Nationalizing the Student Body

In the same gargantuan bill that established ObamaCare, the federal government once again used the fascist socialist model of gaining control by effectively nationalizing college students.  They did this by putting all student loans under a government monopoly.  The theory is the time-honored one of:  "He who controls the money, controls everything."  Of course in the short-run, this just means that whereas a student could approach many private lenders, he can now approach only one lender, the federal government.  That lender will even allow him not to pay back the loan, if the student takes a government job after graduating.  This reveals the government's bias against the private sector, which is merely tasked with the need to be productive enough that the government can suck enough of private sector blood to continue on happily in its bloated growth.

Why did this nationalization of student loans wind up in the ObamaCare bill?  Of course, in part just because Obama can usually count on the young who have been indoctrinated in the socialist viewpoint throughout a public school education and then again in college and he believes in making his followers believe they have been rewarded.  He knew ObamaCare was unpopular and wanted to be sure it would be popular with his loyal base of young people.  But, perhaps it was also in the bill due to simple logic.  ObamaCare nationalizes the bodies of every American by making all Americans dependent upon the federal government for all of their medical care.  The government monopoly of student loans, in the face of extremely high college costs, nationalizes the student body of every college in America.  So, the common issue of the bill was the nationalization of bodies, both student bodies and everyone else's as well.

The first great goal of socialists in America was to nationalize education.  The major American socialists of the 1800s and early 1900s worked very hard to have the government take over education in America.  Then, they worked very hard to enlarge school districts so that very few of the student's parents were on the school boards or would know the people personally who were on them.  The socialists wanted the controlling school boards to be distant from the parents, because the parents were not a good influence on their children, since most parents were not socialists.  The purpose of the schools was to engineer the students into socialists.  It was to design their behavior, direct their emotions, and to fully indoctrinate the students in socialism.  As the government-run schools escaped the effective control of the parents, this plan could be implemented more and more fully.  One of the most important further requirements was that the professional commitment to teaching children to think for themselves on the part of true educators had to be broken.  This was done with the unionization of teachers, which had the added advantage that union leaderships were full of socialists.

The need to put as many scientists as possible into the war effort in WWII, started the heavy funding of research for scientists at universities and colleges which continues to this day.  Along the way, other academics drooled with envy at the funding the scientists were getting.  The government realized that it had gained advantages by winning over the allegiance of many scientists to the idea of a growing federal government by controlling their funding for research.  The government had long exceeded its powers as granted by the Constitution, so it would be a disaster if the learned academics in colleges and universities were to start calling the government on this usurpation of power.  So, it became very clear that it would be wise for the government to provide taxpayer money to researchers in disciplines such as economics, history, sociology, psychology, and other fields to get them on board with an ever-growing government.  This would happen because these academics would want more and more money and a government would have to be growing and taking more and more in taxes to give it to them.  Besides, those researchers who did not praise big government, could be cut off from research funding.  Academics, not normally known for their bravery, could be mostly counted upon to toe the line.  They have done so.

Am I being unfair in saying that academics are not normally brave?  I do not think so.  First, the current crop of academics has among its older members the Baby Boomers.  This is my generation.  I know something about them.  They protested the Vietnam War when they were in college.  Now, there were valid reasons for protesting the use of the draft in the Vietnam War, but they rarely did so for the right reasons.  Most college students were really, really frightened at the prospect of going to Vietnam.  So much so, that they jumped right on board with the flimsy and false arguments of the organized socialists who were the organizers of almost all of the college protests of the day.  Unusually large numbers of this generation hated private enterprise as part of the so-called military-industrial complex.  These fearful people also felt an aversion to the risks of the free enterprise system.  This in turn, drew them into the belief that there was something wrong with the profit motive, so they could claim that they were averse to Capitalism for moral reasons, rather than fear.  Soon, they were largely inclined to sneer at anything to do with the private sector and sing their own praise as being more nobly engaged in the education of young people and to sing the praises of government leaders as well, provided they were not in the Defense Department.  This group, due to its size and the rapid growth of colleges in that era, soon was able to determine which other faculty were hired and then which would be granted tenure.  Almost every department on almost every campus was soon full of liberals and only the socialist viewpoint was ever to be heard.  This proved to be of immense value to the growth of governments in America.

