…to the Great Depression and New Deal
Category Archives: Education
Another Failed Federal Initiative
Despite the claims of MADD, the federally imposed minimum legal drinking age of 21 doesn’t save lives. But it does restrict the freedom of adults, and erodes federalism. In fact, that 1984 act (under Reagan) is one of the reasons that I don’t miss Elizabeth Dole.
Some Thoughts On Charity
From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people’s money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.
But it does seem to make you self righteous.
Kvetch
There are plenty of much greater criticisms, and I have them, as any regular reader of this site knows, and no one was more irritated by George Bush’s “nucular” than I was, but I find the new president’s own verbal affectations quite annoying.
“Tahleebahn”? “Pahkeestahn”?
Who talks like this?
As Glenn Reynolds pointed out a long time ago, it’s like the NPR correspondents who work mightily to get their local Spanish inflections exactly correct when reporting on their communist heroes in Central America while not bothering to learn the difference between an auto and semi-auto gun.
Hey, it’s just “Taliban” (like “tally” and to “ban” a book), and “Pakistan” (like “pack” for a trip, and “Stan,” Oliver Hardy’s partner).
And don’t even get me started about “Oreeon.” What does he, think it’s a cookie? That one will be a real problem for the next four years unless he kills the NASA program.
[Monday morning update]
And yes, before anyone asks, while (unlike many, apparently) I had no problem with Sarah Palin’s speech patterns in general, I did find her “Eye-rak” kind of grating.
Zero Tolerance
A (dead) British girl was banned for the prom for poor school attendance.
Well, that will teach her.
A Small Victory
An invitation for Bill Ayers to speak at Boston college has been rescinded, under public pressure.
A Glimpse Through The Veil
…of the travesty, indeed atrocity that American public education has become:
The reporter, Ginger Thompson, describes how a teacher prepares students for a standardized test. It’s a classic case of “teaching to the test” rather than teaching the subject itself. But that’s only part of the problem:
“If you see a question about Bolsheviks on the test,” Ms. Cain said, “the answer is probably Red Scare.”
So that’s the one thing Virginia high school students are apparently expected to understand about the Bolsheviks: They inspired American paranoia. That’s the Bolshevik legacy, you know.
Sadly, it’s no doubt a tip of the iceberg. And of course the NYT reporter found nothing remarkable about it.
Missed Opportunity
If the Republicans were on the ball, and had the money in the bank, they should look up the parents of the kids who are about to get kicked out of the school that the president’s kids are attending as a result of the Omnibus Bill, and have them plead for a veto of it in front of the camera. Then run the ads.
[Update late evening]
For those who don’t want to follow all the links in the linked article, here is the relevant one.
“They’re All Bill Ayers Now”
Thoughts on the decrepit state of the teaching “profession.” Like the commentator, I find the notion of a “graphic novel” of the teachings of the terrorist sadly ironic. As one commenter notes, in a sane world, holding a teaching certificate would bar you from the classroom. And there would be no federal support for colleges of “education.”
What Ended The Depression
Megan McArdle says (correctly) that no one knows, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying or fooling themselves, but that what you were taught in school is almost certainly wrong. She also notes (again correctly) that there was a lot more to the New Deal than simply government spending (which likely didn’t have much stimulative effect), some of it good, much of it disastrous (particularly the artificial propping up of wages and prices by fiat).
One can’t run controlled experiments in economics, so we can never know for sure, but I’m inclined to at least go with economic theories that make sense and for which there is useful empirical evidence. Someone has to tell me what Hayek and von Mises got wrong to persuade me that Keynes is right. And most people who think that Keynes is right haven’t even read them.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”
[Update a while later]
OK, so I’m not as impressed with David Brooks as the intelligentsia want me to be, but he does have some good thoughts occasionally:
The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.
The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.
What the world needs now is not love sweet love, but epistemological modesty. Particularly inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, the perverse nature of humanity is that often the less one knows about something, the more certain one is in his knowledge. They have never learned from the ancient Greeks that to admit the limits of your knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.
[Via Manzi, who reads David Brooks so I don’t have to]
[Late morning update]
Are we going to emulate Japan’s lost decade? It seems to be what they want to do, unfortunately.
[Bumped]
[Update a couple minutes later]
Renters are angry. They should be. They’ll probably join the tea party, too.
And here’s a novel concept: let housing prices find their clearing price. Can’t do that — it makes too much sense.