Public Education Must Die!

But why must public education die you might ask. Because we’ve reached a point where there is no hope for it. Much like the last days of the Roman Empire or the last weeks of the Third Reich, things would have to get much worse before they could get any better. Undoubtedly, I’m not the foremost expert but I do have empirical first-hand experience. A few years ago I felt an unfamiliar sensation that I didn’t recognize. In retrospect I think it was an altruistic impulse. Nevertheless, I did a mid-life career switch, went to graduate school and got certified in three scientific areas. Over a four year period I worked in three school districts and came out convinced that we desperately need vouchers and/or to have the public education system completely dismantled.

My first clue came while attending a mandatory “training” meeting. After a few minutes I said to myself, “My God! These people think the problem is the solution.” The second clue when I asked my fellow teachers why they got into the profession. Few of them said educating the young and none of them mentioned their subject areas. Virtually all of them mentioned such things as: helping them to be a better person, guide them to the right path, teach them how to think, nurture their self-esteem, et cetera. All of which sounds noble until you remember these are the same people that hand out condoms to underage kids. I’ve decided the name of the Major should be changed from Education to Social Engineering.

It would be unfair, however, to paint all teachers with this brush, or even the teacher’s bane—principals. Many are excellent at what they do and they’ll get right to it as some as the finish all the non-educational busy work mandated by various governments. Does April work for you? Good teachers get buried under big bureaucracies concerned primarily with self-preservation. Of course, the reason those bureaucracies are so concerned is the fear that parents will deliver a hammer blow lawsuit to their heads. Parents believe that as taxpayers they have a right to say how public schools are run which is true enough I suppose. The problem is that parents that have received the Earned Income Credit every year since its creation consider themselves taxpayers instead of tax spenders.

Who do I blame? Sorry, it you parents. I know you feel ganged up on and were hoping for something else, but not liking the truth won’t make it go away. The thing that discouraged me enough to give up teaching and give up that idiotic altruistic impulse was the sad realization that, for you guys, schools are just vast day care centers. During the summers how often do you hear a mother say that she wishes school would start she’s worried that Johnny is forgetting his Algebra? Don’t be silly, you never hear that. But I have heard mothers say, “I can’t wait until school starts so I can get these damn brats out of my hair.”

Let’s face it. It’s a wonderful country but it has a strong and unfortunate anti-intellectual streak in it. People are suspicious of people who are “too smart” and occasionally even discriminate against them. Isaac Asimov referred to this as lacking a “good wholesome American stupidity”. That being so, why do people tolerate the public education system? After all, people with no children are heavily taxed to support them. If you are subject to a levy on your home and don’t pay it you can lose your house. In effect the public education system is extorting money from you.

Apologists for this system have traditionally claimed that educated workers and consumers benefit everyone. Tell this to any employer that has hired a recent high school graduate who can’t read, write, add, subtract, multiply, or divide and expects at least twice what the job actually pays.

In the end, the dirty little secret that almost no one has the guts to say out loud is this: People support the public education system because it provides free (to them) child care and tax-supported sports teams to root for. Pretty much nothing else. Even better it provides them with the chance to claim it’s all for the children. Are you looking for a fight sometime? Try to tell somebody otherwise.

The Poor Don’t Pay Squat

Every attempt at tax reform results in liberals shrieking hysterically about “tax cuts for the rich” and how it will be done “on the backs of the poor”. They usually say that tax cuts, if any, should be given to the working class, by which they mean virtually destitute working people and not successful working people. The problem is that you can’t give tax cuts to those people because they don’t pay squat.

The graphic below illustrates the situation. It’s been around for a while and was found on Rush Limbaugh’s home page. As you can see the bottom 50% of wage earners pay virtually nothing in taxes. Also bear in mind that the people at the very bottom don’t pay taxes at all, they receive taxes in the form of transfer payments, the Earned Income Tax Credit for example. These so-called taxpayers are, in fact, tax freeloaders.

Tax Burden 2001

All too many of you will retort with something like, “So what? The rich should pay more.” Unfortunately, you’re rich. “What? I’m just getting by!” many will bluster. Yeah, I know what you mean, I’m just barely getting by too. What you’ll find in the same article, based on GAO figures is that that top 50% includes people earning as little as $26,000 a year. If I only earned $26K a year I would lose my house and probably my car as well.