Further evidence of cowardice is the insistence of college faculties in silencing any real dissention on campuses.  Brave academics would welcome debate, but today's academics try to shut it down and when challenged to debate, they most generally refuse to do so.  They have even developed extensive speech codes to limit debate by anointing politically correct speech.  A very blatant example of their cowardice was the very widespread acceptance on almost every American campus of the government-accepted theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  This has long been a hypothesis of at least dubious standing and for several years now has been clearly wrong.  Any good scientist reviewing the evidence, whether a climate scientist by profession or not, can clearly see that its central theory that CO2 emissions by man have caused a uniquely large increase in temperature in the late 20th Century with catastrophic circumstances is wrong.  Where have the many academic scientists been who should have vociferously put this failed hypothesis to rest?  There has been hardly a peep from almost any college, but for the very occasional professor emeritus, who the socialist controlled universities had less power to intimidate.

Once the universities were well-controlled by these socialist faculty members, they could put pressure on the student bodies to become socialists in many ways.  First, the faculty only presented the socialist viewpoint at most colleges.  Second, it is much easier to agree with a teacher and regurgitate his line of thinking on exams and in assignments than it is to take off on your own as a student and present an opposing viewpoint.  Third, opposing viewpoints were and are usually graded more harshly.  Fourth, the egalitarianism of socialism resulted in huge inflation of grades so there was little in grades that could be used to distinguish students and this same grade inflation made it more risky not to agree and to be penalized with a lower grade.  Fifth, scholarships and awards are made to students who are good socialists and the criteria are blatantly socialist.  These awards are more important because there is no differentiation in grades.

Affirmative action provided the socialists and government still more power by forcing universities to take under-qualified students, who then were beholdened to government.  But, this still did not make the remainder of the student body sufficiently beholdened.  Meanwhile, the costs of colleges, fed by huge sums of federal research money and the huge increase in faculty salaries and benefits that came with that, kept rising very rapidly.  The colleges could not get these faculty members to teach classes without paying them enough to lure them away from their research efforts a few moments of each week.  Universities had generally become cost plus operations with little need to operate efficiently.  Besides, very many were run by governments and had all the customary efficiency of a government agency such as the DMV.  But, this put a huge strain on students and/or their families to pay the costs.  So, government-guaranteed loans from private banks came into being.  The next logical step in gaining complete control of the students was for the government to create the student loan monopoly, which it just did.

Now, almost every college student will be beholdened to government.  If any college graduate ever argues against socialism, the socialist opponent will yell "Hypocrite, did you not benefit from socialism by taking a student loan to graduate from college?"  What is more, the ready availability of student loans will reduce what little pressure there has been on the colleges to hold down expenses, so tuition and fees for students will continue to go up much faster than costs in the private sector.  This means that the government-run colleges and those private schools so beholdened to the government will become a larger and larger part of the drain on the hated private sector.  The fact that graduates will be able to have their student loans forgiven if they take a government job, will ensure that many graduates will clamber for more government jobs.  Why not?  The pay is twice that in the private sector, the benefits are out-of-this-world, and your huge student loan debts will be forgiven.  Who would go into the private sector under these conditions?  So, the college-educated elite who are supposed to direct the growth of socialism and the corresponding growth of government will be pushed all the more monolithically toward socialism and bigger and bigger government.

Do not kid yourself.  This is an absolutely insidious plan.  It fits perfectly well on the plane with the use of the health care insurance mandate to nationalize our bodies and make us dependent upon government for the very continuance of our lives, at least once we ever have a life-threatening disease or a cause of great pain.  The socialists' fascination with the control of education will be complete when they start using this monopoly on student loans as reason to assure that students are getting a good education with the money the government is committing.  Yes, the government will in time evaluate the colleges and universities the students are choosing and will deny those it does not like money by not loaning money to the students who would go there.  This will be the end of dissenting colleges and universities.  Then, the government will also exercise choice in which students to allow to have student loans.  Those who are not socialists and who view government with great distrust, will be weeded out.  This is a very powerful tool for a socialist federal government to develop as time goes on.  It will too.  It is inevitable.

