Maggie's Farm

How can it be that we have so many people in the upper reaches of government who seem to have nary a clue about what America is all about?

Steyn put it well when he wrote about Your Right to Compulsory Education. I suppose we have another Right - the Right to Compulsory Medical Insurance.

But back to Geithner, Lindsay says what I wanted to say in Geithner and the 'Privilege' of Being American  - The Founders argued that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were rights that preceded government—not things to be granted by it. My bolds:

... the real problem with this whole privilege argument goes back to what the Founding Fathers were thinking. Being an American is a right, not a privilege. The privilege belongs to those who are temporarily allowed to serve this great nation in a decision-making capacity. When they turn this privilege into a right to distribute government largess in ever larger quantities—and in ways, to use Jefferson's phrase, a "wise and frugal government" would not—it is those in government, and not the governed, who bear the responsibility for our budgetary problems.

I once employed a custodian whose family was “a bunch of burglars,” according to the investigating cop. Why the cop had waited so long to tell me, I don’t know. All along, the custodian’s kids had pilfered tools and lawnmowers from me, but I couldn’t prove anything, and besides, I liked the guy. He was a hardworking “hillbilly”—his term. I was his “little bitty buddy.” His kids took the master key and broke into an apartment across the hall. Then they committed a botched burglary down the street and confessed to that, plus my break-in. My custodian had to move out. “See you in the funny papers,” he said. Six years with me—and then, so long, because his kids were crooks.

Prelutsky:

Sometimes, I’m amazed that I know as many decent, intelligent, law-abiding, people as I do. Because the fact is, a disturbingly large number of Americans are simply up to no good and should not be trusted anywhere near heavy machinery, sharp tools, voting booths or me.

Mark Steyn elaborates on that pitiful citizen's sentiments in The Perversion of Rights. A quote:

When it comes to human rights, I go back to 1215 and Magna Carta — or, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum. My italics: I don’t think they had them back in 1215. But they understood that “libertatum” is the word that matters. Back then, “human rights” were rights of humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They’re the rights that matter: limitations upon kingly power. Eight centuries later, we have entirely inverted the principle: “Rights” are now gifts that a benign king graciously showers upon his subjects — the right to “free” health care, to affordable housing, the “right of access to a free placement service” (to quote the European Constitution’s “rights” for workers).

From A Funny Book about Worthless Degrees at Minding the Campus:

"Here are some [college] degrees that cost you roughly $30,000 in tuition, their much cheaper replacements, and the savings you'd realize:

Degree Replacement Savings

Foreign Languages: Language Software $29,721
Philosophy: Read Socrates $29,980
Women's Studies: Watch Daytime TV $30,000
Journalism: Start a blog $30,000

...Since none of these degrees help increase your employability, you might as well avoid these majors and do it on your own."

$30,000? Try $200,000. People with curiosity, who love to learn, will always find a way. Books, libraries, Teaching Company, etc. Those without the gift of curiosity will never know more than they have to. Do you want to learn, or do you need a credential? A quote:

As a recipient of a "worthless" college degree myself (I double-majored in English and classics), I wish that Clarey had devoted few more pages to discussing exactly why the liberal arts have become radically devalued in the eyes of prospective employers. Not too long ago a bachelor's degree in history or philosophy signaled that you were smart and could write well, two qualities that employers prized (and still do). Now, a B.A. seems to signal, "I'm a parasite" in search of make-work at a nonprofit, as Clarey bluntly puts it.

We all surely agree that lying is immoral and, most of the time, a terrible thing to do. We all surely agree that lying by omission is equally evil, most of the time. As we say here, a lie is the theft of somebody else's reality.

In life, we tend to identify liars and to distrust them, figuring reasonably that if they lie about one thing, they just tend to be liars. It's not always true, of course, but it's a safe rule of thumb.

Robin Hanson asks Why Allow Lies? He says:

Claiming military honors offends a lot of people in a way that claiming honors for other subjects doesn’t. Personally, I think that outlawing things merely because they offend people is a bad idea (and unnecessary–you’ll note that the offender in this case got his comeuppance even before the law was applied), but that’s another argument.

Making lying illegal seems crazy to me. For starters, every politician would be convicted.

Here's Lex's take on Stolen Valor.

