“It’s For the Children”
But whose children? The Washington Post says the discovery of a special list through which the Chicago elite might have gotten their kids into good schools shows how a system can be gamed to provide one kind of service for the haves and and another for the have-nots. “Public” systems run on guidelines and not all of them are published. Chicago faced a resource allocation problem. According to the WaPo most Chicago schools “face huge academic challenges” which meant that many parents didn’t want their kids in ordinary schools. They were “dissatisfied with neighborhood schools” and so need to “jockey for a limited number of slots in well-regarded magnet schools, out-of-boundary schools or selective public schools that base admissions on criteria such as grades and test scores.” But the VIPs couldn’t really be expected to line up. One solution: a front door and a backdoor. That’s why Duncan’s list was secret, referring to a special list maintained by current Secretary of Education who then ran the Chicago school system. It contained a list of connected parents and special schools. Some school officials they denied there was any correlation between these two columns whatsoever. If there was a backdoor the rear entrance had no visible signs.
“We didn’t want to advertise what we were doing because we didn’t want a bunch of people calling,” CPS official David Pickens admitted to Tribune reporters Azam Ahmed and Stephanie Banchero, who broke the story.
But those who could read the secret writing could find it. John Kass of the Chicago Tribune described the special glasses needed to understand the way things really work in the Windy City. He says the Daley dynasty designed it some things to be hard to see, unless you had the spectacles. “Today, I’m not going to rip on Daley. Instead, let’s focus on his brilliance, in creating Chicago’s two-tiered public school system. It bound the professional class to him and maintained him in power.” His Honor figured that the way to keep the professional class on his side was to corrupt some of them. So he built a two tier system, like a building with an executive washroom and a sewer. Those who wanted to use the executive washroom needed to find it. Most of all, they needed a key. Those who didn’t play could join the crowd or they could slip into their own environment where everyone was comfortable with everyone else amid the freshly changed linen and scented soaps. Kass explains:
The mayor knows how it works. He etched it into Chicago’s civic infrastructure years … When first elected in 1989, Daley eagerly reached out to those in the city’s predominantly white professional class. They were edgy and many were considering leaving Chicago.
In response, the mayor built top magnet and college prep high schools, pushing through work-rule changes to attract the best teachers. He produced the schools that nervous white-collar voters demanded.
Members of the professional class wanted city life. But they wanted their children educated. They became clients of Daley’s first tier. …
… education in the second tier remains abysmal. High school dropout rates are still around 50 percent, yet much higher when magnet schools are exempted. But even as tens of thousands of kids drop out to become calcified in the permanent underclass, the second tier still supports the mayor.
It’s not just about education. It is about jobs and patronage. Top teachers either fled or were lured to the top schools. But middle-rung teachers and below are the backbone of the teachers union.
The neighborhoods were rewarded with local school councils to elect, and budgets to manage and principals to appoint. By allowing the locals to run their mini-fiefdoms, Daley bound neighborhood activists to the system.
They were no longer beefers outside City Hall. They’d bought in.
Daly discovered the great rule of demagoguery. Convince those who’ve never eaten pâté de foie gras that the swill they are eating is it. Serve the real pate to those who already know what it tastes like. It was a system that would have been instantly familiar to former Soviets. World class academies for the nomenklatura, shacks on the banks of the Volga for those on the outs. Mayor Daley has indignantly denied the special list was used for playing favorites. He argued that just because there was a VIP entrance doesn’t mean anyone actually used it. The Chicago Sun Times reported that “Daley said there was nothing wrong with former Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan’s office maintaining such a log because ‘no favoritism’ resulted from it.” One official, Office of Compliance Chief Anthony Boswell, whose children qualified for a magnet school after moving in from Denver said that while it made him look bad, he didn’t actually know if he received preferential treatment.
Boswell’s children ended up on the waiting list for Mark Sheridan Elementary Math and Science Academy, a South Side magnet school where admissions are based on a lottery, but were subsequently admitted in time for the 2008-09 school year. Those admissions have also drawn the attention of the school system’s inspector general.
“Tony has no knowledge of anybody inside city government, outside city government or from the moon calling to get his kids in to Sheridan school,” Boswell attorney Jamie Wareham said. “He can’t say it didn’t happen. But he didn’t ask for it, and he wasn’t aware of it.”
A former Duncan aide, Peter Cunningham, seconded Daley’s assertions. He portrayed the list as an altruistic attempt to keep the bigshots from strong-arming the school principals. Concerned about … what exactly? … Duncan interposed himself as a human shield. “This was an attempt to buffer principals from all the outside pressure, to get our arms around something that was burdensome to them. It was always up to the principal to make the decision. Arne never ever picked up the phone.” There is some ring of truth to this. You definitely needed a human shield, or preferably Class IV body armor against the kinds of forces that stalked the corridors of the school system. One person has already committed “suicide” in connection with investigations into Chicago school corruption. The NYT says:
Admission to top Chicago schools has long been a competitive and murky process, with longstanding rumors of abuse. Mr. Duncan created a formal appeals process in 2008, and when he left to join the Obama administration, his successor, Ron Huberman, created a system to stop the gaming of the system.
The existence of the list surfaced amid a federal investigation, according to The Tribune. A spokesman for the Department of Education said Tuesday that the investigation stemmed from a case involving a school principal after Mr. Duncan left.
In July, Mr. Huberman announced an internal investigation of the city’s 52 application-based elementary and high schools. The president of the Chicago school board, Michael Scott, who had been subpoenaed in the federal investigation, committed suicide in November.
Scott died in November of 2009, having fallen dead near the Chicago river after shooting himself in the head. Breaking news on that day reported:
The death of Chicago school board president Michael Scott has been ruled a suicide by the Cook County medical examiner’s office, but police said this afternoon they are continuing to look into the death and that detectives are still “early on in the investigation.” …
Scott was found with a gunshot wound to the left side of his head, according to authorities. His body was found early this morning at the water’s edge of the Chicago River behind the Chicago Apparel Center at 350 N. Orleans along the north branch of the river, police said.
He apparently fell forward after shooting himself, and a .380-caliber gun was found under the body, police sources say. No note was found at the scene and detectives are trying to track down the gun’s registration, police said….
Rev. Jesse Jackson spent much of the day with Scott’s relatives today … U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former chief of Chicago Public Schools, released a statement: “I am shocked and saddened by the sudden death of my friend and colleague Michael Scott. Michael cared passionately about public education and made many courageous decisions as President of the Board.”
Dozens of other prominent citizens of Chicago expressed their surprise and dismay at the fall of this civic giant. Yet behind the accolades and the flowers for the deceased there was the disturbing suggestion of titanic and shadowy forces. The Chicago school saga is fascinating for the penumbra which it throws over the possible management of Obamacare, whose architects hail from the same city as Daley Education. What if like Chicago, there were a fist of cold steel and rotting flesh beneath the velvet glove? Who could ever prove it? Daley has already denied that the VIP list was ever used by VIPs. Nobody ever called nobody about nothing. John Kass says that’s the genius of it:
Daley didn’t exactly force parents at swordpoint to bend their knees and kiss his regal garments. His genius here is more coercive, not the force of the warrior, but the subtle work of the arborist. They eagerly graft their branches to his trunk.
The first-tier kids go on to top colleges, the parents sing Daley’s praises. The second-tier workers are rooted firmly in the status quo. And the tree blooms and bears fruit, mayoral election after mayoral election.
It’s pâté de foie gras and if you don’t know it, what’s the diference. Is everybody happy? A permanent majority. All hail the future.
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Except that this model requires a safety valve of the White middle class simply fleeing Chicago. Which they did, for the suburbs. The professionals could stay on, and work the corruption, and indeed the whole point was to exclude the middle class as threats to the White upper class.
But now all at once, without the frog being slowly boiled, the heat is on. On with massive tax increases, but no goodies for four years at least. Meanwhile Dems vote in favor of Viagra for Sex Offenders, and so forth. While Goodwin Liu demands all White men give up their money, jobs, and property to non-Whites. Because of social justice.
Now with Obama’s take over of education, both student loans and the Federal drive for the national curriculum, you see Obama threatening the vast White middle class with permanent poverty for their kids, being excluded from the best K-12 schools and Colleges.
Secret Lists? There’s the problem — with the internet, and the loss of the credibility of the MSM, people are angry, seeing declining income, and can see clearly the alliance of poor non-Whites with the elite SWPL professionals against them.
Wretchard, you misspelled “Hizzoner”.
They may make me pay but they can’t make me care. BUT, it is not for the children, it is for control. When the criminal, illegals, not undocumented workers are made legal and start using medical, disability, and importing relatives that they can’t support, lets just see how this “system” ( and system is a vague term ) works.
Was the school board president left-handed?
If and when doctors begin quitting their profession in droves, as some predict, the powerful will divert money from the federal coffers (secretly, since this is becoming more and more easily done — expect IG’s to eventually be abolished, or their jobs to become patronage bribery) into secret clinics and hospitals where these doctors will be lured back for handsome compensation to treat the elites and their families. Celebrities who are sympathetic to the favored political class (as they almost always are) will even be invited to become members of this special club — like being invited to stay overnight in the Lincoln bedroom, but with medical staff and equipment on hand.
It’s the Obama crowd’s equivalent of a dacha on the Black Sea.
I can’t resist the opportunity to recite the description of Salvador Allende’s death as written in National Lampoon Magazine.
He shot himself in the back with a submachine gun. Pausing only twice to reload.
A magnet school slot here, a kidney there. After all, who is to know? Especially if journalists get to feed at the trough with the high and mighty.
I dunno, is this so new? When I was in high school umpty years ago I was in the college prep “E” classes, for “excellerated” Yessir.
Yes, the entire systems have been trashed since then, in most or all major systems. Some suburban systems are apparently still getting’r done. I assume if I had kids in the big city today, I’d do anything to keep them entirely out of the public system, so I can’t get too excited about back doors and secret handshakes.
“But middle-rung teachers and below are the backbone of the teachers union.”
Of course they are.
You’ll find that the most fervent worshippers at the altar of the false god of perfect income security (guaranteed by some agency outside the self) are the marginally competent and the incompetent. They know that without the thuggish hive mentality of unions that they would be living a subsistence existence at best, and more likely be starving in a gutter.
I submit that a stable and productive society is one that allows only one of three options for life:
1. Work hard and be productive.
2. Don’t work, depend on private charity with lots of strings attached and restrictions on behavior.
3. Don’t work and starve.
Whiskey’s analysis of fighting over spoils is spot on. When the money runs out soon, when the economy goes underground, when the best really do, to one extent or another, go Galt, and there’s no money for public sector union workers and their pensions, we’ll get back to this.