An excerpt for Rush’s article on the subject illustrates the problem:

Think of it this way: less than four dollars out of every $100 paid in income taxes in the United States is paid by someone in the bottom 50% of wage earners. Are the top half millionaires? Noooo, more like “thousandaires.” The top 50% were those individuals or couples filing jointly who earned $26,000 and up in 1999. (The top 1% earned $293,000-plus.) Americans who want to are continuing to improve their lives – and those who don’t want to, aren’t. Here are the wage earners in each category and the percentages they pay:

Top 5% pay 53.25% of all income taxes (Down from 2000 figure: 56.47%). The top 10% pay 64.89% (Down from 2000 figure: 67.33%). The top 25% pay 82.9% (Down from 2000 figure: 84.01%). The top 50% pay 96.03% (Down from 2000 figure: 96.09%). The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.97% of all income taxes. The top 1% is paying more than ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50%! And who earns what? The top 1% earns 17.53 (2000: 20.81%) of all income. The top 5% earns 31.99 (2000: 35.30%). The top 10% earns 43.11% (2000: 46.01%); the top 25% earns 65.23% (2000: 67.15%), and the top 50% earns 86.19% (2000: 87.01%) of all the income.

The problem is that virtually no one thinks they’re rich. I’ve met people with six figure incomes who bitched and moaned about how the were just squeaking by and believe me it was hard for me to by sympathetic when I was living in a $30,000 house in a neighborhood that was rapidly going to seed. One of my favorite example was an interview with a French woman after Francois Mitterand’s socialist government came to power. She said that she voted for him because he said he was going to make the rich pay, but as soon as he came to power the government informed her that she was rich.

Despite all of this I’m encouraged by all the renewed buzz about a flat tax or a national sales tax, though I would prefer the national sales tax because it would catch much of the revenue lost to the underground economy. What could be more fair? Everybody pays a simple percentage. The person that makes $200,000 a year would pay 10 times as much as the person that makes $20,000 a year. Ten times the income pays ten times the taxes. It’s simple, logical, and fair. Best of all, it’s enforceable.

Now I’m sure the next shriek of protest from the professional hand-wringers will be that it will cause disruption in the lives of those paying little or no taxes. In the long term this wouldn’t be a problem because the wage structure would adjust under market forces. In the short term any hardship could be virtually eliminated by a gradual phase-in.

Something like this has to be done eventually. Preferably sooner than later. It’s a common economic principle that if you want less of something you tax it, and if you want more of it you subsidize it. The present tax structure penalizes success and rewards failure. We need to break that precedent and break it now.

Kill Your Birth Control Pills

Come on! It’s a beautiful thing.

A growing number of people are wising up to a problem I’ve been concerned about for a long time blog. That being low fertility rates among American and European women. Nihilistic feminists and other leftists have done an astoundingly good job in convincing the western world’s women that their most fundamental function, and what until recently was her first or second most desired status, is something to be avoided at all costs: child-bearing and motherhood.

It has been well-reported that virtually every nation in the western world and japan now have fertility rats below the replacement rate. Some far, far below. America is in better shape than most the industrialized world because our fertility rate is high enough that our population still grows, although the rate among natives is below the replacement rate. Europe on the other hand is voluntarily committing demographic suicide with fertility rates as low as 1.1 children per woman of childbearing age. A rate of 2.1 is necessary just to hold a population steady.

Europeans who scoff at the idea of having 2 or 3 children, believing they are too much of a burden, might very well find themselves tending 5 or 6 elderly relatives instead of their one child because there is no other way to do it. If this is the fate they choose for themselves, so be it. I hope it works for them and their soon-to-be masters.

I’m not much on the concept of duty because it implies some degree of forced compliance. However, for those that do believe in it, at some point having children becomes a civic responsibility. The situation also calls for a significant bump in our fertility rate. Not only for economic and security reasons, but also to keep our native culture from being swamped.

Personally, I have a hard time wrapping my head around this problem. I always wanted a large family. As fate would have it I only had two; a boy born in 1978 and a girl born in 1998. My new wife is quite a bit younger than me and wants children of her own so that might change. We are also looking to adopt some children. When other people hear about this they virtually gasp in shock. I don’t care though, I’ve had a child in my house since I was 18 years-old. I’m a family kind of guy and wouldn’t want it any other way.

What I do care about is that people like me can’t do it all on our own. I’ve always been kind of disgusted by who has kids and who doesn’t. People who should be having a dozen kids have one, or none. People who should be having maybe one or two have anywhere from 4 to 12. My first wife was the 13th child of 13 children. Now that I’m older and wiser I realize that Natalie (my ex-mother-in-law) should have been spayed back in the 1940s. But I digress.

My point is that, as a people, we should probably chuck the birth control pills into the drawer for at least 10 years or so. Native-born and well-assimilated legal immigrant couples have a lot of work to do if we don’t want to wind up like Europe and be the colony of some former colony.

