We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
...the truth needed to make the world a better place is a "public good" that private markets cannot easily supply. Foundations have spent many millions of dollars financing private, market-oriented think tanks in an effort to compensate for the damage being done by academia. But while these think tanks have had an influence at the margins, the vast majority of college-educated Americans continue to rely on the information provided by elite universities and mainstream media rather than the think tanks that espouse classical liberal thought.
Can market forces provide the creative destruction needed to solve this problem?
Ultimately this division — clerisy and their clients versus yeomanry — will decide the election. The patricians and the unions will finance this battle on both sides, spreading a predictable thread of half-truths and outright lies. The Democrats enjoy a tactical advantage. All President Obama needs is to gain a rough split among the vast group making around or above the national median income. He can count on overwhelming backing by the largely government dependent poor as well as most ethnic minorities, even the most entrepreneurial and successful.
Romney’s imperative will be to rouse the yeomanry by suggesting the clerisy, both by their sheer costliness and increasingly intrusive agenda, are crippling their family’s prospects for a better life. In these times of weak economic growth and growing income disparity, the Republicans delude themselves by claiming to ignore class warfare. They need to learn how instead to make it politically profitable for themselves.
It should be a scandal that the federal government is purposefully weakening a core principle of our value system: self-reliance. To wit, the feds are praising local bureaucrats for "counteracting" what they call "mountain pride." These bureaucrats are convincing people who characteristically reject food stamps to instead embrace a culture of dependence.
It's in the politicians' interest to grow dependency: dependency means votes. It's in the bureaucracy's interest to grow dependency: that's how they grow their "business" and make themselves necessary and important, and keep their jobs.
It's a very complicated state of affairs, but the economy still stinks for almost everybody without a government job. However, it does not alter my longstanding thesis that a liberal arts education is not meant to be a job credential, and never was. It was designed as life-enrichment, advanced mental discipline, and delayed-adulthood for the clergy, for serious scholars, and for the prosperous elites.
Most of the kids today are being challenged to build something for themselves. That's a good thing for everybody, but it works better if the government gets out of the way.
Even assuming a full recovery from the Great Recession—possible, though not certain—the resulting prosperity will be qualified by greater competition for scarce economic resources. Massive federal budget deficits are only the most conspicuous sign of a society that has promised itself more than it can afford. To resurrect a familiar metaphor: A more slowly growing economic pie will face more claimants for slices. Some will receive bigger slices, others smaller.
Another:
The premise of the post–World War II affluent society, that we were or would soon become so rich that we could afford almost anything, was never true, but we often acted as if it were. We avoided unpleasant choices, especially in government, accepting routine federal budget deficits (46 out of 51 years since 1961). Now, limits are painfully evident. There are more promises than can be fulfilled. Meeting all of government’s spending commitments would require higher, broad-based taxes, which both liberals and conservatives reject, or perpetually large deficits, which both parties consider unsustainable and undesirable.
What looms is a future of more distributional struggles between young and old, rich and poor, different regions, and many interest groups. Each will defend subsidies, work to avoid tax increases, and maneuver for regulatory advantage.
The entire piece is worth studying. There are lots of people out there, young and older, who could be doing much more right now were it not for the Administration's horribly misguided responses to the recession.
George Leef is not convinced that many jobs which require a BA have any need for it. What is a BA anyway? He begins:
Why go to college? Go back fifty years, and the answer commonly given was, "To become a well-rounded person who has a grasp of our civilization's history, science, and art." Go back about twenty-five years and the answer commonly given was, "So you'll be able to get a good job." And now one authoritative source is telling us, "Because you'll be better off when the next recession hits."
The authors of the book in question believe that happiness comes from not working. That seems kind of strange, because I always felt that the foundation of happiness came from being useful and productive. A quote from the review:
The authors offer suggestions for how to change the balance between work and leisure. First, everyone should receive either a wage from the government (with no obligation to work to earn it) generous enough to enable him to work only part time, or a capital endowment at birth; the risk of people squandering their endowment in “riotous living can be reduced by limiting their spending to approved objects (such as education)”; in addition, the schools would educate people for leisure. Second, they recommend imposing a progressive consumption tax, to make consumer products more costly in the hope of discouraging people from working hard to be able to afford them (it could of course make them work even harder). Third, firms should be forbidden to deduct advertising expenditures from taxable income, since advertising encourages consumption.
