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.
NYC's City College is a great public school, (ten Nobel laureates, countless distinguished citizens, academics, and professionals) but it had a lot to recover from. So did the rest of the huge CUNY system which aspires to make higher ed accessible to aspiring New Yorkers.
I entirely agree with their idea of job training for high school grads, and I also agree that the overemphasis of college is foolish. I am not sure the idea is neglected, though. There are vocational schools all over (public and private), and community colleges generally have vocationally-oriented programs.
Much neglected in the discussion in the US are apprenticeships, which cost nothing and which are usually paid helper jobs which can lead to well-paid jobs afterwards. My electronics repair guy gets $175/hr. My computer expert gets $200/hr, has no college. My gunsmith, $150/hr. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, tree men, chefs, and so forth all can have solid incomes via apprenticeships.
In fact, legal training is mainly through apprenticeship. Sure, you have to go to law school in most states now, but the real learning is by doing under supervision.
John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, the 20th century’s most influential text on the nature of social justice, was controversial on the left because it provided a supply-side argument against the assumption that socialist equality was the end-all-be-all of distributive justice. Rawls recognized that incentives to production have something to do with levels of consumption and argued persuasively that unequal shares are justified if they leave society’s least advantaged as well off they can be. For many socialists, admitting that justice can possibly admit of unequal shares gives away the store. Rawls sold them out.
Yet Rawls himself, like many other mid-century social democrats, had an uneasy attitude toward enrichment, and tended not to see much to admire in the human motives or legal rights that tend to produce it. Rawls was a liberal who saw society in liberal terms as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” but there was in Rawls’ theory very little appreciation of the possibility that liberal rights and economic growth might need each other. Indeed, he thought that, after a certain modest level of material comfort had been achieved, a regime of fair cooperation founded on liberal rights would do better—and would still be the most desirable of all regimes—without any growth at all. ..
There are endless, interesting debates to be had on this topic. From my standpoint, I like spare cash but value freedom over wealth. However, the core of freedom is private property. My vote is important in theory but trivial in effect.
Style, appearance, dress, and physique clearly vary across subcultures and geography in the US and the Western World, and certainly in the rest of the world.
When people look good, they feel good. Chicken and egg. Codes of personal presentation are useful even if we do not like the codes other groups use. In my somewhat hoity-toity set, being athletic and preppily-proper at all times (except at the gym) is standard, regardless of age. There is a similar expectation, or a higher one, in the American Southland.
I recently began estate work for a new client. She said she was 78. I had to ask her to prove it, because I have seen lots of 45 year-olds who looked far worse than she did and I do not mean at WalMart. I should say, she looked great, elegant, sexy. She skis all winter, golfs and plays tennis all summer, lifts weights, does her own gardening in Vermont and in Connecticut, has two volunteer community projects, plays bridge twice a week, hikes - and has availed herself of a bit of face and neck work in New York. Not enough to notice until she told me her age. A proud lady, I think.
How important do you think it is to look good when in public? Is it about signaling, or class-consciousness, work expectations, or just plain dignity? Or is letting yourself go to pot at some point ok with you?
The problem is that the individual can not afford to fight them. Small businesses can neither afford the legal teams, the years, nor nor lobbyists to defend them. Wallach begins:
What sort of political system do we have in America? Why, republican self-government, of course. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as mediated by our hallowed constitutional institutions. Doing our thing for 227 years now.
A great many people aren’t buying that story these days. They look at our actual manner of governing and see bitterly contested symbolic elections awkwardly joined to a powerful technocratic administrative state that makes most of the important decisions. The disconnect between the ideal and the reality has brought us a legitimacy crisis that has been often touched upon in these virtual pages lately.
Leviathan is now too big to fail:
We live in a democracy full of fellow-citizens who think that “crucial functions” are very extensive indeed. One libertarian tradition is simply to flip these fellow-citizens the bird and insist that a cadre of the right kind of rulers—anti-technocratic technocrats, more or less—will somehow gain power and make our government best by governing least. That is undoubtedly an applause line in many rooms, but it is the equivalent of not playing the game at all.
OK, but why are we still measuring things by race and ethnicity? Does it really matter? People are individuals. Why not measure people by height instead, or shoe size? Or, with the current meme, hand size?
Forget "gender," skin tone, ethnic background, etc. and just evaluate people on their individual strengths and character. How hard would that be? I am sick and tired of this ethnic-racial-gender-class neo-Marxist analysis which tries to put everybody in some labeled box based on the most trivial and superficial characteristics.
