The anti-corporatist, anti-favoritist movement is weakened, however, when its supporters misinterpret statistics, simply invent statistics, draw silly conclusions that are so backwards that they confuse everybody, and misuse slogans like Obama supporters are so adept at doing. Take this college professor (!), who somehow has decided that because college education was considered a “public good” by Americans and treated as such by our governments back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, college was “for the 99%” back then and was therefore more affordable than it is now. In case the link rots, it’s just a picture of a man holding a page he printed off from his computer, on which is typed,

I am a college professor increasingly frustrated by the incredible debt I see my students taking on.

According to the University of Minnesota, in 1968 a student working 6.2 hours a week at minimum wage would have earned enough to pay annual tuition and fees of $385.

That was back when education was considered a public good and not a private investment…

…back when education was for the 99%.

occupywallstreet.org

Every single thing this college professor implies and concludes about college education is completely backwards. Additionally, it is widely known throughout American society how backwards his implications and statements are, so he could only have reached his education-socialism conclusions by flagrant dishonesty or willful ignorance.

First of all, as a result of federal government policies designed to increase college enrollment and graduation rates starting in the 1960’s, a higher percentage of students attend college now than ever before. Therefore, whatever “percent” of the population “education was for” in 1968, it’s obviously “for” a larger percentage now, thanks directly to government policies. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (Table 1), in 1968, 38% of 18–19-year-olds were enrolled in college, 30% of 20–21-year-olds were, and 13% of 22–24-year-olds were. In 2010, these same numbers were 51%, 50%, and 28%, respectively (Table 1). Those are huge increases. Therefore, there never was a “back when education was for the 99%”, and it certainly isn’t true that “education was for” a larger percentage of the population at any time in the past than it is now. This college professor obviously knows this, so he is deliberately making misleading statements and committing a puzzlingly stupid misuse of the “99%” slogan.

Second, let’s address the government’s treating education as a public good. As this graphic from The Consumerist explains nicely, the federal government’s guarantee that student loans will be repaid to the loan agency no matter what, beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Higher Education Act, has caused an explosion of loans extended to the last few generations of college students. The Student Loan Marketing Association, also known as Sallie Mae, is basically a semi-private branch of the federal government that originates most student loans. Sallie Mae or another loan agency incurs very little risk in loaning tens of thousands of dollars to a student because it knows that it will receive payment for the loan on time, either by the student or the federal government or both. In other words, some major barriers to originating loans were removed by the federal government, and Sallie Mae cannot lose money from its bad decisions, so it loans to almost everybody.

Therefore, this tuition money is basically free (in the present), so everybody gets it and there’s little incentive for students to make frugal decisions. This increase in college enrollment at all price levels and the nearly complete lack of incentives for the borrowers to cut costs have contributed directly to the astronomical increase in tuition costs over the last few decades.

In other words, the guarantee the federal government places on student debt has guaranteed the need for student debt.

I suspect that the seemingly guaranteed profitability (or at least guaranteed revenue) that this government–financial sector collusion secures irrespective of the results, in combination with the dilution of the college student pool and the ongoing socialization (read: crapification) of K-12 education, contribute to the decreasing worth of a college education today. Everybody has one, and people don’t seem to be obtaining the requisite intellectual substance or life skills from college, so they paid $50,000 to $100,000 for nothing but the obligation to pay even more back over 20 years. I’d be bitter, too. I wouldn’t blame myself very much, either.

But the difference between me and the typical 99%-er is that I look at the facts and draw principled, objective conclusions instead of parroting juvenile, narcissistic, envy-based, socialist drivel because it sounds like something that could bring America one step closer to my Soviet socialist dream.

Every single thing that any government has ever or will ever touch becomes more expensive, less valuable, and less efficient. It distorts the market by distorting incentives, reducing necessary and inherent risk, and shifting costs away from their rightful bearers, among other insults. The treatment of education as a public good that everyone has a right to or at least should have access to has been the predominating contributor to its increasing price and decreasing worth. The Occupiers should be protesting the Congress and the government agencies responsible for the policies that made college so much more expensive and have removed any incentive for tuition to decrease, and not (just) a subset of the people who happen to benefit from this and hundreds of other distortions of financial markets.

Speaking of large internet-related companies, Canadian ISPs admitted that their pricing structure (which they call “usage-based billing”) is designed to discourage/reduce internet use by its customers. Cory Doctorow writes, “In other words, they’ve set out to limit the growth of networked based business and new kinds of services, and to prevent Canadians experimentation that enables them to use the Internet to its fullest.” Michael Geist, whom he quotes, says that this pricing model, therefore, is more accurately called behavior-based billing. As a rule, private companies in a free market always strive to attract more customers in order to do more business and make more money, in contrast to government-created “companies” and government agencies, which always seem to be seeking to limit the amount of products or services they have to provide to customers (water, electricity, every office you have to go and wait in line). This indicates that Canadian ISPs are not truly private companies in anything resembling a free market.

