Category Archives: Education

The Civil War

of the elitists:

The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program — John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”

This isn’t going to end well.

More Tax Money Down The Toilet

…but at least it will be an eco-friendly toilet. It’s really infuriating that the administration continues to bail out the foolish and irresponsible with the money of the productive.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More brilliant government “investment” decisions. As he notes, these clueless idiots think that any dollar spent by the government is an “investment.”

Smash Capitalism

…and you destroy civilization.

It’s sad that these spoiled children have put themselves so deep into debt for educations that are worthless, both in the marketplace and in understanding how the world works. They rage against the wrong machine.

[Update a couple minutes later]

They’re also not materially poor. But they do suffer from a poverty that is worse in many ways:

These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty. One of the things that shines through when we interview the people taking to the streets is that so many are woefully ignorant, and that they wallow in a sea of relativism that allows for no morality other than that gained by intense navel gazing. They are the antithesis of the original American revolutionaries, whose leaders were men of exceptional erudition and thoughtfulness, and whose followers knew at the very least their Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. Revolutionaries of old were shaped by philosophy, known science, literature, practical life experience, and a deep sense of morality and justice. Today’s little park piddlers are shaped by an aching sense of unfairness, a terrible fear of human-kind (that would be the AGW shtick), and a morality shaped by Oprah and whichever fabulously rich Hollywood Leftist happens to grab the microphone on any given day.

These self-styled 99%-ers are not poor, not by any known standard, either today or in the history of the world. They are intellectually and emotionally bereft, but otherwise awash in material benefits.

Fortunately, they’re not, as they delude themselves, the 99%. If they were, the Republic would be lost.

CLASS Dismissed

Thoughts on the latest collapse of the bunco scheme known as ObamaCare:

To say that this is an embarrassment for the gang in the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, who we already knew could not shoot straight, would be a gross understatement. The failure of CLASS, predicted by conservatives, sprang from the Democrats’ insistence to pass some “historic” health-care bill, any such bill, and deal with the consequences later. Well, later is now.

Obama lied, the economy died.

[Update a few minutes later]

Did 2008 come true?

The skeptics of 2008 proved prescient; those who demonized them should be embarrassed. And we should remember that candidates, of both parties, will govern mostly as they campaign. Slips are not indiscretions, but often will prove in hindsight windows of the soul.

I was wrong about his electability, but I was right about what a disaster he would be as president. I saw him for what he was, but underestimated how susceptible so many are to con men.

[Update a while later]

Adult leadership comes from the House, not the White House.

It’s been that way since the beginning of the year. And at least now, as opposed to 2008-2010, we have some adult leadership in DC.

[Update a couple minutes later]

One ObamaCare disaster averted, but a lot more to go:

This confirmation that Obamacare cannot in fact defy the laws of mathematics and accounting should serve as a warning regarding the implementation of the broader law, most of which would begin in 2014 if it is not repealed by then. The other major provisions of the statute are also grossly ill-designed. If it is permitted to take effect in full, the law will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult. These outcomes are nearly as predictable as the fiscal collapse of the CLASS Act (and have been predicted by the same people who saw that the CLASS Act would never work, including the CMS actuary). But in the case of the CLASS Act, the Secretary of HHS was required to certify in advance that her actuaries believed it could be sustained, and at the end of the day there was no way around the fact that it couldn’t. The rest of the law has no such requirements, so the “we tried our best” excuse will come only after disaster strikes.

But other than that, it’s great.