Thought-experiment: suppose you lived in a police state, such as East Germany, but had the right to bear arms. Would you be free? Guns may arguably be a way to maintain existing freedom, or to gain it in the first place, but neither they nor the right to bear them define what it means to be free.

Moreover, this is hardly something new.

"Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. "

John Stuart Mill, 1874

Sold to Microsoft = You will be assimilated until there's nothing left but a gelatinous blob

Sold to Oracle = We will make you more and more obnoxious until no one wants to use you anymore

Sold to HP = We will pretend we're going to do great thing with you, then annihilate you when you least expect it

This is good advice -- if it can be done. One of the problems is that it's becoming increasing hard to do.

When I was an undergrad in the late 80's, my tuition and fees at a fairly cheap university, going in-state, cost about $400/semester. Minimum wage was $3.35, so one semester cost about 120 hours of work, or 3 weeks of full-time work.

The same university now costs about $3500 for the same number of hours and the minimum wage is $7.31, so one semester now costs about 480 hours, or 3 months of full-time work. That's assuming you can find a full-time job with a high-school diploma. Most likely you're putting together multiple part-time jobs, and those jobs often don't guarantee a fixed number of hours.

The other thing that's missing in this analysis is health care. A substantial portion of the "99%" are individuals who either suffer from chronic ailments or have crippling injuries or diseases that prevent them from working to their capacity. Your ending statement should say something more like:

"An average person, 100% debt free by age 35, will be a multi-millionnaire by the time they are 70 (assuming they aren't a total idiot about how they spend their $ after debt)" if they stay healthy. Get seriously ill, and you go from "productive citizen" to "burden on society" in a matter of days.

I would be more OK with this if we taught children from the beginning "society owes you nothing. You're worth nothing until you prove it, and you'll have to keep proving it until you're dead or financially independent. Work hard, subordinate your desires, evade all the attempts of advertisers to influence your decision-making, and you might just make it." Instead children are taught that they can be anything they want to be, and that they should follow their dream. In school teachers emphasize fairness, sharing and not being judgmental. Outside school, they are raised in an atmosphere that says "go ahead and get it; you deserve it," and "the US economy will collapse without consumer spending." Fine. But if we lie to children like that, we should not be surprised by the results.