The Muddle of Liberal Thinking

What if the Trump Locker-room-gate ends up a damp squib? What if, instead, the voters really don't like Hillary Clinton exposing all our national secrets to the Russians and the Chinese not because they care about national security, but just because they know that they would go to jail if they tried that stuff?

So what about these two Chinese-American women, one who took a lot of abuse as a political prisoner in China and one who has taken a lot of abuse for her conservative views in America? Jeremy Carl:

These women aren’t just Americans, they’re super-patriots — and as you’ll soon see, neither is a fan of political correctness.

Imagine: two women from the culture of Confucius voting for the vulgar Tr\ump!

Conservatives have blathered a lot about political correctness over the years. And I am not sure exactly what good it has done, because the liberals are still here humiliating people with the wrong views, and ruthlessly dividing the country.

And did you know that, over at La Wik, they have deleted their entry on "Cultural Marxism." You can see why in their article on the Frankfurt School. The term Cultural Marxism is an artefact of conspiracy theorizing, don'tcha know. Only, dear liberal friends, the term is appropriate because the Frankfurt School is a change from the economic Marxism of Marx to a cultural Marxism of cultural identity where the helpless victims are no longer marginalized economically, but culturally.

So the term Cultural Marxism is perfectly appropriate.

The problem with cultural Marxism and political correctness and Alinsky tactics is that it is the tactics of war. And the point of social animals like humans is to minimize the occasion for war.

Let's go back to the original Marxism which posited that there was a basic divide between the employers and the workers of the Industrial Revolution. Really? The factories were taking starving people kicked off the land by the agricultural revolution and putting them to work making cheap cotton textiles for other poor people. The employers were organizing the process and the workers were making the textiles that were designed to be bought by people like them. I don't see the fundamental conflict of interest between the employer class and the working class.

Now the original Marxism saw a fundamental exploitative relation between employers and employees. Which meant that class war was the inevitable result.

The new Marxism, inspired by the Frankfurt School that we will call cultural Marxism, saw a fundamental exploitative situation between black and white, between men and women, between gays and straights. So the only solution was culture war.

But humans are social animals. We cannot afford to be at war all the time because war drains society of all its resources in a climactic battle with the other. In fact, in War before Civilization the point is made that primitive tribes could not afford to be having full-scale battles, because it would kill off the men and that would mean that the women and children would have to join another tribe -- no doubt as slaves or concubines like the princess Briseis in The Iliad.

So the idea of all politics all the time is a culture of collapse, because people cannot be at war all the time. They must, most of the time, be doing their daily business of working and earning and wiving and thriving. Because that is how you stay alive and bear children and pass the baton from one generation to the next.

Actually we know what happens with all politics all the time. And it is not a pretty sight. The Soviet Union. Maoist China. Castro Brothers Cuba. Venezuela. Obamacare.

Look, I get it. I get that, in the turmoil of the industrial revolution, some sons of the bourgeoisie imagined something higher and better than the desperate struggle of the working class to scratch out a living. Only their vision did not work, and that is why the Frankfurt School chappies had to come up with another brilliant idea to keep the Marxist flame burning bright.

The only trouble is that the battle of the races and the battle of the genders is just as sterile and destructive as the battle of the classes. We cannot be always fighting. As Voltaire's Candide said: I must go and work in the garden.

To me, the fascinating thing is that the market economy is an astonishing solution to the age-old problem of domination. In the old days you had to subordinate yourself to a powerful lord to survive. But now all you have to do is subordinate yourself to the verdict of the market. Because if you can find yourself something useful to do you will find that the market will pay you for it. Oh, for sure, if you are black, you may have to work for less for a while to prove your worth to a skeptical, racist employer. If you are a woman you may work for less than a man prepared to work 60 hour weeks. But you still get to participate. And the employer willing to risk employing marginalized groups may end up making a killing, because his costs may end up lower. Imagine that!

And all this works itself out in the market without the expensive necessity of well-born activists bullying their way around and humiliating people that dare to object to their ideological hegemony and their cheap idea of enforcing Peace and Justice or else.

So here is the profound weakness of the progressive agenda. It is that we cannot always be fighting, not on the battlefield of armies, and not on the battlefield of ideas. Eventually, the war stops because everyone is exhausted. And then the only thing left to do is to go out and work in the garden.

