The Audacity of Arrogance

From the mountains to the valleys, from sea to shining sea, from Oprah to Bill Maher, America is going crazy with excitement over Barack Obama. At Obama rallies people scream and throw themselves in the isle crying. Commentator Arianna Huffington has called Obama “the foundation of our country.” Obama’s appeal doesn’t end at the border, over 70% of French are “very excited” about Obama’s election.

This excitement is terrifying, or at least it should be. It reinforces myth propagated by the American media and political elite: an assumption that all progress comes from Washington. The love struck Boston Globe now urges Obama to take "bold steps to fix our economic crisis." The New York Times suggests the choice is "between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach .... " In other words, the choice is between one type of government mandate versus another government mandate. In the same editorial, the Times crows endlessly about how FDR ended the Depression and Obama will do the same.

Now Obama tells the nation, "we don't have a moment to lose," and he and the Democrats insist that government must support trade unions while destroying the worker’s right to a secret ballot and even more tax money needs to be handed out like candy to American industries.

This idea that politicians know best how our money should be spent is arrogance of the highest order. Only within Washington’s cloistered halls could this ideology ferment.

Obama promise "We will change the world ... There is nothing we can't do, nothing we can't accomplish if we are unified". Who is this "we" politicians always invoke?

It certainly isn’t me.

The politicians’ "we" isn't really a group of people. It means big government. The politician’s “we” will take your money by force (because they know best) and tell you what to do and how to do and how long you can do it for. That's no way to create prosperity.

Obama is an extraordinarily talented man. But there is one thing even “the one” can't successfully do: ignore the laws of economics. No one can do that. That's why we call them "laws."

The politicians cannot raise wages or create jobs or eliminate poverty by executive order. We can do so by freeing people to save and invest and accumulate capital. The politicians can't make medical care universal and inexpensive by legislative fiat, and we certainly cannot do it with a single-payer health care system. But we can approach that goal by permitting an unrestricted free market in medicine to work.

Stupid Schools: Public Education is Failing our Children

With a perverse wedding of an entrenched union and an innovation-killing monopoly, American public education is a marriage made in hell. This is why our public education system is failing students all across our nation. The two greatest problems facing our educational leviathan are a payment plan which rewards mediocrity while prohibiting meritocracy, and an outdated, one-size-fits-all educational philosophy which fails to prepare American students for the modern world. The best solution to these problems is an end to the government monopoly on public education.

In town meetings, NEA rallies, and school newsletters across our nation, a dire fallacy is being promoted: the great lie that our public school systems are under funded. This simply isn’t true. In 2004 over 536 billion dollars was spent on public education, a figure far more than in countries which routinely trump America on international tests. With an average national wage of $30.91 an hour, public school teachers make a higher hourly salary than chemists, computer programmers, and nurses. The problems lies not in funding, but in a Byzantine union system and the incredibly illogical salary formulas which it has created. Membership in the American Federation of Teachers is mandatory for almost all public school educators. This organization and its hired lobbyists have created a payment system where teachers are paid not based on results, but simply on the amount of time they’ve been teaching. Motivation for excellence is nonexistent when it is not rewarded. In private industry, salaries are based on results and workers who cannot perform are terminated. Results aren’t taken into account in education. a free-market, good teachers would receive a salary increase. If parents had school choice, they would demand the most skilled teacher for their student. Demand for the good teachers would increase their salaries. In the government monopoly though, teachers are paid the same amount whether they are excellent or dreadful. Onerous procedures turn firing an incompetent teacher into a two year legal battle. This leaves most principals unwilling to try to discipline even the most flagrantly maladroit of educators. Mediocrity is rewarded simply because excellence is ignored. A system which disregards merit to pay equally has been proven to fail again and again. This system is called communism.

Monopolies don’t innovate, and the public school system is no different. Most public school’s start in September and end in June. This is a relic of America’s agrarian roots. In the early 1800s, children needed the summer off to harvest the crops. Very few Americans are farmers, and many nations have year-round schooling. American public schools however have remained impervious to change, with the obsolete and outdated schedule dominating. With this resistance to change, it’s no surprise that public education is failing our students.

