Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling ideological culture

Progress in Talk About Schools

Since my days in the early grades of school, there’s been a lot of educational progress in America.

Not so much in the public schools, but in alternatives to them. When I was young, public schools were not only paid for by taxpayers, they were near-monopolies. Parochial schools and other religious-based programs were few. Home-schooling was uncommon, technically illegal in most states and locales.

How things have changed! Not enough, mind you. But the general political culture has improved enough that charter schools are often voted in, and there exist working voucher systems, if of a limited scope, in several areas of these United States.

In Britain, the situation is also opening up. The Labour Party is pitching its support for “parent-led academies in areas of educational need.” Party outreach spokesman Tristram Hunt, who had previously snarked that such projects were “vanity project[s] for yummy mummies,” takes it all back, now insisting that his (quasi-socialist) Labour Party now backs “enterprise and innovation.”

Britain is ruled by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, with Labour on the outs, so of course Labour could be said to be grasping at straws. It’s cheap to try freedom when you have little power. Conservative politicians insist that the latest statements are nothing but empty promises, and that Labour is still socialistically clinging to the old notion of schools “run by bureaucrats.”

But hey: notice that freer solutions are on the table.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Supreme Politics and Sublime Congress

Former FEC commissar Trevor Potter says the Supreme Court “should get more politically savvy.”

Potter really means the High Court should agree with him, and allow incumbents in Congress to write the campaign finance rules under which they — and their opponents — operate, undisturbed by constitutional review.

Last week, the Court heard McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case concerning Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, who wants to give $1,776 dollars to more candidates. He’s limited, because by law he cannot give over $48,600 to all federal candidates combined.

Why? Apparently those who contribute $48,600 or less to candidates they believe in are pure of heart, but that once that forty-eighth-thousandth-six-hundredth-and-first dollar is donated it can only be devoid of any decent intention, an unquestionable attempt to corrupt our government.

Most observers recognize that such an arbitrary limit is constitutionally suspect and likely to be voided. Including Potter, who is already furious that the Roberts Court has restricted congressional legislation dealing with campaign regulation in all five cases it has thus far considered. Potter accuses it of “judicial hubris” and “contempt for legislative authority” and “a surprising lack of respect for Congress’s expertise on political matters.”

How could “a lack of respect” for Congress be “surprising”?

Speaking of “political savvy,” where’s Potter’s?

Potter concludes that the Supremes “should leave politics to the politicians, who have a better sense of when the intersection of fundraising and lawmaking leads to corruption.”

Sure, politicians have a better sense of that corrupt intersection . . . they’re always there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

A Shrill Note

The New York City Opera — the one that just produced an opera about Anna Nicole Smith — may close its doors soon unless it comes up with seven million dollars. That’s the gist of a New York Times story that doubles as an appeal to philanthropic opera buffs.

From comments at the site we learn that some readers feel that the opera house has been mismanaged. Others issue instructions to various deep-pocketed luminaries, telling them that here’s their chance do something for the city and their own legacy. Others heatedly defend the “Anna Nicole” opera against detractors.

Then we have this remark, from someone who calls himself BullMoose: “Tell me again how private charity works better than government subsidies.” That’s it. No argument, just a hit-and-run exclamation of ideological discontent with private enterprises, which don’t invariably succeed. Government-subsidized enterprises don’t necessarily succeed either; but the dole can keep them in operation regardless of whether they are doing something worth doing and doing it well enough to please customers willing to pay.

Private charity works better than funds forcibly extracted from me and other taxpayers because private charity is voluntary. When our contributions are voluntary, it means we don’t have to support artistic or other projects that we have no interest in and may even oppose. We are free to use our own judgment, devoting our limited resources to the things we care about . . . instead of the things BullMoose cares about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture

Liars, Fools, Educators

There’s something very, very wrong with today’s public school culture.

I wrote that as a start for today’s excursion into the land wherein common sense has utterly fled . . . but without knowing whether I would dissect a Washington Times story about two Virginia Beach, Virginia, students suspended (perhaps for the entire year) for playing with an air soft gun in their own yards, or the Washington Post’s excellent coverage of a new test-score scandal.

The first story reflects both today’s crazed anti-gun culture and a sort of imperialism: educators seem to think that it’s their jurisdiction to judge how children behave at home, especially when it comes to toy guns, which they apparently deem inherently bad, etc., etc. Yes, Virginia educators insist on enforcing pacifism and disarmament as a settled matter, as if the Second Amendment didn’t exist.