At some point every religious, cultural, political, economic system must have a notion about how ordinary life goes on, without the clunking fist of power and domination. Because power and domination are all about destruction, not about construction. The longer you keep at war, the more you reduce the human landscape to rubble, so that at the last your power plays do nothing more than make the rubble bounce.

And that is something that our liberal friends are going to have to learn the hard way.

The End of My Fantasy of Welfare State Reform

I like to imagine all the cutting things I could say to my liberal friends, but in the end I don't use them. So, when dining with a liberal couple recently, I merely said that, with Trump, I see the end of my libertarian-conservative dream.

The point is that Trump is bringing a bunch of people into the Republican Party that don't care about reducing the weight of government. They just want it to act for them and give them back their good old good jobs at good wages. Oh, and treat them with respect. 

So what does it matter that Paul Ryan wants to privatize Social Security? Good luck on that, pal. Nobody is talking about entitlement reform: not Clinton, and not Trump. Why? Because everybody getting the entitlements already paid in. And the young are too stupid to understand how they are getting ripped off.

So if the white working class stays in the Republican Party after Trump, the old agenda -- of limited government and grow the economy -- is dead.

And why not? Government is all about rewarding its supporters with loot and plunder. And Social Security and Medicare are the loot that the great middle class expects in return for its support of the ruling class. Or at least in return for turning out and confirming the ruling class in its power and privilege. So what government in its right mind would even consider meddling with the basic entitlement loot that the government offers to its supporters?

That saddens me, because I believe in an America that is higher and nobler than a neo-feudal Patron/Client regime, where the ruling class struts its stuff  and strips the land of its increase, and the peasants touch their forelocks, grateful for the crumbs that fall from the lord's table.

Yet obviously you can't elect a mouse based on what used to be called retrenchment and reform. People expect loot from their politicians, and the politicians tell them what they want to hear.

Why do I care about limited government?  How am I different from the average bear? Is it because my father's family in Russia got cleaned out by the Bolshevik revolution, and ended up in Britain depending, for a season, on the kindness of relatives? Is it because my mother's family was cleaned out by the start of World War II right after the Great Depression when her father had to sell his business in Japan in 1940 to a Czech Jew that had no place else to go and my grandfather lived his last years in a boarding-house in Kent?

That kind of family history does tend to make you think on the lines of the emperor Claudius's friend and aide in Robert Graves' I, Claudius who told the Roman emperor: "Trust no-one, not even me."

So I do not believe the blandishments of politicians and their promises of loot. In the end the loot will vanish and the promises will evaporate in the desperate measures of the next emergency. It is up to me to keep a sturdy ship that can survive the gales and the storms of government folly.

The example of Venezuela is front and center. President Chavez sets up programs to delight his supporters in the bright glare of the noon-day sun, when oil prices are high and revenue abundant. But when the storm appears over the horizon and the winds begin to blow, the government is hog-tied. Because the one thing a government cannot do is reef its sails and cut the spending and disappoint its supporters. So instead of sensible retrenchment of unaffordable programs it bellows "steady as she goes" to the helmsman and piles the ship of state on the rocks. And now the government's supporters are starving.

People like me complain and yearn for another Reagan. But the time is not yet for another Reagan. We are not yet thrashing in the toils of "stagflation," the Carter-era combination of inflation, sky-high interest rates and a no-growth economy. In the 1970s Ronald Reagan was perceived as a fool, an extremist, a light-weight, and anything else the liberal ruling class could use to anathematize him. Even I, in early 1980, rallied to good safe George H.W. Bush until I went to a precinct caucus and encountered the Reagan supporters, the deplorables and bitter clingers of that time, and got to understand that something was afoot. Things are not yet bad enough for voters to rally to a Reagan.

So I told my liberal friend about the end of my libertarian-conservative fantasies. And I did not segue into my "little darlings" meme, how the white working class Trump supporters are the little darlings betrayed by the liberals of 50 years ago, who switched from pouring benefits over the heads of working stiffs and decided that they liked women and minorities much more. Because the white working class was, after all, merely a bunch of Archie Bunker racist, sexist bigots.

(I'm sure that they would have called Archie a homophobe, but the word hadn't been invented back then. Leastways, I don't think so.)

And I did not say that the next group to show up at the Republican Party, turned out of the lord's Democratic estate, would probably be Catholics, followed by the Jews.