Unless we kill this voracious monster and recreate the limited government of our Constitution whose purpose was to make the sole job of the federal government the protection of the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We must keep socialism from killing our very individuality and our individual rights.  We must start by repealing this particularly insidious ObamaCare and Student Loan Monopoly Bill.  And then, we must start dismantling the federal, state, and local government controls on the education of young Americans.  We have to eliminate their indoctrination as socialists, or this fight for our individual rights will have to be desperately fought with each generation and will eventually be lost.

The only savior will be a return to private education with professional educators, rather than blue collar unionists. These teachers must be committed to teaching Americans about our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution and why they fought for the American principle that each individual has an equal, sovereign, and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  They must teach about the real purpose of our Constitution.  They must be knowledgeable about how Capitalism allows every individual to exercise his individuality and how it has allowed an incredible richness of life for almost every American.  They must also be able to tell the sad story of the many failures of socialism, whether of communism or fascism, or any combination of the two.  Then, and only then, might we be able to concentrate on living our own lives without undue concern that the monster of tyrannical government will squash us once again.

A Government-Troubled Economy

Government is the problem, it is not the solution.

For some time the housing industry has been in trouble. What caused those problems? The cost of lumber has been high for a long time due to heavy world-wide demand for lumber as much of the world has latched onto America's coattails and been carried along into relative prosperity and development. This has led to great increases in the price of steel, concrete, and copper, among many other things. Nonetheless, the housing industry has not been in trouble in much of the U.S., despite these cost factors being universal. Why not? Because the principal reason for the housing crunch has been that many communities have limited housing development in the name of planned growth and in order to maintain undeveloped, green areas. In these areas, and a few areas where the federal government owns all of the available land and makes it unavailable, the cost of housing has simply become prohibitive for people to buy homes. When it is recommended that people commit to a purchase price for a home of no more than 2.5 times their annual family income, but the average home costs 8 times their family income as it does in California, one has a recipe for disaster for the housing industry and those who stretch reality to try to acquire a home anyway.

Such situations brought pressure to bear on Congress to make homes more affordable. Congress was largely of a mind to support local community and state restrictions on home building, but needed to appear to care about the desire of middle class and upper lower class families for a home of their own. After all, this is a very real part of the American Dream. So, Congress used the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to make mortgage loans to people who would not otherwise qualify for a loan. They used Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac to make it so the original mortgage loaners could unload their risky loans to others. They encouraged the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates down to help make home mortgages more affordable as well and what else was the Fed to do if it was to keep the housing industry afloat anyway? So, in consequence, we had not only a housing industry in trouble in those areas of the country with highly restrictive new housing development, but also many mortgage lenders, banks, government-sponsored corporations (Fanny and Freddy), and securities and investment firms in major trouble.

The auto industry has been sick for a very long time. For a long time, that industry has been under a huge burden laid on it by the United Auto Workers, which government rules for unionization and company actions when it has been unionized very much helped bring about. Of course, some other industries are also badly hurt by labor unions. Then the auto industry was further burdened with CAFE, which requires each auto company to make a set of vehicles whose average fuel efficiency is below a limit set by Congress. Basically, American companies really began losing out to the Japanese and other foreign car makers when this became the law of the land. We were used to cheap gasoline, and in comparative terms we still are. So, American companies never had as much incentive to make cars that were as highly fuel efficient as the foreign car makers. This was really what opened the door for the foreign car makers into the American market. For decades, American car makers have been forced to make money-losing small cars to meet the CAFE mandate. The tens of billions of dollars lost in this way had a multiplying effect upon the car makers to minimize innovation and the development new technology and quality manufacturing methods. Government destroyed the auto industry, with some help from bad management. Of course, when it is clear to good managers that government has it in for an industry, they steer clear of that industry. After all, the best managers are no dummies.

In addition, we have the highest corporate income taxes in the world, save those of Japan where they are equally high. This discourages American companies from bringing profits made abroad home. It encourages them to build more plants abroad and fewer at home. Most countries throughout the world have been reducing their corporate income taxes, but we have not and BO says that he will not do so in his administration. So, we raise the costs for American corporations and make it harder for them to export goods. Our policy is that they should export jobs and capital instead. Except the government pretends otherwise. The government lives in LA LA land. No, I am wrong. The government largely knows what it is doing. It thinks we life in LA LA land and will never catch on to the fraud they are putting over on us.