Stop Giving Political Parties and Movements Adjectives for Names

Just exactly what is this conservative vs. liberal thing? This is a harder question than it may seem at first glance because, like so many things in life, meanings of words and phrases aren’t static. Tell someone today that another person is a conservative and he will mostly likely be able to tell you many things about that person’s political, religious, and moral philosophy, maybe even about that person’s taste in literature and entertainment. The same can be said for describing someone as a liberal.

The problem comes when you examine history and learn about how those people viewed themselves. You’re confronted with the realization that what is meant by those two terms has flipped to a great extent. Today’s liberal just might be yesterday’s conservative and vice versa. I think that to understand what’s going on you have to look at what the words meant as adjectives before they were transformed into nouns.

Taking a quick look at the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary I find the following definitions (among a few others) for the word liberal: marked by generosity: openhanded: given or provided in a generous and openhanded way: ample: not literal or strict: broad-minded: not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms. Reading this people might say “This is liberalism? Then where do I sign up?” I know that’s what I would think.

Conversely, conservative is defined this way: tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions: traditional: marked by moderation or caution: marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners. This could be either good or bad depending on your perspective but it doesn’t sound too exciting, even to me.

A strange thing, however happens if we look at what the word liberalism traditionally has meant: a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity: a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties. If that sound familiar, there’s a good reason. It pretty much sums up the definition of modern day conservative belief and practice.

So how do we reconcile this apparent contradiction? The answer is both easy and hard. You have to interpret the terms in their historical context. In simpler terms you have to judge by what was meant when the words were originally spoken, not by what they might mean now in the political correct intellectual vacuum or our day. My own shorthand definitions are as follows: a liberal wants to change things; a conservative wants to preserve things. When times change but our terminology doesn’t, the terms swap meanings. So yesterday’s liberalism is today’s conservatism.

he creation of our country was the last dying gasp of the Enlightenment. The beliefs held by our founding fathers and most of the intellectuals of the time are sometimes referred to as classical liberalism to differentiate from modern liberalism, which is a very different creature. So if liberals want change and these guys were old-school liberals what change did they want? They wanted to live in a republic instead of a kingdom, democratic (small d) rule instead of absolute monarchy, reason instead of mindless emotion, free will instead of religious coercion. The list goes on. At the time, this wasn’t just change, it was radical change.

Many of these fine folks assumed that the United States would remain an agrarian nation, filled with gentleman farmers and the occasional craftsman. But latter day liberals wanted to change that established order and do something innovative. They wanted to massively industrialize the nation and secure the blessings of capitalism, so to speak. To the modern mind, this sounds an awful lot like one of those rascally conservatives.

Over time these radical changes became the established way of doing things. In effect, they became the new old-school. So when the anti-industrial, anti-capitalism backlash came it came along with a new flavor of liberal, that of a different group of people who wanted change. After a long and valiant struggle for their cause they prevailed. These folks reigned supreme in the United States from the Red Decade, the 1930s, to the 1990’s. The people that labored for so long to sweep away the establishment had become the new establishment. Unfortunately for them, they never noticed the change.

So what happened? Once this particular breed of liberals got many of their policies in place they wanted to preserve what they had accomplished; wanting to keep things as they were naturally made them the new conservatives in practice even if not in name. For some reason, I’m guessing force of habit, we continue to call these folks liberals. Meanwhile, conservatives wandered like a metaphorical Moses in the political desert for decades. When some effective leadership finally surfaced, we began to agitate for what? Change of course, which made us de facto liberals (classical ones anyway) but we continued to be known as conservatives. It is my view that both factions are currently mislabeled with a name that is more applicable to the other, at least for now.

We conservatives, as we are currently known, have seen some glorious things happen. I was always confident that someday the Left would be beaten back and cooler heads prevail, but I never expected to see so much change so fast, especially not in my lifetime. The victories are made all the sweeter by watching our rivals implode before our very eyes. Amazingly, their response to defeat has been to press the self-destruct button even harder.

It will undoubtedly be many years before the members of the Liberal Orthodox religion can wrap their heads around the consequences of their failure to adapt. These tragic souls continue to mistake the problem for the solution, much like public education. This blindness gives us a great opportunity to advance our cause but it won’t last forever. Eventually, the current liberal leadership will fade away and will be replaced with younger, more vibrant, thoroughly frustrated, and unbelievably motivated people. They will once again be liberals in essence as well as in name. By the time this happens, we will likely have achieved many or most of our goals and want to keep it that way. We will be true conservatives again. It is imperative that we not get complacent. Modern liberalism has great allure for most young people and the less experience and maturity a person has the appeal of liberalism is that much greater. We must remain active, engaged, and involved if our present good fortune is to continue.