Another company that is not close to being entirely “private” and operates in a market that isn’t close to being free is Time Warner. Time Warner supported a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would prevent city governments from introducing fiber-optic broadband infrastructure in their cities. Simple pro-business right-wing conflationists reflexively support a bill that would prevent city governments from doing anything (especially providing a product or service that can and/or should be provided by private companies) and reflexively support the interests of private businesses. They are not entirely wrong, because the ultimate solution is not to get city governments into the fiber-optic broadband business or any other utility. However, the solution that would help the residents of cities where broadband is scarce, expensive, or nonexistent is to remove the regulations that are keeping it that way rather than passing new laws that seem to be mainly aimed at propping up telecom giants. No, I don’t know what laws North Carolina or any other state might have passed restricting competition and expansion in the broadband industry, but, well, look at this bill. It’s a bill that the state legislature will pass that will have profound effects on the telecom industry. It is undoubtedly one bill out of thousands across the country that have set regulations and restrictions on telecommunications, always to the detriment of the average (or, especially, poor) citizen.

Higher education might be the next asset bubble. Well, it’s certainly overpriced, a situation that is entirely the result of government interventions (mainly guaranteed loans to everybody) whose purpose is to make college affordable to more people. All government action has unintended consequences.

This is a great TED talk by Indian scientist Sugata Mitra about how children can teach themselves (and motivate themselves) when given the opportunity (and the necessity) to do so.

Speaking of the problems with traditional, regimented, government education, Boston University Psychology professor Peter Gray writes about the seven sins of our forced-education system. He expands upon a previous post in which he called forced education “prison”. In this post, he also outlines seven reasons compulsory education is harmful to society and not just the children who are currently forced to go to school. Numbers 3 and 4 are “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance” and “Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.” It’s a really good, brief read.

Sixty-three percent of people killed in the Iraq War have been civilians.

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

Glenn Greenwald is dismayed at the speed with which the Obama regime’s official reason for sending military aid to Libya changed.

Glenn Greenwald writes another masterful post on America’s two-tiered justice system: one standard of justice for legislators, high-level bureaucrats, and their big-business cronies, and another standard for everyone else. It is not possible to read Glenn Greenwald consistently and objectively and remain an Obama supporter, or possibly even a Democratic Party supporter.

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.
[...]
Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.

If you can’t be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?
[...]
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
[...]
There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it.
[...]
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.
[...]
What is “proper” social order? What does “right” social growth look like? If you don’t know you’re like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too.

Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn’t arise as a product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn’t disturb them. They had a stupendous goal in mind. The end of unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order.

From mid-century onwards certain utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play, following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.

During the post–Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.
[...]
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.

Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.
[...]
[I]t isn’t difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you’ll miss the real horror of what I’m trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway—without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I’m correct, we’re in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

In the future, I would like to read more of John Taylor Gatto, perhaps by actually buying one of his books. Other than promoting a free market of schooling and more family involvement in children’s educations, I don’t recall him offering very many concrete solutions, but that’s probably because, as he said, there are as many ways to educate a child as there are fingerprints, and families, communities, private companies subject to profit and loss, and even (maybe especially) the children themselves should decide how they each should gain an education. I think the most important point about compelled schooling is that it absolves parents, and therefore children, of most of the responsibility that they would otherwise have in children’s education, and it is impossible to really gauge how much human value is lost by the absence of such a vested interest.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!

I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.

It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)

Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970’s, the 1980’s, the 1990’s, or every year of the Bush regime.

The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.

Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.

They are forever oblivious to the harm the State does to any child’s education, so they think simply requiring children to receive more of it will make them better-educated. This is similar to the imposition of new taxes to pay for things the people don’t want and the enforcement of new regulations to fix economic problems that the government caused in the first place. More rules, more requirements, more bureaucracy, more taxation, more coercion.

Children are subjected to an alarming amount of Statolatrist propaganda from the very earliest stages of schooling, which is proudly lauded by Obama maniacs but which detracts from the quality of their education. Statolatry itself doesn’t make people worse at math, reading, or writing, but it has obviously facilitated the continuing, government-mandated decline in those basic areas of education. The more people who are brainwashed into the peculiar belief that the State should educate people, the more people who will support its idiotic, bureaucratic impediments to good education. And it doesn’t matter how well Americans can do calculus, critique literature, or write eloquent presidential speeches; if they support the absurd socialist agenda that Obama is trying to force upon his subjects, they are doing more harm than good—more harm than they could ever do if they were ignorant, stupid, and not a cheerleader for the Almighty State.