Fighting over the spoils will not favor the left coalition. The leftists think they’ve won. In reality they’ve made it a virtual certainty that their ideal of 30 years of just barely working at producing nothing of real worth that is followed by 20 years of being paid to do nothing except be pretend rich using other people’s hard-earned money will die, and probably horribly.
Hmm
Scott was found with a gunshot wound to the left side of his head, according to authorities. His body was found early this morning at the water’s edge of the Chicago River behind the Chicago Apparel Center at 350 N. Orleans along the north branch of the river, police said.
He apparently fell forward after shooting himself, and a .380-caliber gun was found under the body, police sources say.
In addition to the question about him being left handed [and lacking knowledge about exit wounds and angle entry, and indications from clothing, blood spatters, topography of the ground, etc.], I am a tad skeptical as to the position of the body and where the pistol was found. I would expect a lateral component to the body’s movement, to the right, and for the pistol to react to recoil and not be under the body if the trigger finger did not catch on the trigger guard. If it did catch, having the hand under the body would strike me as … possibly odd.
But then again, we have long known that when Democratic Party politicians are concerned; the laws of physics, chemistry, and forensic science do not apply. They carry their own little alternate reality around with him, and it kicks in whenever convenient, especially at possible crime scenes.
Moving back to the “Front Door” for the masses and back door for the Nomenklatura issue; keep in mind that when your wife, mother, or child is in need of surgery, an MRI, specific drug treatment, etc. that the lives of those who come in the front door are not worth anything compared to the privilege of those who come in through the back door. The same people who set up special schools for the elite will be deciding if your family member lives or dies in order to finance their mistresses face lift and tummy tuck. Gotta have priorities.
In the days when we were still a free country, such an event would get some sort of a reaction. One might even say a Jacksonian reaction.
Subotai Bahadur
Reminds me of the fellah who died accidentally:
He fell down an elevator shaft. Onto some bullets.
Re the nomenklatura–back in the ’70s I had a family from Poland as patients: an engineer at a nearby nuclear plant, his wife and daughter. They had been on a project in Africa when they got something like a message that there was trouble for them back home and they got themselves into the US, where he found work, being fluent in English.
The wife was in one day and I, assuming that being in the US was the answer to her life-long dreams, said something like, “Well, things must be better now.”
On the contrary. She was unhappy and angry that they had to leave Poland. It boiled down to the fact that they’d had a very privileged life back there–the best of everything which, even in Poland, was equal to life in the West.
I’m sure there was some culture shock and homesickness, too, but the thing she made clear was that they’d lived on the inside track and she liked it just fine.
This came back to me as I was reading about the medical plans Congress has; no need for them to sink to our level; they’ll be just fine, along with anybody who sucks up to them.
Scott was found with a gunshot wound to the left side of his head
Large bottles of aspirin are no longer the preferred method of suicide in Chicago?
There is the risk that are apples and oranges getting confused here. The corruption of process inherent in political administration is a problem. The existence of nonuniform institutions to deliver alternative, specialized or even superior services is a good thing.
Magnet schools do help to keep the middle class in the city and offer teachers enduring dreary years in dangerous holding facilities for the future felons of America at least the dream that they can be transferred into a functioning school. They also can offer a model of how education should work. When the town is burning down you do not knock down the only intact building and call it a firebreak. It is pure socialism to destroy it in the name of fairness.
The admissions process into every good school is subject to pressure and corruption. It is a standing sure fire seller for journals in New York to run articles on the desperate efforts of Upper Middle Class parents to place their child in the right private preschool. There is an enormous industry devoted to helping get 4 year old children into schools that their parents are convinced will set them up for life. That is just a market condition, even if it is subject to manipulation and the self righteous and often hypocritical ostensible leftists of the schools and their bien pessant customers set your teeth on edge.
The problem therefor is not that there are some good schools but that the government is involved in their management. Now normally the Magnet schools are subject to attack by left wing Levelers both among the parents of the general population, whose children would view the children in the magnet schools as a source of loose change, and by jealous teachers who do not want to actually work hard at a good school but who also hate to think that somebody someplace has a desk with a lock that isn’t broken.
In NYC the “Specialized” High Schools are protected some by State Law. That delays the attacks usually and in government delay means victory since everything goes by legislative calendars. In addition the city has created large numbers of smaller theme schools that have taken some of the political pressure off of the elite schools. These have no better a student body then the regular ‘zone’ schools but are smaller and offer the possibility of letting the teacher entertain themselves by playing with the lessons. If a student actually does get something that is all the better.
Keeping expectations low can be a good thing if you are cynical enough because then the teacher can be given more freedom to alter their lessons. Basic curriculum in the theme schools still should be covered. For those who decry ‘teaching to a test’ budget constraints will limit the number of subject matter ‘Regents’ examinations in the future. My expectation is that without the light of the examination less teaching will happen.
In Chicago for many years those who did not send their children to an elite private school, like the Latin School of Chicago or the University of Chicago Laboratory School, or one of the Magnets had the option of a functioning Catholic parochial system. The Church schools in Chicago unlike in New York endured for years as the place where people of all faiths would send their children. Sending your child to a regular Chicago Public School should be considered evidence of child abuse.
How can the poison of corruption be withdrawn from the administration of education? It cannot because this is such a basic human need that people will use every advantage to secure something for their offspring. The corruption seen in arranging access to a superior education when it is under government control is a model for what will happen when the allocation of health care services is to be determined by government administrators.
The best that I can suggest is to privatize the individual schools and distribute vouchers to the parents. The inspection of the schools will undoubtedly yield a rich crop of fraud as they fail to meet standards to receive the voucher payments. The inspection of the Inspectors will also without a doubt provide for regular material for crusading journalists. Those School Inspectors in Chicago will under any Voucher program continue to be employees of the same civic machine that hires Building Inspectors. Once I knew someone who claimed he had to pay several times their recorded salary for a chance to get that humble office.
56 states and territories and DC:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_national_parks_quarters
Obama was almost right.
Subotai:
What you say about physics is correct but fails to account for the second or third or fourth head wound. Mr. Scott was an honorable man and would do anything to bring discredit on the Daley administration. He apparently did.
You should not be skeptical. It is the sign of a disloyal mind. We should move along here. Leave the family to the comforts of the Redrum Jacksohn. Nothing to see. Do not trouble yourself. The matter is in the hands of the professionals.
Hmm, given this guy’s (Scott) other problems — being investigated for shady real estate deals (cliche for a politician, no)– suicide is not incredible.
“Today, I’m not going to rip on Daley. Instead, let’s focus on his brilliance, in creating Chicago’s two-tiered public school system.”
Does that sound to you kind of like the reaction of the adults in the famous Twilight Zone episode that starred Billy Mumy as the incredibly powerful child? He would commit some horror and they would say “That was real good what he did, real good.”
But what is really brilliant is how the Democrats can, time and again, serve as the party of the elite, the chosen, and the favored while being regarded as just the opposite. The Augusta National Golf Club, a wholly private organization that is by invitation only, can choose not to admit a woman and the NY Times talks about it for months. But use of public funds in a public school system for private gain? No problemo. It’s not just the Chicago Way, it’s the Democrat Way, the Liberal Way, the Leftist Way.
Resource allocation under scarcity is the human condition. You can never have enough of all the things you want. But some people believe that problem can be abolished by adding “public” or “socialized” or even better “free” in front any good or service. Therefore politicians will offer you free education, healthcare, housing and whatever else they can sell you on.
Now Ernest Hemingway, in a passage which any good Leftist will nod in accordance with wrote “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” Imagine there’s no Heaven! Ok. Now try this.
It will be immediately objected that this can’t be true. But it is true. Either a pricing system will allocate resources or a functionary sitting in the bowels of some department will. Your free education, health care and housing isn’t. The task of sound public policy is to let the most efficient system prevail. Usually that means letting the market (which is the best system) carry most of the load and intervening when there is market failure. Government fixes the exceptions. It is not the rule.
Of course that will imply limited government. Progressives hate that because it limits the scope of their busybodying and — though they won’t say this — their livelihood. So eventually they want systems that don’t supplement, but replace the market.
What Hemingway said about bulls in Spain is true of schoolboard heads in Chicago.
Political corruption is the inevitable result of government-forced collectivization of the people’s property. What is Marxist (or Fascist) government to do with an immense mass of collectivized property obtained through excessive taxation? Answer: First and foremost, feather their own nest.
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” (Communist Manifesto)… meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… In the years following the Revolution it (The Socialist Party of Oceania) was able to step into this commanding position almost un-opposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic (and educational) inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984
Power (government-forced collectivization of property) tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton
What is the cure?
1. Public proclamation that the Declaration of Independence is America’s supreme un-amendable moral law. This should come from the President, Congress and Supreme Court. If Federal Government won’t do it; the Governors, State Legislatures and State Supreme Courts must proclaim it, along with private organizations and private individuals.
2. Amend the Constitution – our supreme amendable secular law.
The 16th amendment will be changed to:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes up to 10%, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amen…
The spending of Federal Government will not exceed its revenues which must only derive through the 16th amendment.
Congressional and Supreme Court term limits
Congressional 2/3 override over the Supreme Court – just as Congress has 2/3 override over Presidential vetoes
Revocation of the 17th amendment
Apropos of nothing, I’ll interject that people have their id-ideologies and philosophical-political paradigms, either from inborn temperament or formative experience, and there is little chance of swaying someone with logic, citations or, especially, cheap debating tactics and even eloquent Wretchardian prose. Discourse between the differently minded is mostly conjugal monologuing.
That said, I agree with the post, about how the system is gamed successfully because individuals hold out the hope that absolute corruption empowers absolutely.
Edit: Wow, weird. I composed my modest comment about Acton and quote just as Storm-Rider wrote same. (Sorry about the Grate Minds thing, SR
)
Now if you follow the NYT link above, it says who was named on the list, which of course, never influenced anyone.
What a small world.
Storm-Rider,
Your suggestions, which I have seen offered before, simply will not work.
1. The Declaration of Independence is a statement of moral law, not a Constitutional guide. If you enter it as a special litmus test then you are admitting the concept of positive rights, and once the ones you like are in play then the same method can be used to discover someone’s other than yours. The DoI is already there for those who care about original intent. Being repetitive, like reissuing the Xth Amendment, does nothing. Unless you intend to have yourself set up above the people we have hired to ensure that basic principles are not violated the problem will always remain.
2. A 10% limit on taxation may be to much at some times and not enough during others. If the government had no authority to issue debt and was held to the arbitrarily low level you suggest then we could not have fought WW-II. Schemes have been proposed to demand super majorities to exceed a certain limit or go into debt. They never so far have been workable. What will stop the Congress from funding the waste first and then demanding extra revenues for the basics that you desire? If a Super majority is demanded then you are empowering any destructive minority to block critical action unless bribed. For years a Democratic minority obstructed Bush and set the nation up for the crisis that propelled Obama into office.
