Archive for June 14th, 2006
In this case what we are getting is poor pubic education at the expense of taxpayers. The cause? Another $17 million being thrown at the Buffalo Pubic Schools in yet another attempt to raise educational standards through failed programs.
The school system is a government regulated and supported monopoly. That is why it doesn’t work. Competition is needed. If consumers were forced to by GM cars and had a government subsidy rammed down their throats to support GM, do you think GM would care how their cars compare with Japanese cars? Of course they wouldn’t because they know you would have to buy their cars.
Education is no different. It is a service. Goods and services respond to the same basic principles of economics. One of which is that competition keeps costs down while increasing quality at the same time. The schools have no incentive to operate that way.
There are only two logical solutions. 1. Privatize schooling and get the government out. or 2. Institute a voucher program that enables real choice in education. Two major forces will continue to force us into the system we have now. The government, because politicians do not like to give up their influence and the unions who abhor the thought of competition. Imagine, better service at a lower cost. It will only happen when enough people speak out!
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PHILADELPHIA — The sign contains just eight words and is hardly big enough to wrap around a cheesesteak. But here in South Philadelphia, home of the cheesesteak, the sign that Joey Vento posted at Geno’s Steaks speaks volumes.
It reads: “This Is America. When Ordering Please Speak English.”
The sign is most definitely ignorant.
Vento, whose Italian grandparents arrived in America unable to speak English, faces a discrimination complaint from the city’s Commission on Human Relations, which said the English-only sign may violate city laws.
Just as bad are the laws mandating how someone operates a private business. People can and will vote with their wallets, we don’t need legislation to address such stupid issues.
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Precise language facilitates clear thinking, which may help explain why our politics are in such a muddle.
What is a “conservative”? A conservative is someone who wants to keep things pretty much as they are, dubbing any major shift in direction a “risky scheme.”
By that definition, who in Washington today are more conservative than the so-called liberal Democrats, yapping like protective bitches, should anyone approach their overgrown brood of social welfare programs? Those puppies may have grown far too large over the past 40 years for even the welfare state’s distended nipples – any sensible owner would get them out of that nursing pen and send them on their way before the insatiable mutts suck us completely dry – but the Democrats will have none of it, shrieking that even a modest plan to allow workers to shift some small part of “their” Social Security “contributions” into privately owned accounts would “leave children and cripples and old people starving in the streets!”
But if the leftist Democrats are in fact conservatives, why do we call them “liberals”?
Beats me. The 19th century definition of liberal – we now use “classical liberal” to maintain the distinction – was basically a laissez faire type who favored free trade and sound money. True “liberals” wanted low taxes and not much meddlesome regulation.
Sounds modest enough. But anyone who really took those precepts seriously today would have to call for a vast and real reduction in the size and intrusiveness of government at all levels, boarding up all kinds of departments and agencies.
Such positions are today the lonely terrain of the “third parties,” widely reviled as radical wackos. In Nevada, we have the Independent Americans, some of whom are refreshingly bold on these issues, though the party seems unable to drive off an oversized subset of confused, populist conspiracy buffs, anxious to blame all our problems on those timeworn scapegoats: the queer, the pot smoker and the Jew. (We will not delve, today, into the Uniform Commercial Code or the yellow fringe on the flag.)
I make no secret of preferring the more consistent smaller-government philosophy of the Libertarians. Though in today’s America, the Libertarians (precisely because they threaten to shut down the pork parade, rather than merely diverting it to a new coalition) might poll 4 percent on a good day.
by Chris Floyd
I was going to write something about the prisoner suicides at Bush’s Cuban concentration camp, and the Pentagon’s ludicrous “explanation” that the deaths were, simultaneously, both a carefully planned act of “asymmetric warfare” and also an outburst of pure mumbo-jumbo among primitive darkies who had somehow concocted the mystical belief that if three of them died then all the prisoners would be freed.
(Sidenote: The utter contempt in which the Bush Regime holds the American people was clearly on display here: they’re not even trying to make a coherent, plausible defense of the torturous limboland they’ve devised in Gitmo anymore. They just say anything, even if it contradicts itself, anything to muddy the waters, knowing that people – or at least the ever-servile media – will swallow it and move on to the next news cycle. But they also don’t care if people don’t swallow it; the blatant Bushist attitude toward public relations now is: “This is our story, we’re sticking to it – and what are you going to do about it if you don’t like it? Nothing, punk.” The self-contradictory explanation of the Gitmo suicides – rational, deliberate, intelligent act of guerilla warfare and crack-brained hoodoo from exotic lands – is strangely reminiscent of the Regime’s take on the 9/11 attacks: an act of war so rationally and intelligently planned that not even the world’s largest intelligence apparatus could detect it, much less stop it – and a lucky shot from a bunch of half-baked kooks dreaming about 72 virgins in Heaven.)
Today I finished reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D. The title is really misleading. The book is “politically incorrect” because it exposes the fallacies of our government’s forays into social engineering and economic regulation. The book enjoyed a good run on the New York Times bestsellers list.
Woods exposes the many lies and misperceptions we have been fed over the years. You will read about how the war on poverty has actually made poverty worse. The forced integration of the schools to promote racial equality was a huge bust. In fact, it was one of the prime causes of “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs, thereby exacerbating the problem it tried to fix.
The book is not an intense read, the pages flow smoothly and give a good overview of the topics covered. There is an extensive bibliography for those wishing to pursue further reading on the subjects. Once I started reading, it was hard to stop. I would highly recommend it as a great book for the upcoming hot summer days.
