Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets too much government

That Was Fast

Ah, Minnesota. The home of “nice” Big Government. And in keeping with that, last week the state produced a grand example of mindlessly intrusive regulation. That’s the “Big Government” part. The “nice” part is how quickly the government conceded it was wrong.

I read about it first at Reason’s Hit & Run, where Katherine Mangu-Ward proclaimed “Minnesota Bans Free Online College Courses from Coursera. I Give Up.” She briefly related the burgeoning online industry of offering college course lectures free to the public (minus the accreditation), and how one of them was singled out for prohibition from the state’s Office of Higher Education: “Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there.”

Ms. Mangu-Ward’s conclusion was simple:

Idiots.

A day later, however, the story had radically changed. Minnesota’s bureaucrats had rethought their position, as related by this particular bureau’s bigwig, Larry Pogemiller: “Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning and wants Minnesotans to take advantage of educational materials available on the Internet, particularly if they’re free.”

Obviously.

Pogemiller went on to promise that, when the legislature “convenes in January, my intent is to work with the Governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances.”

The regulators of Minnesota’s higher education proved that they could learn a new lesson. How well? We’ll see, as online schooling continues to gain its foothold — and accreditation, too.

Gerard Piel famously wrote of the “acceleration of history.” With the Internet, we see the feedback time from bad policy to removal of said policy cut down to a mere day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Albert Jay Nock

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

Categories
links

Townhall: Confused, Concerned, and Canaried

This weekend’s Townhall column by Yours Truly is, truly, an expansion of Thursday‘s Common Sense. The story just couldn’t be confined to one brief comment, I guess. Check it out.

Oh, here are links to articles and relevant reading matter:

Categories
video

Video: Rand Paul and the Future of the GOP

“I love Rand, he’s awesome”; “We are the future of the Republican Party”; “The youth are … tired of the same-old/same-old”:

Categories
Thought

Albert Jay Nock

Society’s tacit assumption is that all normal persons are qualified for matrimony, and this is not so.

Categories
ideological culture

Owning Up to Racism

Last week, actress Stacey Dash tweeted her support for Republican candidate Mitt Romney. And unleashed a firestorm, including AP coverage — “Do Black People Support Obama Because He’s Black?”

On Twitter, she was called “jigaboo,” “traitor,” “house nigger” and worse. . . .

The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.

It might behoove Twits (those who use Twitter?) to take a breath every now and then and not immediately type out the first thing that comes to their heads. Especially if they’re racists, like those who tapped out these vile attacks on Ms. Dash.

What should the president’s skin color or her skin color have to do with whether she chooses to support Obama or Romney or whomever?

Funny, while attacking her for being stupid and subservient, this “progressive” beat-down crowd is upset precisely because Dash is smart enough — independent enough — to think for herself, refusing to be subservient to them.

It’s scary that this sort of racism is so blatant, even after the long and difficult progress made on civil rights; scary, too, that today a black person can be “high-tech lynched” online for thinking and acting and speaking in ways not somehow assigned to his or her race.

Slavery is long over. The laws that made blacks second-class citizens have been repealed. So, why do some progressives think they own blacks?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Russell Kirk

If a man has a *right* to marry, some woman must have the duty of marrying him; if a man has a *right* to rest, some other person must have the duty of supporting him. If rights are confused thus with desires, the mass of men must feel always that some vast, intangible conspiracy thwarts their attainment of what they are told is their inalienable birthright.

Categories
Thought

Albert Jay Nock

I regard marriage in the way that the French have of regarding it, as a partnership effected for certain definite purposes, essentially practical.

Categories
ballot access First Amendment rights general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Concerned and Confused

Why call it “political correctness,” when it’s simply “political” and so terribly incorrect?

Whatever we call it — “a totalitarian impulse” comes to my mind — placing Angela McCaskill on administrative leave from her job at Gallaudet University is just flat-out wrong.

“It recently came to my attention that Dr. McCaskill has participated in a legislative initiative that some feel is inappropriate for an individual serving as Chief Diversity Officer,” Gallaudet President T. Alan Hurwitz wrote, last week, on the University’s Facebook page. McCaskill’s alleged transgression was to sign a petition to refer the Legislature’s same-sex marriage law to the ballot for Maryland voters to decide, and potentially overturn.

Hurwitz didn’t mention any specific policy violated by McCaskill. Worse, while acknowledging her “right to sign a petition,” Hurwitz added, as if in clarification, that “many individuals at our university were understandably concerned and confused by her action.”

There appears to be much confusion at Gallaudet . . . about the meaning of freedom.

President Hurwitz, who faces criticism from both proponents and opponents of the same-sex marriage referendum that started this fracas, claimed to be confident that a “resolution of this matter can be reached,” hazarding that it “will require that she and the university community work together to respond to the concerns that have been raised.”

A “resolution”? McCaskill has an attorney, and the greater likelihood is a large lump sum settlement for violating her civil rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Albert Jay Nock

For several years now I have been trying to get various publishers to start some ambitious youth writing a book about work. The idea first struck me when I was doing some rather close reading in our Colonial history, and was impressed by the amount of actual labor, both of brawn and brain, that the Founding Fathers seemed to be able to put into a day, and keep putting in, day after day. I doubt that there is anything like it in the country now. Take, for instance, Mr. Jefferson’s journal of a three-months tour in France; consider the facilities he had, the kind of accommodations he found, the amount of time and energy that had to be put in on the mere business of living and getting about from place to place, and then reckon up in terms of actual work, the achieve- ments recorded in that journal. Also, figure up the net of work in one of John Adams’s days, from the time he got up until he went to bed, or one of John Quincy Adams’s, when he was Secretary of State. I remember, too, when I was reading the history of the early English buccaneers, that what struck me most forcibly was the amount of actual labor that they were capable of doing, and did do, without making any fuss about it. No publisher ever bit at my suggestion, however, which I think shows a lack of enterprise.