3. If the only revenues the government can collect are from the Income Tax then you are denying the right to use tariffs and excises as an instrument of policy. While I am generally supportive of free trade and do not want to return to the age when the government was almost completely funded by import duties, they remain a valuable tool of diplomacy.
There are arguments to be made on both sides regarding term limits.
The possibility of an over ride of a Supreme Court verdict is worth exploring. My suggestion was for using the Electoral College rather then the Court for the final judicial review process. That would make them available for Congress to use for an appeal from the Court. Congress already has the right, rarely used, to establish Rules for the Judiciary and also has the right of Impeachment. That A.C. Hastings, an impeached judge, is sitting in Congress is something that should have been prevented. The theoretical power of the Court is largely a myth that relies more on inertia than on the text of the Constitution.
Our government is designed for a free and honest people. You cannot design a system that will both protect your liberties and control the venality of the majority if they are not themselves predisposed towards moral conduct. The answer, even though I have proposed Amendments myself, lies not in reworking the Constitution to return to the less effective system of the Articles of Confederation or some similar structural constraint. The only answer is in persistent local efforts to regain control of the machinery of government and restore the integrity of the educational system. Without functioning schools we will not have a citizenry that can support a free country under any constitutional structure.
On the repeal of the XVIIth Amendment I concur.
wretchard,
Jesse Jackson avoided the problem of finding a better public school for his children. He sent them to the nearby, he lived at 47th and Lake Park, University of Chicago Laboratory School on 59th Street.
To be blogged under the title “Don’t Chain Congress.”
Of course there is a reason that the schools in Chicago are so awful. The schools Mission Viejo, Irvine, Lake Forest, and even Oceanside, are not bad. The schools in Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Stanton are terrible.
Now … did some Alien Wizard make those schools bad, or is there something else that made them bad? Maybe the people who live in the districts? It just might be!
And the cat’s out of the bag. Every middle class White parent must now suspect there is a secret list for the connected to have their own special schools, excluding their kids. What to do?
TEAR IT ALL DOWN. They’ll never get in, not connected enough, not rich enough, not our kind Muffy dear enough. So why should the elite have a special school their kid can’t get into? TEAR IT DOWN. Make the elites pay through the nose for private tutors or day schools or boarding schools, if they have to. TEAR IT DOWN.
This means public campaigns to eliminate the magnet schools. Parents in them can be labeled “Secret Listers.” There is no way to disprove it, and that is the terrible, terrible flaw of the Chicago Way. As ruthless as it might be, it has one achilles heel. That no one believes it could ever possibly not be guilty of anything. Ever.
A secret list in Chicago? Why not LA? No one wants to send their kids to places like Garfield, filled with violent gang-banging Mexicans. Particularly not powerful Mexicans like Mayor Tony. Why should ordinary middle class White Angelenos not simply TEAR DOWN magnet schools? Their kids won’t get in, ever. They can demand they be defunded. Heck a statewide ballot iniative would be powerful stuff, ala Prop 13, with the powerful argument that the ONLY kids in Magnet and other special schools are those of the powerful elite. You can’t deny a secret list, if everyone believes indeed there is a secret list.
I have no special knowledge of this situation. However, I must say that the mere existence of a list is not particularly surprising, or troubling. If you were Superintendent in Chicago, you’d have to maintain a list, because every true and wannabe power in the city would be calling you or someone to try to get a special deal. Arne Duncan, faced with this sort of environment, would need to know who has been trying to game the system, or, rather, play the game, if for no other reason that to know who might hold a grudge if they didn’t get what they want.
My guess is that there were no special deals cut by the Superintendent. Why? Because there’s no need to cut a special deal. The powerful live in nice neighborhoods, and the nice neighborhoods all have good elementary schools. (Which way the causality runs in this situation is irrelevant for the purposes of this point.) By the time high school rolls around, those students are already 2-3 grade levels ahead of the poor kids trapped in the crappy neighborhood attending the crappy school. Any objective selection criteria at a magnet school would select the children of privilege.
That’s the dirty little secret of public education. You think it’s bad, but it’s really atrocious in low income communities. The overall average is pulled up by the high performing magnet and district charters. Pull those good schools out, and you would not believe what is left. So those kids trapped in the ‘hood are screwed.
Two of the greatest ironies I’ve discovered in my time working in education reform are:
1. The creation of magnet schools were the byproduct of desegregation, but have contributed to a more insidious segregation by diverting funds from (predominantly minority) low-income schools to (predominantly majority) higher-income magnets.
2. The strongest opponents of educational choice in urban areas are black politicians who do not want to upset the status quo upon which their power is based.
Given these two facts, if I was Superintendent in Chicago, I’d keep this kind of list too. But I would never give a special deal to someone on the list. I would use it to keep track of who thought that I was corrupt.
Asymmetric information has value, after all.
L3
L3 @ 25
Actually, it’s not all that neat and in economic equilibrium.
1. There are more kids whose parents want them in the magnet schools than there are slots.
2. The racial composition of the magnet schools has always been a big issue, so there are LOTS of highly qualified white and asian kids competing for the available slots, whereas a black or hispanic kid with anything on the ball is highly prized and schools will even compete for them.
This is not theoretic, I live in and raised kids in Chicago and had to deal with these questions.
It really is as wretchard describes, allocating scarcity, specifically the scarce slots for kids not in protected classes. Your alternatives are to move or pay for private or parochial school. There is a real, discernable cash value to those magnet school slots, which is around $20K/year at the high school level, based on the cost and relative inconvenience of teh alternatives.
And if you and/or your spouse work for local government you have to live in the City (and enforcement is taken seriously), substantally foreclosing the moving option unless you split the family, or the relevant partner has to find another job.
I have no direct knowledge, but I would be SHOCKED if such a list and such a process did NOT exist, and it would be run at the highest level, you wouldn’t let individual principals have that kind of power to reward or hurt your political supporters or adversaries. Patronage must be controlled or it has no value.
Duncan’s list sounds a lot like the lists on Bob Sorich’s computer, that had names of applicants, names of clout and titles of City job positions. Maybe nothing was ever done, and the layout of the list was for some other purpose, but the judge and jury sent Sorich away for several years because they didn’t buy it.
More for L3 @ 25
I forgot to mention that “good” neighborhoods” are only tenuously associated with “good schools,” because the whole pupil assignment process is really not neighborhood based due in large part to the need to get racial balance at all schools. The truly worst schools tend to be in the worst neighborhoods, but many ‘hoods with middle class populations who value education and want their kids to succeed still have schools that are by most standards crap.
Also, many/most of the teachers have room temp IQ’s and teaching certificates from Chicago State, there are proportionately few good, experienced teachers, not nearly enough to be everywhere they would be valued, and they tend to be at the competitive-admission places because they select based on seniority and those places are more rewarding, better-physical plans, SAFER (a huge issue), more resources generally. A new teacher will have to spend time in a truly horrible place for several yrs to get the seniority to go somewhere decent, and any young teacher good enough to have options will go elsewhere, part of why teacher quality is low despite very nice pay and benefits.
In general I think it’s hard for people who don’t live in or near a big old city with all the racial and other baggage, to appreciate how different they are from the rest of the country.
Leo, I know you to be a great man, especially on this particular issue, so I have to chalk what seems to be your position down to a case of maybe you know something that I don’t know.
It looks like what you have said is that the parameters of this situation are hopelessly corruptive so what can you do? You seem to resign yourself glumly towards a conclusion that its organically corrupt. Doesn’t our example here of the Chicage school system, replete with figures such as Daley and Ayers, give pause to the idea that maybe the corruption is not so organic?
And, even it were merely organic in the end, is it not still corruption?
I’m more of a mind with Whiskey, with very low tolerance for the airs of privilege, the double dealings it brings, and the observation that someone’s usually left holding the bag.
If my beloved sons were screwed by a school district such as this you can bet that it would have been better for the superintendent to have had a millstone tied around his neck, then tossed into the sea.
Lifeofthemind 23,
The Declaration of Independence is both our un-amendable moral law and the Founding Father’s Constitutional Guide. Sacred, unalienable human rights to equality before law, life, liberty and private property earned through creative labor (pursuit of happiness) are the very reason for government – the very mandate for our Constitution.
“On the distinctive principles of the Government … of the United States, the best guides are to be found in… The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States.” James Madison
“That to secure these rights, Governments (Constitutions) are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm
You have the concept of “Positive Rights” backward. “Positive Rights” is Orwellian (Marxist) Newspeak for reversible, government-discovered, government-given privileges – here today – gone tomorrow. “Negative Rights” is Orwellian (Marxist) Newspeak for God-given, unalienable human rights. The Declaration of Independence lists our four eternal, God-given, unalienable human rights – not derived from government – not derived from the Constitution. Similarly, our Bill of rights (specifically the first and second amendments) do not confer rights on American citizens; rather they acknowledge that those rights are present from the time of creation – that government must keep their hands off that which is not theirs either to grant or rescind.
Leo Linbeck III,
You make a good point about how special High Schools track from functional neighborhood zoned Primary Schools. For the present I will not discuss Middle Schools which are probably a disaster everywhere, it is a rough age for the kids. While there is a correlation between family income and the performance of a school it is not a simple identity with race. whiskey is simply wrong about this. What matters is culture and expectations.
In New York the Specialized High Schools for math and science enrichment, Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, as well as other elite public High Schools, Hunter and Townsend Harris, are only partly there to serve as an anchor for the white Middle Class. They largely serve as ladders for immigrants seeking entry into elite colleges. The real elites in the city are not sending their children to those schools. They are sending them to private schools. Fifteen years ago the student body at Bronx Science was approximately 5% Upper Middle Class Whites (mostly Protestant), 10% Black, 10% Hispanic, 10% South Asian, 10% White ethnic Catholic (mostly Italian), 15% Jewish (including Russians) and 40% East Asian. The last being about equally divided between Chinese and Koreans. A few Japanese and some South East Asians completed the mix. The majority of these were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Korean girls would sit with a dictionary open on their laps and they would work and they would succeed. Most of the Black students barely scrapped by, not because of a lack of intelligence but because of a lack of a work ethic that comes from the home and the local school.
Good schools are not the problem. The problem is in the bad schools and in the public administration of the schools and in the union that discourages hard work and in the homes. Any student can get in trouble as much as any student can learn to work. Either result must be recognized. The child of two wealthy lawyers who are never there for her is as or more likely to get in trouble as the child of immigrants working in a dry cleaner who is feeling enormous pressure to achieve.
To be blogged under the title “On Specialized High Schools.”
The word “reform” in public speech when postfixed to any activity (health “reform”, immigration “reform”, banking “reform”, etc) is always a signal that a change in power relationships is about to begin. “Reform” is only incidentally about the thing in itself. It is not about the pie. “Reform” is about how the pie sliced.
