Right up there with the Abu Ghraib prison and Gitmo, a shopping mall is one of my most unfavorite places. My annual Christmas trip to the mall this year was especially bad … rather depressing, in fact.
The place was mobbed, as though people were determined to have one last go at the good life, perhaps sensing that next Christmas the shopping malls might be turned into homeless shelters. I watched with great interest as people stood in long lines to pay for the on-sale merchandise they clutched tightly in their arms.
Religion aside, it would seem that the least everyone could agree on is a single, self-evident point: that a Universal Intelligence exists. I guess if an individual chooses not to believe that there is a Universal Intelligence (“God,” “Conscious Universal Power Source,” “the Universe,” “Supreme Being,” etc.), there’s nothing wrong with that — provided he doesn’t try to interfere with the rights of others to connect in their own way.
So, what is the insidious two-headed snake that plays havoc with our children’s lives throughout their school years? I am referring to none other than (1) the government and (2) the National Education Association (NEA).
One time, loud and clear: The government should get out of the education business, and the NEA, arguably the most coercive and intimidating organization lobbying our shameless lawmakers in Washington, should be outlawed. These two entities form the foundation that makes it possible for unthinkable atrocities to go unchecked day in and day out in our schools. They are at the heart of the flawed American education system.
Let’s take them one at a time …
First, government. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the government the right – let alone the duty – to educate anyone. Government is a contract between those who want their lives and property protected and those who want power.
The Founding Fathers’ original idea was that those who aspire to power were to be given limited power in exchange for protecting the lives and property of those who granted them that power. Never was it stated, or even implied, in the Constitution or in any other document, that government would have the right to plunder at will, violate the constitutional rights of its citizens, or engage in any other kind of activities not expressly spelled out in the Constitution.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan promised that if he were elected he would abolish the Department of Education. I believe Reagan’s intentions were sincere, but, like almost all politicians, he was corrupted by the system. Once elected, his advisors quickly “rehabilitated” his “misguided thinking.” As a result, not only is the Department of Education still in business, but government mischief has brought us one misleading education program after another, the latest and most misleading of all being George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” scam.
In my view, public schools should cease to exist. John Stossel summed it up well in his 20/20 segment titled “Stupid in America” when he said:
“Competition brings accountability. Private schools may be ‘unmonitored’ by bureaucrats, but they face the most demanding kind of supervision our society provides: a market full of freely choosing individuals. Parents’ desire for a good education for their children is a much more powerful check on schools than any politician’s law or union rule.
“The people who want to control every young American’s education like to talk about accountability, but what they want is to make schools accountable to anointed bureaucrats who think they know what’s best for all of us. They evade real accountability – the kind of accountability where if a student or parent realizes a school isn’t doing its job, he can find another one.”
As for the NEA, the name itself is misleading. The NEA has nothing whatsoever to do with educating children. It is an organization dedicated to keeping the failed public school system in place and making it virtually impossible to fire any of its teacher members. It is the NEA that gives teachers the confidence to torment students and support school bullies.
I completely agree that teachers are often the victimizers. When I was student teaching, I taught under a teacher (coach who didn’t love anyone on the team) who took a solid “B” student and turned him into a failure. It was awful. He taunted that kid every day – taking a bobby pin and pinning up his hair because it was too long, etc. When I looked up this boy’s history and found that he had done well until that year, I had a talk with him. I told him I knew he could get good grades, and he told me he didn’t bother because “no one cared.” I told him I cared – and he got an “A” on the next test. But I knew from my own days in school that some teachers shouldn’t be allowed near kids. I wore a pony tail, and every day when I walked into Algebra class, the teacher would say, “Here comes the horse’s a___.” Didn’t bother me – I knew my horse was smarter than him. But it would have destroyed a lot of girls. – M.C.
Is it realistic to believe that we can get the government out of the education business and close down the NEA? I believe it is possible to achieve both goals, but it will take time. As the public school system continues to careen ever more out of control and the U.S. is forced to face up to its looming bankruptcy, libertarian activists could actually be successful in getting government not only out of the business of education but also out of such businesses as mail delivery and medical care.
If government relinquished its chokehold on our schools, the NEA would be stripped of most of its coercive powers. But don’t sell this ever-angry, appallingly militant group short. Its hierarchy could very well try to worm its way into private schools, which likely would result in an irreversible disaster for American education.
In any event, since tons of material on both of these subjects is available on the Internet, I’ll leave it at that, because I don’t want to get sidetracked. Instead, in the next installment of this series, I’m going to move on to other steps that I believe could be taken to slow the Cho incubation rate without regard to whether schools are private or public … without regard to whether teachers are forced to sell their services in the marketplace or remain chained to the NEA agenda.
Some of my proposals may sound radical to some readers, but that’s only because we live in an upside-down world. Regardless, I feel that the time has come for someone with a forum to be willing to stand up and speak the unspeakable. It’s sure to cost me a lot of subscribers … hopefully you won’t be among them. All I ask is that you keep an open mind, because I must warn you: I’m just getting warmed up.
In Part I of this article, I offered some examples of people who seem to have paid for their bad deeds with “compound interest” added. The belief that everything that goes around comes around is a comforting view of the world, but two other possible scenarios destroy the idea that the world operates in such a manner on a consistent basis. They are:
When bad things happen to good people, and …
When good things happen to bad people.
In thousands of years of recorded history, no one has even come close to being able to explain why bad things sometimes happen to good people. It could be that God has a plan to which we are not privy. Or that appropriate rewards will be forthcoming in the afterlife. Or perhaps that God doesn’t care about earthly events. Who knows?
When asked what he believed to be the greatest discovery of the 20th century, Albert Einstein is said to have answered, “Compound interest.” And wealthy people — you know, the ones who clip debt-instrument coupons as a pastime — would undoubtedly agree with him.