But here is the oddest thing about the book: There is virtually no discussion of how people, their incomes halved, might be expected to employ the vastly greater leisure that the authors want them to have.
Don't ya love those would-be utopian societal planners? The authors of the book must live in some alternate universe. We can't all be Michelangelos, nor would most people decide to be.
If your struggling car company wants a government bailout, you’ll probably have to build the government’s car – even if it’s a car very few people want to buy.
Repeatedly asking for government help undermines the foundations of society by destroying initiative and responsibility. It is also a fatal blow to efficiency and corrupts the political process.
When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything, because no one will be producing anything.
Do you ever feel the need to confess your sins? To confess them to somebody else, other than in prayer or ritually in church (as in "Forgive us our trespasses")?
It is difficult in life to live without accumulating one's share of sins of commission, omission, sins of character, sins of unkindness, sins of arrogance, sins of self-centeredness, sins of cruelty, sins of self-indulgence, lies, thefts, personal flaws and weaknesses, and sins of passion or stupidity. These things burden our souls.
Pastor says "Lay it all at the foot of the Cross," and quotes Christ: “Go, and sin no more.”
People with serious religious aspirations often engage Spiritual Directors as guides. That's a serious and daunting business but I have heard that it can be a life-changing journey.
Do our readers sometimes feel the need to confess and, if so, to whom?
I'll say it again: government is a special interest group, and one of the few growth industries left in the US right now. Washington DC is a boom town: people go where the money is.
Democrats have never tried, much less managed, to convince voters that the Democratic domestic agenda is so beneficial that ordinary Americans — not just the CEOs of the companies they work for, or the stars of the TV shows they watch, but their own friends, neighbors, and co-workers — should pay significantly higher taxes for government endeavors.
Democrats hate Paul Ryan because he has taken the measure of their cowardice and made public the logical, humiliating conclusions of their disingenuousness.
Taxes are going to rise much further on the middle class. My simple theory is that the Left wants to take the money we all earn in the private sector, take their cut, decide what we need because we are too foolish and feckless to run our own lives, and then expect us to thank them with our votes for the service. They imagine we need care, like sheep, but we just want freedom from them. The Welfare State Industry underestimates the human spirit, and then shackles or cripples people to make their idea come true.
Try saving the money to open a corner pizza joint when you're paying a 50% tax rate. Then, try getting a license to sell beer there. Then, consider your employee cost of Obamacare. At some point, people say The Heck With It and you have an empty storefront. That's the way to end up like Euroland, where nobody tries to do anything except to hold on to their safe crappy job, and everybody just waits to retire on the dole to complete their entire safe, spiritless, crappy life while their government betters live it up. Serfdom.
It is a mistake for people to ignore the political appeal of the security of serfdom or slavery to the State or the Lord of the Manor, or dependency on the State, as long as those words are not used.
Re the photo, I find the entire US Capitol revolting in its grandiosity. What are we - the Roman Empire? Possibly many disagree about that, but, as a New England Yankee with a long pre-revolutionary heritage here, I strongly object to the notion of an imperial city. Those idiots should be meeting in a church basement where they might acquire a little humilty.
Re-posted from Springtime, but late-summer/early fall is the best time for lawn repair in most of the USA. We are refreshing one of our raggedy lawns, next week, with power-seeding with a tough sports turf seed (tough enough for the dogs and kids and occasionally the horses), and doing the aerating at the same time. Then Milorganite. By Spring, it will be perfect and crowd out the weeds. You can rent a power-seeder and an aerator for a few hours very cheaply, anywhere.
I will spare our readers my usual springtime lawn-restoring post, and bring a new topic to your attention: Power Lawn Seeding. This machine injects grass seed to a proper depth in an existing lawn or a new lawn. It's overseeding, but with far more effectiveness than surface scattering.
It will quickly give you a new or refurbished lawn, and sort-of aerates it in the process but best to arerate at the same time. We happen to need about 1/2 acre done this way due to stream flooding in a storm last fall. Services like Lawn Doctor can do it, or you can rent the machine for cheap and do it yourself.