“Reform” is invariably a political act. That’s fine as long as everybody knows what’s going on. But the prefixes often confuses the heck out of people, especially those of goodwill. They think “reform” is about caring for people, reducing disease, abolishing illiteracy, spreading honesty and goodwill throughout the world. That’s the free cheese in the mousetrap, the come on; the no downpayment sofa you don’t have to pay for until 2014 by which time it will cost more than a Steinway piano. And yet …
There’s a real need for reform, in the sense of improving the subject matter. Someone has to attempt what “reform” is supposed to do but doesn’t. Strange as it may seem, one way is to simplify the problem; to reduce the numbers of cooks stirring the broth; to pry away the hyenas from the carcass. This leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that society may be better of with fewer fixers; fewer saviors; that it may be better off with smaller government.
Doctors have a word for “too many cooks”: iatrogenesis. It’s the point beyond which the ill-effects of treatment outweigh its benefits. But it’s lonely to take the position that we may actually be better off with fewer do-gooders than more. More is always better. If second prize is a round trip ticket to Cleveland then first prize should be two round trip tickets to Cleveland. And maybe it is, but only up to a point.
Lifeofthemind 23,
10% Federal taxation will be just fine. We won our War of Independence with a Federal income tax of 0%. The U.S. gross domestic product is around 14.5 trillion dollars, and Federal receipts are 2.7 trillion dollars (18.6%). Federal spending is 3.1 trillion dollars:
o $944 billion – Social Security
o $408 billion – Medicare
o $224 billion – Medicaid and SCHIP
o $360 billion – Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
o $260 billion – Interest on National Debt
o $515.4 billion – United States Department of Defense
o $145.2 billion(2008*) – Global War on Terror
o $70.4 billion – United States Department of HHS
o $68.2 billion – United States Department of Transportation
o $45.4 billion – United States Department of Education
o $44.8 billion – United States Department of Veterans Affairs
o $38.5 billion – United States Department of HUD
o $38.3 billion – State and Other International Programs
o $37.6 billion – United States Department of Homeland Security
o $25.0 billion – United States Department of Energy
o $20.8 billion – United States Department of Agriculture
o $20.3 billion – United States Department of Justice
o $17.6 billion – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
o $12.5 billion – United States Department of the Treasury
o $10.6 billion – United States Department of the Interior
o $10.5 billion – United States Department of Labor
o $8.4 billion – Social Security Administration
As you can see the vast majority of Federal spending is on (un-Constitutional) social programs and the national debt. Military spending is only $658 Billion (21%). If Federal government took in 10% of GDP that would be about 1.5 trillion dollars – more than enough to fund our military and the other essential functions of Federal government that are actually enumerated in our Constitution. Guess what? If Federal government needed more than 10% during time of war they could ask the American people for donations – we are a generous people – and a people willing to expend labor and money in self-defense. The un-Constitutional social programs would fall to the States or to individuals as per the tenth amendment. Limiting Federal taxation would bring the tenth amendment back to life, and it would drive a stake through the heart of American Marxism. I agree with you on tarrifs – that would be acceptable in addition to the 10% domestic tax. Excise taxes are domestic and would have to go since that would be covered by the 10% income tax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget
The late great Balin Vazonyi related his experience growing up as a child in Hungary in the aftermath of World War II. The one schoolhouse in his village was destroyed, their one schoolteacher had been led away by the Nazis to the death camps and never heard from again. With no textbooks, with shards of a blackboard and a chronic shortage of chalk, Balint maintained that back in that day he recieved an education far superior to anything offered today by the public schools of America. I believe him.
All this talk of hogging resources, of the derilection of parents, etc., seem to be beside the point if you ask me. The lack of resources complaint is especially galling, given the per-pupil outlays today, and also given my own admittedly anecdotal observations about the spending proclivities of my own hyper-bloated and wasteful school district.
The failure we face in American schools today is one a failure of will, of desire, of honest dealing, and of fidelity to time-tested proven methods in the face of flirtation with faddish and cynically derived schemes.
A concomittant failure is the deadly assumptions about getting into the “right” schools. Much of education has become a game of credentialism, of getting one’s ticket punched.
Acedemic culture, from the elementary school teacher’s podium right up to the professorial lecturn, needs to be questioned, and to be reformed.
What’s happening in the inner-cities are symptoms, alarming ones, of this pernicious problem.
Doctors have a word for “too many cooks”: iatrogenesis. It’s the point beyond which the ill-effects of treatment outweigh its benefits. But it’s lonely to take the position that we may actually be better off with fewer do-gooders than more. More is always better.
I think it’s worse than that, the definition of iatrogenic is simply hospital-caused, the point being that even one cook may be too many, or in other words, ain’t nuthin free, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But if you’re a do-gooder, a humanist, who wants to fix the world, the applicable cliche is, “What, and get out of show business?”
Education of our children is not a power enumerated in our Constitution for Federal Government; under the Bill of Rights (tenth amendment) responsibility for educating children must fall to the States or to the individual. If we return to the Constitution I predict a flowering of education, creativity and achievement in America beyond anything we’ve ever seen. The dumbing down of America is a project of Federal Government in collusion with the “education” establishment, mass media and the entertainment industry. George Orwell explains why the creation of millions of Beavis and But-Heads is necessary.
“It was possible no doubt to imagine a society in which wealth… should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged cast; but in practice such a society could not long remain stable, for if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves, and when once they had done this they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function and they would sweep it away… In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” George Orwell – 1984
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… What opinions the masses hold or do not hold is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.” George Orwell – 1984
Whiskey is mostly right. Of course there are will always be exceptions.
Here is LA, 1/4 of all white kids are in private school as well as 1/8th of all black kids, because the schools are downright scary.( according to a Charter school expert I was assisting the other day). And yes there are black professionals with a brain who will put their kids in private school.
That said with the exception of a few magnet schools and a few suburban schools far from the urban areas, the rest of the public middle schools and high schools are absolutely terrible and downright dangerous to attend. It doesn’t matter really what neighborhood they are located in. The school district has it ‘s priorities and they’re not the kid’s welfare or education. These schools are really cruel and unusual punishment for the kids.
As for the good magnet schools, there is a pecking order. The connected get in where they want. Professionals with kids can work the system better than the uneducated and the poor, and the Professionals often succeed somehow. The poor usually do not. In my neighborhood’s parties with people of a certain child rearing age, there are usually many discussions on how to get into which magnet or charter school, and which is the best.
People who live and work in more decent cities and towns just have no conception how corrupt and despicable the ruling socialist elite are in places like NY, Chicago and LA. Particularly in smaller towns where there has to be some transparency to the political process; people there don’t have clue have bad it can get. In a place like LA, the sheer power of the socialist machine just grinds people under. The machine is just oblivious to the needs of the ordinary citizen, and it doesn’t really matter often whether they are white, black, brown, yellow or green; when the machine wants it’s way it get it’s way, no matter what. The socialist machine is what is on the verge of taking over America, and most won’t see it coming.
All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others. No liberals want their kids sacrificed on the altar of the common good. I have seen parents whose cars are festooned with Obama stickers get enraged and go nuts over a middle school principal who wanted to drop an algebra class and divert the resources to a Saturday academy in a school where the kids spoke 30 different languages at home.
When it comes to their own kids all parents are selfish but the rich liberal thinks nothing of sacrificing a working class kid to his multi-culti ideals while putting his own child in private school. The carpenter’s son should bear the white mans burden and integrate the neighborhood school while the lawyers daughter packs off to the Academy of the Immaculate Contraption or citywide magnet.
Don’t get me started
wretchard:
Chicago’s corruption is little different from the corruption documented in a book called “Creating a Class”, by Mitchell Stevens. Yet, this is the same professor who is trying to push for a “national preschool program”.
Now, a “national preschool program” worries me on many different levels. Firstly, I am worried that this would be mandatory. In other words, the federal government would be systematically taking children away from their parents for “socialized parenting”, Soviet style.
Secondly, I am worried that the curriculum would be standardized. In other words, children would be indoctrinated to hate their parents at an earlier age than ever.
Thirdly, this would only “equalize” opportunities if children with well-educated parents were systematically held back from learning faster than children with poorly educated parents. This would mean dumbing down children faster than ever.
Fourthly, a “national preschool program” can be a highly effective means for ideological teachers to bully “privileged” children. This can come in the form of refusing to keep other children from hitting or pinching a child while also stopping him from defending himself. This can come in the form of forcing a child to apologize for comments he was falsely accused of making. It can also mean overt bullying of “privileged” children.
There’s no nice way to say this, but I think the “champagne battalion” of the Texas Air National Guard was an unfortunate necessity for George W. Bush. The alternative was fragging, the kind of behavior that may have happened to Pat Tillman. It’s a dirty little secret of the military that some sergeants have it in for anybody more “privileged” or educated than they are. Reports of horrors committed by such men keep entire classes of “privileged” men out of the military.
A two-tiered system is horrible. There is only one thing worse than a two-tiered system. It’s one where everybody is forced to take equally bad classes from equally bad teachers, with peer pressure to never get an “A” lest one be deemed a “sellout”.
I dislike social inequality based upon hereditary privilege. Yet, I dislike the insane world of Harrison Bergeron even more. If I had to choose between hereditary privilege and a regime that sought to destroy every vestige of cultural difference that could possibly cause privilege, I would prefer to keep hereditary privilege if only to carry on the hope of keeping some vestige of liberty intact.
Although I would rather not see myself as “elite”, I fully understand that there are those who would hack me to death for much the same reason that Interahamwe murdered Tutsis or the Schutzstaffel murdered Jews – they see me as “elite”, privileged, and powerful even when the only power I have is the power of my ideas coming from my inner confidence. I am only too aware that men who hate themselves tend to focus their resentments upon me even if they have more tokens of success than I do.
Mayor Richard M. Daley is triangulating. He is using the very legitimate fear of school brutality to keep the upper middle class in line. It is working. The irony here is that if poor people tried to create their own safe schools where children would feel comfortable learning, the power of the Daley machine would crumble. In essence, the Daley machine needs bad schools in order to stay in power.
If Chicago’s schools were good, the Chicago machine may very well disappear.
Cowboy,
It looks like what you have said is that the parameters of this situation are hopelessly corruptive so what can you do? You seem to resign yourself glumly towards a conclusion that its organically corrupt. Doesn’t our example here of the Chicage school system, replete with figures such as Daley and Ayers, give pause to the idea that maybe the corruption is not so organic?
It’s a great question. I guess history would tell us the following:
1. Monopolies accumulate power.
2. Power corrupts.
So if you design a system that is grants a monopoly to any entity, public or private, it will end up corrupt.
Some will say, “Well, let’s reform it!”
My answer: No monopoly in the history of mankind has ever reformed itself – only pressure from an external threat will cause the monopoly to change.
Is this a reason to despair, or be fatalistic?