I imagine most Obama maniacs will support these proposals because they are coming from our Savior himself but also because they love the State and anything that expands it. But the most important issue here is not the content of the proposals themselves; it’s the fact that they will be coming from a very few people who will force their ideas on the entire nation. The fact that any apparatus or infrastructure exists that would allow for a single edict to govern that many people’s lives is of primary importance—obviously the content of its edicts will serve only to enhance and enlarge it, so the existence of the Department of Education and the power given to a single president over so many people’s schooling should alarm everyone, with condemnation of the specific proposals following as a corollary. It will not alarm most leftists. They vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind because George W. Bush signed it into law, and then later they found rationales (all valid ones, I surmise) to support their knee-jerk reaction; they will undoubtedly support Obama and his Education Department’s proposals because they come from Obama, and then later they will find rationales to justify their continued support despite clear evidence that they are biased tools.

Notice my use of the term “school year” in the first paragraph. Does it bother you that we gloss over the singular, all-encompassing term “school year” as commonplace and obvious in meaning? There should be no “school year”! There should be no bureaucracy or secretary or president who decides what the school year is! That’s the problem: the unilateral power of the State to define the “school year” and do all the other things it does under the pretense of educating children!

If people want some solutions to the deficiencies in schooling, particularly class time, that children are given, they should look to the absence of family, community, and individual responsibility in children’s education. These are direct and predictable consequences of the State’s involvement in anything. I am not surprised that Obama’s proposals will put even more of the children’s time under the purview of governments and necessarily less in the company of family members—people who should (and would, in a free society) be more influential in their education. Children should be playing and exercising more, spending more time learning from their parents, more time with their siblings, more time in extracurricular music or sports lessons, more time learning how to make their own decisions, and less time in the vicinity of bureaucrats with education degrees.

The idea that more government schooling will educate children better smacks of the dim-witted Statism that also led people to advocate throwing more and more money at failing schools. Here are four easy solutions to America’s educational shortcomings: 1. Eliminate the monopolistic Department of Education (and the ability of any criminal, elected or unelected, in the federal government to make any decisions about any child’s education but his own). 2. Abolish all taxes everywhere that in any way fund any public school or public-education-related endeavor. 3. Abolish all laws that are in any way related to home-schooling. 4. Remove all restrictions, regulations, and barriers to entry for private schools.

NEWTON COUNTY, Ga.—The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old student sadder and wiser, and facing expulsion and long-term juvenile detention.

“I think I shouldn’t have brought a gun to school in the first place,” said the student, Alandis Ford….

Alandis’ gun was a “cap gun,” a toy cowboy six-shooter that his mother bought for him.

“We got it from Wal-Mart for $5.96,” Tosha Ford said, “in the toy section right next to the cowboy hats. That’s what he wanted because it was just like the ones he was studying for the Civil War” in his fifth-grade class at Fairview Elementary School.

Tosha said that Wednesday afternoon, after school, “six police officers actually rushed into the door” of their home. “He [Alandis] opened the door because they’re police. And then they just kind of pushed him out of the way, and asked him, ‘Well where’s the gun, where’s the real gun?’ And they called him a liar…they booked him, and they fingerprinted him.”
[...]
Lt. Mark Mitchell said Thursday that Alandis had used the toy gun to threaten other children on the school bus and in his neighborhood, which Alandis denies.

Alandis was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats.
[emphasis added]

Let’s compare the accusations and police-state-speak of the thugs in clown suits to the child’s account of the incidents:

“On the school bus,” on Tuesday, Alandis said, “when I dug into my bookbag trying to get my phone out, the boy beside me, he reached in my bookbag and got it [the toy gun] and started telling everybody, ‘He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun,’ and spread it around the whole bus. So I put it back in my bookbag.”

But he said the students kept shouting, “He’s going to shoot all y’all, he’s got a gun, he’s going to bring it to school and shoot all y’all.” Did Alandis ever say anything like that or make any threatening moves with his toy gun? “No!”

In police states of the past, all it took was a rumor, an accusation, a vindictive psychopath wearing a clown suit, or a disgruntled bureaucrat to ruin a peaceful, innocent person’s life. Here the worthless pieces of trash who work for this child’s government school and the jack-booted thugs who probably at some point mouthed the words “serve and protect” take the incidents that the child described above, on the school bus, and report them as having happened in exactly the opposite way. The other children took his toy and taunted him with wild and obviously false accusations; if his account is correct, he clearly wasn’t going to (pretend to) threaten anyone with his cap gun, or else the one bully wouldn’t have had to take it out of the child’s backpack, against the child’s protests. This complete misrepresentation of the accused child’s account of what happened is a characteristic of totalitarian police states: you’re guilty until proven innocent, and don’t question the government’s authority figures.

Oh, yeah, I forgot: children don’t have rights at school.

