There’s no arguing with resentment. The fact is that social mobility seems to be higher and income inequality lower where there are no tuition fees. Free university helps the poorest people more than it helps the richest people…
The “Why spend public money on a thing that doesn’t benefit me” way of thinking is the reason for the death spiral into oligarchy. People argue they shouldn’t pay taxes for public schools because they don’t have kids (or even more horrendously because their kids already graduated). They argue that there shouldn’t be universal health coverage because they have good insurance from their employer. Jeff Bezos could probably pay road crews to pave the way to anywhere Bezos personally wanted to travel, so why spend public money on roads or bridges?
If you demand better for yourself then your own logic means someone else will shout you down. Somehow we were convinced that you should defect every time even in iterative prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone stopped voting in their own interests entirely and simply voted for the politician that would help the most people things would get better fast (and then after a decade or two that would start getting gamed and people would have to course correct the other way).
