> People still decided to respect the words onto which they signed their name.

18 year olds. We don't consider them responsible enough to drink alcohol, yet we expect them to take on crippling amounts of life-long debt? We shouldn't. It's setting them, and society at large, for failure just to make a few quick bucks.

> And now, those same people see that others get benefits from not acting with the same responsibility.

For very different amounts of money. People who went to college 20 years ago paid less than half than folks who just graduated. 10 years ago was 75% of today. A lot of people are ignoring this fact.

Society is about helping everyone, not just a few individuals who an individual deems as "responsible".

Yeah I think a lot of people are acting like the system is static and not dynamic. Tuition increases over year in unexpected amounts. Interest rates do too. Student loan costs are similar to a 30 year mortgage cost. If you're expecting 18 year olds to accurately know what 30 years (or even 10 years) is, then you're fooling yourself. They just don't have that experience. They're just relying on what their parents and society told them: "go to college". But this is exacerbated by everyone acting like what worked in the past works today. You can't go in thinking that school can be paid off by working over the summer (like my dad did) as that just isn't going to happen. Schooling is also more difficult now because intelligence has progressed and what students need to learn to stay up to date is a higher bar. This makes working during schooling harder too. The ecosystem is moving at a rapid pace and ignoring this just increases the problems.

Just to add a bit of context here, a vast majority of those who have "crippling amounts of life-long debt" used their money for grad school, and so certainly were not merely 18 when they made this decision.

$40,000, the 2020 average cost of tuition (not including living expenses, books, etc), at up to 14% compounding interest... You'll have to pay over $450 a month just to cover interest.

It doesn't take that much debt at student loan interest rates to be "crushing" in this economy.

>18 year olds. We don't consider them responsible enough to drink alcohol, yet we expect them to take on crippling amounts of life-long debt?

In my country, as in most of the world, 18 year olds can drink alcohol. They can also make many other life-altering decisions.

The current system has existed for long enough that we can observe the results of its incentive structures. We can see that people continue to suffer from heavy student loan burdens which limit their ability to fully (and productively) participate in society, even well after they graduate (or don't) university. The incentives you allude to clearly haven't aligned social behavior away from this outcome, so why should we expect that to change?

Given this apparent reality, what we're considering isn't whether or not to risk negatively impacting the existing incentive structure - which isn't producing an optimal outcome to begin with, but whether or not to assuage the suffering of a significant number of student loan holders. Would you prefer taking a purely moral stand for "personal responsibility" if it meant preventing a measure that could help lots of people live fuller lives and contribute to society at a higher level?

> Incentives should be aligned with the societally-beneficial behavior.

Interestingly you've ignored all of the societal benefits of subsidizing education for all of society's participants.

> The world would be a better place if everyone acted responsibly.

This is way too reductionist. Of course the world would be better if people would just all be personally more responsible. Most developed nations don't have the concept of crippling debt due to education cost. Are those nations being irresponsible too?

The fact that the people arguing against this spend less time arguing against the massive spending increases for the american military is a pretty big hint that the central point is "I want to punish my fellow american, I want them to hurt." and not the actual money amount. They don't care if it's $10,000 or $1. "Personal responsibility" is largely a dog-whistle for "if your situation is bad, it's your fault and you deserve it. FYGM."

>> predatory student loans applied to people at a time where society yelled "get a college degree or you'll never get a good job

> People still decided to respect the words onto which they signed their name.

Sorry, are you defending predatory practices? Most government regulation that are almost universally agreed upon, even by stout libertarians, are making predatory practices illegal. In absolutely no world is a singular person, of any intelligence and experience, a match for a team of lawyers at multi-million or multi-billion dollar institutions. It is the same reason many dark patterns are illegal. Because if trickery is used then informed consent is not actually given. It is a situation that is near universally agreed upon as unfair. I'm sorry, you can't just hand wave predatory practices away. They are not okay. Talk about incentives. If you allow predatory practices to flourish you get Robber Barons. That's not healthy for an economy or a country's citizens either.