Who Needs Literacy

About 14 percent of adults in the United States cannnot perform a simple reading task like “searching a short, simple text to find out what a patient is alloved to drink before a medical test.”

About 22 percent of adults cannot perform a simple computational task like “adding the amounts on a bank deposit slip.”

Adult literacy is slightly improved from the last adult literacy survey conducted in 1992.
That is what the U.S. Department of Education just released in its A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century.

Yes, but at least the rest of American adults are literate, right? Not exactly. Those with “basic” literacy, the ability to perform the simple tasks mentioned above, but nothing more, amount to 43 percent of the adult population.

Only 13 percent of American adults are rated “proficient” in prose reading, document reading, and computation skills.

So what’s the point? What’s the point of spending five percent of GDP on schooling K-12 when the net result is an America where only 13 percent of adults exhibit “proficient” skills in literacy?

Maybe these numbers are telling us something. Maybe they are telling us that literacy has been overrated. Maybe most people only need basic literacy skills. Maybe the fuss over literacy has been ginned up by literate people who think that everyone should be like them. After all, if literacy were the royal road to power, money, and the love of beautiful women, you’d think that everyone and his brother would be literate and proficient, and eager to cash in.

By the way, the survey only tested reading skills. Writing skills? Forget about it.

Hugh Hewitt Pops MSMer's Bubble

Be sure to check this interview of LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik by Hugh Hewitt. The full text is available on Radio Blogger. It is priceless.

Hewitt interviewed Hiltzik on his radio show because he had made some uncomplimentary remarks about Hewitt as director of the Nixon Library. The result was hilarious, as Hewitt revealed Hiltzik to be a committed left-wing activist, with consistently left-wing opinions on every left-right political issue from Helen Gahagan Douglas (for you youngsters, liberals consider Nixon to be a red-baiter because in the 1950 Senate campaign he called Douglas the Pink Lady, pink down to her underwear) to the Iraq War (he’s against it). Hiltzik found it difficult to agree that Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting in the 1950s was not in the same league as Stalin’s Great Terror.

After demonstrating, on issue after issue, that he is about as left-wing as you can get, Hiltzik won’t say who he voted for president in 2004. Oh no. That just wouldn’t be right.

The MSMers can never admit who they voted for. It would end the pretence of “objectivity.”

Your Bubble is Bigger Than My Bubble

President Bush lives in a bubble. That is the breathless conclusion of Newsweek reporters Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe. He doesn’t answer the calls of congressmen and his humor, rather than being inclusive and team building, like Ronald Reagan’s, is often intended to belittle a subordinate,

intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

Of course media analyst Brent Bozell is outraged. What Thomas and Wolffe are really upset about is that President Bush doesn’t call them. The media really doesn’t care about policy (except that it should be more “moderate”), it cares about access.

But Bruce Bartlett agrees with Newsweek. The president doesn’t like day-to-day politicking, meeting with members of Congress, or getting information from outside official channels. “The result is Mr. Bush appears to live in a sort of fantasy world utterly divorced from reality.”

The critics fail to appreciate that the leader of any organization must operate in a bubble in which most information is blocked out. Otherwise he wouldn’t get anything done. Every enterprise operates on faith in the future, and a willingness to ignore bad news and discouraging reverses. The key is to have the information to know when to take decisive action: to launch the right new product at the right time or to abort a failed initiative before it engulfs the enterprise in disaster. In the Iraq War, of course, the president would have gone mad if he had made it a point to be connected to the daily ups and downs of political sentiment.

On the two important national issues presented to him during his term in office, President Bush has made the right decision, bubble or no bubble.

President Bush’s war on terror operates within the simple grand strategic situation of the United States. It must not let the oil in the Middle East fall into the hands of one power. That is why the Iraq adventure makes complete strategic sense. It stopped Saddam’s predatory adventurism and it blocks Iran’s future predatory expansion westwards.

President Bush’s economic policy of tax rate cuts may well have prevented an economic meltdown. We cannot be sure of that, of course, because the tech crash did not develop into a full scale depression. Job One for an American president is to keep the economy on track.

People who do not understand these two points, the necessity to keep the Middle East divided and the necessity to keep the US economy on track, are the ones who are really living in a bubble.

But so far, President Bush has passed the test.

After the Iraq Election, Then What?

When you bring a nation back from the dark night of terror, you have to do it step by step. On December 15, the Iraqi people will elect the leaders who will lead the nation for the next several years. But, as Amir Taheri writes, the big problem comes later. It comes when the new government sets the economic framework for the new nation.

The trouble is that the Iraqi people cannot imagine anything other than a distributionist Soviet-style state.

It is important for the Iraqis to realize that they can’t build a Western-style democracy based on a Soviet-style economic model: A key condition of genuine democratization is the creation of a robust and self-confident private sector. Yet that is something that most members of the new Iraqi leadership reject, both by ideology and personal calculations. Almost all want to be chiefs and patrons distributing favors on behalf of the state and buying support for themselves.

Of course, this kind of attitude isn’t confined to Iraq. Many people in the United States, both politicians and ordinary voters, cannot see beyond the idea of the national government as a dispenser of benefits and favors.

