Black Education Tragedy is New - Walter E. Williams

 If you believe that the atrocious inner city educations that many black Americans receive today is due to the legacy of black slavery or due to systemic racial discrimination, then how do you explain the much greater success of inner city black schools of the past compared to today's government holding pens for blacks?  Read Prof. Walter E. Williams article Black Education Tragedy is New and gain a more rational perspective.

Public School Monopoly Favored by Obama over Education

I have long opposed the government monopoly on our school system and education.  There is only a path to less and less freedom so long as this monopoly control continues.  It is the greatest of all impediments to the protection of individual rights in the USA.  The government will always use the schools as a propaganda tool to gain more and more power for itself at the expense of our liberties.  Children are rarely capable of teaching themselves how to think critically and independently enough to overcome the onslaught of highly biased Progressivist attacks on the private sector as the government is held up as the cure to all problems.

Not only are they devoured as individuals by a biased view of history, economics, and of society, but they are all too often left even more defenseless by schools that deliver them into adulthood unable to read, write, and perform basic math skills.  These government-run and controlled schools are making adult dependents, which really means they are producing people who will always be children.

Daniel Mitchell has written a very good article on the Obama administration backing of public teachers unions at the clear expense of the education of mostly black and totally poor students in the Louisiana voucher program.  Louisiana is a state particularly cursed with a long tradition of awful public schools.  Obama wants to prevent the reform of these terrible schools simply to keep the backing of the powerful public teachers unions.

Dan also gives some interesting links to articles by the always great Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, as well as to articles on how Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands are using vouchers to reform their school systems.

Daniel Mitchell is an economist and commentator well-worth the read.  He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a very good man.

Sowell: Dismantling America

Thomas Sowell has written another excellent Opinion Editorial entitled "Dismantling America" in which he discusses the fact that our Constitution has always been seen as a terrible obstacle by those elitists seeking power over the People.  In particular, he notes that the Progressives in America have been at war with it openly and that President Wilson was the first President to openly attack it.  Progressive Teddy Roosevelt also attacked it by saying that he would do whatever he felt was necessary as long as the Constitution did not tell him he could not do what he intended to do.  See p.4 of Bully Boy by Jim Powell, where he quotes from Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography, published in 1913.  This is also an attack, because the Constitution says that the government and President can only exercise a few enumerated powers and makes no comprehensive effort to tell them what they cannot do in other terms.  Teddy Roosevelt's statement is a clear attempt to circumvent the restrictions of the Constitution on his power.  While he attacked the Constitution as President prior to Wilson, I do not know how publicly he did this while still President, so Sowell may be correct in his statement.  The Progressives have steadily eroded the interpretations of the Constitution ever since those earlier days and redefined words and read the white space between lines in a mad effort to circumvent it ever since.  There is now a huge body of legal precedent for doing just that.

Here are my further comments on his commentary from the Atlasphere website:

Ben Franklin clearly recognized that the American People had to believe in and understand the Constitution if the limited government republic it set up were to continue to exist. The failures attributed by some to our Constitution are actually failures of the American People to understand and support the Constitution. With due diligence, our Constitution would be strong to this day. That diligence required that each and every generation of Americans should have been educated in our colonial, revolutionary, and later history, as well as having an appreciation for the failures of monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies, and, yes, democracies throughout human history.

Allowing the Progressives to turn us from private education to public education give them all the long-term advantages in the fight to maintain legitimate government as defined in our Declaration of Independence. Legitimate government protects the equal, sovereign right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All the implied rights should have been discussed endlessly in our schools and they almost never are discussed beyond the First Amendment.

The fact that Congress has only a few powers closely delineated and most of them relate to dealings with external countries and people is not taught. These powers are further restricted by the requirement that they be exercised only in accordance with the General Welfare. The power to tax is given only to carry out the enumerated powers and is further restricted in kind. The interstate commerce clause's purpose was to free interstate trade because a man in one state has a right to trade with a man in another state. The Ninth Amendment recognizes that the federal government cannot infringe upon our many individual rights or privileges and immunities. The Tenth Amendment further protects our right to local government for such other purposes of government as we may have need. The Fourteenth Amendment protects our privileges and immunities from infringement by state and local governments. All this could have been taught in the schools, but we gave the schools away to the Progressives and to the governments from which we need protection. Government-run schools have a serious conflict-of-interest. They will distort the Constitution in order to give government the power that governments always lust for.

The crucial issue of our day is the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights. This cannot be achieved without the private education of American children with a greatly renewed interest in history and the principles of legitimate government.

Thomas Sowell on AGW and Science

The wise and astute Thomas Sowell has had a few words to say on the subject of the global warming hysteria in a recent commentary.

There are a number of comments of interest in his piece, but I especially like these:

People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few-- like themselves-- can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.

