The Internship Tax

Unpaid internships are one of those arrangements that sound like a ladder and behave like a toll booth. They tell young people to “gain experience,” which is often a charming way of saying: please pay with your time, your bus fare, and your dignity. The cruelest part is how normal it has become to treat opportunity as something you should already be able to afford.

What bothers me most is not just the unfairness, but the idea beneath it: that ambition is a private hobby, best pursued by those with someone else to cover rent. We pretend this is meritocracy, but it is really inheritance with better branding. If a job is valuable enough to train someone, it is valuable enough to pay them.