Beyond School Choice

As the nation's education system continues to rot, President Obama has come up with a revision of No Child Left Behind that rewards success, lets states define their own standards, and fires teachers at failing schools (maybe).

Conservatives continue to advance school choice, principally in promoting charter schools, public schools freed from some bureaucratic standards. Paul E. Peterson, in The Wall Street Journal, discusses the need to ramp up charter schools from 3 percent of students to 50 percent in order to get US education to compete with the rest of the world.

Harvard's Martin West and German economist Ludger Woessmann examined the impact of school choice on the performance of 15-year-old students in 29 industrialized countries. They discovered that the greater the competition between the public and private sector, the better all students do in math, science and reading. Their findings imply that expanding charters to include 50% of all students would eventually raise American students' math scores to be competitive with the highest-scoring countries in the world.

Peterson adds that education is about to be revolutionized by "powerful notebook computers, broadband and the open-source development of curricular materials (a la Wikipedia)." Competition in education is bound to improve results.

Not to mention the YouTube videos of Kahn Academy.

But I want to go further. I want to challenge the very notion that the best way to raise children is by compulsory incarceration in schools for K-12. For inspiration I have looked into the past, in the era before the centralized bureaucratic method had triumphed.

I found that the typical childhood education experience included two to four years in a school that taught basic literacy and numeracy, followed by apprenticeship at twelve or thirteen. Very often, of course, the child (usually a boy) would leave home at that point.

In other words, work started in the early teens, but education continued. The whole idea of the apprenticeship system was a contract between master and apprentice in which the apprentice would provide cheap labor and the master would teach a trade.

The big advantage of this system, it seems to me, is that most people can afford it. It is ludicrous to expect parents themselves to fund twelve years of indifferent incarcerated schooling. But most people, I'll bet, could afford a few years of elementary school, especially if they pitched in as volunteers.

And most people really don't want to go to college. That's because most people aren't interested in the best ideas that have been thought. They just want to get a job. In practice, of course, most colleges are just teaching job preparation skills. Most students want a vocational education and major in business, health care, or some technical subject. It's just that a century ago, children started on their job skills ten years earlier.

It would be quite simple to set up a system that allowed kids to transition into a practical education in their early teens. All that we would need is to adjust the child labor laws and the minimum wage. And there lies the rub.

If you look under the blanket you realize that the whole point of child labor laws and the minimum wage is to push kids and unskilled people out of the labor market, to eliminate their competition. It's not the kids that are yelling for restrictions on their labor market participation. If you check out anecdotal stories of child labor you'll find that kids prefer work to school.

The overriding principle of social policy should be to make it as easy as possible for people to live and work without having to lean on government. If you look at government's big programs, you notice that the maze of subsidies and assistance tends to make it at first difficult, and then impossible for people to function without government. The rules, the requirements, the certifications all combine to make schooling, health care, housing very expensive. They make it so expensive that the average person can't afford it without assistance.

I have a vision. It's a vision of a sociable society where Americans combine a sturdy independence with a generous safety net of cooperative and sociable associations. It's so independent and so generous and so sociable that it doesn't need any help from government. Government keeps to its core functions: defense against enemies foreign and domestic.

What a concept!

Howell Raines, Media Dinosaur

We conservatives have our little blind spots. One of them is that MSM journalists get it.

In other words, when they go on and on about objective journalism and the horrors of Fox News they understand that, as the postmodernists say, they are reciting a narrative, a narrative that justifies their power.

To run the kind of stories they run, to consistently bias towards the liberal point of view, as in the recent Toyota acceleration crisis, when the MSM was parroting the line of left-wing consumer groups and the plaintiffs' bar, you have to run under a world view that imagines that you are the noble objective journalists, and everyone else is biased.

If you had an ounce of self-consciousness, if you'd done a speck of reading, you would know that your pious affirmations of objectivity were, at the very least, self-serving.

But the reality probably is that many MSM journalists are liberal fundamentalists. They believe the dogma and they have never stopped to apply any higher criticism to their beliefs. They are happy to rail against Biblical fundamentalists, but are utterly blind to their own fundamentalisms.

So what are we to think about the screed by Howell Raines published in The Washington Post on Sunday?

You see, Raines has had something tugging at his professional conscience as the debate swirled over the last year on ObamaCare.

Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

You mean, compared to the anti-Bush campaign supported by the mainstream media for the last eight years?

You see, Raines feels that Fox News has been dishonestly pushing the line that Americans don't want health care reform. On the contrary, writes Raines,

The American people and many of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt.

