Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture

Tea Readers

According to a New York Times article by Kate Zernike, the “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-​Ago Texts.” A strange way of saying that Tea Party folks are reading, learning, and studying ideas older than those of, say, Paul Krugman.

Tea Partiers are reading classics … but ones not recognized as such by the New York Times:

  • Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
  • F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
  • Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Huh? That third book serves as an oddity on the list. It’s a handbook on street-​level ways to effect political change. The left’s loved it for years. Now it’s in the hands of people with scant interest in mass expropriation or heavy, vindictive regulation, or a vast, tax-​funded gimme-​gimme state. 

The article cites the “Austrian School of Economics” — a brand of economics that includes many of the most important free-​market thinkers — as an important force, but merely mentions its 20th century leader, Ludwig von Mises, as if a duty. Bastiat, a French economist who died before the school was founded, is lumped in with Mises and Hayek, perhaps because he’s so radically anti-taxation that the Times hopes by mentioning his ideas over and over, readers might dismiss him as a nut.

That could backfire. Some of the Times’s smarter readers might become curious, reading Bastiat and Mises and Hayek with the notion of learning something. 

Maybe they’ll even read the Constitution.

Wow. What a revolutionary thought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Demolition Time!

The socialist party of Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, expects to lose seats in the next election. El Presidente pled with voters to not forsake the “revolution.” He dubbed the opposition — which last time around boycotted the elections — “Operation Demolition.”

This is supposed to be a bad thing?

Surely what we hope for in an opposition party, in South America or El Norte, is, in everything but the incendiary, literal sense, demolition.

Of expansive, intrusive, know-​it-​all government.

“Big” and “intrusive” are just two words that characterize what the GOP brought to America during its heyday. Others? Massive spending, a new medical “entitlement,” growing public debt, and — as a sort of crackpot coda — bailouts for rich people. 

Same for united government under the Democrats: More uncontrolled spending, an even more massively expensive medical “entitlement,” ballooning public debt — and, as a variation on a theme — more bailouts yet.

Massive government with no limits. But we’re told we can’t call it socialism!

Reports from Venezuela say the opposition has shifted from hatred of Hugo to issues such as rising crime and cost of living. In America, Tea Party folks have gained most ground when they attack spendthrift and socialistic policies rather than demonizing President Obama.

In both cases, ordinary people’s everyday concerns — taxes, debt, inflation, thuggery, and all the other things that go along with socialist-​leaning policies — trump the cult/​anti-​cult of personality as well as political theory, expressed by this ism or that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture too much government

Sir Terry Confesses to Forge-ry

Recently, two dreams came true for comic fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Yet, the final result was comic reality … Great Britain-style.

First dream? He was knighted by the Queen. 

Second? He forged a magic sword.

Well, he mined ore off his estate, and, with the help of a friend, smelted it using a hand-​made kiln heated with sheep dung. Pratchett even added in meteoric iron to make his sword. The heavens-​sent ore is called “thunderbolt iron.” Yes, that’s the “magic part.” 

But perhaps more magical, really, is Pratchett’s personal hankering for a sword. Swords are out of fashion these days. But if you dream up Discworld, Pratchett’s comic magic domain, it makes some sense.

There is a sad tag to this story. Pratchett suffers from Alzheimer’s. That little tidbit, a terrible disease, lends a sort of strange discord that takes over the tale, if you let it.

Of course, there’s the ever-​present political element. One is not allowed to carry around large knives, daggers and swords in England.

Pratchett says that it it annoys him that “knights aren’t allowed to carry their swords. That would be a knife crime.”

Normally, I’d agree with him. Knights should be able to carry around large blades. So should regular folk. It’s the criminals, who keep them hidden, who are the problem. Not the citizenry. And certainly not knights.

Still, should dementia hit him full, perhaps it’s just as well he’s hid his sword.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

The Bad Lesson

If you favor hiding evidence and quashing open inquiry with regard to public questions of the most urgent interest, what does that say about your philosophy of education?

Teachers’ union officials in Los Angeles have been in a tizzy because the Los Angeles Times, a liberal bastion, published a detailed series casting controversial light on the quality of public school education in the city. The articles include a database of scores assessing — gasp! — the effectiveness of teachers.

This is a disturbing development for union reps demanding ever greater pay and job security for even lackluster instructors. To be sure, it’s not the negative evaluations that most intensely disturb them, nor even any debatable aspect of the methodologies used to assess effectiveness. It’s that the data has been publicized and discussed at all. The Times should not have published the database, complained one union official, Randi Weingarten. Another union honcho, A.J. Duffy, even called for a boycott of the paper, as if it were morally turpitudinous to give parents even an inkling of teacher performance.

Slate​.com contributor Jack Shafer concludes that the Times has “done its readers a great service” by exposing Duffy and his cronies as “enemies of open inquiry, vigorous debate, critical thinking, and holding authority accountable — essentially the cognitive arts that students are supposed to be taught in schools.”

Is there any way to bypass the dilapidated and authoritarian educational regime altogether? You homeschoolers out there: Any ideas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Academically Free to Leave

One goal of academic freedom is to protect inquiry from the guardians of orthodoxy, the machinations of those who resent any articulation of an alternate view.

Administrators at UCLA don’t seem to be fans of this goal.

James Enstrom has been at UCLA for 36 years. He lacks tenure, and his contract is not being renewed because, according to the school, his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department. 

The professor was booted soon after coauthoring a piece at Forbes​.com, disputing the relationship between diesel soot and deaths in California. According to Enstrom, in 1998 regulators “declared diesel exhaust a toxic substance based on studying truckers and railroaders from back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when emissions were much higher. They never factored in … that a very high percentage of truckers are also smokers … yet they were using this research to declare that all diesel exhaust is a toxic substance.”

Even colleagues who disagree with Enstrom worry about the implications for academic freedom. Michael Siegel at Boston University notes that the mission of Enstrom’s department is “to study the impacts of the environment on human health, and that’s exactly what Enstrom does.…” 

The department apparently objects not to “the nature of his research but the nature of his findings.” 

UCLA says chucking Enstrom has nothing to do with his conclusions, but won’t comment further. If there’s nothing to hide, why are they hiding it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture incumbents political challengers

Establishment Out

Another one bites the dust: Nine-​term Congressman Mike Castle was defeated in Delaware’s primary by Tea Party-​backed candidate Christine O’Donnell.

Weeks ago, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski was bested in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, also Tea Party-​supported. Before that Utah Senator Robert Bennett lost his re-​nomination bid.

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, who has actively assisted the insurgent Republicans, clarifies: “The GOP establishment is out.”

Media folks love talking about the angry mood throughout the land. The bad economic times have made people upset, they say — the supposition being that this rage is irrational, aimed indiscriminately at those in government, no matter how well they may have performed.

But the mainstream media hypothesis is wrong on both counts. First, the anger at career politicians isn’t new. Four years ago, long before the recession, Alaska GOP voters tossed out their incumbent governor, one Frank Murkowski, in favor of Sarah Palin. Voters have long disapproved of the way career politicians have wrecked our country. At some point, “enough” has morphed to “too much,” hence the current large-​scale revolt.

Further, voters are clearly discriminating, not taking their ire out on all incumbents, just those they feel have not represented their interests.

That’s why we have elections: to hold elected officials accountable.

We ought not bemoan that citizens are boiling mad, but that it takes so much bad behavior by politicians to raise this righteous fury.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.