Now, schools should not allow violence on school grounds or buses. And, if the kids who were playing with the toy guns were pointing and shooting with dangerous irresponsibility, and against city code, then maybe the school has a leg to stand on.

Nearby in Washington, D.C., in our second story, public school administrators have rigged the testing system to yield better math scores. Indeed, the district had boasted of a four-point gain. Then it was discovered that scores had actually declined, in part because of new rigorous tests. But instead of “biting the bullet” and taking a “temporary” hit, educators fiddled with the statistics and came up with phony bragging points.

Liars to the north of me; fools at another point in the compass, entirely.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture Second Amendment rights

The Gun Anti-Fetish

Would-be gun-grabbers like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and CNN’s Piers Morgan don’t just hate and fear all guns. They fear some scary-looking guns more than others, and keep bringing them up even when not appropriate.

Take America’s most popular rifle. After every horrific mass shooting Feinstein and Morgan call for banning (or at least heavily regulating) these “assault weapons.”

Following the naval yard shooting the other day, Feinstein pronounced, “There are reports the killer was armed with an AR-15, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol when he stormed an American military installation in the nation’s capital and took at least 12 innocent lives. This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time. When will enough be enough?”

It turned out that the killer brought only a shotgun to the massacre — a weapon endorsed by our current Vice President, as Jacob Sullum reminds us — and used two handguns acquired during the spree. No AR-15 in evidence.

Sullum also notes that CNN justified Morgan’s post-naval-yard-shooting anti-AR-15 diatribe in an off-hand way, as if facts didn’t matter.

So, what matters?

The taboo. The anti-fetish, the magical thing reviled — the obsession with the scary look of an evil gun, over its actual use.

Why?

For lots of politically-centered people, policy is more about symbolism than anything else. For such folks, talk of principles or about overall crime statistics or unintended effects means nothing. To understand their notions, bring in the anthropologists.

Or the shamans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The Sinister Rugged Individualism Conspiracy

Were Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, the mother-daughter team who crafted the popular Little House on the Prairie books, eager to distort pioneer life to advance an anti-FDR libertarian agenda?

So alleges author Christine Woodside in a tendentious article for the Boston Globe, citing “strategic commissions and omissions” deployed to produce a “testament to the possibilities of self-sufficiency rather than its limitations.”

No testament to the limitations, eh? Sounds nefarious.

One alleged omission pertains to the 1862 Homestead Act, without which the pioneers supposedly could not have pioneered. The books insidiously pay scant attention to this “federal largesse.”

First, what “largesse”? The Act merely permitted what people have a right to do anyway (setting aside cases of prior Indian settlement): make an un-owned piece of land one’s property by mixing one’s labor with it. Such land was certainly not owned by right by government. Second, Megan McArdle reports that contra Woodside’s claim that the Prairie books “barely mention” the relevance of the Homestead Act, “there are many lengthy passages explaining the Homestead Act, and how it works, including the granting of the land to the family by the government.”

Woodside is the type of writer who regards eloquent passion for liberty as “strident” (her adjective for Lane’s Discovery of Freedom), and the self-reliance involved in hardscrabble survival as part of an American “myth.” So many dubious assertions, so little time. Fortunately, McArdle has done much of the pioneering work in this area for us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Another Trout in the Milk

Maine’s small farmers had held out great hope for LD 1282, explained the Bangor Daily News a few months ago. The bill, if made law, would have allowed “unlicensed farmers whose facilities are not under inspection to sell up to 20 gallons of raw milk per day directly to consumers, so long as the product was clearly labeled.”

For small farmers, a traditional freedom, a niche in the system.

For big farmers it presented an unwelcome double standard, allowing something for the little guy that the big guy couldn’t match. And yes, the bill did suffer from this kind of inconsistency, but only because current regulations all stack against small farmers.

The bill passed, but last month the governor vetoed it . . . and the veto was not overridden. No legal raw milk in Maine.

For some in the state’s Republican Party, including national committee member Mark Wilson, that was just too much. “We want our God-given rights to buy, sell and consume what we want protected by the law — not restricted by FDA or USDA directives.” Citing lack of principle on the federal level, too, they resigned from the party, choosing to focus on helping their “fellow Mainers outside of party politics.”

The story hit the papers.