Then, as I have recently discussed, the government has monopolized a huge fraction of the land, especially in the West. As our population has grown and as we have used more of the resources available in our privately owned lands, these Western federally owned lands have become more and more valuable. Still, the government holds on to these lands and is constantly trying to remove more and more land from private ownership and productive use. This crimps the economy.

The government mandates for ethanol production have resulted in the misuse of much of our privately held and potentially productive farmland. There is no net energy produced by ethanol production and it simply causes less food to be produced and thereby raises our food prices. As more of our income goes to meeting our food needs, less goes to other industries and they start to hurt. American agriculture is the most productive in the world and will do well without ethanol subsidies. With these subsidies, we raise taxes for everyone, including the other industries who will only be hurt by diverting money to farmers and ethanol distillers.

The government has made it exceedingly difficult for companies to drill for oil in the U. S. and in our off-shore areas. They have made it hard to produce natural gas in many areas. They also make it hard to mine coal, use nuclear power, and frequently to deliver electric power, especially from coal-fired power plants.

Government has given over the education of our children to the teachers labor unions. These most socialist unions now pound American youth with socialist propaganda and teach them to hate making money (creating wealth) and industry. They also fail to teach them the skills they will need as productive employees, such as rational thinking skills.

So, governments have done great damage to our economy by damaging the housing industry, lenders and bankers, investors, the auto industry, other industries saddled with blood-sucking labor unions, the electric power companies, all corporations competing on a global basis, the oil and natural gas industries, the nuclear power industry, coal mines, and all companies who wish to hire young employees with critical thinking skills.

But, this does not yet give us the full scope of how government is the source of the troubles in our economy. Not yet even close!

Companies and industries must look to the future and plan how to use their employee's time, invest their capital, figure out what new products are needed, train employees to do the work they will need to do in the future, find ways to improve present products and to transport them efficiently, and figure out where to build facilities and how to heat, air-condition, and light them. Companies and industries must plan to survive. But, governments are insidious in popping surprises upon companies and industries that wreck their planning and development processes. Companies no sooner make an investment than Congress, state legislatures, and local politicians change the rules and turn their investments into losses.

The Federal government is doing just this on all sorts of fronts. With the Bush tax cuts scheduled to come to an end in 2010, the Democrat Congress is surely going to raise many taxes, especially on the wealthy who invest much of their money and on corporations. But, no one knows what the new taxes will be. Consequently, if they invest money, will the new taxes insure that they will have a bad investment? Under such conditions, people sit on their money, which is exactly what the politicians are presently complaining that they are doing. I sure am sitting on my lab's income at this time.

BO has said that he is going to bankrupt the coal-fired power plants. As I have noted several times, coal-fired power plants produce 50% of the U.S. electric power. Does this mean that we are about to lose 50% of all American electric power? If so, the coal mines, the trains that carry coal, the coal-fired power plants, the electric utilities, and all companies that use electricity are going to be hurting. Every blackout at my lab creates havoc. Vacuum pumps stop and air is sucked into some vacuum systems. All data collection stops and some long experimental runs are ruined and may take days of work to reproduce. Many industries have to undergo long processes to restart production when power is lost. At the moment of power shutdown some products are ruined. Power outages are much more serious for many businesses than they are for households. Of course long power outages at home cause concern for our two freezers and about loss of food in them. Frequently power outages and power fluctuations also increase the failures of electronics at home or in the workplace.

What will future energy costs mean for business? The imposition of cap and trade restrictions on the use of fossil fuels will have huge, unknown implications for the cost of making goods, transporting them, will in many cases determine which goods should be made, and will perhaps keep some employees from coming to work. Trained, critical employees will be lost if they live too far from the workplace. Plants may have to be moved to reduce transportation costs or to have more reliable electric power. Of course, many jobs will be exported to India and China where cap and trade does not exist.

As BO induces much of American youth to go to work on road and bridge-building, they will not be available to other industries. BO's service leagues will take still more young people out of the workforce. Labor costs will go up. Industry cannot yet know how much they will go up. Uncertainty again.

BO and Congress are determined to make it easy for labor unions to coerce workers into signing union election cards. Many more businesses will be saddled with unions. How badly will this cost the business in higher wages, less labor force flexibility, and less labor productivity?