We all know that Jews and Asians statistically out-perform academically, and that African-Americans outperform in many athletics. So what? Many blacks are klutzes and intellectually-talented, and many Asians and Jews are not too bright. Cultural and societal averages might be academically interesting, but we are just talking about basic education here. With an undamaged brain and a decent teacher anybody can learn enough Trig and Calc to study Civil Eng in high school or after and never be unemployed.
To disguise the value judgments inherent in their regulatory agendas, economists and policymakers justify their proposals as hyper-rational, politically neutral responses to "market failures." To prove these proposals enhance economic efficiency and societal welfare, they produce "cost-benefit analyses." Free markets and price signals work better, they tell us, when we embrace their recommended taxes, subsidies, and mandates. Any rule that requires $1 million of equipment to reduce by 1% the risk of death for 100 people is just common sense; one requiring $1 billion of equipment to reduce by less than 1% the emission of carbon dioxide for one year is the only responsible choice.
All this may be true on classroom blackboards and in abstract computer models. But technocrats armed with sharpened pencils and boundless egos tend not to calculate reliably which market prices are "too low" or which resource re-allocations would produce benefits that exceed costs. The easy recourse to the language of market failure — the claim that somewhere some social cost is going unpaid — reflects a subjective policy preference when we do not know the cost's size or incidence, the extent to which it is unpaid, or what countervailing benefits might be lost through a correction. A cost-benefit analysis that summarizes how many "lives" a rule will "save," how many "jobs" will be "created," and how much these achievements are "worth," is little more than marketing propaganda when the terms are unhelpful abstractions and the estimates unreliable.
Expecting everyone to "reason" like a moral philosopher is based upon the assumption that everyone can. This of course is a rehash of the radical equality principle of all men and fails to recognise that some men are limited in reaching this level of cognition. (Note, it's one of the ways mainstream Christianity inadvertently laid the groundwork for Liberalism.) So anyone pushing this agenda is, in a way, furthering the intellectual supposition that all men are cognitively equal.
But suppose you do accept the fact that there is an inherent intellectual inequality amongst men, how then do you regulate public morality in such an environment, especially when asking men to act in a strongly counter-intuitive way? The only way to do so is by having a strong external apparatus, i.e. Church or State threatening to punish wayward behaviour. i.e. Big Brother. Furthermore, with the collapse of "cultural constraints" the void for regulating behviour needs to be assumed by the state, thus, radical liberalism necessitates a powerful state regulatory apparatus to provide a check against the intuitive tendencies of the masses.
The naysayers did not trust the dam to hold. Rather, they were sincerely worried that the national government would expand beyond all recognition, and that, in its broadened form, it would inevitably begin to encroach upon the rights of the people. To help prevent this from happening, they sought a parchment backstop to which they might appeal in such cases as denied their natural liberties.
They already understood that power tends to attempt to amass more power. But how did they know that the masses would, someday, demand more? Wise men, indeed. Freedom from government was their lodestar.
"America doesn’t trust you anymore. That’s the truth... and that’s not one party, that’s both" raged former Senator Tom Coburn during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs this week. As Free Beacon reports, Coburn, making his first appearance before the Senate since his farewell speech when he retired in late 2014, pleaded with Congress to take action to reform government, quoting de Tocqueville, that an ever more centralized control reduces its citizenry "to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
What if most people are happy to be sheep with a government-shepherd?
(Americans) want to believe that every young person is equally educable and that we can solve social inequalities by ensuring that nearly all children complete high school and go on to earn college degrees. Reality says otherwise, however. Kids vary enormously in ability, which means that the right kind and extent of education varies tremendously. And instead of trying to put more students through college, we should recognize that we already have far too many there.
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Throughout our whole educational system, we are “asking too much from those at the bottom, asking the wrong things from those in the middle, and asking too little from those at the top,” he maintains. From kindergarten to college and from the smartest students to the dullest, our education system underperforms.
This letter was a hoax of sorts, posted somewhere on the internet as a response from Oxford to students attending as Rhodes Scholars to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor Cecil Rhodes.
Not sure who wrote this. Best line to the students: "Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you."
American higher ed administrators might bear that in mind.
Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near as damn it to zilch.
Her argument comes down to something like "It might maybe help kids from low-functioning families a tiny bit for a year or two." Weak argument. Don't have kids if you can not raise them well, teach them well. We already have free government birth control...
Wrong, because the true Progressive argument is more unionized "teaching" jobs. We all know that "Pre-K" is a euphemism for babysitting. Prosperous moms use nursery school so they have time to volunteer, get to the gym, and play tennis. And, of course, to get a break from the brats.
"Education"? Well, if your parents can't teach you to speak, count, add, or recite the alphabet, you are in trouble anyway. Blame your parent(s) for a crappy start in life, and get yourself going.