The Iraqis have an advantage. They are not entering the world of democracy as pioneers struggling on an unexplored frontier. We humans know pretty well how a prosperous economy based on democratic capitalism works. It works best when you minimize privilege and subsidy, keep government interference and the size of the public sector down. It needs a robust court system defending private property against the power of the great special interests.

It is a truth that the peoples in the democratic countries have struggled with for over a century. Welcome to the club, Iraqis.

If Fathers Had "Choice"

If women deserve “choice,” then why shouldn’t men enjoy comparable rights to order termination or continuance of the fetus in the womb of their sex partner. That’s what Meghan Daum argues.

Most people now accept that women, especially teenagers, often make decisions regarding abortion based on educational and career goals and whether the father of the unborn child is someone they want to hang around with for the next few decades. The "choice" in this equation is not only a matter of whether to carry an individual fetus to term but a question of what kind of life the woman wishes to lead.

But if we are talking about the mother, er, host of the fetus making this sort of “lifestyle” decision, why not extend the same rights to the father, er, sperm donor?

So off goes Ms. Daum for 800 words of mostly unmarried hypotheticals. She illustrates with remarkable clarity how once you step out of the moral and legal framework of a marriage you end up in a moral and legal snakepit.

Let’s look at this differently. Let’s say that your “educational and career goals” are a fine thing, and the “kind of life” you wish to lead is an even finer thing. Can anyone say that their lifestyle choices are finer than a man and a woman entering into marriage and making a vow to bear and rear the fruit of their union?

When you “choose” to assume less than full responsibility for the children you conceive, aren’t you making a rather unfortunate statement about the kind of life you wish to live?

We’ve had about a century now of talk about overpopulation and the unwanted child and lifestyles and choice and all the rest of the opt-out agenda. Expect the next generation but one to develop a rather judgmental attitude towards all this self-serving talk.

As a Hindu friend said: If you get married and don’t have children, what’s the point?

People want to have their cake and eat it. They want the freedom to make choices, but don’t want to deal with the moral consequence of their choices.

People forget that freedom is not a cloud-cuckoo land where everyone is freed from every restraint and consequence. Freedom is the right to make the wrong choice, and live with that wrong choice for the rest of your life.

Let’s stipulate that abortion should be legal. But legal doesn’t make it right. And nobody should imagine that the choice to abort doesn’t have consequences, consequences that will be whispering in your ear for the rest of your life.

More and more, I am coming to believe that conservatives should say: Go ahead liberals and feminists, make my day. Go ahead and abort every liberal and feminist baby in sight. That’s what you liberals want; that’s what you believe in and that’s what you should have.

But we are conservatives. We believe in rules. We believe in following rules not because they are the law but because they are right. We just think that aborting babies is wrong. And we won’t do it.

You can see where this leads. It leads to conservatives grabbing the moral high ground. Liberals would hate that even more than they hate President Bush.

President to Take Credit for Good Economy

Now you’re talking. The White House is sending out the word that the president is going to focus now on the war and taxes, after being distracted for months by hurricanes and Supreme Court flaps. According to Donald Lambro the president is finally getting out and

promoting one of his highest domestic achievements and the fiscal policies that have produced four years of uninterrupted economic growth.

Here we are, after all, the industrial country with the fastest economic growth and 43 percent of Americans think we are in a recession. Why would they think that?

They think that because our media publicize all the bad news, and the president hasn’t been publicizing the good news.

Now that is going to end. The president is going to get out and toot his own horn, and we’ll see what the American people think about that.

What Would Hayek Do?

In Britland they are worrying about the consequence of cranking up the government share of the economy from 38 percent in 1997 when Tony Blair became prime minister to an expected 44 percent this year or next. Well, we all know the answer to that. Nothing good.

In the annual Hayek Lecture given at the Institute of Economic Affairs,
Andrew Neil thinks about the bigger picture. With China and India poised to become economic giants in the next 50 years should Britain stay a part of a Europe in inevitable decline or should it become the 51st state of the USA?

What would Hayek say?

Based on the ideas he formulated over a lifetime of scholarship and advocacy he would argue against a Britain founded on The Fatal Conceit of building society using “constructivist rationalism,” the idea that
“all social institutions are, or ought to be, the
product of deliberate design”. Instead he would argue that Britain should be built using “evolutionary rationalism,” that is
orderly
“structures which are the product of the actions
of many men [and women] but are not the
result of human design.” He would say (and his words would apply just as much to us here in the good old U.S. of A.) that

Government policy should not respond to
China as such, he would say, but strive to
become a low-tax, high-skill, well-educated,
high-productivity vibrant nation-state just
offshore the highest-taxed, increasingly low-skilled, sclerotic set of rich nations in the
world. The ability to compete with China would
follow naturally.

It really isn’t that hard, is it. Just do it.

But we can see where the hard part is. It’s dealing with all those who have squirreled into the vast welfare state (that princely 44 percent of GDP) and built themselves a nice little hoard over the years. Maybe their hoard is a tenured professorship. Maybe it’s a 30-and-out union job. Maybe it’s a 30-and-out government job. Maybe it’s a job in some tax-favored industry.
All those folks are going to squeal like banshees over any move to a low-tax, high-skill vibrant nation-state. Because, after years getting paid pretty nicely for not doing too much, they are going to object to all that vibrancy. To them, it will feel like Hurricane Katrina.

It’s just human nature.