The next day, the kid went to his neighbor’s house to ask him if he wanted to come out and play cowboys and indians or something. Read the neighbor kid’s reaction to the sight of—gasp!—a toy cap gun, and weep:

“He saw the gun that I had. So he ran in the house and called 911.”

Alandis said he found out later that his friend had never before seen a gun and thought it was real, and thought Alandis might shoot it. Alandis insists he never said anything to the friend other than inviting him to come out and play.

“The 911 call that we received” on Wednesday, Lt. Mitchell said, “was that a 10-year-old male was outside of a residence with a gun threatening to shoot another child.”

Mitchell was referring to the incident report from the Newton County Sheriff’s investigators who write that deputies “responded to a 911 call from a ten-year-old [neighbor of the Fords] who said there was a boy outside of his house with a gun trying to kill him.”

This probably isn’t the strongest evidence of my theory, but I think much of the Statist rot that has infected our minds during the last few generations has led to the self-hatred, disrespect for life, externalizations of blame, and vindictive attitudes that lie at the root of so many youth shootings. Guns are not the problem, and even lack of proper training with firearms, like many children from hunting families receive, is not the problem. This paranoia about weapons, the knee-jerk reaction that anyone with a weapon is a criminal and should be turned over to authorities, and the suspicion that a 10-year-old with a cap gun is a potential murderer are all part of the Statist malaise that either causes or certainly doesn’t help prevent school shootings. In other words, this kid’s paranoia and the weapon-hating, authority-kowtowing, State-worshipping mindset are more to blame for public killings than kids having access to guns.

Alandis’s mother sounds like a sharp woman:

“Someone heard that Alandis had a toy gun in his bookbag and said, ‘Oh, Alandis is going to bring a gun, he’s going to shoot everybody.’ He [Alandis] was wrong, he should never have taken it to school. And I told him that. And he’s being punished” at home. “But also on the other side of the coin, I think it’s a travesty what’s happened to him…. For them to say that’s he’s made terroristic threats is just ridiculous. We’ve taken it and changed what ‘terroristic threats’ was meant to be for.”

The public relations officer of the school system hides behind rules and procedures and political correctness like any useless drain on the human race would:

Sherri Viniard, the Director of Public Relations for the Newton County School System, emailed a statement to 11Alive News Thursday that reads, in part:

“Student safety is our primary concern, and although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property.”

The main police officer quoted in this article is similar: he has some vague idea in the back of his mind that what they did was wrong, but they can’t quite grasp the concept that following politically correct zero-tolerance policies could ever lead them astray:

“A toy gun is a toy gun,” Lt. Mitchell said, “to be played with and for kids to have fun with. But when kids use it the wrong way, just like anything, then it can be scary.”

The only people in this entire matter who have demonstrated the slightest bit of common sense, compassion, or social intelligence are the accused child, his mother, and the reporter. Unfortunately, Alandis still wants to be a police officer when he grows up. I hope that changes. I hope he works hard and goes into a field where he can add something to society instead of parasitizing it, like business or science or medicine. Or maybe a political activist (the good kind). I hope this sad saga alters him in a fundamental way such that he develops a healthy distrust of authority and hatred of the State. That could be a very bright silver lining to this atrocity.

And, you know, I could say all I’ve said before about government schools and monopolistic law-enforcement systems—how no one would ever freely choose to be victimized by their school and the police like this, how monopolies will never get better, how competition would go a long way to preventing such stupidity from ever happening and completely prevent it from continuing. But who is going to listen? Every Statist who hears about this story is going to blame everyone but himself and blame every way of thinking but his own. They think that the extent of their involvement in the government is to vote for politicians who are the lesser of two evils and maybe serve on a jury. It doesn’t occur to them that their explicit and repeated acts of support for this entire Statist system are exactly what allow bureaucrats to commit wrongs against people without fear of punishment. They are scared to death of letting us run our own lives and freeing ourselves of their Statist nightmare, so they will never let the freedom of association flourish that would punish and prevent these rights-violations. As evidence that I’m right, that libertarianism would promote peace, respect, and common sense where government monopolies currently forbid them, consider how few people actually support zero-tolerance policies that lead to the arrest and fingerprinting of a 10-year-old with a cap gun. These animals in clown suits and the lifeless pieces of sludge that populate school boards would either demonstrate some intelligence or become jobless and penniless in a real hurry.

I try to show my outrage and frustration at these injustices as passionately as possible in posts like this, but it’s hard. It’s tiring. You all agree with me, and you’ve heard all this before. Probably because these are far from isolated incidents, which makes it harder to evoke outrage at any particular incident either in ourselves or in others, but their commonplace nature is exactly what should outrage us the most!

Brother: Oh, can I add some political talk here? I encourage you to go vote your convictions and vote early if you can. We just got back from voting. I know you’re not happy (esp with the presidential election) but if you vote for the best candidate in your view in spite of the odds, then you are truly voting for liberty!!