Ben Shapiro via Tatler:

“In the view of the Left, the state is everything. Why? Because in the progressive belief system, only the state guarantees rights. All of our freedoms and liberties spring from the state. All moral and philosophical and scientific authority is vested in the state. Only the state can enforce the progressive ideology. And so the state must survive and it must grow. The bigger the state, the bigger the rights. Want a right to healthcare? You need an enormous state. Want a right to taxpayer-funded contraceptives? You need a huge state… Our founders agreed, they saw the constitution as a charter of negative liberties — it protects people’s natural rights against the government… The Constitution only gives the state the power to protect rights.”

What he said.

So says Powerline. Global Warming Alarmists Resort to Hoax. John says:

Let me be perfectly clear: I think it is obvious that Peter Gleick fabricated this document–the only one he posted that makes the Heartland Institute look bad–because the real ones he stole from Heartland didn’t serve his partisan purpose. Or, if he didn’t make it up himself, he got it from an ally who fabricated it. No knowledgeable person could mistake Gleick’s hoax for a legitimate top-secret Heartland memo.

So, Peter Gleick: if I am wrong, sue me. If I am right, apologize for fabricating a document and attempting to perpetrate a hoax, and retire from public life.

Mead:

Of contemporary mass movements, the green movement has been consistently the most alarmist, the least constructive, the most emotional, the least rational, the most intolerant and the most self righteous.

And at PJ, Fakegate: Can’t Hide This Decline - Peter Gleick adds yet more fraud to the warmists’ resume (my bolds):

As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that, even if we had such an understanding, the people who have been doing the modeling have either the competence or the computer power, in terms of both memory and processing speed, necessary to accurately model it with any confidence at all, let alone sufficient confidence to make radical and costly policy changes that will devastate the wealth of our unborn descendants. Similarly, I deny that the people doing such shoddy modeling have even studied, let along understand, economics and the future course of technology sufficiently to justify their demands that we implement such changes (which conveniently just happen to coincide with things that the Left has been wanting to do for…ever). To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.

Lots more at Watts: BREAKING: Gleick Confesses and Heartland accuses him of forging documents.

Here's Gleik's own personal justification for perpetrating a fraud. (His excuse is that the alarmists are losing the debate, so he got upset. What debate?)

I find the ongoing saga of fraud after fraud, deception after deception, to be depressing. As we have said here many times, some good old global warming would be great for the earth and great for people. It certainly has been, in the past. However, I predict that we will not be so lucky.

" $2.7 billion later, it was concluded that the Registry had never resulted in the solution of a single murder."

How rare it is for a government to shut down an entire government program, even if it doesn't work. Or especially if it doesn't work: "We didn't spend enough money on it."

From Husock: The Myths of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth:

Public housing today, even in the post-welfare-reform era, continues to give priority to those of lowest income, which, as a practical matter, means female-headed, single-parent families, who still dominate the projects and the Section 8 housing-voucher program. Census data from the 1950s makes it possible to compare marriage rates in white and black St. Louis neighborhoods. The numbers show that black marriage rates have long lagged behind white rates. In nine predominantly black census tracts, married persons (husbands and wives, not including children) constituted 16.4 percent of the population. In predominantly white census tracts, the number was 24.5 percent—half again higher, before the advent of public housing. Without question, the perverse incentives of public housing and public assistance worsened this situation. In contrast, the incentives created by the private housing market—to maintain two-parent households so as to pool incomes in order to get ahead—would have worked in just the opposite direction.

It's really all about help that wasn't helpful - or even wanted - and perverse incentives.

Related: The Left Is Still Ignoring the Costs of Family Breakdown. In my opinion, the Left ignores it because it creates more household poverty, and thus more government dependency. When has the Left ever championed family values?

A major essay from Mead: Beyond Blue 5: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs:

In our times, the advantages of unplanned capitalist innovation and competition are even more valuable than usual. We need an era of social and business experimentation. Many of the bright young people who a generation ago would have gone to work for large corporations or law firms, or moved into tenure track academic positions, need to find new ways of making a living. The young people who would have gone into factory jobs or routine but secure clerical positions must also find new ways of using their skills and talents. The terrain is uncharted; the old systems don’t work.

Government needs to clear unnecessary obstacles out of the paths of the pioneers of the new economy. The single most effective way the government can support the necessary change is to adapt its regulatory and employment policies to the needs of the start ups from whose ranks the leaders of the future will emerge. That is not the only type of change that would help, but it is the most important one.

Was the Bill of Rights an error? It is debatable. If you recall, the NY delegation insisted on it.

Every time I find myself slipping into the modern statist mindset, the assumptions of which dominate so much political discourse, I try to step back and remind myself that the American experiment was not so much about instituting specific rights for individuals as it was about limiting the power and rights of the Federal state, leaving all the rest of the power to individual people (or the individual states and localities).

The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it makes it appear that those are the peoples' delimited rights. They even decided to stick in the #10, redundantly I think:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

America is not about rights. America is about the locus of power and self-determination. In other words, the government has (or had) strictly limited rights and powers. That sort of freedom from government was the whole point. Rights are for peasants and serfs, grasping for crumbs of freedom and autonomy or, in the "positive rights" lingo, grasping for freebies. American government was meant to be in handcuffs while we, the people, led our lives freely, and as we thought best.

Over time, political freedom has expanded in some ways: emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage. In other ways, the growth of the would-be leviathan state has usurped much individual freedom - albeit with the consent of the people who seek benefit from its growing power and wealth.

The Libertarian side of me would love to see "a new birth of freedom." Who is the greatest enemy of freedom from state power? Us - the voters, who have consistently for 100 years been willing to trade a birthright for a bowl of lentils.

Says Knish:

The left believes strongly in social solutions. It believes that all our ills are social in nature and that social justice can only be practiced by a healthy society. Their idea of a healthy society is totalitarian but they have that in common with most ideologues who want a perfect state, rather than a free state.

Our idea of perfection is good old messy individual freedom and responsibility.

Barone today quoted the stunningly perspicacious de Toqueville:

"Thus, taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."

That is what House Republicans are fighting to reverse.

Painting is a young George Washington, by Peale

From Herb London:

The trick is to unleash market forces. Let curriculum reform dictate marketability. Let online courses serve as a credible alternative to classroom study. Let some universities fail--some certainly should. And let parents and students make choices based on the trade-off between taxes and tuition.

The President could make a difference if he said it is time for the federal government to get out of the way so that market forces can flourish. There was a time when tuition rates were affordable for even working class people, but that was before federal intervention. It may be time to turn the clock back to that period.

One in four Americans are grandparents, soon to be 1 in 3. From Grandparents play a bigger role in child-rearing:

America is swiftly becoming a granny state. Less frail and more involved, today's grandparents are shunning retirement homes and stepping in more than ever to raise grandchildren while young adults struggle in the poor economy.

The newer grandparents are mainly baby boomers who are still working, with greater disposable income. Now making up 1 in 4 adults, grandparents are growing at twice the rate of the overall population and sticking close to family — if their grandkids aren't already living with them.

The modern invention of the nuclear family never really worked out that well, did it? Too isolated, too little support and help, etc. Farm families consisted of extended families.

Solyndras In the Classroom: How We Vastly Overrate Education:

...it appears that our massive “investments” in education have produced no measurable economic return. Should we be surprised by this? No. Average scores on standardized tests have not risen, despite the fact that we are “investing” seven times as much in real terms in each student than we did six decades ago. So, even by the measures used by the educational establishment, it is clear that the higher spending has not created any additional human capital.

I do not overrate learning. I think we overrate spending on the education industry which protects a monopoly on credentialing. Learning and education are not the same thing. Learning is for adults (over 16); education is for children.

I have been posting about the value of a rigorous high school education, and the frequently minimal value-added of college for many kids. I forget the average number of study hours of American college kids these days, but it is low. High school can prepare anybody for a lifetime of learning. Maybe you can't take a class with Jacques Barzun, but anybody can read his books.

(At Insty today: For $35 an hour you can get a cum laude graduate of Harvard with a degree in Folklore & Mythology to do your calendar management and travel planning.)

So here's my question for my readers: Let's hear about people you have known who have led interesting and challenging lives without a college degree, including yourselves if applicable.

I'll start with a few:

- The omniscient, cynical, whiskey-breathed City Editor of an urban newspaper where I worked summers during college
- The guy in town who started his plumbing contracting company and now has 50 employees
- Bill Gates (I don't really know him)
- Our Shakespeare scholar electrician
- my Master Gunsmith

Kevin Carey in The Wilson Quarterly makes the case for college - or at least some college - for all. Naturally, I think that is insane, and for more reasons than I have time to list.

A rigorous high school degree can still provide all that is needed to continue one's education on one's own, if wanted; all that is needed to be a good citizen, and all that is needed to perform 90% of the work out there.

We all know that a college degree can mean a great deal, or next to nothing - same as a high school degree.

A couple more education links:

Are Colleges Ripping Us Off? Half of all college students make no learning gains in their first two years, and 36 percent show no significant intellectual growth even after four years.

McArdle:  Envisioning a Post-Campus America

She wants one of these (the convertible, please) to show the love:

I want this pair:

However, back in reality, what I am going to do is to make dinner for She Who Must Be Obeyed: Cherrystone clams on the half-shell with lemon slices, then a steamed 3 lb. lobster with home-made horseradish mayo, cucumber slaw and potato salad, with champagne or maybe a nice Meursault. Valentine cupcakes for dessert.

Penicillin, and its deadly poisonous antibiotic cousins, kill billions of life forms yearly. Some near-extinct critters hardly exist, these days, outside the zoos of biologists' labs. The little Anthrax critter, for example, and variola.

These little bugs are just as much a part of the ecosystem as any other living thing.

Photo is of the Pneumococcus, a species which humans attack and kill by the billions every year. Even good old treponema pallidum and yersinia pestis are near extinction.

Where is PETA? This is a serious biodiversity issue. The vast majority of earthly life forms require microscopes to see, but is that any reason to excuse man-made extinction of these critters?

Is it just because they don't look cuddly? Dr. William Osler famously termed pneumoccal pneumonia "the old man's friend" because it provided a peaceful ending.

A very good deal: Free Offer: Hillsdale College Constitution Course.

What would this cost your kid in college? Or would they even offer it? This is an example of the New Education. How many Americans really know this stuff? Not many, I suspect.

If you can get through an American high school, much less an American college, without understanding our Constitution and its history, you cannot know enough to vote. Just my opinion, of course.

From Zero Hedge:

According to our hypotheses, the tax code is equally open to all. Does the average citizen have the time and expertise to plow through 70,000 pages of tax codes? Clearly, the answer is no, so it's simply not true that the tax code is equally available to all.

Let's imagine a different set of values and governance. Let's suppose the tax law stated that the entire tax code must meet two requirements: it must be able to be read and understood by the overwhelming majority of citizens with a high school education in one hour or less.

The national labs (or equivalent impartial bodies) would be tasked with conducting a randomized sampling of 100,000 citizens to test each year's tax code. If 80% of the adult citizenry with a high school education (or GED) were unable to put the tax code into practice after an hour of study, then the code would be rejected and sent back to Congress for revision until it passed this simple, transparent standard for equality before the law.

Clearly, the tax code is both legal and completely skewed to the very wealthy and politically powerful. $100,000 is still a fairly significant contribution in politics, and if that contribution ends up yielding a tax break that gains the donor $1 million in lower taxes, then that donation earned a 10-fold "return on investment."

Only the wealthy can afford to hire Panzer divisions of tax attorneys to pore over the 70,00 pages and game the system to pay less than self-employed citizens pay in Social Security and Medicare tax, never mind income tax.

The first hypothesis is still vaild--the tax code is legal--but the second--that fundamental opportunities are open to all--is demonstrably false. Equal opportunity is revealed as a social control myth promoted by those benefitting from opportunities that are not available to the citizenry at large.

This is the definition of an oligarchy.

All that the regular person can do is to declare all of their income (unless you are somebody like Tim Geithner or Charlie Rangel - hey, nobody is perfect). After that, it's a crap shoot.

The wife of a friend of mine was recently made to feel uncomfortable while visiting her freshman daughter's dorm to see fellows walking around the halls with towels or undershorts with long-neck beers in their hands as if the dorm were some sort of downscale Roman orgy.

I commented that co-ed showers would be the next new thing. The idea of that is, indeed, titillating.

In my paleo view, co-education itself was a bad idea. It ignores the reality of adolescent sexual tension, the reality of distraction, and the distortion of behavior that can ensue. Speaking for myself, the idea of trying to study or sleep knowing that some leggy blonde was in the next room three feet away, alone and perhaps feeling lonely, would make studying Plato a difficult thing to do.

What's your opinion?

Hayward found time to get to this before I did: Is there any doubt that if liberals had their way, they’d junk the U.S. Constitution and install one that enshrines liberal ideology?

Why is the US exceptional? Because it focuses on freedom from the state. That remains a revolutionary notion in an era in which so many want the State to be a beneficent God.

I noticed this: Biden Florida Visit: College Degrees for Everyone.

I had to laugh at that, because America is still far from providing a meaningful high school education to the average kid:

The cheerful confidence in face of utter ignorance is the most impressive aspect of this video. You can either blame the schools, the parents, or simply accept that these kids simply are not interesting in knowing much. You can lead a horse to water... 

These kids don't need college. They need remedial grammar school. As Black and Right says: "We fund public schools. I demand my money back"