>If I have a skill that a large number of people are willing to pay for them that in itself represents independence.

No. Having an in-demand skill is a tool to obtain and keep independence. It's not independence itself. There are many people out there with high-demand skills who still find themselves unhappily slaving away in a job where they must do someone else's bidding for 40%+ of their waking day. Once they have the property and assets to make that an optional activity that they can leave at any time, they are independent. Having the ability to go find a new master if you get fed up enough with your current one is good, but it's not really independence. Independence is the freedom to control how you spend your days, and unless you're debt-free, own your living space outright, and have a consistent, sustainable source of food, you don't have the option to not work.

> If they don't have skills that contribute to society, they are irrelevant.

Define "contribute to society". I think you're being way too exclusive here. There are ways to contribute to society without being part of the industrial workforce. Just ask the big bosses, who, incidentally, are the ones pushing this narrative that life is meaningless without their patronage. You don't have to be a professional to make a meaningful contribution. In fact, I would argue that being a good parent has a far greater positive social effect than being a good professional.

>And guess what, if your children decide not to use those banks and universities, and don't get jobs then they may be "independent, but they are also dead weights.

A bank provides people with very little actual value, so I'm not sure why you included it. I will be immensely pleased if my children can go their whole adult lives without having to pay a cent of usury. It's a massive hidden tax on the middle class, making every major purchase cost about 2-3x its sticker price.

If you think about it, you'll see that much of our industrial culture is based on guaranteeing this effortless income to usurers, and I want to break that cycle for my children. This is also a large part of why the media wants to promote negative images of independent wealth; they're trying to protect their dirty income streams and reinforce their position as a hidden cost that people just accept as an implicit requirement.

Of course the children of independent people should be taught to do something useful with their time and lives. I think that by and large, they are. You don't hear about that because it doesn't please the massive indentured population to hear about it on TV, but if you look around, you'll see that it's generally true.

And in the age of welfare, you don't have to be independently wealthy to be a layabout or a loiterer. It's no longer an exclusive privilege, so providing a decent estate that will allow your posterity to have its freedom and control its own destiny is not really any more dangerous to individual productivity than not doing so.

>I agree that people should have access to enough money to realize their potential, but not more than that.

I absolutely do agree that too much money in the wrong hands is a recipe for disaster.