Me: I think, in some weird way, that you’re encouraging me to go vote, even if it’s for Ron Paul. However, I regret to inform you that I don’t vote. Period. I summed up my reasons for succinctly here: http://www.blagnet.net/2008/09/10/why-i-dont-vote/ Ron Paul was the glowing exception in this past presidential primary because he was the only candidate who stood for almost everything I did, and more importantly, he wanted to STOP running peoples lives. Unfortunately, it seems the general American populace doesn’t like that idea. They’re enamored with the notion that someone out there is going to be in charge, even if they do horrible things in our names ($700 billion bailouts, for example).

Brother: Yeah, honestly I had heard about your article but wasn’t sure how to ask you about it. I had not read it until just now.

I think the unfortunate thing about the country is that at each stage the government has grabbed more responsibility and taken away more rights. It’s part of the cycle of history. I’m just choosing to fight it as best I can. I am just one person after all. I voted for the lesser of two evils…both men are more socialist than I’d like.

P.S. – Doesn’t a vote against anything that takes away liberty say more than the lack of a vote? I mean, if you don’t vote “pro-liberty” on the four GA constitutional amendments (at least), then you’re just leaving it in the hands of someone else…the alternative to voting on the issues is to take matters in your own hands and have a revolution with arms (i.e. big guns and bombs).

Me: From whom did you hear about my article? My facebook status?

I can’t find the quote, but I believe Jefferson once said something to the effect that history has shown us that it is the natural course for government to grow at the expense of liberty. It’s not just this government that confiscates your freedom over time, but any such government you would attempt to implement. Hence why I’m an anarchist.

I’m assuming you voted for McCain, but that letter already spelled out why I don’t vote for the lesser of two evils. To make it more specific to the current political climate, even if I did consider McCain the lesser evil of the two (I don’t – they’re both equally as horrible), giving him my vote is a direct endorsement from me to carry out any action he desires in my name. So while he may give the upper class a 3% tax reduction over Obama, what if he decides to bomb Iran? I certainly don’t want that. But if I gave him my vote, that means he can do it with my full backing. No thanks. Choosing between the lesser of two evils is a false choice. It’s like being asked if you would like to be killed by firing squad or by hanging.

I will admit, I didn’t even realize there were amendments to be considered on the ballot. Maybe I’m a bad citizen after all. However, amending the constitution is a worthless exercise anyway. The constitution – US or Georgia – after all is only a worthless sheet of paper. I imagine when I say that, most people freak out, since the Constitution is supposed to be Holy Writ. And I don’t say that because I dislike the Constitution, but rather because I realize that it is unenforceable. But why should it be? If you and I had entered into a contractual agreement, and then decided that all recourse for violations of that contract would be decided and enforced by me, would it surprise you then if I started to violate the original contract whenever it was beneficial to me? You would think that contract is useless. Why is it then that people think that government is bound by our Constitution when it is also the interpreter and enforcer of it? It’s obvious from American history that the government doesn’t care for it’s own restrictive contract, which the occasional glowing exception.

As for those amendments, I must admit they make for interesting internal debate. For instance, should people get tax cuts for using private land for forest conservation? On one hand, I like tax cuts. On the other, the government shouldn’t tell people what to do with their land. Curious.

As for your revolution, there are other methods I think. One is a revolution of minds – not of arms. In other words, if we educate enough people of the evils of the state, then either we force the state to show their true colors by trying to put down that threat – pulling more people to our cause. Or, and this is the path I think is more likely, letting the state continue on it’s destructive ways until it implodes on itself. Then, hopefully, when rebuilding from the ashes we can convince everyone to not put anything in it’s place.

Anyway, yeah. I’ll let you guys know about dinner.

Me: PS: Also, as a follow up, given that the Constitution is ineffective because the government is the controller of the strings, why is it that you think voting in their rigged system is the correct course of action to bring about effective change? It seems to me that would be the LEAST effective route to take.

It should be noted that I blatantly stole the firing squad/hanging comparison from Mike as well.

I don’t mean to take away from the excellent refutations and condescension he smacked the school administrators and their supporters with. Maybe he didn’t learn the same lesson Randall Munroe learned: pay no attention to the comments about news articles, blag posts, YouTube videos, etc., because they are some of the loudest and stupidest writings you will ever encounter. But it worked out well for him because he got an excellent blag post out of it.

One of the first insights the libertarian will garner from the thought processes of the Patriotic Correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade is: they violate the very things they purport to value and protect in their overzealous efforts to force other people to value and uphold them. Force is obviously the key word. A lot of supporters of the school’s decision to punish the children base their support on the belief that, since they have the privilege of living in the freest country on Earth (fuck yeah!), children should show their respect for the soldiers and generals who gave (!) them that right, and if the kids don’t show this gratitude to their enlightened and gracious government, then they should be punished and taught to respect the military and the government that have given them so much.

The reason, the patriotic correctness people claim, that our country (government) is so great is that it protects our freedom of speech, freedom of association, and other general human rights, whatever. (Some might even say the government and its Constitution “guarantee” or “grant” these things to its citizens.) These presumably include the right to do or say anything against the government itself, as long as you don’t hurt anyone or their property. And so, obviously, by teaching children that they are wrong to protest against their government because their government is so good and gracious that it allows them to protest against the government, they are being ignorant, stupid hypocrites. I doubt any of them sees this simple and un-subtle point.

This thought is nothing new. Anti-war Americans say the same thing about an aggressive foreign policy executed in the name of “protecting our freedoms”: we are violating our own freedoms and debasing our own values to defend ourselves against people who (supposedly) want to take away our freedoms and who have barbaric and un-humanitarian values.

These thoughts prompted me to comment on the life and times of Emma Goldman, an anarchist activist from Lithuania who did most of her writing, speaking, and activism in the United States. In 1893 Goldman was arrested and tried for the very dubious crime of “inciting to riot.” To my (limited) knowledge she didn’t actually succeed in inciting any riots and she certainly didn’t injure any people or property herself. According to Wikipedia, which is as far as I’ve gotten in my readings about Emma Goldman,

As she awaited trial, Goldman was visited by Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World. She spent two hours talking to Goldman, and wrote a positive article about the woman she described as a “modern Joan of Arc”.

Despite this positive publicity, the jury was persuaded by Jacobs’ testimony and scared by Goldman’s politics. The assistant District Attorney questioned Goldman about her anarchism, as well as her atheism; the judge spoke of her as “a dangerous woman”. She was sentenced to one year in the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary.

Emma Goldman was also arrested completely unjustifiably in connection with the assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz:

Because he was an anarchist and had interacted several times with Goldman, authorities became convinced that she had planned the action. They tracked her to a residence in Chicago she shared with Havel and Abe and Mary Isaak, an anarchist couple. Goldman was arrested, along with Abe Isaak, Havel, and ten other anarchists.
[...]
Although Czolgosz repeatedly denied Goldman’s involvement, the police held her in close custody, subjecting her to what she called the “third degree”. She explained their distrust of him, and it was clear she had not had any significant contact with Czolgosz. No evidence was found linking Goldman to the attack, and she was eventually released after two weeks of detention.

Wikipedia says in 1906 Goldman and a group of activists were arrested for meeting to “reflect on Leon Czolgosz.” And, “in 1915 Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation’s attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested in February 1916 and charged with violation of the Comstock Law. Choosing not to pay a hundred-dollar fine, she spent two weeks in a prison workhouse….”

Then, in 1917, she was arrested for opposing military slavery and “inducing persons not to register” for the draft.

Finally, in 1918, she was deported by the federal government for being an anarchist.

The US Department of Justice’s General Intelligence Division, headed by J. Edgar Hoover and under the direction of Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, conducted a series of raids to arrest radicals. In a memorandum prepared while they were in prison, Hoover wrote: “Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and [a] return to the community will result in undue harm.” Although her marriage to Jacob Kershner arguably provided her with legitimate US citizenship, the government invoked the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act and deported both Goldman and Berkman to the Soviet Union, along with over two hundred others.

Woodrow Wilson, whom my college libertarians club colleague described as the Antichrist, claimed he was dragging the U.S. into World War I “to make the world safe for democracy.” Presumably he meant safe to speak freely, assemble freely, and not be arrested, charged, convicted, or imprisoned for actions that don’t harm someone else. These are just a few freedoms that, we are constantly reminded, need protecting by soldiers and generals. These are the same freedoms that J. Edgar Hoover and Alexander Palmer officially were protecting when they forced two hundred radicals out of the country.

Hopefully, you know better than to buy the State’s official line. They were acting to protect the State’s own interests and insulate itself from radical opposition and protest. How just and enlightened.

The Statists who opposed Emma Goldman’s rhetoric and activism back then and who still support the federal government’s handling of her and her ilk today would claim that the interests of the State (order, peace, security) need to be protected and maintained, or else no one will have their basic rights protected. Those basic rights include writing, speaking, assembling, and demonstrating against the State and, yes, advocating revolution. It is kind of doubtful how innocent she was of promoting only peaceful activism and no potentially destructive and deadly activities, but given her at least three wrongful arrests and very wrongful deportation, she was perfectly justified in so fiercely opposing the very existence of the United States government. She was right to protest its transgressions against the rights of its subjects.