Can they accomplish more good outside the GOP? Probably. The state’s initiative and referendum process rated a C in Citizens in Charge’s 2010 report; most states rate an F. But there’s no point in even trying to rate partisan politics. It’s that bad.

And direct citizen action is certainly less frustrating. It’s hard when you must fight not only the opposition party, but your own team as well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

A Briefing for the President

Say we have evidence that entrepreneurs can build roads, railroads, and other means of transport even without government-spewed largesse and macro-mismanagement.

Would President Obama tell us?

Considering the man’s wonted denigration of individual achievement, probably not. Why should mere track records put a damper on his lust to conclude that social cooperation as such, especially as shoved and molded by government, somehow renders individual achievement less pivotal or praiseworthy? “You didn’t build that,” not all by your little lonesome, the Discourager-in-Chief says of anyone too proud of personal accomplishment; government’s always been there to help, however hinderingly.

Turns out, though, that as historians Larry Shweikart and Burton Folsom detail in a recent article, we do “build that,” even roads, when allowed to. Nothing about getting from here to there is intrinsically gotta-be-made-by-government.

The authors observe that auto makers put cars in “almost every garage” long before the 1956 Highways Act. They “began building roads privately long before [governments] got involved.” Businessmen also helped build the first transcontinental highway in 1913.

Before the Civil War, railroads were built and financed privately. When government decided to push for transcontinental railroads, the only continent-spanning railroad to be consistently profitable was the only one not scooping federal stimulo-funding: James J. Hill’s Great Northern.

What about, earlier, Robert Fulton’s steamboat? Was the steamboat able to ride the rivers even before subsidies for canals?

Must airports be government-owned?

Read the whole thing.

You too, Mr. President. It is, after all, a brief brief. But if you are looking for longer accounts, complete with footnotes and citations of primary documents, they are available, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

A Very American Turn

Is there a wisdom emanating from the great mass of Americans — a common sense?

A new USA Today/Bipartisan Policy Center poll found that Americans still possess a strong civic-mindedness, but are souring on government and politics: “Americans by more than 2-1 say the best way to make positive changes in society is through volunteer organizations and charities, not by being active in government.” This is even more true of younger people than older folks, like me.

And yet, despite the distaste increasing numbers of Americans have towards their governments, they aren’t turning against service. They’re just switching from the realm of the State to the realm of communities and non-profits.

This seems entirely rational, a welcome development. Rational, in that, yes, of course today’s big government politics is poisonous. And government doesn’t work the way people dream it might. It’s not magic. And there are sharp diminishing returns. That’s why the political realm works best when distinctly constrained.

That is, the best governments govern least, when limitations — constitutional checks and balances, a rule of law, term limits, etc. — are placed upon its operations.

Now, there’s no real magic in the non-profit sector, either. It’s not as easy to give effectively as it is garner donations from the sympathetic. But, more good news, the charitable sector may be on the brink of a major revolution, too.

While hordes of well-meaning folks turning off of politics may cede ground to the politically unsound, better, younger, and more enthusiastic (and even ambitious) folks entering the voluntary sector has to be a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Progressives’ Progress

Want to understand a political movement? Distinguish between its early proponents and its later followers. The thinking and rhetoric change over time.

Take Progressivism. It started out as an intellectual movement. Its leading lights were Americans who had studied in foreign colleges and universities. They brought back European ideas of an aggrandized state to counteract American notions of limited government.

Though I disagree with their notions almost totally (with interesting exceptions), it’s worth noting that they thought they were “scientific,” and would sometimes even encourage an experimental attitude towards public policy: Devise new programs, test them, chuck them when they don’t work.

Modern “progressives” don’t seem to sport that “testing” idea any longer.

I just received an email from BarackObama.com, which was complaining about the Speaker of the House, who — on TV, of all things! — said that “Congress ‘should not be judged on how many new laws we create,’ but rather on ‘how many laws . . . we repeal.’” My BO correspondent found this “embarrassing”:

We elected our members of Congress to work on the issues we care about: creating jobs, fixing our immigration system, fighting climate change, and passing laws to reduce gun violence.

We didn’t put them in office to sit there and wind back the clock.

Notice the assumption here: All the laws on the books are good, serving the common good; none are worthy of repeal.

Doesn’t seem like an assumption an early Progressive thinker would have made. But for too many of today’s progressives, progress apparently consists in accumulating regulations, rules, prohibitions, and tax programs as if each one were a pearl of great price.

Progress is government growth? That defies common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.