No. Absolutely not. It simply means that we have to create a competitive environment to break the cycle of power -> money -> power.
The story of collectivization always begins with the elimination of competition in the name of efficiency. “Look at all this wasteful competition! Let’s just have one provider that does things right.” Sounds so easy, so obvious. But once competition is eliminated, the incentive structure of an organization becomes exploitative: exploit workers, exploit customers, exploit suppliers, exploit investors, etc.
So my point is not that the corruption is OK, or should be tolerated. My point is that you can’t get rid of it unless you fundamentally change the system. Periodic attempts to root out the “bad apples” are pointless. The apples aren’t bad when they’re put in the barrel – it’s the barrel that turns them bad. Use that same energy to create a system of schools – that is, change the barrel – and the bad apples will be tossed aside as the valueless garbage that they are.
System of schools means neighborhood schools, magnet schools, charter schools, public school choice, unlimited intra-district transfers, unlimited inter-district transfers, vouchers, tax credits, whatever works. It means that parents must be take responsibility for their kids’ education, and hold schools accountable. It means that great teachers must be free to earn whatever the market will bear, and bad teachers are tossed out of the classroom. It means that money has to follow the kid. It means transparency and disclosure. And, most of all, end the monopoly.
Get rid of the monopoly, and you’ll get rid of the accumulated power, and the corruption will abate.
Cheers,
L3
a list you say? well…
some are more equal than others.
I went to a private school in a 3rd world country, which was not well endowed at all by First World standards nor particularly expensive. There were ten sections of 40 in the graduating class. Of the 40 in the “A” section fifteen went on to the US Ivies or their equivalents as foreign students. Imagine how surprised I was to learn that the Philippine Public school system spent more per student than the religious teaching order which ran my old school.
The public schools have dirt floors, marginal teachers and often no electricity, nor running water nor anything. So where did the money go? Apparently the World Bank had a look at the system and concluded since the public school kids were only going to stay in the system for four or five years only a few essential subjects should be taught. Basically, Reading, writing and arithmetic. The Department of Education bargained for one more: something called makabayan, which you can loosely translate as ‘civics’.
The World Bank’s idea was to push all the deadwood out of the public schools and force it to focus its resources on the 3R’s. What the World Bank failed to understand was that the Department of Education existed to employ teachers rather than teach students. What happened was that the bureaucrats pushed all the deadwood into makabayan. When the schools reopened under the new system, the result was that even more deadwood had crept into the system. One pundit described how the both science and math took at hit when the smoke cleared. In the landscape of institutionalized mediocrity, makabayan towered like a mountain.
One of the dangers of reform is that the full-time do-gooders have an almost infinite amount of time to hijack the process. Every attempt at improvement is wrenched into yet another jobs program for the left. Some people are afraid to propose a Constitutional Convention out of the concern that the Left will simply run off with it and proclaim and Union of Soviet Socialist America.
Yet how can a society exist when “reform” is to be feared as much as stasis? The underlying problem it seems to me, is a political one. Reform cannot be attempted without the explicitly political goal of keeping the Bolshies at bay. It’s like opening a screen door on a summer night. Got the keep the skeeters from rushing in. But how?
The net effect is to make reform a very expensive and often destructive process. It is damned if you do nothing; damned if you do something.
LOTM,
What matters is culture and expectations.
Exactly right. Poor kids can learn. The problem is that they are often raised in a totally dysfunctional environment – bad culture, low expectations. Change the culture, the expectations, and they do succeed. KIPP, and high-performing schools like them around the country, have proven this. They select kids via lottery, so there’s no elite advantage. They just do better.
But it’s not just the school culture (and I don’t think you would disagree here). The problem is the more general urban culture. A culture that glorifies violence, exploitation, sexual conquest, image, pride, materialism, and domination is not going to produce a steady stream of anything other than criminals and thugs. This is true whether we’re talking about white, black, brown, yellow, purple, or green skin color. A redneck is a redneck, as Thomas Sowell pointed out so well.
Education can play an important role in overcoming and eventually destroying this cancerous culture. Whether it is enough remains to be seen.
But we have to try. The alternative is much, much worse.
Cheers,
L3
Not a bug. a Feature.
Let us go back to the foundations of all leftism, the Communist Manifesto. Marx wrote:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.”
What the leftist seeks to destroy is the “cash nexus”, The very idea that things in a society will be given to those who can pay for them is anathema to the leftists.
What then is the alternative? Marx was quite unfocused about this, believing that the revolution would eliminate all economic scarcity and social tension. Lenin, and later Mao, had to run post revolutionary societies. They made a virtue of their political necessity, and handed all allocative power to the Party.
Mao’s slogans are instructive. “Better red than expert” was one. It meant that opportunities were for the loyal, not the talented. It is certainly the power behind Arnie’s list.
Of course, as these systems evolve, they become hereditary. Look at the Soviet Nomenklatura, and the ruler of North Korea. This is what BO and his henchmen want.
wretchard @ 41: OK. Well, Rome fell because of its weakness, but it seems we are mostly in danger of falling to our own weakness. Well, first that, and later, who knows, Canada might invade and take us all into protective custody.
There’s always the second amendment. There’s always the military – even though so many of the prominent generals are such weenies these days, I wonder what that comes to. There’s always secession. We could bring back Emperor Norton here in California, or maybe Empress Pelosi.
But I still think we’re getting ahead of ourselves, the 2010 and 2012 elections are still potential recovery points, and wouldn’t that be dramatic!
Storm-Rider,
Military spending is only $658 Billion (21%)
Thank you for your reply. You understand I believe that I am broadly sympathetic with your goal of reducing federal expenditures in areas not included in the enumerated powers. There are only four points that I would like you to consider at this time.
First, you elide from desiring a 10% ceiling on Income taxes to fund the entire government to calling for a government that consumes 10% of GDP. These are two different, although linked, things.
Second, even if the expenditures that you wish to eliminate totaled a trillion dollars a year it is not physically possible to simply defund Medicare etc. What is needed is a practical 20 year path to getting out from under the rock that the Baby Boomers lifted over our heads. During some considerable period of time we simply will have to keep paying for the follies of the past. Once we begin the glide path back to solvency the interest on the debt will begin to decline. If my idea of withholding the vote from the tax eaters were adopted this would be much easier but there is no benefit in dreaming that we can simply repudiate half the budget. Even in my dreams I like to follow a workable path to my goal. If I could simply close my eyes and be surrounded by beautiful and friendly women it would nice but in my dreams I tend to be exploring the stony path to my goal more than the goal itself. If my dreams start to get more interesting I may share them with you.
Third, you accept the current level of military spending as a base line. Why? While it is true that the Left wants to see it cut in half or more it is already far below what we have maintained over most of the last 60 years. My personal expectation is that during peacetime, or nominal peacetime given that we are in an effective, if officially unrecognized, Cold War with China and Russia again, we should expect to spend between 6.5% and 7.5% of GDP on Defense. The Armed Forces should be tripled in size over an eight year period, and then increased a further 50% over the following four years. Doing so would not make the military larger as a percent of the population or as a percent of the economy than we have been able to support during periods of growth. Such an expansion would not only solve many of our economic and social problems but it would also forestall a wave of aggressive conduct overseas that is arising in the face of America’s retreat.
A larger military consuming the taxpayers money in training is a better investment for both America and the world than a smaller military stretched by constant conflict. As I see it a smaller military in accordance with a more Isolationist policy is, while admittedly in the absence of external conditions desirable to many for understandable reasons, simply to dangerous. VA and associated expenditures are also underfunded and should be counted separately. All of this is expensive but a reasonable response to the conditions we face.
My expectation is that for the near term, at least 10 years, we will need to spend at least 2.5 trillion dollars a year, even if we reorder our priorities. Your desire to get the budget down to the $1.5 trillion line is one that I share but do not expect us to get to under any scenario for at least 15 years.
Finally, I am concerned by how you expect to pay for a genuine crisis.
during time of war they could ask the American people for donations
Now that is not serious. Yes during WW-II we held Bond Drives. We had people in Iowa hanging blackout curtains, but not to pay for the war but to build morale and a sense of solidarity with the war effort. War time rationing was economically irrational, as were most scrap metal collections, but they were politically important. The worst thing about them is that they established the popular emotional connection with economically irrational recycling under government mandate that has been hijacked by the environmental movement. Such efforts are often desirable under wartime conditions and we may need more of them but they are not part of a sound financial policy.
To be blogged under the title “Funding Defense.”
“A culture that glorifies violence, exploitation, sexual conquest, image, pride, materialism, and domination is not going to produce a steady stream of anything other than criminals and thugs.”
I don’t know about that as it seems a pretty good description of ancient Greece and Rome, Elizabethan England or Solomon’s Empire for that matter. I do know that we will not have better schools until we have better families and the welfare state has destroyed the economic rationale for two parent families. Cultures are adaptations to environment and the culture would not survive if it were not well adapted to the environment. The problem is that in dysfunctional environments cultures adopt, promote, encourage, and propagate behaviors that outside of that culture rarely produce positive outcomes.
Cowboy/33
“Acedemic culture”
I think the correct spelling would be acidemic culture. After all, it was, for the large part, a result of acid trips in the 60′s.
…which explains a lot.
Alexis — Pat Tillman (and a few others) were killed in a tragic mistake. This happens a lot more frequently than you’d expect. Read EB Sledge’s “With the Old Breed,” or any book on the European theater by Stephen Ambrose. Tillman was well-liked and respected. At fault was his commander who split his column unwisely in two.
Moreover, the problem with Chicago’s schools is the people in them. The Black and growing Hispanic population is characterized by single mothers, gangs, illiteracy, and no desire for learning. Both Japanese and Mexican emigres to the US in the late 19th Century arrived dirt poor. One came with a value for education, literacy, and technology despite themselves only recently freed from abject feudalism. In other words the life of the average Mexican in 1830 was far richer, freer, and filled with more dignity than that of the Japanese peasant at the end of the Edo period.
Yet who prospered, and who fell into abject social dysfunction? Neither were White, neither absent racial prejudice nor overt discrimination. Yet one group became solidly upper middle class while the other gave us words like “barrio.”
Mayor Daley could be touched by Jesus himself, and go on a mission to give Chicago schools the best teachers, books, fewest bureaucrats, most technology, and so on. And it would not make A DAMN BIT OF DIFFERENCE. At all.
Hungarians in 1946 learned despite having nothing. Because they were Hungarians. Wretchard’s companions in his school days learned because they were Filipinos imbued with the desire to learn. For whatever reason you wish to ascribe, the possibility of this condition (hunger for learning) applying to any significant segment of the Black and Hispanic population of Chicago is just about nil.
Daley is just the symptom, not the cause. Just as Obama, Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan, Gibbs, Axelrod, Emmanuel, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest are not evil genuises with power to rival Sauron and Lord Voldemort. They are CREATED by the people around them. Chicago is corrupt and decayed and decadent because most of the people who live their, the average people, WANT IT THAT WAY.