What will BO and the Congress impose as costs for a nationalized health insurance and health system upon companies and wealthy individuals? Will this force companies to let employees go? Will this force them to export jobs aboard? Or to build new plants that use more robots and fewer people? Or redesign product to be made by more machines and fewer people?

Many privately held companies will be ruined when the death tax is reinstituted by BO and the Democrat Congress. Many companies will have to be sold to pay taxes. Many will have to be shutdown, since no buyer will be available. Many businesses will either be sold before 2010 or will be shutdown before then to take advantage of the higher threshold for the death tax that will be available before then.

Many capital investments will be cashed out before BO and the Democrat Congress raise the capital gains tax. Many investments will not be made because it is not yet certain what the capital gains tax will be.

Many individual taxpayers do not know what their tax burden will soon be. They think it will go up and will go up considerably. They know that someone has to pay for the bailout, the youth leagues, the welfare checks posing as tax rebates, the building of roads and bridges in accelerated rates, the payouts to the teachers unions, the bailout of the United Auto Workers Union, the subsidies for inefficient alternative fuels, and the nationalized health care and health insurance system coming. So, they are sitting on cash and are unwilling to invest it.

The trillion dollar bailout has failed to save the lenders, the banks, and Fanny and Freddy, and the investment firms. New winners and new losers are being picked by the politicians and bureaucrats daily. No one can figure out if they will be a winner or a loser, but most understand that there will be many more losers than winners. With this uncertainty, who wants to make an aggressive and forward-looking business decision. With no decisions, less and less money will be made, fewer goods will be delivered, and fewer services will be offered and fewer purchased. The economy slows down more due to uncertainty than due to any other cause, because uncertainty stops everyone in their tracks. Everyone feels as though they are in a minefield, so no one wants to make a step for fear of stepping on a mine. This is exactly the response to be expected.

Yes, the economy is hurting. Governments sure have worked overtime to put it in that world of hurt. Government is the problem, not the solution. We need a determined return to the concept of limited government, of Constitutional government.

National Involuntary Servitude

Obama is calling for Universal Voluntary Public Service. But, clearly no voluntary service will be universal, so what is HE planning? The plan is for many forms of national involuntary servitude.

HE will start training Americans to submit to many calls for involuntary servitude by making it a requirement for high school and college graduation. HE says HE will "set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year." "All"? How will this be achieved without making it mandatory?

First, the socialists in control of the blue-collar teachers unions can do almost anything they want to do in the public schools. One measure of proof of this is the public schools that have had Obama Days. Of course, the curricula in Social Studies, English, and History classes are the bigger proof of their control. Many school districts and some states (Maryland being one) already require public servitude from students as a graduation requirement. Obama will extend this to the red states and make this requirement more universal even in the blue states. HIS requirement is also a heavier load of hours of service.

The requirement in college will almost certainly be wrapped up in the student loans almost everyone needs to go to college. College expenses are incredible and constantly skyrocketing, due to the administration of almost every college by caring socialist faculties and administrators. If they care so much, why do they not control the cost of a college education? Well, they are simply being the consistent hypocrites we have come to know and love on our socialist left. These are the same socialists who constantly tell us they care about the disadvantaged and poor, but who give pitiful little to charities. Charities have to turn to mean-hearted non-liberals for the bulk of their income. So, socialist college administrators can use the high cost of college to force would-be students to take out loans that require 100 hours of servitude per year.

Michelle Obama said, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone....Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual -- uninvolved, uninformed." Well, my life as usual is what it is because I chose it. How about you? As for Obama's requiring us to be informed, it is clear from HIS campaign propaganda that what HE means is that we will be subject to constant propaganda and the BIG LIE. Those who do not get it, such as yours truly, will be sent to re-education camps? What if some of us cannot be re-educated? Does he have a special tax for those who cannot be re-educated? Perhaps a carbon tax on our breathing (we emit CO2) which will be so high that it will bankrupt us and put us out of business?

Obama says, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." Hitler had such a force of brown-shirted thugs.

Obama says, "People of all ages, stations and skills will be asked to serve." What kind of government incentives will they be given to do so? HE may be coming for more us than just the students.

The Obama quotes come from an editorial in Investor's Business Daily on 31 July 2008, which Paul Cohen pointed out to me.