Picture the printer aisle at Best Buy. The consumer has an almost infinite number of choices. Printers with scanners, printers with clocks, wireless printers, printers with forty-eight hour batteries, and many other kinds of printers are all available. Best Buy doesn’t offer these myriad options because it likes the consumer. Best Buy offers choices because it needs the consumer’s money. The miracle of competition offers a multitude of choices in almost every aspect of life. From shopping at the supermarket to buying a new automobile, choice is all around the American consumer. This is a miracle unknown in the government monopoly of public schooling, where enrollment in schools is based on an arbitrary district line. With the stroke of a pen, bureaucrats can doom a child to a failing school or deign to send him to a better school. If parents are unsatisfied with the school, it’s their problem. If the school is terrible, and fails to provide an education, the government’s attitude is simply arrogant disinterest. With this system, it is no wonder American students finish in the bottom fifty percent in international math surveys.

From Microsoft Windows, to VEB Sachsenring, to the defunct Ma Bell, monopolies have proven time and time again to fail their customers. Public schooling is no different. While it’s true that parents do have an effect on their student’s educational success, many good parents are being forced to send their children to failing schools. When the government monopoly on public education is broken, parents will have as much choice in their schools as they do in their printers. The best way to give them this choice while maintaining education for all is a voucher system. Vouchers will attach the money to the student rather than the school and give parents choice. With vouchers, private schools would no longer be the domain of the wealthy. There could be schools with uniforms, schools with nontraditional hours, technology schools, schools that graduate students at sixteen and alternate high schools that cater to troubled students. With choice will come student success, because a free-choice public school system will force schools to perform, or lose money. Rather than being stuck in a failing school district, parents with school choice can take their business elsewhere.

America has not always suffered under a public school monopoly. Only in the 1830s did a campaign for centralized, socialistic public education begin. Horace Mann thought that education would eradicate poverty and establish a virtual utopia. He claimed that with public education “over nine-tenths of the penal code will be antiquated.“ These impossible dreams were not realized, and sugarplum delusions of perfection became stood in the way of realistic achievement. Americans only believe in this failed educational system because they know no better. Imagine if the government forced people to get their food the same way students get educated. People would pay heavy taxes and then be assigned to one restaurant where they’d be forced to eat every meal no better how abysmal the food is. This wouldn’t be tolerated, and neither should the monopolistic and socialized public school system.

Bankrupcy isn't just for companies anymore.

The mayor of Vallejo, Osby Davis, recently told reporters, "If you have a can that's leaking two ounces a minute and you put an ounce a minute in it, it's going to get empty." He is describing his city's coffers. Vallejo is an American city which has declared bankrupcy. Vallejo's financial crisis is a cash flow insufficient to cover contractual obligations. This fiscal nightmare came about because (to use figures from the 2007 fiscal year) each of the 100 firemen paid $230 a month in union dues and each of the 140 police officers paid $254 a month, giving their respective unions enormous sums to purchase a compliant City Council.

So a police captain receives $306,000 a year in pay and benefits, a police lieutenant receives $247,644, and the average for firefighters -- 21 of them earn more than $200,000, including overtime -- is $171,000. Furthermore, police and firefighters can store up unused vacation and leave time over their careers and walk away, as one of the more than 20 who recently retired did, with a $370,000 check. Last year, 292 city employees made more than $100,000. And after just five years, all police and firefighters are guaranteed lifetime health benefits.

These salaries are bizzare, and only serve as another example of business which doesn't have to compete in the free market. Nothing breeds laziness and kills innovation faster then monopolies and strong unions. Public employees have both of these.

Even the City Council has at last faced facts and voted 7-0 for bankruptcy. "The day after they voted," Davis says, "I didn't go out of the house -- I was that embarrassed."

In other states, municipalities can pay for improvident labor contracts by increasing property taxes. But Vallejo's promises were made in the context of Proposition 13, which 30 years ago wisely restricted California politicians' reach for property taxes. In 1996, the Navy base in Vallejo closed, which probably pleased some local liberals who share the anti-military mentality of San Francisco, to which some Vallejo residents commute by ferry. Liberals who, Tanner says dryly, "want Vallejo to look a certain way," were pleased when Wal-Mart moved to an adjacent town, which now reaps the sales tax revenues.

Vallejo is an ominous portent for other cities, and some states, few of which are accumulating financial resources sufficient to fulfill pension promises they have made to their employees. Are you weary of worrying about the crisis du jour -- subprime mortgages and all that? This coming storm is described with aplom and intelligence in Roger Lowenstein's magnificent new book, "While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis."

It has arrived in Jefferson County, Ala., which includes Birmingham. Like Orange County, Calif., a few years ago, Jefferson County made risky investments in a desperate attempt to achieve a growth of assets commensurate with the cost of an infrastructure project. When San Diego was in the process of earning the sobriquet "Enron by the sea," firemen could retire at 50 with 90 percent of their pensions -- almost full pay for not working during half of their expected adult lives.

