Leo Linbeck III: Smell the glove on that one! Eleven! You really must set up a site for your collected postings, limericks, and sonnets.

They lived in denial
So kept turning the dial

Because this one, it goes to eleven.

——

L3

The statistical poor skew young. Young people, since building wealth takes time, are going to be poor.

Transfer payments won’t spread wealth anyway –they spread consumption. What spreads wealth is investment in for-profit production of goods & services.

Fewer young people every year are conservative. That means conservatism is closer to dying out every year. We cannot win this struggle unless conservatism quickly regains a majority. And stays a majority. But unless that majority includes a majority of each oncoming cohort of young people, it will be overthrown in just a few more years. If we are already too late, this is why. So what can we do?

We have to take back our kids! They are leftist mostly because of the leftist indoctrination of the government schools. (Sure, because of the media and entertainment too, but mostly the schools.)

We’ve been trying for 30-odd years to fix that. We’ve tried running for school boards and changing things from there. But as soon as we were voted out, it just changed back again. We even learned not to do it politically, because it can all be lost at the next election – including the next PTA election. We tried public charter schools. We tried home schooling. We tried vouchers. And these have gone a long way. But it has not been on a big enough scale. Neither has it had staying power.

The best answer I see is church-based schools. Churches, first and foremost, are not the government! There are about 350,000 of them, scattered all over. They have staying power. Churches last a long time, even through many changes of members and staff. They have facilities that are mostly unused during weekdays. Also, most churches are hard to control from above and hard to take over. Besides, motivating them to each have a school is not terribly hard. They just need the money.

It is an option that can start quickly, given the right motivation. This year! Many kids could be pulled from the government schools THIS YEAR and put into hastily-started church-based Christian schools. There is so much fine curriculum out there, so many great models! No re-inventing the wheel here.

If we could ever get about half of all our kids into church-based schools, using scholarships for poor kids, the country would change permanently like you would not believe! In about 15 years, big time!

We should not be surprised. The Founders said that our new constitution and nation would work “only for a religious and moral people.” Doh. Such people make up the great base of the conservative movement. The bigger that group gets, the more democracy and public common decency we have. The smaller it gets, the less.

Unless it gets bigger, and stays bigger, we are lost. Oh, we might win a bit here and there, for awhile. But we couldn’t keep it.

We conservatives look back to the Constitution, as we ought. But we have forgotten about its essential foundation on the Judeo-Christian tradition, massively followed by the population of that time.

Without it, we have been skating on thin ice. It had to start cracking sometime.

(See Niall Ferguson’s thoughts on this, even though he is a “materialist.” At http://www.gerrycharlottephelps.com/2005/07/christianize_fa.html.)

Shortening the feedback loop (mark to market) is exactly what caused the problem. What is really wanted is more integration: averaging over longer time periods. That damps out oscillation – unless the gain is too high.

Good luck with that one. Can anybody check to see if he’s been on the guest list at all the parties Obama has been throwing?

I think Kennedy is easily flattered and rolled.