Actually, I checked. Back in the platform of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party they were calling for a uniform system of "public health," whatever that means. Let's amend those remarks. Liberals and liberal presidents have been demanding that government run the nation's health care since the turn of the 20th century.

Raines is forced to confront an ugly truth.

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party.

It seems incredible that Raines, as editor of The New York Times has slept through the last ten years in which the partisan bias of the liberal media has been decisively exposed. Especially when you consider the 2008 campaign in which the mainstream media just about fell down in raptures before Candidate Barack Obama.

But let us give Raines the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he really does believe that stuff. Maybe he really thinks that New York media types like him are objective, lordly arbiters that sit astride the media world like gods, dispensing objective wisdom.

That's really the most likely explanation. Never underestimate the capacity of the human for self-delusion. Everyone that Howell lunches with is outraged at Fox News, so it must be so.

But one thing in Raines's article I must protest. He writes of "historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News." (How would he know? Does he watch Fox News?) In fact, Fox News personalities like Glenn Beck go out of their way to provide historical context on liberalism. That's why Glenn Beck began his recent CPAC speech with the declaration that he hated Woodrow Wilson. Beck has been spending a lot of time on his show recently developing a historical context for today's mad liberal plunge towards a social-democratic state. Partisan or not, it is historical context that you won't get on the mainstream media.

The Rotation of Power

The essence of governing is to let the other guys have a turn.

My Greek friend George Maroutsos used to teach me the essence of democracy as it applied to Greece after the fall of the Greek colonels back in the 1970s. The point was to elect the left, then defeat them in duly constituted elections. The key is that, when defeated, the ruling party leaves office. And then the other party takes power, gets defeated, and leaves office.

The great fear of all partisans is that the other guys will cheat. They will cancel the elections. They will stage a coup. Al Haig will declare: "I am in control!" So the one essential thing is that you can defeat the rascals in office, send them packing, and they actually leave office. That is the one big guarantee of peace.

The corollary of this truth is that, for your side to prosper, you must put the other guys in to face reality. That's what I argued back in 2008. We had to put the Dems in charge of the War on Terror. Let them face the situation that Bush and Cheney faced in 2001/02. Let them really decide if they want to bring the troops home by a date certain.

As we have seen, the Obama administration, despite all its "reset" and "soft power" talk, has doubled down on Afghanistan and is now taking credit for the successful elections in Iraq. Reality rules.

It is also running up against reality on health care, climate, energy, and a host of other issues on which liberals have been talking to each other in an echo chamber for years.

You and I believe that the liberals are wrong, dead wrong, on all these issues. But the only way for us to win is for them to try and to fail at their ideas. They won't listen to us. They are smarter than we are. So they have to learn the hard way.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer says all this and more in his regular column today: "In Praise of the Rotation of Power." Suppose Bush or McCain were still in power and escalating our involvement in Afghanistan, he asks?

Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn't see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?

Exactly. And then, Krauthammer adds, there's Guantanamo and the KSM trial where the Obamis are learning all about reality. All good and healthy.

Next up is the Obami challenge to the Reagan recipe of governance.

The Reaganite dispensation of low taxes, less regulation and reliance on markets should be challenged lest it become merely rote and dogmatic. Obama has offered a bracingly thorough attack on that dispensation with his unapologetic embrace of a social democratic agenda whose essence -- more centralized government exercising its power through radical health care, energy and education reform -- is the overthrow of Reaganism.

All to the good. Either Obama will succeed, and the American people will accede to his social democratic agenda, or they will throw it and him out. At the end of it we will have a solid disposition of Reaganism and all it stands for.

We really need to come to closure on Reaganism. For thirty years the liberals have been saying that Reaganism was all a mirage and a mistake. The economy didn't really heal itself. People didn't really prosper. The Societ Union would have collapsed anyway.

Well, now they are getting the chance to prove Reagan wrong with their administrative state solutions to health care, energy, finance, size of government, everything.

I say good luck to them. Because they are going to need more than luck to avoid the biggest political meltdown of our lives.

The sad thing is that Democratic supporters that will suffer the most. Because those are the folks that have put their trust in government. I am not talking about gentry liberals. They will do fine. No, I am talking about ordinary Americans that believe the liberal line: teachers, government workers, seniors, etc. You may say that they deserve it, that they ought to have known better. But I think it's a shame.

Meanwhile let us sit back and watch as the Democrats twist themselves into pretzels over their unpopular health care proposals. They will learn an important lesson that may keep the Democratic Party sane and sensible for a generation.