Going forward with Trump, we aren't going to reform entitlements. And with Clinton we aren't going to reform health care, education, and end the climate change boondoggle. So nothing changes, and the rocks get closer. And Lord knows what happens with the Russians the the Chinese and the Muslims.

How to Unify America and the West

For years I couldn't figure out why Bismarck decided to unify the German states with wars. What was the point? Why didn't he just get everyone in a room together and work it out?

Silly me. There is only one way to unify a nation -- or indeed any human grouping. You have to go to war. The only thing that unifies fractious humans is war. If you are a leader you have to figure out just the right war you need in order to get everyone on board and reading from the same page.

The genius of Bismarck was that he executed just about the perfect Goldilocks and the Three Bears operation. Neither too hot or two cold. First he went to war against the Danes over the Schleswig-Holstein question. Presumably this was just for practice, to see if he could get everyone on board for a dry run.

Round Two was Austria. I suppose this was a dress rehearsal to see if all the planning and concentration of troops with railways would work.

Round Three was the real thing, where Prussia and the North German Federation went up against Germany's traditional enemy, France. And the result was a humiliation for the French and the announcement of a new German Reich, uniting all the German states except Austria.

In my view World War II united the fractious America resulting from the huge immigration from southern and eastern Europe around 1900. All the trials and divisions of the Great Depression and the 1930s were forgetten as all Americans united to fight Nazism. The result was 20 years of unity until the baby boomers grew up and decided to get rebellious. Of course, it wasn't just them getting rebellious. Our lefty friends in the US were all in favor of fighting Nazism, at least they did after they got their marching orders from Uncle Joe in 1941. But fighting the Cold War against the arc of history? The left and the fashionable liberals begged to dissent on that one.

So here we are in 2016 with new existential threats. Shall we all join up and fight "hate" and "xenophobia" as a liberal friend implied to me? Or fight against the existential threat of climate change before we get fried? Or shall we all join up in the West to fight the Muslim threat?

From time to time I bring up Enoch Powell, who warned that the European project would fail because there was no European demos, no European people. He is right, of course. The European project is a top-down ruling-class project that imagines it can order the peasants around at its pleasure.

But there is a way to create a European demos, and for that matter a Western demos. And that is to fight a world war against Islam.

No doubt we will have to do it, eventually. But not just yet. Right now, the ruling class is on one page and the people are on another. So things will have to get worse before they get better and the ruling class decides to bravely lead the West against Islam and create a western demos.

In a way, our jihadi friends are doing us a favor. They are creating the feeling that we are not safe. And that will eventually create the feeling that we need to do something about it. Reporters will be sticking microphones in presidents' faces and demanding to know: "Mr President, is it safe?"

And then the ruling class will have the warrant to gin up a lovely war. Which is tremendous fun for all ruling classes, ancient and modern.

Just make sure you win, you rulers.

Five Books for Liberals to Worry About

Cass Sunstein, the advocate of "nudge," is warning liberals that they may have a problem. He puts it politely, suggesting that even though Obama and Clinton are the best thing since sliced bread, liberals might want to read some books. Not that it would change their minds, but that it might help them understand why some people down there among the deplorables and the irredeemables  might disagree with them.

He starts with James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. He tells his readers that

Scott argues that modern governments, relying on top-down knowledge, tend to be clueless, because they depend on “thin simplifications” of complex systems -- and hence lack an understanding of how human beings actually organize themselves.

Hmm. But Scott also says that the basic plan of the modern state started with the absolute monarchs, who needed to break through the mediating institutions of the time, the guilds and land-owners, so that they could tax and draft individuals rather than merely deal with intermediate notables and power-holders. The same plan is going into effect as the globalists attempt to "piece the shell of national sovereignty."

Hey, liberals could also read Tocqueville's French Revolution and the Old Regime, which tells how the top-down administrative system of the French ancien régime killed all sense of belonging and loyalty to the regime and thus set up France for the debacle of the Revolution and the Terror.

Then Sunstein moves on to A Matter of Interpretation by Antonin Scalia, which I have not read. Progressives don't like Scalia, writes Sunstein, because he was an opponent "of affirmative action, abortion, gun control, and campaign finance legislation."

But what Scalia cared most about was clear, predictable rules, laid down in advance. In this book, he argues for approaches to interpretation that produce clarity, generality, and fair notice, and that sharply constrain the discretion of federal judges.

