is expensive. If it is expensive, it makes sense that lots of people can't afford it. You can't pay teachers a lot if you have them teach poor people. Otherwise where is the money supposed to come from?
Reducing the Eurozone crisis to "taxes" is a non-argument. Especially considering that Scandinavia is doing pretty well, and the local tax rate, speaking from personal experience, is one of the highest in the world.
Not sure which country you're talking about exactly, but don't countries in Scandinavia benefit from large resources of oil and natural gaz in the North Sea? That sure eases welfare.
I'm a French expat living in Denmark, which is definitely not blessed by large amounts of resources of any kind. But you could take Germany as another example of a country who is not about to run out of other people's money any time soon.
Or to take examples in a different way: Spain and Ireland's issues were mostly caused by a housing bubble.
« Denmark has considerably large deposits of oil and natural gas in the North Sea and ranks as number 32 in the world among net exporters of crude oil[101] and was producing 259,980 barrels of crude oil a day in 2009 »
It seems I have underestimated the Danish oil reserves. However, oil export is a small fraction of its economy. I haven't been able to find an accurate figure, but according to Danmark statistik [1], it was about 8.17% of Danish exports in April 2014, which is very far from making Denmark into an oil-based economy like Norway is.