If the Black and Hispanic majority wanted good government, Chicago would be synonymous with boring, efficient technocrats. It would look like Portland or Boise. If the Black and Hispanic majority that makes up Detroit wanted something other than a bad parody of Robocop, THAT city would look like Fort Worth or Denver. No one put a gun to the people’s heads and made them vote Daley or Kwame Fitzpatrick.
Chicago, and its awful schools (like LA btw) is what it is because the people who live there would not have it ANY OTHER WAY.
Offtopic: The Senate GOP Leadership under Mitch McConnell will not allow a vote to repeal Obamacare in reconcilation. It seems the poor little RINOs don’t want to vote against Obamacare again. http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/03/24/senate-gop-trying-to-scuttle-repeal-it-amendment/
If this is the way Republican Leadership wants to fight the oncoming socialist dictatorship, we’re doomed. What part of their oath to defend the Constitution don’t they understand? These A-holes don’t seem to understand the concept of guilt by association. The Democrats are clearly traitors to the Republic. Those who willingly associate, and give aid and comfort to those traitors are traitors too.
With the exception of DeMint and Coburn and maybe a few others, the time for a trial for treason, follows by a mass lynching of the entire treasonous US Senate draws near.
Unsk, how’bout throwing the bums out and applying generous amounts of tar and feather? I am not particularly enamored by your lynching idea.
…and make them work for a living, in addition to their temporary avian status?
Term limits. period.
Granted, one day, there may be a situation when the angry mass would consider the street lamp posts as very impromtu and serendipitous.
I dunno… is a velvet revolution possible? “We are mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore”.
Somehow apropos: The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.
This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
I hear a sucking sound of a singularity not that far ahead.
Ah, who wouldn’t see that coming!?
So basically this is a carve out in the health care bill that creates a two-tiered system for congressional staffers. Some staffers that work for some of the upper-level offices like leadership or on the committees are getting the option of keeping their old health insurance. Whereas other staffers that work for personal offices actually have to go, like the rest of America, and get their insurance under President Obama’s new law. It was originally thought that everyone was going to be covered under the president’s health insurance plan, but it looks like from the legislation that that’s not the case.
Nomenclatura, new and shiny.
Linky
How about a moderate proposal to help fund health care?
I suggest a 20% tax on all public sector pensions and grants, with an exclusion for the military (who already have their own system in the VA).
That way, the public sector employees get to pay their fair share of this, and are privileged to lift some of the burden which is now put entirely on the private sector.
This should be a priority for the Repubs should they get in after November.
The University of Illinois was caught doing the same thing. Underqualified or unqualified students were admitted to the law school in exchange for the placement of the bottom members of the graduating class in top Chicago law firms. Graduating seniors with political connections were admitted to the University despite their inferior grades and test scores. Both the University President and Chancellor of the Urbana Campus will be gone at the end of this academic year.
This has been probably going on for years but at least at the undergraduate level the children of th movers and shakers quickly disposed of by the academic rigor required to stay in one of America’s top public institutions. Still becuase some slug with connections got in some more deserving peon went to Northern Illinois or UIC instead.
Cowboy @ 33,
Exactly right. My father (1902-1988) had a formal education only through the 8th grade in a two-room school. Nonetheless, he built and ran several mid-sized businesses in the 1930′s and 40′s. He was far from unique. Most of his peers at our church were from similar subsistence-farming backgrounds and were successful businessmen. Many of the people who built the country had little schooling. My father’s father was 7 years old in north-east Alabama in 1865. Dad quoted him as saying, “Coming up on the heels of that war, I didn’t get no education.” Nonetheless, he built a successful farm and family. It’s not about quantity of education, but rather quality of moral thinking and work ethic. The sad fact is that the mindsets of folks born much after WWII are woefully deficient for the multiple problems facing us. BTW, in Brazilian Portuguese, “educacao” means, in addition to schooling, one’s comportment that is derived from moral education. Do we even have a word for that concept in modern America?
Anybody ever read “The Underground History of American Education”, by John Taylor Gatto? Gatto was a former NYC Teacher of the Year who eventually realized the system was rigged.
Twobyfour,
Maybe my lynching idea is a just a tad extreme, I admit. But our Republican , not too mention our Dem, representatives all too often forget bout their oath to defend the Constitution, particularly in times when we really need it, like now.
As far as terms limits. Here is LA , there was a proposition that passed about ten years ago that limited Councilman to two four year terms . What it created was a political merry go round where councilcritters would end their terms and run for State Assembly or Senate and then after being termed out there would come back. Since they were all Dems and backed by the Media and unions, it was just a reshuffling of the deck from one place to another.
But it got worse. Since LA has no honest media that would ever think to tell the truth, our Councilpeople conspired to have a new “Term Limits and Campaign Finance proposition” just recently. The overwhelming majority of voters thinking all term limits were a good thing, voted this piece of crap in even though it increased the number of terms allowed from two to three and relaxed campaign limits. Btw, Councilman and County Supervisors in LA are allowed legal campaign slush funds usually running in the millions of dollars that can used for any purpose, including a new car, house whatever.
If you think this is nuts, embrace it, it ‘s your future. It’s the Chicago/LA way.
38. Alexis: What leads you to believe Pat Tilman was the victim of fragging? I thought it was friendly fire on a dark night.
2) See this http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_1_chicago-crime.html for a truly horrifying account of Chicago’s schools.
3) The problem of bad schools ultimately comes down to discussions of race, and we can’t have that, because we are all equal and it’s only the badness of society that is holding anyone back
stormrider
“Education of our children is not a power enumerated in our Constitution for Federal (tenth amendment) responsibility for educating children must fall to the States or to the individual. If we return to the Constitution I predict a flowering of education, creativity and achievement in America beyond anything we’ve ever seen. The dumbing down of America is a project of Federal Government in collusion with the “education” establishment, mass media and the entertainment industry.”
Cowboy
“All this talk of hogging resources, of the derilection of parents, etc., seem to be beside the point if you ask me. The lack of resources complaint is especially galling, given the per-pupil outlays today, and also given my own admittedly anecdotal observations about the spending proclivities of my own hyper-bloated and wasteful school district.
The failure we face in American schools today is one a failure of will, of desire, of honest dealing, and of fidelity to time-tested proven methods in the face of flirtation with faddish and cynically derived schemes.
A concomittant failure is the deadly assumptions about getting into the “right” schools. Much of education has become a game of credentialism, of getting one’s ticket punched.
Acedemic culture, from the elementary school teacher’s podium right up to the professorial lecturn, needs to be questioned, and to be reformed.”
Round and Round we go. Many good and great comments, ideas and conclusions. But they leave the average parent just confused, pissed and not being sure what to do about their children’s education. Or to put it more simply what they can do.
Now if I were a pol, a educational professional, a teacher, a money man, a mover and shaker the discussion here would be of value.
But most Americans are none of those, they are just men and women who are trying to make a life and a life for their kids.
So I have just a few things to say that might help right now. Or if not may give those average Americans a goal to work toward.
A little background first. I married, had two kids. My job back in the sixtys on, had long hours, frequent trips away from home, and extream pressure on me and consquencely my family. There was no owner’s manual on how to raise kids and have a happy marriage, except by example my parents.
An example that I mis-layed and forgot, much to my shame and to the determent of my children and wife.
Well, being young and still not over my own problems from my little war and trying (I thought) to be a good husband and father by working my butt off and bringing in the bucks, I thought I was doing good.
As you may guess, my thinking was all wrong and negated the teachings of my own parents.
Raising happy educated kids and having a happy marriage has little to do with how much money you make or how successful you are.
So it wasn’t long until my children were in trouble, not only in their education but in their every day lives. Not enough supervision, in some instances not even enough love. Which made me ashamed because I loved my kids more than my life. But I didn’t show it because I was never there. Phone calls just are no substitution for hugs and kisses and long talks helping them learn life and it’s hard lessons and beautiful truths.
We made it barely, forty years later they are OK, but it was a rough trip and in someways they are still paying as I am.
So, now grand kids. Three grandsons who were planned. Two wonderful granddaughters who were not, but welcomed just as much as the boys. By God’s design I am the primary caretaker of the girls. Which is both a blessing and as as you might think hard on an old man. But I was an am, better prepared for this go around.
I have now what I didn’t have before or didn’t make for my kids before…TIME and EXPERIENCE.
Time to help them not only in life’s lessons and learning about God’s Creations and our World but with their education.
I have been their schools greatest pain in the ass that (as in one principle’s words) “she had ever has the misfortune of dealing with.” Or as one teacher put it: ” You just can’t accept that we teach what we are told to and that we have no control over it”.
Well, you can imagine the fifteen minute lecture she got from me.
I have spent thousands of hours, hundreds of dollars and lots of love teaching my five grandkids what they need to know because their school district and schools would not. Homeschooling, well it was a hybrid deal, they came home we reviewed the lessons, the work needed and what they didn’t teach and what they taught WRONG.
The results are not all in yet, but two of my grandsons are in the Military, one Navy, one Air Force with the thirteen y/o young grandson wanting to be a United States Marine.
My two granddaughters, one just turned nine and the other fixing to be three will need my help for quite some time.
I’m just hoping and praying I will be here long enough.
Don’t depend on others to educate your children or grandchildren.
It is your responsibility, as it always has been.
Papa Ray
Hungarians in 1946 learned despite having nothing. Because they were Hungarians.
No. It wasn’t because they were Hungarians. It is because they wanted to learn before they even came to America.
When middle class Cubans came to Miami, they had nothing. Yet, they worked hard and made it to the top of Florida society.
When Guatemalan shopkeepers came to America, they became part of the American middle class.
When Holocaust survivors came to America, they brought their respect for learning with them and their children became doctors and lawyers.
When people move to a new place, they bring their attitudes and their values with them. It isn’t congenital. It’s cultural.
Look at Maroons in Jamaica. Maroons have been famed for generations for their stable families, their piety, and their strong attachment to private property. For a slave to escape and move into the hills was not only about fleeing the slave master, it was about leaving slavery behind him. A slave captured by a Maroon didn’t become a Maroon; he stayed a slave until he escaped from his new master into another village.
The kind of Hungarians who came to America were rarely servants from the Pushta. Instead, they typically came from the Hungarian middle class.
In contrast, look at working class Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Welshmen, and Italians who came to work in the mining camps. Many of their descendants are still working class.
People bring their status with them. A street walker in Paris may become a grand dame in San Francisco, but Parisians know the difference. A pickpocket in London may become a powerful businessman in Sydney. Yet, the main effect of emigration has been to imprint class differences upon the landscape, not erase them.
Many American Negroes have left the plantation. I think most have not. The real problem we face is that many Negroes brought the plantation with them when they moved into big cities.