Why ObamaCare is a Dem Donkey Trap

Conservatives and other opponents of ObamaCare have been flapping on about "consent of the governed" as the Democrats twist this way and that to get out of their box canyon.

Michael Barone has just summed up the Dems' problem pretty well. So let's go with it. He writes of three cases to consider when trying to pass legislation:

You can pass popular legislation on party-line votes, and you usually get some support from the other side, even if unsolicited.

The Dems passed Medicare on this basis, and on final passage they picked up Republican votes. But what about unpopular legislation? The way to do it is the method used to pass the TARP bailout of the banks.

TARP was passed, after one misfire in the House, by bipartisan coalitions of members of both parties with safe seats. Members of both parties with vulnerable seats, with only a few exceptions, were left to protect themselves by voting against it.

But, of course, that is not the strategy being used by the Dems to pass ObamaCare. They thought they could ram it through on a party-line vote. Probably, they thought, a year ago, that they would be able to swing public opinion their way and bully the Republicans into voting for it. But they failed to move public opinion. In fact, every time that ObamaCare gets into the news the president's approval numbers go down, as yesterday when the president hit -21 on the bellwhether Rasmussen Poll. The poll for the last few months has shown steady erosion in the president's strong supporters.

There's a reason it's hard to pass unpopular legislation on party-line votes. It's not the Senate rules. It's called democracy.

In other words, if you are trying to pass unpopular legislation and the opposition thinks that it is a bad idea and the American people also think that it's a bad idea you really have a problem.

Let's rehearse this into a simple set of rules.

1. Governing elite split, American people in favor: Pass
2. Governing elite united, American people opposed: Pass
3. Governing elite split: American people split: Pass
4. Governing elite split, Americn people opposed: Problem!
   

Everybody got it?

The Democrats are now trying to solve their problem by proposing to pass ObamaCare without even having a vote in the House. They are considering a rule in the House to "deem" it passed.

My advice to Dems. Don't do it. You cannot imagine the rage you will provoke if you try to get ObamaCare through by cheating. As the French 68ers said years ago, the whole point of bourgeois democracy is the process. It's the process that keeps people from forming a head of rebellion. Smash the process and you smash your legitimacy.

Conservatives as Reactionaries

Liberals just can't get enough of the idea that conservatives are reactionaries, trying to turn the clock back.

So you would expect that the Wall Street Journal's tame liberal, Thomas Frank, would be eager to take a whack at the subject whenever he gets a convenient hook.

Mostly though he is outraged that Glenn Beck hates college professor President Woodrow Wilson. OK, so Wilson vetoed prohibition; Beck had that wrong. But he did push the Fed, the income tax, and of course nasty attacks on potential subversives during World War I.

Note to Frank: Beck hates Wilson probably because he has read Jonah Goldberg's bestselling Liberal Fascism. Jonah does a dandy job of explaining why Wilson is the author of all our troubles, and the First Fascist.

But are conservatives really reactionaries? Hardly. Modern conservatives don't want to turn the clock back to the middle ages. That's what liberals want to do, with their hierarchical neo-feudal welfare state. Modern conservatives echo the philosophy of Edmund Burke. We want slow, sensible reform that is sensible of the responsibility the current generation has to honor the ancestors and think of the generations yet unborn.

To suggest, as Frank does, that conservatives are the "emotional descendants of the squalid royalists who reconquered Europe after the French Revolution was extinguished" is bunk. Conservatives don't oppose the French Revolution because we believe in the divine right of kings. We oppose it because all such revolutionary spasms end in the guillotine, with ordinary people getting totally screwed by monsters like Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao.

On the other hand, we conservatives do worry that liberals are developing a curious case of the divine right of liberals to rule in defiance of public opinion.

We conservatives look forward with hope, to a land of limited government, of voluntary exchange, of thriving moral communities, and generous provision for the poor. Our dream is that this can all be done without liberals like Thomas Frank bossing us around with trillion dollar government programs.

Now maybe that vision is utterly romantic and pie in the sky. But it is not backward looking.

By-the-numbers Conservatism

There are all kinds of conservatives and all kinds of conservatism.

Some people say there are three kinds of conservatives: economic, social, and national-security.

Then there's Ken Blackwell's six-legged stool: social conservatives, Christian conservatives, Second Amendment conservatives, economic conservatives, philosophical conservatives, national security conservatives.

How many conservatives does it take to change a light-bulb?

But for my money, the guy to watch is John Hawkins. You could call him a by-the-numbers conservative. Today, he's got "Five Ways Liberals Misjudge the American People." That's a helpful thing to know when liberals are about to cram down a government takeover of health care down your throat. It gives you hope that, when they are actually asked what they want, the American people will want the monstrosity of ObamaCare repealed.

