Fatherland without freedom and merit is a large word with little meaning.
Anders Chydenius, For What Reason do so Many Swedes Emigrate Every Year? (1765)
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Anders Chydenius
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Sweden minus Norway
On September 23, 1905, Norway and Sweden signed the “Karlstad treaty,” peacefully dissolving the union between the two countries.
One’s political ideology should not become a cult.
The text for today’s sermon against cults is a post about a curious case of child sacrifice.
In Alex Tabarrok’s first sentence he links to a 2016 article in The New York Times by one Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City.” Economist Tabarrok, blogging yesterday at Marginal Revolution, explains that Ms. Hannah-Jones “sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder.”
What Hannah-Jones did was send her daughter to a failing public school to somehow advance social justice. She could have sent her daughter to a school with a better curriculum, better teachers, and better fellow students, but to serve her woke ideology, she subjected her own child to a terrible education.
A decade later she and Najya, her daughter, finally confronted the consequences of that choice, the lackluster learning being just the first half of it: “Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”
And the psychic toll was worse.
Tabarrok swiftly undermines the initial assumptions going into the schooling choice,* concluding with an astute analysis of our times: “It’s been said that Ayn Rand’s heroes don’t exist, but her villains do. . . Hannah-Jones says that she and her husband ‘felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good.’ But she wasn’t just sacrificing herself for her ideology; she was sacrificing her child, who had no choice in the matter.”
That’s the operative word in education, no? Choice. Schooling decisions aren’t easy. Even parents with education, intelligence, and resources can make mistakes. Sometimes ideological ones. With our system failing, at whopping tens of thousands spent per pupil, please consider that sacrificing individual kids doesn’t really serve the collective good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.”
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Dostoevsky
You know, amongst us socialism spreads principally through sentimentalism.
The character Pyotr Stepanovitch in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), Part Two: VII, Ch. 6.
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Emancipation Proclaimed
On September 22, 1862, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. None returned, and the subsequent order, signed and issued January 1, 1863, “took effect” except in locations where the Union had already mostly regained control — but of course, since the proclamation applied only to states in rebellion, no slaves were freed.
California’s decades-in-the-making high-speed rail system has problems.
The first: In 2008 Californians approved a $10 billion bond measure as down payment on a $45 billion, 800-mile bullet-train system.
At the time, a policy analyst suggested that many people “sense that maybe that [bullet train] is something I can use at some point. It’s something they can relate to.” Hence the 52.7% support.
Now, I can “relate to” plenty of big projects I might “use at some point,” preferably before shuffling off this mortal coil, but that doesn’t mean I favor forcing fellow taxpayers to shell out many tens of billions for extravagant dreams.
Neither does it mean I wish to open the door to endless horse-trading and political skullduggery.
There is another problem: It’s become clear that the only likely result of California’s “high-speed” project, in addition to lining the pockets of the politically well-connected, will be duplicating and interrupting an already-existing service.
The chapter-and-verse is laid out by blogger Chris Bray. “The High-Speed Rail Authority is,” Bray writes, “replacing trains with trains, and train stations with train stations. The Central Valley, which is connected by rail, is being connected by rail, after which the Gold Runner will be shut down where it overlaps, but still operated where it doesn’t.”
Instead of the mega-connective system Californians though they were voting for, they’ll get “trains to Fresno where they already have trains to Fresno.” And when riding, have to keep switching back and forth between an Amtrak train and a bullet train.
But, hey, look on the bright side: maybe it will never happen.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Piker on Mao
He’s a great man of history. Of course, there were a lot of excesses.
Hasan Piker, in interview with Alex Thompson, on Axios. When asked what kind of “excesses,” he responded: “Deaths borne out of mismanagement and famine.”
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At Salamis
On September 21, 480 BC, Greeks defeated Persian forces in the massive naval battle of Salamis.
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A.I. “Force”?
While the Space Force ramps up and military men say the darnedest things in public, President Donald Trump is now talking about a new “force” — one pertaining to artificial intelligence.
“The president posted on Truth Social that he wanted to appoint an ‘AI czar’ to lead a new ‘AI force,’” explains an article in The Verge. “He made the announcement amid growing calls from across the political spectrum and even within the industry to pump the brakes on AI development. He posted that his administration ‘will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!’
So, just to be clear here, this is not the laissez faire president you may have been looking for.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” Esquire, Sept. 1935.