The Washingtom Post has said that state and local governments have a cumulative $1.5 trillion shortfall in commitments for retiree health care. But it is the pension crisis that most dramatically illustrates Lowenstein's thesis about the slow accretion of power by the unions. Pensions "are a perfect vehicle for procrastination; in the financial world, they are the most long-enduring promises that exist." Human nature -- the propensity to delay the unpleasant -- rears its ugly head: When pension benefits come due, the people who promised them, thereby buying labor peace and winning elections, are long gone.

Vallejo's unions contend that the city is solvent enough to meet its obligations. But last Friday a court disagreed, holding that the city is eligible for bankruptcy protection. A lawyer for Vallejo says the unions will have to negotiate a "plan of adjustment." Other cities are watching, perhaps including the one across the bay.

San Francisco recently reported that 184 of its employees made at least $30,000 apiece in overtime in the first half of this year. A nurse at the county jail made $128,000 in overtime, putting him on track to top his total 2007 compensation of about $350,000. Nice work it you can get it, and you can get it in many places ruled not by the marketplace, but by inept city officials.

What was he thinking?

Themost audacious move of the race so far is also one of the dumbest. It ranks right up there with Joe Biden's "clean-cut" comment and Fred Thompson's entire campaign. John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate has set the political atmosphere alight with both enthusiasm and dismay.

McCain has based his campaign (correctly) on the idea that this is a dangerous world—and that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to deal with it. He has also acknowledged that his advanced age—he celebrated his 72nd birthday on August 29th—makes his choice of vice-president unusually important. Now he has chosen as his running mate, on the basis of the most cursory vetting, a first-term governor of Alaska.

The reaction from inside the conservative cocoon was at first ecstatic. Conservatives argued that Mrs Palin embodies the “real America”—a moose-hunting hockey mum, married to an oil-worker, who has risen from the local parent-teacher association to governing the geographically largest state in the Union. They praise her as a McCain-style reformer who has taken on her state’s Republican establishment and has a staunch pro-life record (her fifth child has Down’s syndrome). Who better to harpoon the baby-murdering elitists who run the Democratic Party?
Mrs Palin was greeted like the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan by the delegates, furious at her mauling at the hands of the “liberal media”. And she delivered a tub-thumping speech, underlining her record as a reforming governor and advocate of more oil-drilling, and warning her enemies not to underestimate her (“the difference between a hockey mum and a pitbull—lipstick”). But once the cheering and the chanting had died down, serious questions remained.
The political calculations behind Mr McCain’s choice hardly look robust. Mrs Palin is not quite the pork-busting reformer that her supporters claim. She may have become famous as the governor who finally killed the infamous “bridge to nowhere”—the $220m bridge to the sparsely inhabited island of Gravina, Alaska. But she was in favour of the bridge before she was against it (and told local residents that they weren’t “nowhere to her”). As mayor of Wasilla, a metropolis of 9,000 people, she initiated annual trips to Washington, DC, to ask for more earmarks from the state’s congressional delegation, and employed Washington lobbyists to press for more funds for her town.

Nor is Mrs Palin well placed to win over the moderate and independent voters who hold the keys to the White House. Mr McCain’s main political problem is not energising his base; he enjoys more support among Republicans than Mr Obama does among Democrats. His problem is reaching out to swing voters at a time when the number of self-identified Republicans is up to ten points lower than the number of self-identified Democrats. Mr McCain needs to attract roughly 55% of independents and 15% of Democrats to win the election. But it is hard to see how a woman who supports the teaching of creationism rather than contraception, and who is soon to become a 44-year-old grandmother, helps him with soccer moms in the Philadelphia suburbs. A Rasmussen poll found that the Palin pick made 31% of undecided voters less likely to plump for Mr McCain and only 6% more likely.

The moose in the room, of course, is her lack of experience. When Geraldine Ferraro was picked as Walter Mondale’s running-mate, she had served in the House for three terms. Even the hapless Dan Quayle, George Bush senior’s sidekick, had served in the House and Senate for 12 years. Mrs Palin, who has been the governor of a state with a population of 670,000 for less than two years, is the most inexperienced candidate for a mainstream party in modern history.
Inexperienced and Bush-level incurious. She has no record of interest in foreign policy, let alone expertise. She once told an Alaskan magazine: “I’ve been so focused on state government; I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.” She obtained an American passport only last summer to visit Alaskan troops in Germany and Kuwait. This not only blunts Mr McCain’s most powerful criticism of Mr Obama. It also raises serious questions about the way he makes decisions.

