Our brains are being dipped into a Conservative vat of fluid and moved along down the assembly line. The way we look at the work-and-money transaction is being slowly altered for us in a way that is doing us damage. Short version? We’re worthless.

The recent attempt by the University of Toronto Law School, said to be Canada’s best, to help students who do unpaid work in the summer is just the latest evidence of confusion about work and pay. The March #OneDayofPay plan, courtesy of the Students’ Law Society and the faculty, is for students who have paid jobs to donate a day’s pay to their unpaid fellows presumably doing more virtuous “public-interest” work.

As the Star has reported, all the students, who already pay $30,710 in tuition in each of their three years of study, must get summer legal jobs, some paid, some not, if they want a shot at finding work after graduation. I hate to call them “jobs” because to my mind an unpaid job is not a job in the first place, it’s charity or slavery or a guilt trip or, as they always say, “a chance to get something on your résumé.”

Never mind me. In an elegant piece in the school’s student paper, Ultra Vires, editor David Gruber pointed out that this is part of a sinister historical loop.

The astonishingly high tuition fees came courtesy of Ontario’s Mike Harris government which deregulated tuition at professional schools in the ’90s. Then the law school raised fees to match those of American schools, allegedly so that great professors wouldn’t be lured south, and now heavily indebted students are being asked to subsidize profs — and cheapskate employers — by donating cash to those even more indebted. As Harris intended, market forces fought it out.

Actually, they didn’t. In this case, impoverished students fought each other, thus distracting from the real fight, which is the growing gulf between the haves and have-nots, the corporation and individuals.

And beneath them all is the have-nevers, which is what you become when you rack up student debt before you’ve even begun work. In our scrappy, tight-fisted, I’m-all-right-Jack world, the money has run out and young people are faring worst.

At no time in this law school dilemma has it been suggested that all employers be made to pay for the work of these terrific students or that tuition be lowered.

Call me naive because I am. Last year, I said quietly that I didn’t think digital journalists should be hired at a lower starting rate than were newspaper journalists who’d been around for decades. This idea of mine, that we might all accept lower pay, went down like a cement helicopter, to my embarrassment. I realize now that I was preaching communism but in a way that made me its victim. (Did you know there’s a hideous monument to Victims of Communism like me about to plant itself outside the Supreme Court building in Ottawa? Nice.)

Canadians need to see how they’re being manoeuvred into self-destructive ideas about money and fairness. The very idea of pay is increasingly disparaged and concealed. Internships are unpaid. Popcorn Time steals movies for you. Awards presenters are paid in gift bags. Writers are told to write and give speeches for free, to sell their own books. People are expected to be entertaining on Twitter or Facebook to profit corporations. Documentaries are financed not by a grateful nation or a wise industry but by crowdfunding. We are overwhelmed by charities funding things like cancer research and school playgrounds, which are clearly a public good and used to be treated as such.

Elections change things. Tossing coins at subway buskers doesn’t.

Nothing comes free. If you ever think it does, beware.

Here’s another example. Tax-free savings accounts aren’t actually free, not in the long run. The Harper Conservatives dream of raising TFSA contribution limits to $11,000 a year. Not everybody can afford that, so wealthier people get a goody bag while the majority will cope without public money available for big projects like health care, infrastructure and basic old age security in the future. One hand gives, the other robs.

Other people’s jobs always look easy; everyone is alleged to be overpaid. But I’ve noticed that there’s a kind of veiled contempt around serial interning and starter jobs. The lower the pay, the lower regard the work is held in.

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You, reader, may well be reading this for free, as you so often tell me, having fiddled with your device so as to avoid a paywall. But as your worship of cheap goods and free labour — engineered by neoliberal Harper groupthink — takes you down a lonely dirt road, you’ll pass warning signs, this column being one of them.