An Icelandic Teacher Opposes Budget Cuts

The problems in Iceland sound similar to what I wrote about in this post earlier today, but unlike me, this Icelandic teacher takes a decidedly Marxist/socialist view of things:

The education of Icelandic children is facing an ominous threat. Funding to schools is being slashed by municipal authorities, which can only have dire consequences for the current generation of children. So Icelanders have a stark decision to make in the immediate future. In a nutshell, citizens must choose between the welfare of their children and increasing taxes to those who can afford it...

Accepting the proposition that children are sacred, the parents rightly protest to the municipalities. The municipalities have no money. Ergo, the municipalities must get more money. However, the government has no money to give them. So the government must get more money.

This is where we run into a roadblock. The obvious solution is for government to increase taxes to those who can afford it in order to save the children from harmful cuts.

Enter the neoliberal mouthpiece, with the standard baseless dogma about the inherent evil of taxes. Greed is good. To such people, economic austerity is good for everybody but their true constituency: the wealthy...

Those who have the money must pay up through taxes. To do otherwise is to cannibalise the future of Iceland's children.

He doesn't consider the value of teaching Iceland's children about the cost of socialism or even the cost of government. No, he goes right for "the rich", believing "the children" are entitled to other people's money. We have plenty of "the rich", and the companies they own, leaving California for more business-friendly environments in nearby states. Iceland has only 300,000 people in the whole country, less than 1% of California's population; it can't be that hard for "the rich" to up and leave if they're not entitled to keep what they earn, leaving the rest to fend for themselves.