Naturally, you have to either pray for rain or water it regularly for a few weeks.
Re lawn fertilizing (which must be done 2-3X/year), I enjoyed the credentials of the person who wrote up this piece:Dawn West holds a B.A. in English from Harvard University and teaches writing at Oregon State University.
The Atlantic has an article this month with the title “Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don’t Realize It).” I am always curious when intellectuals announce that the people (who in the American constitutional system serve as the sovereign power) don’t know what’s good for them (What’s the Matter with Kansas?) or don’t even know what they want.
Implicit in all of these revelations, of course, is the firmest, if never directly expressed, belief of the Left: That the average person is too stupid to run his own life, let alone make public policy decisions. Those few, those happy few, that band of liberal intellectuals, must do that for them.
The author of the Atlantic article, Dan Ariely—a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke—divided the American population into quintiles according to wealth. He then asked a representative sample of more than 5,000 Americans to guess how the country’s wealth was distributed amongst these quintiles.
He doesn’t say exactly how he determined the population’s wealth. Are the hundreds of billions of dollars in union and government pension funds that will fund the retirement of millions of blue-collar and government workers considered an asset of those workers? I’d guess not.
School education isn't everything in life. There are many important things to know that cannot be learned in school. As parents, we all try to ensure that our kids acquire basic life skills to help them enjoy life and to participate fully in life.
What makes life interesting is that all parents have different ideas about this.
Here's my first stab at making a list of the things we have expected our kids to know how to do - or at least to give it a good try - before turning 18 (guys and gals):
- Handle firearms safely - Ride and groom a horse - Play a musical instrument and sight-read - Achieve some level of competence with at least one sport which can be played throughout life - Learn CPR, and basic lifesaving, water safety, and mastery of basic swimming strokes - Handle a sailboat and a powerboat with at least basic safety and effectiveness - Display appealing and engaging table and cocktail party manners - Strong familiarity with our religion - whether they believe or not - Manage their own money safely, and learn how to save it - Internalize our (sub-) cultural codes of conduct, from dress codes to effective job interviewing - How to prune trees, hedges, and shrubs - How to cook a good number of basic foods - How to cut, split, and stack firewood - and for boys, chain saw expertise - How to start a fire - How to (try to) catch fish and shoot a duck or pheasant. And clean them, too. - How to handle a tractor safely on New England hills - Row a boat, paddle a canoe - How to identify at least basic plants, wildlife, habitat types, and rock formations - How to travel in foreign countries - Vegetable gardening - Drive a standard transmission vehicle, change the oil, check the anti-freeze, inflate tires - At least basic understanding of household basics like painting, power tools, hammers and screw-drivers, making cement, etc. - Know the basic laws, and how not to break them - Know how not to get lost in the woods, and use of a compass - How to select friends - How to be an informed citizen and to participate in one's community
That's a start. I know that some of it is somewhat culture-specific to our lives, but it seems to me that all of these would come in handy for anybody.
I pretty much agree with everything in it. From the blurb:
Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.
Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Real Education reviews what we know about the limits of what schools can do and the results of four decades of policies that require schools to divert huge resources to unattainable goals.
Too many people are going to college. Almost everyone should get training beyond high school, but the number of students who want, need, or can profit from four years of residential education at the college level is a fraction of the number of young people who are struggling to get a degree. We have set up a standard known as the BA, stripped it of its traditional content, and made it an artificial job qualification. Then we stigmatize everyone who doesn’t get one. For most of America’s young people, today’s college system is a punishing anachronism.
“As an administrator, those are the kinds of things I’m really sensitive to – what are the students saying – because even if it’s not true, the perception is their reality,” said William L. Howard, assistant vice president of academic services at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In other words, while a student’s method of calling attention to perceived prejudice may be flawed, that perception of prejudice still exists. “If you say, ‘This is not an issue on my campus,’ and a student has an experience that is counter to that, you have to listen to them.”
Baloney. If the fraud is their reality, they do not belong in school.
It's about Americans who have 
The authors of the book in question believe that happiness comes from not working. That seems kind of strange, because I always felt that the foundation of happiness came from being useful and productive. A quote 
Middle-class taxpayers will pay a
I will spare our readers my usual springtime lawn-restoring post, and bring a new topic to your attention: