That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself.
Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole.
The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.
Indeed, many do advocate that paying for the roads you drive on through tolls would be a much better system. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to subsidize certain fields of study with public money.
In the past, when a smaller percentage of people were "educated" the marginal value of educating an extra member of society was very high. It seems much lower to me now that information is cheap and freely available.
Education is not about memorizing information. It is about learning how to think. If anything, this is of much more value now that we're drowning in so much information -- and so much misinformation.
Not really. It’s more like getting outraged when the government wants to build a road that does nothing. imagine they build half a bridge over a body of water and stop. Do you want to pay for that useless thing?
Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole.
The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.