Then, as now, many cheerleaders for the State advocate State actions that go against the very reasons the Statists supported them. To use an overused phrase, they violate the freedoms they are meant to protect. In the very action of defending State interests over individual rights, the State proves that the individuals in question were right to be protesting the State—proves that the State itself is abominable and monstrous because it beats, terrorizes, imprisons, deports, and kills peaceful protesters while speaking of defending everyone’s rights, and furthermore it says the beating, killing, and imprisoning are essential to its protection of everyone’s rights!

One of his strong libertarian leanings is about government schooling. I’m pretty sure he thinks it should be abolished altogether. I know he wants to abolish the Department of Education. Under that anti-government-school umbrella, he takes the very anti-State position that no one should be required or expected to pledge their allegiance to the United States flag (the central government), and furthermore that it shouldn’t even be done in schools. His reasons are the same you and I would give: it is wrong to indoctrinate children with an adulation of any state, and this seems to be the primary function (purpose?) of government schools, and he opposes feeding children the propaganda that government is good or that government has accomplished what is great about this country. His failure to apply this notion, in principle, to all State actions and neocon military actions in particular is what makes him spectacularly non-libertarian.

I think of this every time I hear anything about the Statist Pledge of Allegiance. A Chattanooga high school student was suspended for refusing to stand and say the pledge. It’s pretty stupid that administrators only reversed their decision and let her back in school after they found out her reasons were religious. I’m with Boortz: the entire pledge should be eliminated from schools, and the government along with it.

Hat tip: Wendy McElroy.

It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.
—Frédéric Bastiat

I wish Statists would apply their vivid and active imaginations to the moral, psychological, and economic benefits that we would reap if we lived in free societies, instead of to their tired, old catastrophic images and doomsday scenarios. Maybe they actually don’t have very active imaginations, which is why they all have the same misconceptions about what an anarcho-capitalist society would be like and continue to repeat boring drivel like “chaos would reign in the streets” and “let them waste in the streets” (see below).

Lew Rockwell wrote a pretty interesting column on the transition from mostly government schooling to all-private schooling in a hypothetical city or county, called What if public schools were abolished? He begins with the libertarian assertion that the main purpose of government schooling is not to impart to children the knowledge and problem-solving skills to improve human society, but to indoctrinate them with the civic religion, i.e., that government and democracy are generally good things and participating in the voting process is our duty (and our right) and most of our leaders in the past were good people who did good things, etc. This is also why it is so hard to even get people to listen to a suggestion of abolishing government schools. He then goes into what the initial stages of a city’s or county’s transition from having mostly government schools to having zero government schools would be like.

He mentions the selling of the school buildings to the highest bidder, the firing of all teachers and administrators, the decrease in property values because “good government schools” are no longer an attractant to new homeowners, the exodus of families from the area, and paucity of cheap schools for poor families.

But then he describes what would emerge from that: more, better, and cheaper options. More secular and more religious schools. The elementary–middle–high school model will be eliminated or at least the lines will be blurred in some schools, being replaced with ability-based grouping. (I’m not convinced that’s an entirely good thing, which is why a marketplace with abundant choices is necessary for a quality product to be provided.) More specialty schools will emerge for specific areas of study (we called them “magnet schools” where I’m from). Private tutoring will blossom. Home-schooling will, too. Entrepreneurs will emerge to provide transportation since no government school buses will operate. “In all areas related to education, profit opportunities would abound,” says Rockwell.

It sounds fantastic. I’d love it. Two things I want to add, though:

A city or county need not abolish all State schools in one fell swoop, though I haven’t thought about what a gradual alternative would look like. I am a big proponent of gradual abolition of most government functions (with immediate abolition of the rest), because the people who would suffer from immediate abolition of huge State institutions are not (entirely) to blame for society being this way and, ideally, would only be inconvenienced by the adjustment to a free and private lifestyle, without adding the insult of leaving them with no private options in the aftermath of an immediate removal of a governmental activity. Also, who would support a reduction in government when it would apparently harm so many people, at least in the short run? We’re trying to convince people of the benefits of freedom, not screw people over in the process of making things right just because they were so wrong to begin with. Also, it is entirely plausible that “the order that should follow reform” would actually come at an earlier date if a slow and gradual reform process were undertaken than if an immediate and complete reform were enacted all at once; since these State institutions have existed for so long and are so entrenched in our society and our psyche, the most good might be done by removing injustices gradually rather than immediately. I strongly believe this is true for most State functions. Whether it is even practical to reform things slowly, lest socialists regain control of local, state, or national governments in the middle of the reforms and undo them before they have a chance to get very far, is another matter…

(Though, as Thomas Sowell says, “No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: ‘But what would you replace it with?’ When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?”)

The second thing I wanted to add, which Lew left out: In the absence of government schooling, the level of personal interest that parents would necessarily take in their children’s education would increase, and this would lead to further improvements in childhood education. It would also contribute to an increase in the strength of familial bonds and family values.