Likewise, most “Hispanics” are not Spaniards. They are Hispanized Indians with Spanish language, Indian culture, and a long history of forced subservience toward Aztec imperialists, Spanish conquerors, and then neo-Aztec imperialists (a.k.a. Mexican nationalists) again. “Aztlan” is Aztec irredentism and it is very dangerous.
There is a term in New Mexico for deracinated Indians with Spanish language and Indian culture – genizaries. Janissaries. Janissaries were Serb boys taken away from the families who were forcibly converted to Islam and served as Ottoman shock troops.
The worst part of slavery isn’t the forced labor. It isn’t the brutality. It isn’t even forcing families apart to sell each slave to the highest bidder. No, it is that too many people admire the slave owner. Too many slaves envy the slave owner. The slave master becomes a role model rather than a man to be pitied and despised. They may call for “reparations” but what they really want is to become slave owners and hold the whip themselves. The reason I oppose the ideology called “The American Dream” is because it has essentially become the exaltation of slavery and “keeping up with the Joneses”.
What America needs are cities, not plantations. Villages, not isolated farms where the women feel lonely. Communities, not street gangs. The common good, not conquest.
What we get out of America is what we put into it. Liberty is made for man, not man for liberty. We need to look beyond everyday life at Pelican Bay and its ideology of the prison gang. We need to think of what we want America to become.
What the South African Apartheid state did with evicting the people of District 6 was downright evil. Likewise, it was downright evil for black racists to evict Pepperdine University from Watts. The fact that Pepperdine has a fabulous campus in Malibu now is beside the point. Modern Pepperdine is a creation of a kind of black segregationism every bit as harsh as South African Apartheid.
I want a nonracial United States of America. People can call themselves whatever they want in private, but our fundamental political loyalty must be to our states and our federation. We can have a nonracial United States of America regardless of the racism of those in the halls of power. We can make it happen. To say this cannot be done is to say that the United States of America is doomed, doomed to the balkanization that caused the collapse of so many other empires. To say that this dream is nonsense is like Doctor Faustus claiming he could not repent of his sins because of his contract with the Devil.
Many of us make a Faustian bargain with racism at some time in our lives. The door is open even so. The door is open to create the kind of community we can all feel proud of.
#58
Really good. We had a local author here, Carol Ryrie Brink, who made much the same points, especially her phrase about if you bring the Old World with you to the New, the old attitudes, rancors, etc. you really haven’t gone very far.
Onion?
OBAMA FAMILY SPARED!
Washington, DC March 22,2010. President Obama breathed a sigh of relief today as he and his family narrowly escaped a Disaster. The President thanked Congress for its heroism in exempting him and his family from the requirements of the Health Care Reform Act. Noting his elevation about the rest of the American population he remarked teasingly, “This is what change looks like.” Obviously letting down after this close call, he joked to to staff, “Can you believe these dumb whites voted to screw themselves and their children with this for this pig**** of a Bill?”
wretchard@19,
So true, and so obviously the genesis of the archetypal “strong-man” figure redolent of tyrannical governance.
Which buttresses a political concept I’ve been chewing on: I call it “the politics of scarcity” – or, more succinctly, just “Oasis Politics.” Scarcity drives dependency. Dependency drives patronage. Patronage leads directly to class-divides, slavery and dhimmitude. And, in what can be described as an acute mimicry of Orangutans’ organization at a World Wildlife Fund feeding station, humans seem hard-wired to organize in deference to the bully-patriarch at our “feeding stations, too.
To keep this short, I’ll wield this concept here just to make two points.
(1) America’s giant middle class and mercantilist society generate surplus and leisure, and immunize the nation’s democracy against Oasis Politics.
(2) So, in order for the “strong man” archetype (or oligarchy, or autocracy, or fascism…call it what you want) to gain a foothold in America, scarcity must be manufactured, the Oasis must be created.
Can a polity beget a Mohammed, or a Daley, or an Obama without scarcity – be it water scarcity, a dearth of “affordable housing,” or pinched access to abundant fuels?
My answer, I guess, is no.
And my question is, of all the scarcities burdening Americans everyday, which ones are manufactured…and by whom?
-Steve
Can’t say enough about the role of faith and family in kids flourishing in bad schools . My oldest son’s senior year at a bad Alabama high school, a number of his fellow seniors (including him) got scholarships and/or accepted to prestigious universities. This despite three housing projects and several marginal neighborhoods feeding in. Then re-districting removed the celebrated diversity from the school, leaving only the “hoods”. Now no one this side of basketball players get accepted into college. Probably the intact family ratio at the school is about 2%. These kids have almost zero chance of prospering in the stripped down post-industrial America our elite idiots are creating.
Of course soon the left will come after home schoolers and religious schools as enemies of egalitarianism.
steveaz/61
Probably not so simple. Notice that the young lefties are usually kids of leisure, rather than kids from poor working families. If you have a little connection to reality, you may be tempted to adopt utopian ideas before maturing.
You may have to think it through.
There is, as we all know, no single remedy for our current ills. But there is a place to start that is powerful and constitutional.
I mentioned it just the other day and @ 35. Storm-Rider hit it again today.
The movement must come from a vigorous and unceasing resurrection of the Tenth Amendment. There are of course bitter divisions over this suggested action, however it is plainly stated in the Bill of Rights and thus should be exercised with great urgency by those who believe the Federal government has over reached not only its original intent but also breached the foundation of the Constitution itself.
It is vital to know that the Constitutional convention was not convened to create an entirely new form of government, but rather of modify the Articles of Confederation. The Founding Brothers, in total secrecy, exceeded their charge. That lead to a schism within the convention regarding the thesis/antithesis of incorporating a Bill of Rights in the original document and thus gave rise to Patrick Henry and others becoming the Anti-Federalists. Convinced that there was but one shot at having a convention and NO chance of convening a second, the promise of a Bill of Rights would be the first order of business in the “new” government. The Founding Brothers kept that promise.
There is an overarching need for a total ban on the assaults We the People have seen directed at Our Bill of Rights over the years and it must be stopped, and their rightful preeminence restored. If we do not another revolution cannot be avoided.
http://www.legislature.idaho.gov/legislation/2010/HCR044.pdf
10th Amendment activity in Idaho.
An overview–
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Americas/2009/April/Deciphering-the-Tenth-Amendment-.html
We need some courts that mean something.
Lifeofthemind 45,
Federal revenue is currently 19% of GNP; cutting it to 10% makes perfect sense – for the average tax-payer that would represent 10% Federal income tax. I’m not suggesting defunding Medicare or Social Security etc.; just breaking up all the un-Constitutional social programs into 50 corresponding State programs – phased out (and phased in) over a period of years. State programs would be run better because those in charge are closer to the people and the people to government worker ratio would be lower; the states would also more likely comply with the tenth amendment’s provision for individual tax-break opt-out.
As far as war is concerned people and corporations would support the effort with their labor, monetary donations and by purchasing war bonds. Military spending to GDP ratio has decreased since WWII in large part since the GDP has increased so much. When the nation’s creativity, energy and economic productivity increases from $100 Billion to $14,500 Billion (when we still had our factories) the pie becomes so much larger – military spending compared to GDP goes down. The key to military strength is not based on higher than 10% taxation, it is based on GDP – based on the natural energy, creativity and productivity of the American People.
Considering our current GDP, no more than 10% is needed for Federal Government. If Federal Government could only take 10% of GDP their logical reaction would be to encourage the private sector – under Marxism it is the opposite. 10% Federal Taxation would be sufficient and it would be the end of American Collectivism – the end of American Marxism – a re-birth of the American Revolution.
Allow me to add this suggestion. If you are not familiar with Herbert Spencer and his book Man versus the State ( the State being the Feds) then I recommend it. Some notes:
Henry Hazlitt said that this book is “One of the most powerful and influential arguments for limited government, laissez faire and individualism ever written.”
Spencer played a huge role in the history of ideas, one that contemporary sociologists have sadly neglected other than to dismiss him as “social Darwinist.” In fact, his great contribution was precisely to untangle the study of society from all claims that it operated as a life form apart from the choices made by individuals.
He was a laissez-faire radical in times when academia was becoming ever more ill-liberal. He was an opponent of militarism, economic regulation, infringement on personal liberty, and government centralization.
This fiery book was published in 1884. The great English libertarian ( the libertarianism spoken of here is NO relation to liberalism today) sociologist Herbert Spencer sees a statist corruption appearing within the liberal ideological framework, and warned of the Coming Slavery.
It was Darwin who took his metaphors from Spencer, who was one of the last defenders of the classical liberal idea in England. He was the scholar who argued for the law of equal freedom: “Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”
In this book, he presents that argument that liberalism, which liberated the world from slavery and feudalism, was undergoing a transformation. Its new love for the state would put liberalism behind a movement to create a new despotism that would be worse than the old.
His understanding that freedom must also mean freedom from the state:
“The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind; and towards such an enslavement many recent measures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us.”
Further:
“The final result would be a revival of despotism. A disciplined army of civil officials, like an army of military officials, gives supreme power to its head power which has often led to usurpation, as in medieval Europe and still more in Japan, has thus so led among our neighbours, within our own times.”
His essay on political superstitions is a brilliant argument on behalf of self-organizing society, as against nearly all his contemporaries who had come to believe in the merit of power. He writes to condemn “the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.”
As David Gordon has written: “Spencer’s arguments against the early manifestations of the welfare state are of far reaching importance.”
The edition I copied this from includes the Introduction by Albert Jay Nock. Nock writes: “Spencer shows that the early Liberal was consistently for cutting down the State’s coercive power over the citizen, wherever this was possible. He was for reducing to a minimum the number of points at which the State might make coercive interventions upon the individual. He was for steadily enlarging the margin of existence within which the citizen might pursue and regulate his own activities as he saw fit, free of State control or State supervision.”
(2) So, in order for the “strong man” archetype (or oligarchy, or autocracy, or fascism…call it what you want) to gain a foothold in America, scarcity must be manufactured, the Oasis must be created.
Bingo. Right on the money. Goes hand-in-glove with manufactured crises, and is often the same thing.
31. W
Thank you, Wretchard. For the post and esp. this comment.
From my vantage point, I see life offering fewer and fewer guarantees these days, since everything is in flux and upheaval (or so it seems).
So, I find it ironic that as government enforces more and more ‘guarantees,’ the end result is that there are actually fewer and fewer of them over time. Anyone else notice that?
To me, “guarantees” are the notion that the government will not interfere with what Obama calls “negative rights.” But life in modern America had, in my lifetime, also meant things like an expectation of lifetime employment and a pension for people in the non-union private sector, or a reasonable expectation that kids would get a good education in public schools, or that doctors would do their utmost for what was in their patients’ interest (and also didn’t charge senior patients for procedures that Medicare subsequently insisted should be paid for). I’m not professing nostalgia for some of what I just enumerated (like the employment issue), but noting that Americans are loosing their moorings at a time when the government is making false promises of providing them with new anchors it cannot possibly guarantee.
