Message to BillG: Try Freedom in Education

Billionaire Bill Gates made a fortune in the software business, doing stuff without permission, exercising his God-given talents and revolutionizing business and society.

But when it comes to philanthropy, it’s same old, same old, according to Neal McCluskey from the Cato Institute. Gates’ strategy for education, partnered with Eli Broad of KBH Homes, is all about big government.

[A] forum sponsored by their $60 million Strong American Schools initiative last Wednesday made clear that when it comes to education, they’re backing a tired, big-government loser.

Oh dear. You’d think the new generation of philanthopists would have learned something from business. Unfortunately, it seems to be that you don’t mess with government or you’ll get your head handed to you.

How about freedom in education? At least Sen. John McCain seems to be taking some baby steps in that direction.

“[A] public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child’s education follows that child into the school the parent chooses,” McCain’s education statement declares.

Maybe our education Pooh-bahs should learn from our economic competitors.

In education, the ascendant South Koreans consume more private schooling than the people of any other industrialized nation. Even parents in the world’s poorest slums know the score. Ongoing work by British researcher James Tooley in impoverished places like Ga, Ghana, and Hyderabad, India, find poor parents turning in droves to for-profit private schools in order to move their kids ahead.

You can read more about James Tooley here.

Could it be that we can actually trust parents to educate their children without the detailed day-to-day supervision of the state?

Probably we’ll have to, because in another generation the government education system will have run down some more, delivering less and less at a cost of more and more.

By then, educating your own children will not be just a choice, but a matter of survival.

Reality on Judicial Activism

Now we conservatives are all in a tizzy about the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage. How could they, we wail? How could they find the right to gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment? How could they turn upside down centuries of tradition and custom?

They found it because they regard the issue as a simple matter of dignity and equality. They found it because the Enlightenment proposes that anything that can’t be rationally defended ought to be regarded as a superstition. Of course gays should be able to marry if they love one another. Isn’t it obvious?

Conservatives have to understand that we are a subculture in the United States. The educated elite, which drives the culture, gets to set the agenda on most everything in the United States, and we should that’s the way it is.

What conservatives have the power to do is make life very uncomfortable for the educated elite.

Mostly, we can make it uncomfortable at the ballot box. Thus we have moved the chains on abortion and guns because Democrats have found that their support for abortion and gun control loses elections.

On gay marriage the media and the courts naturally follow the lead of liberal activists and enact their agenda. That’s what politics is all about. Conservatives only get a look in when a policy manifestly fails (and we are talking big-time failure like welfare) or because Democrats start losing elections.

Does gay marriage constitute an attack on heterosexual marriage? Will it lead to polygamy and bestiality as the alarmists insist? Nobody knows. And even if it does it may not make any difference unless the Democratic support for gay marriage starts losing them elections.

Think of this. The government education system is a mess and mostly hurts the children of minorities. But the Democrats don’t care. Because the victims of the lousy education system don’t turn around and vote for Republicans.

That’s the tragedy about the social issues. It is lower-class Democrats that suffer from the dumbing down of the culture, the sexualization of childhood, the decline of marriage. It is their lives that are blasted by social breakdown.

Surely we should be able to find a way to speak to them. But to communicate we’d probably have to talk the language of victimhood. And Republicans don’t do victimhood. We don’t believe in it.

Now She Tells Us

After the “stunning” loss of a special congressional election in Mississippi, many Republicans are “stunned.” Really, writes Peggy Noonan. On her reckoning:

You have to be stupid to be stunned by that... Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in ’78 or ’82 or ’94... In politics especially, the first lesson sticks.

What Republicans should have done is broken with Bush back in 2005, or ’06, or ’07, Noonan advises. It’s a bit late now. Anyway,

"Members and pundits . . . fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

I’ll say. You can say that the war is now going well, that the economy ain’t so bad. You can say that the gas prices are high because Democrats have stood on the drill rig platform for twenty years forbidding exploration for oil. You can say that the foreclosures are an ineviable result of half a century of housing subsidies.

But that is beside the point. It all happened on Bush’s watch and so the Democrats are going to run on the idea that voting for McCain is voting for a third term for Bush and his mistakes. You can’t argue with that!

In my view we must stop all this defeatism. Of course the conservative brand is badly burned right now. Of course Republicans deserve to be soundly defeated. Of course the American people think it is “time for a change.” But we’ll be back, and sooner than you think.

Conservatives believe that it is time to radically downsize the government role in education. Democrats believe that it is time to expand government education with universal pre-school.

Conservatives believe that it is time to crank down the huge government role in health care, getting most people to pay directly for routine health care. Democrats want to extend government power in health care by forcing everyone to carry health insurance.

Conservatives believe we should prospect for oil and gas, and that we should respond to any global warming by adaptation. Democrats believe we need swingeing taxes and regulation and subsidy to transform the energy economy.

Conservatives believe that we should reduce the government preseence in the social safety net, and that we should re-empower the mediating institutions of family, church, association, and neighborhood. Democrats believe we should normalize gay marriage.

These are huge differences, and both sides cannot be right. Each approach implies a vastly different approach to government and society.

Conservatives believe that we are right and that the liberals are wrong. What is more we believe that the Democratic path will lead to serious economic and social dislocation. We believe that it is not a question of “if” but “when” America gets a clue and realizes that we are right about the major issues of our time.

Win or lose in November these issues will define the politics of the next fifty years. Therefore we should not lose heart and give into despair.

Be not afraid.

Oh, and Peggy. Could you think of something helpful to contribute to the conservative narrative?

Enviro-racism

Environmentalists are racists. And sexists, and classists. Think that’s a little bit extreme?

