On August 24, the Biden administration finally announced what pretty much everyone (including me) had been predicting for months:  A new round of “student loan forgiveness” and an extension to the COVID-19-justified “payment pause.”

Quick details of the current plan: More than 40 million borrowers will receive some relief. About 20 million will have their debt completely forgiven. Individuals who earn less than $125,000 per year (or couples earning up to $250,000) will have up to $10,000 taken off their tabs. Lower-income individuals who qualified for Pell Grants are eligible for double that amount.

While the details are new, the timing was never much in doubt, because helping out existing student borrowers is the effect, not the intent, of the plan. The intent is to motivate 40 million voters (and their parents, spouses, and children) to vote for Democrats less than three months from now in the midterm congressional elections.

Similarly, the intent behind Republican howling over the measure is to motivate everyone who feels ripped off because they didn’t borrow money for college, or paid that debt off without such assistance, but who will be taxed to cover the check for Biden’s generosity, to vote Republican.

My guess is that the Democrats have the upper hand here: The beneficiaries are going to be very happy;  taxpayers in general are barely going to notice in the long term, and probably not get nearly as up in arms as the GOP hopes they will in the short term.

The total amount involved (in this round, anyway) comes to “only” $329.1 billion over ten years according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Yes, that sounds like a lot of money, and it is.

On the other hand, it’s less than half (again, spread over ten years) as much as each of us gets ripped off for every year, year in and year out, for a supposed “national defense” that consists largely of writing welfare checks to Raytheon, Boeing, and friends, and workfare checks to kids who go into uniform instead off to college.

Say what you will about some of the more seemingly useless courses of study: At least your average “gender studies” student probably isn’t torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or murdering eight-year-old American girls in Yemen. So there’s that, anyway.

As someone whose tiny student debt was paid off long ago (I dropped out midway through my first semester of college and have paid cash for the credit hours I’ve slowly accrued since), the idea neither enthuses nor upsets me.

On the other hand, this “forgiveness” does nothing to address the underlying problems with the high costs of higher education.  It’s just a Democratic Party vote-buying scheme that Republicans are hoping to use as a BOGO for their own base.

If our political class actually wanted to address the real problems, they’d get government out of the student lending business, and allow student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy on the same terms as other debt.

Unfortunately, solving problems is the opposite of what politics is about.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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According to a recent National Institutes of Health survey, United Press International reports, “use of marijuana and hallucinogens among young adults in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021.”

According to the survey, 43% of young adults admitted to having used cannabis in the past year, with 8% saying they’ve tried LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, or other “hallucinogens.”

That, believe it or not, is good news.  Both of these “drug” categories have a history of use as long as the history of humanity, with known medical and mental benefits, few negative side effects, and virtually no correlation to violent behaviors.

None of these items should have ever been illegal to use, possess, sell, or grow/manufacture in the first place, and increasing familiarity with them continues to feed  growing opposition to the  “war on drugs.”

They’re all, in three words, “safer than alcohol.”

Which, the same survey says, remains the most popular “drug,” with binge drinking rebounding from a 2020 low and “high-intensity” drinking steadily increasing.

That’s the bad news.

If I knew one of my children (all now thankfully and safely out of their teens) was going out to “party,” and that recreational substances would be involved, I’d much rather they got into a bag of weed or some mushroom caps than into a case of beer or a fifth of bourbon. There’s just less potential for senseless brawls, sexual assault, or driving while impaired.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve personally got nothing against alcohol, and don’t think it should be illegal. I use it, although these days I drink maybe a six-pack of beer and a few ounces of whiskey a year; it used to be … well, quite a bit more.

Here’s the thing:

People have both self-medicated and recreationally dosed themselves with various things since there have been humans.

They’ll keep doing so, even if politicians get together and decree that they mustn’t.

The choice we face is not between a society of junkies and a “drug-free America.” History has taught us that neither of those things is going to happen.

The choice is between a society where we’re free to choose what we eat, drink, smoke, or otherwise ingest — and are responsible for what follows — or a society where eating, drinking, smoking, or otherwise ingesting the “wrong” substance may mean prison whether we harmed anyone else or not.

We’re moving in the former direction. And should continue to do so.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In early August, a Nebraska prosecutor charged  a mother and daughter with violating the state’s ban on abortion after 20 weeks. That ban was passed in 2010, but didn’t go into effect until the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year overturning Roe V. Wade.

Part of the state’s evidence consists of Facebook messages between the two, indicating that the mother obtained “abortion pills” for her pregnant daughter.

Police obtained those messages in the usual way: They presented a search warrant to Facebook and the company turned over the data.

If the two women had used Facebook’s optional “end-to-end encryption,” the police would still have been able to get that data — but they wouldn’t have been able to read it.

Facebook has since announced its intention to make end-to-end encryption the default, rather than an option, in its Messenger service.

That’s a good thing.

Whatever your opinion of abortion in general, or of Nebraska’s laws and the women’s alleged actions in particular, the case illustrates how easy it’s become for government to eavesdrop on our communications in real time, or seize and read our private files after the fact.

Between constantly advancing technical means, the tendency of judges to defer to law enforcement, and government’s willingness to just plain break the law when the law doesn’t suit their purposes (see Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the NSA’s illegal spying programs for examples), it’s become far TOO easy.

Some politicians on both sides of the major party aisle disagree. They don’t think it’s easy enough. They’re constantly working on laws they hope will make strong encryption less available (or, with “back door” schemes, just less strong).

This is the kind of battle that’s easier to fight now than later.

Strong encryption has been widely available for more than 30 years now.

But in order for the government to lose its war on our privacy, we need to see far more widespread adoption at both the individual and corporate levels … and we need that adoption to outpace unscrupulous politicians’ ability to keep up with it.

In a mostly unencrypted world, encrypted communications (of most kinds — there are exceptions) tend to stand out. In such an environment, it’s not unlikely that at some point, encryption will itself be deemed “suspicious” and its use treated as grounds for investigations and searches.

But if we’re all using encryption, all (or even most) of the time, prosecutors will need other pretexts, maybe even real evidence, to get permission to pry into our private affairs.

Which is exactly as it should be.

By using encryption on principle at least some of the time, and by asking your messaging providers to enable it by default, you’ll be protecting your privacy. And everyone else’s.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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