Compound interest, however, can accrue on things other than money. When I was a very young man, I observed that I almost always ended up paying considerably more for a “wrong” action than what I had hoped to gain from it. When the payment came due, it was like an invisible balloon note that carried onerous, compounded interest. (Sound familiar?)
A recent Time cover displayed a mockup of Barack Obama decked out to look like FDR. And if you caught the special about FDR that The History Channel did about a week ago, you can understand why. BHO, a master at recycling old, tried-and-failed ideas — ideas that have never enhanced either prosperity or freedom anywhere in the world — clearly intends to be the chocolate version of our thirty-second president.
Like FDR, BHO has the arrogance to use your money to “create” a job for someone else. The fact that creating jobs is not a Constitutional function of government doesn’t seem to bother BHO anymore than it did FDR. And, just as FDR’s intervention in the economy kept the U.S. in a depression seven or eight years longer than was necessary, BHO’s shenanigans are virtually certain to have the same effect.
Right now, we’re in a deflationary period, which, as I have explained, is a good thing for the economy long term. It cleanses the market of excesses and forces people to be more frugal, more prudent, and more rational in their planning and spending.
As I shared with you in Part I of this article, my friend, Leo the Centimillionaire, believes it will be several years before the government prints its way out of the deflationary hole it has dug for us. He could be right … or he could be wrong. For all the reasons I’ve previously stated, it’s simply impossible to predict the timing of economic events in an economy that is artificially manipulated.
Could we actually be headed toward a massive deflation — perhaps a deflationary depression? To me, the bottom line is that the political buffoons in D.C. have things so screwed up that no one can predict with certainty exactly how our economic debacle is going to play out.
The only thing we can be certain of is that virtually everything the government does will make things worse. Regardless of whether it’s “jobs programs,” “rescue packages,” or any of a myriad of other anti-free-market measures government loves to impose, its spending must be paid for in one of three ways: printing, borrowing, or taxing — and all three are bad for the economy.
Another one of those dimwitted financial experts recently popped up on CNN and said that she believed the economy would start “turning around” by the end of the first quarter of 2009. She offered four reasons:
Banks are now lending to each other. (So?)
Government programs are working. (They are?)
Consumer confidence will rise. (It will?)
The housing market is ready to revive. (It is?)
I’ve gotten so used to this kind of gibberish from TV-created experts that her inane opinion did little more than cause me to shake my head and smile condescendingly. It was right up there with O’Reilly saying that the media is hurting the economy by scaring people. Sure, Bill. Maybe we should put a cap on scare mongering right along with gas prices.
I thought long and hard before chiming in on the latest O.J. saga. Since everyone is now pretty much in agreement on the character of this psychopathic primate, I’m not interested in getting in a few “me too” jabs.
Nevertheless, as I watched O.J. near tears in court, the word karma came quickly to mind — as it probably did with you. Not only because of the way his life has turned out, but also considering the lives of so many of the other actors in the fourteen-year run of this modern-day Greek tragedy.
Now that I’m finally back down to my playing weight, I can tell on myself: I was a bad boy on Thanksgiving. To steal a couple of my own (old) jokes, the way I ate, I was lucky the universe was expanding. They say no man is an island, but I came close. It was sheer gluttony!
Of course, what I ate was a mere snack compared to what I devoured at the Thanksgiving dinners of my youth. But that was then and this is now.
Gluttony is defined by the dictionary as “excessive eating and drinking.” But, metaphorically speaking, just about anything one does in excess is gluttonous.
Back in the early eighties, when I was publishing my newsletter The Tortoise Report, the thought crossed my mind that the crumbling U.S. empire might find itself breaking up into smaller pieces — as Rome and the British Empire did.
When it comes to ruling over people, even I agree that bigness is bad. The most recent example of this is the former Soviet Union. With its satellite countries biting at its ankles at an accelerating pace and its troops bogged down in Afghanistan, the bitter truth finally came to the surface: With all its military might, the thugs in Moscow couldn’t control the disintegration of their “Union.”
In Part I of this article, I said that a high ratio between executive pay and worker pay is neither good nor bad – that it is, in fact, irrelevant. Why? Because in a truly free market, “employee rights” have nothing to do with it. An employer would decide what he is willing to pay an employee, and the employee would be fully protected by the market. (Not the government – the market.)
When I say “protected by the market,” I mean that if he’s worth more than what an employer offers him, he is free to sell his services to another employer who places a higher value on what he does. In response to a blasphemous statement such as this, I’ve heard people say things like, “That sounds good in theory, but what if the employee can’t get a job somewhere else?”
It seems like yesterday that seedy Michael Moore was ranting and raving about General Motors laying off thousands of workers in a year when the company’s profits were in the neighborhood of $5 billion. Too bad he didn’t get his way, because it would have put GM out if its misery a lot sooner.
It’s hard to believe that just fifty years ago GM controlled 50 percent of the U.S. car market (now down to about 22 percent). Who could have imagined that, after the harsh consequences of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would have the temerity to invade such unglamorous heartland spots as Ohio and Tennessee with their efficiently run auto plants?
I had a dream last night that my unsubscribe link sent me an e-mail saying, “Would you please stop taking on divisive issues and stick to the touchy-feely stuff?” Just to be obstinate, my answer to that request was to write this article.
You’re probably familiar with Gianna Jessen from an ad the Republicans ran during the presidential campaign. She’s the young woman afflicted with cerebral palsy as a result of surviving a botched abortion. Gianna has also appeared on many television shows, including Hannity and Colmes, and, incredibly, has run marathons and travels the world speaking out on the rights of unborn babies.