Mr McCain had met Mrs Palin only once, for a 15-minute chat at the National Governors’ Association meeting, before summoning her to his ranch for her final interview. The New York Times claims that his team arrived in Alaska only on August 28th, a day before the announcement. As a result, his advisers seem to have been gobsmacked by the Palin show that is now playing on the national stage. She has links to the wacky Alaska Independence Party, which wants to secede from the Union. She is on record disagreeing with Mr McCain on global warming, among other issues. The contrast with Mr Obama’s choice of the highly experienced and much-vetted Joe Biden is striking.
Mr McCain’s appointment also raises more general worries about the Republican Party’s fitness for government. Up until the middle of last week Mr McCain was still considering two other candidates whom he has known for decades: Joe Lieberman, a veteran senator, independent Democrat and Iraq war hawk, and Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania (a swing state with 21 Electoral College votes) and the first secretary of homeland security. Mr McCain reluctantly rejected both men because their pro-choice views are anathema to the Christian right.
The Palin appointment is yet more proof of the way that abortion still distorts American politics. This is as true on the left as on the right. But the Republicans seem to have gone furthest in subordinating considerations of competence and merit to pro-life purity. One of the biggest problems with the Bush administration is that it appointed so many incompetents because they were sound on Roe v Wade. Mrs Palin’s elevation suggests that, far from breaking with Mr Bush, Mr McCain is repeating his mistakes.

Left-Wing Nutjobs Celebrate Hurricane

Rotund propagandist Michael Moore said on television that Gustav is "God's wrath upon the dirty, evil Republicans," and seems to be wishing for as much death and destruction as possible in order to ruin the impact of the convention.

It isn't in a wacko like Michael Moore's DNA to understand that for most decent Americans, politics takes a back seat to the fear of lots of people dying gruesomely. Don't kid yourself: the deranged, debauched demagogue is hoping for a whopper of a storm, the bigger the better. The deadlier the dandier. They figure it will take a hurricane to make people forget about the stunningly brilliant vice-presidential pick.

But cheering for a hurricane to kill massive amounts of people isn’t just the purview of Moore. Caught on camera during a flight Democratic Party leader Donnie “Foul Fowler” Fowler giggles like a drunken sixteen year old girl who just found out her shirt is drenched with her own puke when he says to his fellow traveler that the hurricane is scheduled to hit right at the start of the Republican Convention.

Can you begin to fathom how pathetic one has to be to hope that a disaster helps erase some scored political points from the other side? Nothing like the image of helpless people being battered by a hurricane to make a good Democrat smile, I guess.
It was nice of Fowler to attempt a lame apology for being caught red-headed taking great pleasure and delight in the timing and potential severity of Gustav. But his apology is almost worse than what he said in the first place. In his pathetic “apology” he’s complaining about being recorded by a "right-wing nutcase", he pretends to suggest that he was making a "joke" about the late Rev. Jerry Falwell who said that 9/11 could have very well been an example of God's wrath. Does anyone believe this? The only nutcase in this situation is Fowler. See a truly bizarre human being right here.

Economic Ignorance is Far From Bliss

"I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators to find out whether speculation has been going on and, if so, how much it has affected the price of a barrel of oil. There's a lot of things out there that need a lot more transparency and, consequently, oversight."

Those are the shrill campaign promises of presidential candidate John McCain. This man is the Republican?

There's more.

"I am very angry, frankly, at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they've made but at their failure to invest in alternate energy to help us eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. They're making huge profits and that happens, but not to say, 'We're in this so we can over time eliminate America's dependence on foreign oil,' I think is an abrogation of their responsibilities as citizens."

Let me get this straight. A potential president of a putatively free country scolds companies for "obscene profits," failure to invest in competing products, and therefore irresponsible citizenship. Why? Is McCain running for national economic commissar?

This is not the first time McCain has displayed an anti-capitalist mentality. In an early presidential debate he countered former businessman Mitt Romney's claim to superior executive experience by saying, "I led the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy, not for profit but for patriotism".

Why the put down of profit?

It's clear McCain does not understand how markets work or why they are good. He certainly doesn't understand the role of speculators and other middlemen. He's not alone. Speculators are among the most reviled people in history. When they were members of ethnic minorities, they have been easy targets for economically illiterate people who were jealous of their success.
McCain wonders "whether speculation has been going on." He needn't wonder. Speculation always goes on. Speculation means to take a risk on what the future holds in hopes of making a profit. The world's stock and commodities markets are based on this principle. Sen. McCain must have meant it when he told reporters, "I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues".