The only reason I chose to blag about this column is because B.K. Marcus posted it to his website, and a stubborn Statist posted a thoroughly stupid comment, whose ignorance and stupidity were disguised by its rare departure from an appalled and hysterical tone.

The comment reads:

That’s not totally true and there are problems either way. In some way’s I support the idea and other ways I don’t. One of the main reasons republicans support the removal of public schools has nothing to do with cost and everything to do with religion. Most private schools are religious. The public schools represent a counter to their ideological indoctrination which many young people would have to be put into if that was the only school available in their area.

The other problem is that poorer families will opt out totally. Why pay for something you can’t afford? That isn’t totally true but at least in America I live in education isn’t seen as very valuable. At the age of 15 many will be forced finished with their schooling and be thrust into the job market by their parents.

I personally also went to a private “religious” school because that is what my family wanted. It was unfortunate because the public schools would have given me far better access to good education. I had to make up a lot in college which made things very difficult.

As long as globalization is running around we are going to need the public schools. People must be educated otherwise they become a burdon to society. Or should we just let them waste in the streets.

There are a million other things we could do away with. Though I do believe teachers unions and other powerful lobby’s are actually causing more harm than good.

So many problems but this one should be down the list. I would just be happy with removing the federal government from forcing federal requirements and letting each state choose how they handle the situation.

“So many problems but this one should be down the list”?! Are you fucking kidding me? This is one of the biggest problems our society—any society!—faces. It is the reason education is so expensive and so ineffective! It is the reason parents don’t hold a greater direct interest in their children’s education! It is the reason children are so gullible and do not question the “civic religion” that the idiots in the media and the professional criminal class feed them! For example, the belief that income taxes are just, and they are necessary, and the rich do not deserve to be rich and should therefore pay even more than they already do; or the belief that the criminal justice system is largely just or is somewhat accountable for its mistakes (or its blatant and intentional crimes against the innocent); or the belief that wars and other foreign military interventions have served to protect or defend our freedoms; or the belief that legality bears some vague or remote semblance to morality; or the belief that money should be taken from people who earned it and given to government schools to educate other people’s children. The State’s near-monopoly on education is one of the very first and foremost problems of the Statist society! Good lord, that person is unintelligent and misinformed.

And about this: “Most private schools are religious. The public schools represent a counter to their ideological indoctrination which many young people would have to be put into if that was the only school available in their area.”

Siiiiiiiiggggghhhhhh. Lew already addressed this, briefly, in his column, but I’m surprised it’s even necessary to address it. I guess it is. Obviously the number and type of options available to people of all income levels would skyrocket in a free market for education, so secular as well as religious private schools would abound.

My last point is regarding the commenter’s statement, “The other problem is that poorer families will opt out totally. Why pay for something you can’t afford? That isn’t totally true but at least in America I live in education isn’t seen as very valuable. At the age of 15 many will be forced finished with their schooling and be thrust into the job market by their parents.”

Let’s assume he’s referring primarily to poor minorities in the inner city. He asserts that in the absence of government schools, they will have no good schooling options because they are so poor, and so they won’t get an education and will have little hope for good career opportunities. Um, this is in contrast to their current situation…how? Their schools are already terrible precisely because they are run by the State and paid for by other people. (Oh, and the State hinders their economic opportunities in lots of other ways that I’m not going into here.)

This person has so little imagination and has examined the issue so poorly that not only is he incapable of imagining a non-governmental solution to an entirely government-caused problem, but he doesn’t realize the government causes the problem to begin with! He doesn’t even realize—or, at least, doesn’t address—the fact that the situation is exactly as bad under the Statist system as he imagines it would be in a free society!

He rightly implies that if you don’t get a good education, you will most likely have a bad job and therefore a bad life, at least socioeconomically. He got an education from a private school and claims, against all statistical evidence and common sense, that he would have done better with a government education and needed to make up material in college. That is either a blatant lie or is 100% the fault of him and his parents, not you or me or the taxpayers or his teachers and administrators.

But I digress. He probably got a decent education, and went to college, and benefited from it, at least more than the poor minorities whose fortunes he laments. His education, and the government schooling of millions of other kids, got them pretty good lives and pretty good jobs, but what else did it do for them?—it indoctrinated them with socialist-Statist notions that scourge all of human society. Some people’s bad home lives, bad neighborhoods, and bad schools ruin their own individual lives by hurting their job prospects and values and work ethic, but the American public’s indoctrination in the “civic religion” ruins millions of other people’s lives, not just their own. Their support for immoral and ineffective State functions like childhood education and their insistence that everyone be forced to participate allow the State to grow and grow in its oppressing and impoverishing activities. Not coincidentally, the people whose lives are not just inconvenienced but ruined by our socialist State are predominantly poor minorities.

So, in conclusion, this ignorant and closed-minded commenter would perfectly exemplify the problem with government education, except (he claims) he went to a private school.