I’ve seen numerous articles like this neoliberal scatological leaving at Slate proclaiming the impossibility of paying McDonald’s workers living wages – never mind that other countries do so quite well, thank you.

Part of that is just to shift the focus to an individual corporation, and thus to deflect attention from the systemic in an effort to forestall reforms, but even more of it is about that most people – including this clown at Slate – can’t actually even see the problem.

The system in other words is so natural to them that it is completely invisible. Of course it is impossible to pay more. Of course that would hurt McDonald’s competitiveness. Of course everything has to be exactly like it is.

In psychology this is called the status quo bias. It’s incredibly common in human reasoning.

But most of the writers I read are allegedly well-educated. Weismann is a graduate of Northwestern University, for instance.

And yet it seems that most of these so-called educated people cannot think their way out of a flipped-over refrigerator box.

Why is this? What are people learning at university that they are so ignorant of history, of other nations, or other possibilities, even of how to better educate themselves?

If that’s the best universities can do, I’m glad I am an autodidact.