I doubt that speculators are responsible for much of the run-up of oil prices. Why didn't they run them up sooner? Besides, there are too many other explanations: increased demand from China and India, the declining dollar and Middle East tensions.

Even if speculators did play a role, what McCain apparently doesn't understand is that speculators perform a valuable service. Most people don't realize this because on the surface speculators don't seem productive. They buy what already exists and resell it. How does that help society?

In fact, the hated speculator is a good guy because his buying and selling reduce volatility and uncertainty in an unpredictable world. He may only be out for his own profit, but that doesn't matter. As the intellectually immortal Adam Smith said, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest".

The prices of commodities often change unexpectedly, making business risky. The speculator brings a degree of certainty to otherwise risky ventures. When supplies of a commodity are plentiful and prices low -- but speculators expect the price to rise later -- they buy -- cushioning the collapse of prices. When supplies become scarcer and prices rise, they sell -- easing the shortage and lowering the price. Also, speculators may agree to buy a commodity in the future for a price locked in today. This reduces the risk for an oil producer or farmer who fears investing because he doesn't know what price his product will sell for next year.

As a result of these activities, volatile supplies and prices are evened out over time. Occasionally, speculators increase volatility. Markets are never perfect. (Although they are better than government regulation.) But in general, speculators increase liquidity and keep the market on a more even keel. This makes long-term planning easier for everyone.

It would be nice if McCain would finally learn some economics. He'll be far, far better than Barack Obama but McCain had better surround himself with economic advisers if he hopes to achieve anything like his so-called idol Ronald Reagan.

NEA: For education? Or for Communism?

The nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the July Fourth weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as "Gay marriage causes global warming only because we are so hot," "Hate is not a family value," "The Christian right is neither" and "Gay rights are civil rights."

The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA's official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols.

NEA resolutions cover the waterfront of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a "single-payer health care plan" (i.e., government run), gun control, ratification of the International Criminal Court Treaty and taking steps "to change activities that contribute to global climate change."

The NEA fiercely opposes any competition for public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental option plans or public support of any kind to nonpublic schools. The NEA strongly opposes designating English as our official language even though such a designation is supported by more than 80% of Americans.

The NEA opposes home schooling unless children are taught by state-licensed teachers using a state-approved curriculum. The NEA wants to bar home-schooled students from participating in any extracurricular activities in public schools even though their parents pay school taxes, too.

The NEA wants additional (job-creating) services and programs — such as early childhood education — provided by public schools. NEA resolutions call for "programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8" and for "mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance."

NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as "the right to reproductive freedom" (i.e., abortion on demand), "comparable worth" (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology), full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women's Educational Equity Act and censoring all masculine words such as husband and father. The NEA even urges its affiliates to work for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years ago.

The influence of the gay lobby is pervasive in dozens of NEA resolutions adopted by 2008 convention delegates. Diversity is the code word used for pro-gay indoctrination in the classroom.

The NEA's diversity resolution makes clear this means teaching about "sexual orientation" and "gender identification." The NEA demands that "diversity-based curricula" be imposed on preschoolers.

NEA convention delegates were invited to an open hearing by the SOGI Committee. In case you don't know, SOGI stands for sexual orientation gender identification.

The NEA urges its members to offer "diverse role models" via the "hiring and promotion of diverse education employees in our public schools." The NEA puts "domestic partnerships, civil unions and marriage" on an equal footing.

The NEA wants every child, regardless of age, to have "direct and confidential access, without notification to parents, to comprehensive health education. That would include things such as learning how to use condoms for premarital sex, as well as social, and psychological programs and services."

The NEA wants public schools to take over the physical and mental care of students through school clinics that provide services, diagnosis, treatment, family-planning counseling and access to birth control methods. Family planning clinics are called on to "provide intensive counseling."

The NEA wants all sex-education courses, textbooks, curricula, instructional materials and activities to include indoctrination about sexual orientation and gender identification plus warnings about homophobia.

The NEA not only favors amnesty for illegal-immigrant students, but also in-state college tuition and financial aid to illegal-immigrant college students.

The NEA is strong for "multicultural education," which means "the process of incorporating the values" and influencing "behavior" toward the NEA's version of "the common good," such as "reducing homophobia."

Of course, the NEA supports "global education" to teach "interdependency in sharing the world's resources." It's also no surprise that it opposes any requirement that schools "schedule a moment of silence."

These platforms sound like they should coming from the ALCU or the DailyKos, not the organization that speaks for the nation's public school teachers. How can education attempt to be objective and unbiased when the NEA is spouting off garbarge like this?