Yeah, well, that's the problem innit? What liberals want is complete freedom for their nominees to be able to administer as needed, without regard to any rules laid down in advance. And that issues from the very nature of top-down administrative government. Just like with Obamacare, the ruling class cannot predict in advance what unanticipated problems will occur, so it needs complete discretion for the administrators to clean up the problems and patch them with additional billions without having to go back to Congress for additional legislation.

And that leads Sunstein into Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform by Casey Mulligan.

Mulligan’s central claim is that the Affordable Care Act is imposing large implicit taxes on full-time employment, producing real reductions in wages. The result, he argues, is that many employees would do far better if they worked fewer hours per week -- and in some cases, if they didn't work at all. 

Actually, this is true of the entire welfare state. It is an enormous tax on work, starting with the payroll tax, and then going onto all the other taxes on work, like unemployment and workers compensation taxes. Some people might actually call the welfare state unjust, in that it weighs so heavily on the brow of labor.

Then Sunstein comes to The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haight, which I have read.

Do conservatives have moral commitments that progressives may not even recognize? Haidt says yes, and he identifies three: authority, loyalty and sanctity. If, for example, someone has betrayed a trust, or treated a boss or a parent disrespectfully, conservatives are far more likely to be outraged than progressives.

The interesting thing here is that liberals do too believe in "authority, loyalty and sanctity." Liberals are really big on the authority of big government and the moral authority of peaceful protesters. Liberals are crazy loyal to their side in the culture wars, and demonstrate their loyalty by defenestrating any heretics on the spot with their naming and shaming. But they think of themselves as independent thinkers bravely speaking truth to power. And as for sanctity, liberals believe absolutely in the sanctity of the environment and the planet and a woman's right to choose. So liberals are living in a dream world. They don't understand what they believe.

Finally, Sunstein wants his liberal friends to read Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes by Robert Ellickson.

Progressives tend to believe that without a strong government, social order just isn’t possible; you would have anarchy. An impressive body of research -- much of it by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom -- demonstrates that this belief is wrong. Sometimes people can sort things out well enough on their own, benefiting from social norms that have nothing to do with government.

Oh really! "Sometimes" is it? Where I come from the settled science says that if you put a group of Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do so, attempting to resolve it by giving each party to the problem something to take away. That agrees with the notion in Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent that the best form of legislating is the rule of unanimous consent. That way the proposers of any government program have to buy the votes of the people that will lose out on the program by compensating them for their losses.

The point is that in order to get people to fight, most of the time, you need a politician. As I say, politics is division.

I don't know what Cass Sunstein really believes. In any case, he lives in the world where he might get a government gig in any Democratic administration, so of course he believes that "Barack Obama has been a terrific president... and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor." Jobs, jobs, jobs.

But I suspect that the subtext of his article is a warning to liberals, as in: You may think that everything is copacetic, dear liberal friends, but you need to know that there is "trouble at t'mill," not just because the rubes are deploring, but because a lot of what we liberals take for granted just isn't so. 

The Real Clash Isn't "Civilizations"

The argument of Sam Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations is that the real divide isn't between nations, as in the post 1848 nation-state system. It isn't between ideologies, as in capitalism vs. socialism.

No, the real large-scale conflicts are between civilizations, meaning the extended expression of "blood, language, religion, way of life" that people in a civilizational area have in common.

The crucial distinctions in religion among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors.

On Huntington's view the last century was a failed age of ideology, which aimed to replace the dominant European hegemony with a new world secular religion. But the failure of the Soviet Union put an end to that and resulted in a West-and-the-rest in which the basic civilizations reasserted themselves. Post 1990 and the collapse of communism we have: Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, Japanese civilizations.

Which is to say that the peoples of the Earth have returned to their Axial Age religions after the failure of the proposed secular religion and culture of the Class of 1848 and socialism. Of course they have. When a new god fails, people go back to the old gods.

Now I agree with Huntington that the world of global politics is certainly a clash of civilizations, but I think that he misses the larger point. Something else is trying to be born, something that nobody understands and nobody wants to look in the face. Call it the opening of a new Pandora's Box.

And so the story of the last century and more is an attempt to stuff these new demons back into the box. Or an attempt to return to the pre-industrial Garden of Eden.

But, of course, there is no going back to the Garden of Eden. It was Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge that did it, or in Hegelian terms, the beginning of self-consciousness.

In my view the secular religions and politics of the last century or so since 1848 has been the effort, both by elites and the lower orders, to turn away from the new order of markets and innovation, because they hate it and fear it.

That was the point of the socialist revolution; it would put the genie of capitalism and freedom back in the bottle. And that is why ideological revolutionaries all across the world flocked to socialism's banner and erected socialist regimes everywhere from Russia to China to India. They were threatened by capitalism and freedom too just like Europeans. But it all failed because it was an attempt to deny the new reality, that people were now going to interact with each other in their daily business through markets rather than through vertical power relationships with a lord or priest or patron.

What we see in the world today, after the death of the socialist god that failed, is a grudging acceptance of capitalism and markets, up to a point. But everyone is agreed that it must be kept in its bottle, as far as possible, and subordinated to the age-old wisdom of the culture, the Sinic culture in China, the Hindu culture in India, etc. So Huntington quotes political leaders like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, about how Sinic culture is much superior to Western culture and its corrosive individualism.

But there is a profound conjuring trick going on here. Many of the new leaders in the post-colonial nations were products of western education, like Pakistan's Jinnah, Singapore's Lee, and Sri Lanka's Bandaranaike. When they rose to power they had to "indigenize" to appeal to their countrymen and get elected.

They reverted to their ancestral cultures, and in the process at times changed identities, names, dress, and beliefs.

So what they are really doing is changing their nations while pretending to adhere to the old ways. Because you just can't expect most people to, e.g., get on a rocket ship to Mars knowing that they will never come home again. Just because Elon Musk is selling tickets.

I wonder if that is what Donald Trump is doing, promising to Make America Great Again in a return to good manufacturing jobs at good wages. Trump is a businessman; he knows you can never go back. But I am sure that Moses never told the Israelites that he would keep them in the wilderness for 40 years.

In Jesus in Beijing a Chinese Christian speaks of the experience of the Chinese confronting the West. First the Chinese thought the West was all about its military power, then its science, then its politics, then its Christianity. All true, but notice what he misses out: the West's markets and its permissionless innovation.

It is the last thing, markets and innovation, that all politics is presently organized to control and to neuter. That is what the six or so civilizations are trying to do all over the world. Or, at least, that is what their leaders are telling their peoples.

But the real clash is between the old ways of vertical allegiance and its Patron/Client (or Hegelian Master/Slave) culture and the new ways of horizontal cooperation through the market. That is what scares everyone half to death even as it has brought forth the Great Enrichment of per-capita income from $3 to $100 per day.

All across the world politicians and wise men are promising to protect people in their vertical silos against the fearful rising of the oceans that will marketize everything it its path. But they are lying, either to themselves or to the people they lead.

All religions ask their adherents for surrender: to God, to the ancestors, or to God's love. The god of the new world asks us to surrender to the market, to search out, each individual, how to contribute to society and its prosperity. And the whole world is united in determination to stop such a shocking and radical break with the past.

What will be the result of this real clash? Nobody knows. That is what we are all trying to figure out: the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Government Will Defend Its Power to the Last Dollar and the Last Soldier

I was reading John Mosier's Verdun: The Lost History of the Most Important Battle of World War I, 1914-1918 last week. And one item shot out at me.

Mosier has made a career as a contrarian historian of the World Wars, starting with The Myth of the Great War. His line is that the Germans really knew what they were doing, militarily, and solved the problem of the "lethal battlefield." They did it with their infiltration and storm-trooper tactics. Instead of storming across No-mans-land in serried ranks into the teeth of the machine guns they infiltrated in small squads, bypassing strong points if possible. Only the entry of the US into the war allowed the allies to win.

In Verdun Mosier returns to the Great War and the incompetence of the allied generals and politicians, and the basic German strategy in attacking Verdun in 1916. The German idea was not to "bleed France white" but to destroy French morale by engaging the French army in a dispiriting fight for an iconic border town. This strategy failed in the short term; by the end of 1916 nothing had changed.

The strategy failed because the French army and government lied about the battles on the front line, so people really didn't know what was going on. What the German general von Falkenhayn had not taken into account was that

governments frequently lie to their citizens, generally when the lies are necessary to keep the members of the government in power[.]

