June 4 marks the 1989 Chinese government crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square. Tanks entered the square and soldiers opened fire on citizens outside the square: they are estimated to have killed thousands.
It also marks Tonga’s Emancipation [or Independence] Day, commemorating the abolition of serfdom in Tonga by King George Tupou in 1862, and the independence of Tonga from the British protectorate in 1970.
According to a plan discussed at a recent school meeting, “Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap.”
Teachers must now ignore whether, for example, students miss class, misbehave, or fail to promptly submit homework. It seems that students of certain races commit such lapses, on average, more often than students of other races.
It’s not the first major step taken at the school to promote “diversity, equity, inclusion and justice [sic].” Last year, a teacher there adopted a grading scale under which students had to score as low as 19 percent to get an F and could get an A with 80 percent, a B with 65.
Students who conscientiously try to learn despite the fact that excellence and conscientiousness are no longer being appropriately recognized may do okay despite the perverse incentives being pushed.
But what about students on the margin who need to be rewarded for their efforts? Might they not slide into apathy if, no matter what they do, they’re treated like anybody else? Grades, after all, are there to serve as feedback — signalling successes and failures in learning, rewarding for excellence and warning for error. Take that away and one incentive to adjust studying habits flies out the window.
Even under the new plan, there will perhaps be some remnant of recognition of actual individual performance at Oak Park and River High. But precedents have been established that pave the way to further erosion of standards.
Unless the whole noxious egalitarian approach is repudiated, things there can only get worse.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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No one should attempt to describe a utopia unless he’s recently reread, for example, the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais and Dostoevski to remind himself of how different people are.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State And Utopia (1974).
On June 3, 1959, Singapore adopted a constitution.
“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500,” Elon Musk tweeted a few weeks ago, “while Tesla” — the billionaire’s high-end electric car company — “didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
We could quibble. Is “phony” the right word? “Social justice” has always been slippery. It’s a “mirage,” explained Hayek, really just a stalking horse for power.
What Musk is objecting to, though, is worth thinking about. The ESG standard is supposed to mean something . . . based on objective criteria. The reasons to eject Tesla from its Top Ten and place Exxon at the pinnacle are laughably transparent. It’s a woke power grab. The leftist ideology has taken over another capitalist institution, the better to create . . .
What?
Socialism? Fascism?
Michael Rectenwald, in a fascinating essay, calls it “woke corporatism.”
The plan is, he writes, to “establish a woke monopolistic cartel.” Musk’s company has been “subjected to the S in ESG — the ‘social’ or ‘social justice’ quotient.”
Musk, Rectenwald argues, “has been deemed a deplorable, and thus his company does not pass ‘social justice’ muster.” In other words, the putatively pro-inclusion folks are excluding him from the ranks of the favored.
And all because he wants free speech on a social media platform!
Laissez-faire grew out of economists’ objections to the grinding inefficiency and over-politicization of business. Adam Smith, back in 1776, called the pre-liberal, insider-based trade system “mercantilism.”
The leftist mob now pushes a neo-neo-mercantalism, mobocracy capitalism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958).
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
Oil is one example of a good that would be more abundant and cheaper had the government left it alone — stopped blocking domestic production and the flow of oil from Canada.
Now parents are having trouble getting baby food.
A proximate cause of the shortage is the closure of a single major factory producing baby formula. But Kevin Ketels, a professor who studies the global supply chain, argues that restrictions on production had set things up so that a blow like this would be crippling.
For one thing, only a few companies, Abbott, Reckitt, and Nestlé, are allowed to participate in a government program to provide baby formula to low-income families. This is not a minor program. The federal government provides substantial grants to the states to fund it.
More importantly, only a few manufacturing facilities are allowed to produce baby formula, and “startups don’t have the volume required to produce in these facilities.”
High tariffs on baby-food imports have also reduced supply.
You would think, then, that the first thing to do would be to remove governmental barriers to production and imports.
And all, not just some.
So why isn’t that what we are hearing about now?
Well, politicians do not gain their power, prestige, and insider trading advantages by leaving well enough alone. Admitting that their stock in trade — regulation and tariffs and the like — is the cause of this problem might suggest to distracted minds that it is the cause of most, if not all, our problems.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William John Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905), p. 50.
Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues.
On June 1, 1792, Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States. Four years later, Tennessee became the 16th state.