Here in Silicon Valley an extreme libertarianism is favored by some ultra-wealthy like Marc Andreessen. He advocates deep-sixing all those stupid humanities classes, lowering wages for his proposed chattel class who won’t need to be bothering their inferior brains with college, and encouraging college grads to get the proper engineering and programming skills so as to better serve his class of overlords who Know What It Best For Them.
Andreessen, who has made hundreds of millions of dollars off the back of his tech investments, says that the phenomenon of “people with a high-school education earning college-level wages” was an “artifact” from the post-WWII era that has not translated well into the 21st century. To build today’s economy, he says, we need to lower the minimum wage, discourage college students from majoring in English and other humanities (which he says will doom them “to a future of shoe sales”), and encourage them to pick science, technology, engineering, and mathematics instead.
The Pentagon should be totally down with the idea of a serf class too. Serfs make make ideal cannon fodder for US military adventurism since they are deliberately kept uneducated and bred to know their place. As for discouraging studying humanities, why that makes perfect sense too if you want a docile work force. Those pesky humanities do foster independent, critical thinking and that’s just what wannabe overlords do not want.