2X4,
Point taken…
But, you’re missing the larger point. Without government mediated “scarcities,” or paid media messages hyping supposed scarcities, then Oasis Politics will never work in America.
Study American polities where government concentrates resources, be they abstracted ones like “education” and “safe neighborhoods,” or real ones like energy and water, in loci surrounded by relative deserts lacking these resources, and you’ll notice that the centralization and controlling mechanisms serve the Progressives’ “Strong Man” governance model – of which Daley’s Chicago, or Sacramento’s California are two excellent examples.
(To push the point: Have you applied for permits to repair a home in San Francisco County lately? Tried to till land near Inverness this year? Tried to drill for oil in ANWR this decade?: Scarcity!)
As to your mention of “leisure,” again, you miss my point: Leisure, itself, is one of the “scarcified” commodities. Look at the growing list of abstract wants now being posited as humane rights. Things like “leisure,” “health” and “comfort” (one could list Obama’s “positive rights” here and come close to finalizing the list) themselves are commodities under mediation for us by city Big-Men, or DC pols, or even UN Development agencies.
And, once they get our hire, history shows us that the mediators will abuse their agency: From Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, from Chicago to Flagstaff, the game follows well-worn ruts: threaten the compromised polity with rationing (or scarcity) in any one of these abstracted “necessities,” and the electorate will vote for the Oasis Patron’s allocation system every time. And the Masters have a coercive, psychological back up: every Oasis inhabitant lives campused by the fear of losing a privileged allocation, a promised dowry, or an elder son to the big man’s wrath. They may even face banishment to the deserts! Believe me, Daley-style Oasis Politics ensure the “citizen” will vote the “right” way.
See it or don’t, this is the game Daley, Mohammed and Baraka play, and their ploys hinge on actual or perceived scarcity.
Which brings me back to urban culture and the City-as-Campus concept I love to trot out at Wretchard’s site occasionally: Daley and Duncan needed a trapped, dependent citizenry to practice Oasis Politics on. If their urbanized charges roam freely, or if they customize and proliferate a plethora of patronage networks outside of their Alinsyite urban campus, then the Democrats’ big-ape tactics will not work – the machine simply cannot “own” the populace. If the campus walls are permeable, then there is no Oasis, and the big-Man isn’t.
And, to press one of my favorite points, there is something about the urban citizen that makes him vulnerable to the artificial rationales for hiring government mediation. Something about never seeing natural horizons, never staring for hours into moving water, never planting and eating her own corn…that renders him/her susceptible to confusing techno-trivia with essential needs.
My contention is that, under Obama/Duncan America’s urbanites, and now America at large, have become fodder for a grotesque Arabian import, Oasis Politics.
And I’m sticking to it!
Has everyone caught Dingell’s remarks about “controlling the people?”
http://www.thefoxnation.com/rep-john-dingell/2010/03/24/rep-dingell-its-taken-long-time-control-people
Habu 68,
Spencer was right; Karl Marx was not a Classic Liberal – he was a philosopher of tyranny.
“The proletariat (non-disabled poor) will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie (middle class), to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state (Corrupted Federal Government)… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at…. The fight of the Germans… against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest. By this the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism (Communism) of confronting the (Classic Liberal) political movement with the socialistic demands… against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
“The People’s State of Marx … will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally the application of capital to production by the only banker — the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!” Michael Bakunin
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
steveaz/72
Maybe… I see scarcity as a side effect of other factors. It may be used as a political tool, but the whole issue seem to be a bit more complex. I think Wretchard’s busybody factor has a degree of primacy and the scarcity is both the result and often a tool of convenience of the busybody segment. I’ll think about it more and address your contention when I’ve a free moment.
OT
This is how bad it is getting
Obama snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle and the girls, Israelis claim
The United States treated the representatives of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan with more courtesy. Obama is bird flipping trash. He writes checks for others to cash. He wants to provoke a fight between the US and Israel because those who would suffer would all be people he despises on both sides, whether the Jews of Israel or the American military.
Kinda late to this thread, but my first thought was:
Give us this day our Daley bread
And forgive us our trespasses
Or don’t forgive them, we don’t care
Steveaz, i agree totally with your scarcity concept.
“And, to press one of my favorite points, there is something about the urban citizen that makes him vulnerable to the artificial rationales for hiring government mediation. Something about never seeing natural horizons, never staring for hours into moving water, never planting and eating her own corn…that renders him/her susceptible to confusing techno-trivia with essential needs.”
One of the things people don’t understand is that many cities, particularly my LA, and probably Chicago is that the political jurisdictions are way too big to govern. There is no “close to the people”. The sheer size of jurisdictions allows for careless on purpose steamrolling of constitutional rights by the bureaucracy and the politicians. There is no transparancy; just a huge intractable blob of government where corruption is easily hidden. If you want a visual example watch the movie “Brazil” sometime.
Democrats want “far from the people’ government with layers upon layers of bureaucracies and commissions to wade through. So much easier to control the populace that way, and so much easier to grant special favors to the VIP elite class without some snooping conservative patriot objecting.
You’re right about the complexity, 2X4.
In my search for the right rhetorical talisman to warn folks away from Obamanomics ["Oasis Politics," "WWF Feeding Station:" I kinda like 'em. -ed], I admit I’ve taken some license.
I’ll let the concept cook a little while longer and try serving it up again, but with Ketchup next time.
Steveaz, there is one thing, the utopian movements (and progsoc as well) promise a horn of plenty (“Obama will pay my mortgage and car insurance!”). That implies a scarcity of some kind, whether real or by implication: “feh, that’s nothing, you can have more!” [we'll steal it from well-to-do and provide a whole bag of crumbs if we get your vote to perpetuity!]
So it does look a bit oasisy.
Of course, as the capitalism employs motivation of greed (constructive, creating more wealth, appeal to excellence), so does progsoc (destructive, zero-sum game, wealth transfer, appeal to mediocrity).
Destruction is another form to create scarcity. It may be called “deconstruction” but that is just a label. Like a deconstruction of a building by explosive charges.
Just a drive-by, incoherent as it is.
don Rodrigo
“From my vantage point, I see life offering fewer and fewer guarantees these days, since everything is in flux and upheaval (or so it seems).”
This is not an entirely bad thing, as I have argued many times here at the Club.
Here on BC I think we’d all agree that the greatest thing about America is guarantees of rights that will not be infringed.
It is NOT real or imagined guarantees – provided by lack of global competition, unions, civil service, rent-seeking bureaucrats, etc. – of perfect income stream security.
Yet for many Americans, since the 1960′s, that has become PRECISELY what they define as being great about this country. The damage of that shift in perceiving what is great about this country from being “liberty and freedom of opportunity” to the idea that “making it to adulthood still breathing means I get x, y, and z, without any worry about it ever being interrupted (IOW, outcome egalitarianism)” has been tremendous.
Guarantees in the material world have been made by politicians that have no basis in sound accounting practices and no historical context. These guarantees must be greatly diminished going forward if America is to move back from the precipice. Americans must re-learn as a people what all humans, but especially all Americans, knew prior to the New Deal, which is that no job is guaranteed and risk of losing income stream and the stresses associated with that potential loss are a normal part of the human condition.
In addition to blunting or destroying the entitlement mentality, this realization will improve work ethics for many overnight. Most humans will work hard because it is in their nature. But for vast swaths of people, a little fear of losing one’s bread and butter does wonders for making them show up on time and break a sweat on the job.
Demogogues like Obama and his henchmen will try to tell people that voting Dem will mean they literally never have to worry about their income. But they can’t do it forever if they corrode and demonize those who actually produce wealth. He sells a dream with no basis in reality. You can’t give away bread that isn’t being made.
Just got off of the phone with one our group in south Texas. He has been reading this book and recommends it highly and offered to mail it to me.
I told him if was as good as he said I would just order a copy for our family.
Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation
The reviews are great. I will read it and then give it to my family to read including of course my two oldest who are serving.
From one of the reviews:
Papa Ray
What terrorists? Where. O’ver there.
>>> Yuk: “the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists”
…-
“Gates expresses “concern” over Iranian drones
(AFP) – 3 hours ago WASHINGTON — US Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed concern Thursday over Iran’s aerial drone program, saying the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists”
Another side of the Chicago school scene was the Bill Ayer’s – Barack Obama CAC/Small Schools initative.
WSJ – Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools
Steve Diamond archived in No Quarter
I’m waiting for the next bill board. The one with a portrait of King George and the “Miss me yet?” line.
The more detail that come out about Obamacare the more I think some of those who think they are upper class are going to discover that they’ll be joining the ranks of the lower classes.
“We didn’t want to advertise what we were doing because we didn’t want a bunch of people calling”
The tree of liberty must be watered with…, ah, what the heck, I’m going home and having a sandwich. Let Chicago be Chicago.
89.toad: From your lips to God’s ears — http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=20125
84. no mo uro:
Thanks for the feedback. Part of my comment that you are referring to is misinterpreted because I wrote my thoughts poorly. I agree with you on the issue of guarantees. It was my intent to point out that a modern American people with their expectations and sense of entitlement don’t understand that we reached a sustainable saturation point a long time ago, and that additional government mandated “guarantees” designed to make life “better” will have the opposite effect over time.
Just as one of many examples, the feds are now moving to make foreclosures harder to carry out, and guaranteeing that hundreds of thousands of people can partially default on their loan obligations with the full backing of the government. Same with the new student loan policies. The nation has learned absolutely nothing from the financial debacle that got us here in the first place.
Pappy O”Daniel: “We need a shot in the arm. You hear me boys? In the goddamn arm! If the election is held tomorrow, that son of a bitch Stokes would win it in a walk!”
Junior O’Daniel: “Well, he’s the reform candidate, Daddy.”
Pappy O”Daniel: “Yeah.”
Junior O’Daniel: “A lot of people like that reform. Maybe we should get us some.”
Pappy O”Daniel: “I’ll reform you, you soft-headed son of a bitch. How we gonna run reform when we’re the damn incumbent?”
- O Brother Where Art Thou
Chicago non-magnet schools are even worse than you think. John Kass tells it like it is.
The truly scary thing about our future is almost everything will be “who you know.” Goodbye, American Dream. Hello, clout list.
The scarcity here is not the cause, it is just a step on the way, the result of regulation. When you force me to sell something for less than what it’s worth to me, I’m gonna quit making it or go make it somewhere I can make a profit on it. That’s just human nature, whether it’s cookies or blankets or health care or education.
Wow, well written.
This is why of all the blogs I’ve read for years, you’re the only author that I track to see what they’ve written.