Have you heard the one about the guy who passed the bar exam in Ohio, but was denied his law license on moral grounds because he had accumulated too much debt going to law school?

Yeah, well, it ain’t funny:

Wow. Guy goes to law school, guy racks up a huge amount of debt, guy has no idea how he’ll pay off his debts. Sound familiar? Okay, here’s the twist: the guy failed the “character and fitness” component of the Ohio bar because he has no plan to pay off his loans.

What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?

Because it’s not like Hassan Jonathan Griffin was in a particularly unique situation when he went before the Ohio bar. A year and a half ago, we wrote about a man who was dinged on his character and fitness review because he was $400,000 in debt. That’s an extraordinary case. Hassan Jonathan Griffin owes around $170,000. He has a part-time job as a public defender. He used to be a stockbroker. He’s got as much a chance of figuring out a way to pay off his loans as most people from the Lost Generation.

The more that we make getting out of a hole impossible for ordinary Americans, the more we make a hollow country that will one day implode.

If this is what America is, then we need to examine what we are, because this is the sort of sh%$ makes me want to play Nero, and fiddle while the whole corrupt place burns.