The Convenience of Not Thinking in Politics

Thomas Sowell, in Applied Economics, points out that people generally think only about the immediate intended result of any political issue they think about. When thinking that it would be nice if there were less violence, it seems so easy to wish that the elimination of gun ownership will eliminate violence. The fact that criminals will still acquire guns, while law-abiding citizens will be the ones disarmed, does not come to mind unless one takes the thought process a step further. Certainly thinking about the studies that show that there is more violence and that more homes are robbed when occupied when gun ownership is limited to the criminals, is still another step down the road of thought that is not followed.

Here in Maryland, the electric utilities have not been allowed to charge residential home owners enough for their power that the electric utilities could properly maintain and modernize their power distribution systems. In the BG&E area, residential owners were paying one-third less for power than were commercial users. In effect, commercial users were subsidizing the residential power users, since their additional payments were providing a disproportionate share of the power system maintenance costs and for the upgrades to the system. These commercial users were getting only a portion of the benefits in reliable power that they should have been getting. There is a very unreliable transformer near my laboratory which has long needed to be replaced and it has not been. This is likely a direct result of the residential home power subsidy. In addition to the many power failures experienced at my lab, we have nightly brown-outs, which I suspect are due to BG&E intentionally reducing the line voltage in the middle of the night in a desperate attempt to reduce their operational costs a bit. This may not affect many residential users of power, but my laboratory often runs experiments through the night. These brown-outs only rarely kill the computers, but they add to uncertainty about the quality of some of the data acquired by our spectrometers. Of course, those businesses which place a premium value on reliable power do not have as many concerned voters on their side as does the side which wishes for lower home power costs. It is simply assumed that we commercial users will be able to continue to provide jobs whether we have reliable power or not. It is not rocket science to understand what the effects of state power commission interference in rational power rates will be, but most of the voters will not allow themselves to think past the idea that it would be nice if the state government arranged for their power costs to be lower.

I talked to my mother tonight and she remarked that many of her elderly friends refuse to think about the effects of social programs such as Medicare, Social Security, and further proposed socialized medicine schemes. My Mom points out that medical care will suffer and that the costs of Medicare are too high because it is in no one's immediate interest to control costs. My Mom has often questioned why she or my Dad were charged so much for a procedure, a doctor walking through and asking "How are you?", or the cost of a medical product. The reply is usually, "Why do you care? You are not paying for it." Commonly, this response is an angry one. She asks her elderly friends why they do not care that the programs they want come at the expense of higher taxes on their children and grandchildren. They respond that that is depressing to think about, so why think about it? It seems to me that this is a clear case of parental and grandparental abuse of children and grandchildren, but it is apparently widely accepted practice. The AARP institutionalizes it and works mightily to lobby for this abuse. For this reason, I immediately throw away their invitations to join their organization. I love my three daughters and my nieces and nephews. I do not want to smother their life options in oppressive taxes. I will not join AARP in their crusade of intergenerational warfare. But most elderly people apparently do. They are only too happy to hurt their children. It is good not to think about this painful consequence of thinking only about their immediate convenience.

In the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC such as Montgomery County and Howard County, about half of each county has been set aside to remain farmland or to be developed in 3 acre lots. The cost of land is so great in these counties that hardly anyone can afford to buy 3 acres and put a home on them. These land-use restrictions are intended to provide plenty of open green areas. This is the wished for result and it works. This is the claimed sole intent. However, a great many of the voters have an ulterior motive. Their monetary stake in their homes is great, so they do think a bit further down the road on this issue. They are generally very aware that they are choosing a course of action here which will drive up the cost of housing in their area and increase the value of their home in particular. On this kind of political issue they have an incentive to think about the consequences of their green area restrictions and they like the result. Yes, given a money incentive, people will think about what they are doing politically, at least a bit further down the road. But, do they admit that this is the real reason they are so green? No, never. They are very happy to pull the mantle of being an environmentally friendly good guy over their shoulders. But, that is not their primary reason for wanting land-use restrictions. The primary reason is to make housing more expensive. There is little remorse that this hurts others.

So, what do the politicians think of these usually unthinking voters? That it is very easy to present ideas for legislation which have wished for intentions. This legislation always gives the politicians more power. It improves their chances of re-election. By the time the problems come home to roost, they will be in a higher office or already retired from politics. If they serve in the US House of Representatives or the Senate, they will be enjoying a retirement with more than $1,000,000 a year income from a Fedeal government pension and further income for lobbying. Far from wishing to provide leadership in the quest for good government, our politicians see only gravy in the micro-thoughts of their electors. They are intelligent enough to manipulate the voters into giving them power, but never intelligent enough to think about the consequences of their actions on future generations of Americans. You see, they do their own wishing. They wish for power and a conscience free of concern for the ill they have done the country. In my correspondence with Maryland Senators and Representatives, I have found them all to be simple-minded in their espoused thinking, but very nimble in manipulating the voters. They are clearly practiced at selective thinking. They specialize in only that thought directed at being re-elected and increasing their own power over others.