In other words, to stay in power in World War I the French army was quite happy to lie to the French government, and the government was quite happy to lie to their people and keep fighting, down the life of the last Frenchman, if that was what it took.

So even though the French army was abominably led right through the war it took until 1917 for the soldiers to say: enough, and until 1918 for the people to say: enough.

I am waffling through all this to get to a point. World War I was not the last gasp of the old order, as we are carefully taught. It was the first cock-up of the new world order. Britain and France were democracies, led by average elected politicians, and Wilhelm II was a a less-than-average constitutional monarch, even though we have been carefully taught to think of him as a militarist monster. Germany had the most advanced welfare state in Europe in 1914.

Whatever had been the point of the old European wars there was certainly no point in the richest countries in the world getting at each others' throats like competing robber bands.

Today we are a century on after the First Cock-up of the new world order, and the educated ruling class seems to have learned nothing.

Of course not. That's because, as Mosier wrote above, the ruling class is composed of people that are interested in power, and will do and say anything to stay in power. And they will do it with your money without a qualm.

That's why we have Trump. Because the GOP base is fed up with its leaders. Because the white working class has finally given up on the Democrats. Of course Trump is no better than the established rulers. He is lying about bringing back those good manufacturing jobs at good wages. Etc.

I didn't watch the debate last night but here is the item that spoke to me. One commentator faulted the pathetic questions from the audience, that all seemed to be saying: show that you care about me.

That's the problem, folks. They don't care about you. They only care about your vote. And they are quite happy to keep bribing you with your own money so long as you keep falling for the con.

The first step to political sanity is to tell the politicians to take their free stuff and the taxes that support it where the sun don't shine.

But we don't, and we never will. Because when we, e.g., face big medical bills after an accident, our first reaction is to think that "single payer" is the answer. Our first instinct is to get other people to pay for our problems.

Because, I guess, we are human.

Education: What Do Mothers Want?

Given that government education is a mess, what do we do now?

From the policy analysis shops come a couple of articles arguing for more school choice: Lennie Jarratt argues for "The Right of Parents to Choose Their Child's Education." And Michelle Ray writes that "The Children Have Been Left Behind." These ladies get into the weeds about school choice and bureaucrats and dilapidated buildings. If that is your thing.

Then there is Rhonda Robinson with "Why Self-Directed Education Has More to Offer Than Public Education" making the home-school argument. Not that she started out as a home-school advocate. Her son was failing in school, not learning to read until he found his father's military training manual. Then it was Katy bar the door, and home-schooling and now her son "is a conservative business owner and a self-made man."

It all depends on what you think education -- or indeed childhood -- is for.

The fact is that education activists have always had an ulterior motive: they want to substitute their judgement for yours on the raising of your child. If it's the Jesuits, it is "give me the boy before he is seven and I will give you the man." If it was the French revolutionaries, it was to get the kids away from the Jesuits. If it was the Germans it was to make soldiers for Germany. If it was Horace Mann it was to turn Boston Irish Catholic boys into Protestants and to cut the crime rate by 90%. If it was education experts in the US at the turn of the 20th century the idea was to prepare children to be obedient workers in factories.

The problem is that when these activists come with free education for your children they are not doing it to help you and your child; they merely want to enlist your child in their ideological army.

So if you are not paying for your kid's education you are probably surrendering your kid to somebody else's agenda, making them into somebody else's mind-numbed robot.

The point is that one-size-fits-all is probably not a good idea, because,

If you are a mother that is barely literate you probably should want a KIPP-style education that force-marches your kid into the literate middle class.

If you are an ordinary middle-class mother you probably want an ordinary middle-class education.

If you are an elite mother you probably want your kid hot-house educated into one of the elite professions.

If you are a creative mother you probably want your kid to educate him/herself at home and follow his/her bliss and create a life on their own energy and will.

And if you are a liberal mother you probably want your kid to grow up to be an activist.

Meanwhile the current wreck of a government education system will continue to go down, year after year, and it will be left mostly to fail to educate the children of the poor. That, of course, is a crime, but you don't see many in our ruling class that concerned.

Then there is another question. Should mothers direct childhood education, or fathers? I wish I knew.

I'm inclined to believe that we should bring back child labor and chuck kids out of the home at age 13 and only let them stay in school if they are willing to crawl over broken glass.

But I could be wrong about that.