How do liberals misjudge the American people? Hawkins counts the ways:

1. They believe the American people want liberal policies.
2. They believe that many Americans don't know what's in their own best interests.
3. They believe that the American people want to be treated like children.
4. They believe that most conservatives are evil.
5. They believe they can lie to the American people without consequence.

Hawkins does a nice job of tossing these notions up in the air and snapping at them. But let us step back a moment. When you look at the five things that liberals believe about the American people that ain't so, you realize something.

If you wanted to cram down your agenda on the American people then you'd have to believe these things. You'd need to believe them in order to convince yourself that your cruel, corrupt, unjust program is the soul of caring, compassion, and justice. Of course the American want liberal things, except for those (in Kansas) that don't get it. Of course the American people want to be taken care of, otherwise the eevil corporations will get them. Of course conservatives are evil: they oppose all the good things that liberals want to do.

And of course it's necessary to tell a porky or two. Didn't Plato condone the "noble lie" so that the Guardians could create and sustain their Republic?

What I find astonishing, given the wall-to-wall liberal environment in which we live, is that something like the Tea Party movement is possible. As Hawkins says:

Your kids are exposed to liberalism at school, Hollywood forces liberal ideas down your throat when you watch TV, the local paper leans left -- you just can't get away from it.

So how come you can get, all of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, a Tea Party movement with people waving Don't Tread on Me flags? These are not profound intellectuals who have studied the classics off in a corner at Hillsdale College. These are bread-and-butter Americans who go to work, obey the law, and pay their taxes. Yet they have somehow picked up a world-view that collides head on with their liberal masters.

As the philosophers say: How is that possible?

Like liberals, I sometimes think that we conservatives don't understand the American people at all!

Lack of Trust in Dem Congress

I captured an interesting comment from former Majority Leader Tom DeLay over the weekend. He was critiquing the Pelosi operation in the house. Let's look at his comment in full.

DeLay accused Democrats of “arrogance” after CNN host Candi Crowley asked DeLay how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have a Democrat-controlled House, Senate and White House, but haven’t been able to secure passage of President Obama’s health-care bill.

“It’s because they’re going back in rooms and then telling the members, take it or leave it. You can’t do that. It’s obvious,” he said.

DeLay contrasted Pelosi’s handling of the health-care bill process to when he was in the Republican leadership and “knew which members were having problems and we’d take care of those problems so that by the time it got to the floor, they wanted to vote for it because they had ownership of it.”

But now, he explained, “Nancy Pelosi writes the bill, hands it to the chairman, says ‘get it out of committee in an hour and we’re going to the floor, we’re going to debate it and I’ll break arms if you vote against me.’ That will come to haunt you and bring you down.”

This speaks volumes. It means that when the wind turns against Nancy Pelosi it will turn hard. Maybe it already did.

We often complain of the way that politics works, the log-rolling, the back-scratching. But it's done that way because it works that way. Members of Congress are not nobodies that can be bullied around. At least, not much. And the closer that wavering members come to November 2010 the less they are likely to vote with the leaders.

In fact, we are seeing the fundamental weakness of the Democratic strategy since 2005. The idea was to get moderates and conservatives elected in Republican leaning districts. That's fine, so long as you have a moderate agenda to enact when you get into office. That way you build confidence and trust and maybe a permanent majority.

But that's not what the Dems did. Once they won control of Congress and the presidency they threw all the moderate talk overboard and went for a partisan, left-wing agenda. But that's not what the swing Democrats were elected to do.

Conservatives have a similar situation: the RINO problem. Republicans from states in the North East have not been willing to vote the conservative agenda. No wonder. Their constituents didn't want it. But conservatives hated their timidity. Yet the moderate Republicans kept the GOP from doing what the Democrats are now doing. Going way off the center ground and leaving it wide open for the other party.

The way you avoid conflict and dangerous polarization in politics is by nudging the political center a little bit in your direction and then coming back next year for more. This strategy is the despair of partisans (like me) but it is the decent thing to do. People from the center and from the other party are Americans too. They deserve the right to have their voices heard and to feel that, even if they are out of power, they have an input into the governance of the nation.

I remain convinced that the Democrats are making a major strategic mistake that will echo through the politics of the nation for decades. But try telling Democrats that! Try getting them to listen to good old Tom DeLay, the former small businessman with a pest-control business.

Still, it's often best to learn the hard way. That way you really learn the lesson, good and hard.