Then read Roy Ennis of the Congress on Racial Equality. When Ennis looks at the proposals of environmentalists and global warming enthusiasts he can’t help wonder if they care about poor folks.

The Congress of Racial Equality and I care deeply about our environment. But we also care about having jobs, and affordable food, heat and transportation. We care about impoverished Third World families achieving their dreams.

Me too. You wonder about the agenda of rich environmentalists.

The fact is that you can trust rich people to look after themselves. And one of the things that rich people value is open space and freedom from “sprawl,” other peoples’ sprawl, that it. But you can’t really trust them to think of other peoples’ needs.

When the rich environmentalists want to make ANWR out of bounds to oil production, and the outer continental shelf, it means something. When they want to stop energy development to save the polar bear, it means something.

These energy takings force Americans to pay more for energy that is artificially scarce. Their economic progress is held back. They lose the jobs that energy development would create. They lose billions of dollars in royalties and taxes.

So let’s go ahead and blame ExxonMobil and Shell Oil for “price-gouging.” That should teach them a lesson. And it is bound to help the poor.

Polar Bear Threatened

With the listing of the polar bear by the Interior Department as a “ threatened” species, here’s the current state of the Stupidity Index:

• Polar bear threatened
  
• No oil drilling in ANWR
  
• No oil drilling on continental shelf
  
• No refineries built in last 30 years
  
• No nuclear plants built in last 30 years
  
• No reform of education in 100 years
  
• Huge subsidies for health care
  
• Huge subsidies for homeownership
  
• Huge subsidies for higher education
  

And so on. Of course, this is nothing new, or even extraordinary. The whole point of government is to use power to short-circuit the operation of the market and its tendency to deliver products and services that the consumers want and at the price they are willing to pay. When you go to government to get some privilege or subsidy, you are trying to do an end run on people without access to power, and do a little “rent-seeking” courtesy of your friendly local politician.

Maybe it’s just as well that Republicans are getting flushed down the toilet this year. When all these problems and stupidities back up, we wouldn’t want it to be on the Republicans’ watch, now would we?

Conservatives: Be Not Afraid

According to the opinion polls, over 80 percent of Americans think that the US is on the wrong track. But does that really mean: Go Left, asks Dennis Prager?

Well, yes it does, Dennis. The American people have two choices when they go to the polls. It’s the donkey or the elephant, and right now, they are sick of the elephant. It doesn’t matter why: Iraq war, mortgage meltdown. Americans are sick of it, and they think that it is time for a change.

The question is whether the kind of change they want is the kind of change that Democrats are offering.

If you vote for Barack Obama, you are voting for more government in health care, more government in schooling, more government in the energy industry, and more “progressive” social agenda.

My guess is that Americans aren’t in favor of all that. But they do want the troubles of the past eight years to go away.

Unfortunately that’s no way to live. There is only one way to live, and that is to follow the advice of Pope John Paul II to the oppressed nations of the Soviet Empire: “Be Not Afraid.”

In worrying about the future under a new Democrat administration, Dennis Prager sounds almost defeatist.

There is no call for defeatism. Be Not Afraid. Democrats won’t be able to destroy the nation in two or four years. In fact, a short Democratic interregnum might be the best possible thing for America.

The American people need another good look at the Democrats, and they deserve to get it. When they see what they get, the higher taxes, the bigger government, the declining schools, the higher energy prices, they’ll think again.

And then the conservative army, after a dose of the time that tries mens’ souls, will be ready for another glorious era of conservative reform.

But first we must be clear. Like is uncertain; reverses are inevitable. Be Not Afraid.

America Moving to the Middle?

Everyone says that they are fed up with the partisanship of the past decade. In consequence many people are eager to uncover signs that the partisan years are over, and that America is moving to the middle.

So along come Gerald F. Seib and John Harwood to tell us that Americans want change.

When the Wall Street Journal and NBC News surveyed voters in December, as the campaign began, almost half agreed that America needed "major reforms and a brand new and different approach" to handling problems.

Earth to Seib and Harwood: Major reform is what Republicans have been trying to enact for the last 12 years since Newt Gingrich won a Republican majority in Congress.

But major reform, if it means anything, means major changes in the way we run government. If it would mean anything it would mean changing the numbers on government spending. Here are the numbers for 2008 from usgovernmentspending.com

• Pensions: $911.6 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $925.0 billion
  
  
• Education: $848.2 billion
  
  
• Defense: $730.8 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $445.2 billion

Now, seriously, what kind of a hope do we have that any substantial change will happen in the delivery of these huge programs?

A big part of the current animus, Seib and Harwood claim, is that Congressmen no longer live yearround in Washington. When Friday rolls around everyone heads back home to the voters instead to sticking around and socializing.

But there is hope. There’s Mara Vanderslice, a Democratic operative who is trying to develop outreach to religious voters. She represents “a new wave of younger activists willing to reach across party lines for the causes they advocate.” That’s one way of putting it. But her website Common Good Strategies seems to be nothing more than a Democratic Party organ. Its mission is:

Working with the Democratic Party and non-profits on the local and national level to reach out and build authentic relationships with America’s diverse religious communities.

OK. Why not Peter Wehner, “a genial social conservative who worked for Mr. Rove in the Bush White House?” He sees, apparently, a movement among evangelicals away from abortion “toward social issues, social justice and aid to Africa.”

If you read what Peter Wehner actually writes—for instance this piece for the Commentary blog—you experience basic Republican partisan talking points.

This talk of moving to the center is just a slow-day navel piece. The level of partisanship is a measure of the political temperature: how much agitation is there for change and how much resistance is there to reform.

The partisanship of the last decade issued out of Republican desire for reform and Democratic determination to stop it. Right now, Republicans are exhausted and discouraged. So you can expect a period of quiet.

But something tells me: Not for long.