Liberty Maven

What do we demand from government? Jobs? Prosperity? These days those come to mind first, but during the post World War II years we had prosperity and jobs and discontent was rampant. Did we want something else then? I came of age with the first Boomers in the 50’s and 60’s and the country’s prosperity did little to dampen our discontent. What were we so mad about? I believe we were mad because we didn’t have a good national story that pertained to our generation.

And I think that in addition to our clamoring today for jobs and a return to prosperity, mine and succeeding generations have continued the yearning for a good national story. Now we have the makings of the sort of compelling story we lacked before. The only problem, as I shall conclude, is that sometimes stories can be too satisfying, too soon.

First let’s rid ourselves of the idea that a story is essentially fiction. After all, the words “history” and “story” share the same root. This is not to say that stories and history are equally non-fictional- they may be equally fictional. Their truth or falsity is beside the point. We eagerly adopt stories of either kind to underwrite our lives.

Hitler is relevant to this discussion, as he was the most strident and successful storyteller of the generations just before mine. He told different stories to different people, and everyone believed him. He told Germans that Jews and the rest of the world generally had conspired to destroy the destiny of the German people. This story was a bestseller, so to speak. Great swaths of German society devoured it as precious mental nourishment, because it made them feel good, made them feel part of something important and justified, as an effective story does. Then he told the rest of the world that he was a ferocious megalomaniac, poised to take over and punish all states and societies that were not in his thrall. That story too was a great hit, in the sense that people followed it and adopted it as their story.

The stories told by Roosevelt and Churchill were predicated on Hitler’s story: We were the defenders against Hitler, the homicidal maniac. Of course Hitler was a homicidal maniac, but as I say my use of “story” denotes neither fiction nor non-fiction. It was Hitler’s story telling capability that put him on the map. Our mental wards are full of crazed megalomaniacs whose stories are listened to by no one but bored staff. Hitler might well have been one of these isolated souls, but as a powerful storyteller, his story became, well, “real.”

Then what was wrong with post-war America’s story? Looking back I see a few things: the dreadful Hitler-enhanced war story that our parents lived, with its heroism and triumph, was not available for us to identify with, partly because it had not happened on our soil, and partly because we were so definitively post-war. Nor could we derive self-esteem from the earlier Depression, with its tales of injustice and endurance, awash as we were in surplus. We had for our coming of age rituals- not recognition of triumph over adversity- but endless exhortations conveyed via the new wonder, TV, to spend our parents’ money on keys to popularity like Brylceem (a little dab ‘ll do ‘ya!). We were just consumers of hair grease always on the look out for new products. I think I sensed even then the potential for Tom Brokaw to slander my entire generation as something less than “great.”

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As a retired public school teacher, I find it useful to define terms by imagining how I would define them to children. The trick is to present a term with its most basic meanings. This works particularly well with political terms, since the media already defines them in childlike ways. Thus, if children ask me what Republicans and Democrats are (and they have) I might lift a simple definition right out of the media: “Republicans are people who don’t want to spend money, while Democrats want to spend money.” That would, of course, be an oversimplification, but it would satisfy the needs of the typical adult newspaper reader and might lead a child to ask more.

These days I don’t talk to as many kids as I used to, but the discourse is surprisingly similar. Consider, for instance, the reply of a California Democrat to this question: “What do you think state money should be spent on?” You’ll get a simple answer: “It should be spent on services for society’s most needy: children, the indigent,” etc. That’s an answer a child could understand. And most children, hearing such a statement, would think, “Well, why would anyone not be a Democrat? We should help children and poor people.”

Thus partisanship, the adherence to one party over another, is born. The problem, of course, is that adult political life is not so simple. To put it bluntly, Democrats don’t particularly care about children and poor people. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Take, for instance, the question of President Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) grant, which, we’re told, is supposed to help children. In California, as in the rest of the nation, almost all office-holding or appointed Democrats are for it, while many Republicans are against it. What I am arguing here is that, while this is a partisan struggle, it is not about whether or not we should help children.

To begin with, RTTT applicants must commit to adopting new federal “Common Core” academic standards (CCS). The reason given is that many states have poor standards. But California, in the estimate of virtually everyone who has studied its standards, is not in that category. Nonetheless, the Schwarzenegger appointed state school board approved paying, according to the non-profit group EdSource, up to $1.6 billion to cover the costs dropping our standards and adopting the CCS, and the board’s new members, appointed by Democratic governor Jerry Brown, are not perturbed at the prospect. Meanwhile our RTTT application was rejected and we will receive no federal money, so we will be paying the $1.6 billion with state funds, increasing by that amount our $25 billion deficit.

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Last night’s appearance by Senator Rand Paul on David Letterman’s late night show was quite interesting. Rand answered the barrage of somewhat contentious questions with plain facts and well-reasoned arguments. Apparently this was strange to Letterman who had no better response than to more or less say, “well your wrong and I’m right but I don’t know why.”

Some are saying it was a disaster for Rand Paul. I don’t see it that way. What do you think? Check out the video below.

Quote of the Day: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” — Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

The Federal State has no constitutional authority for involvement in education. This alone should be sufficient reason to abolish the Department of Education and all federal education spending. But there are also two other powerful reasons . . .

* Federal education programs don’t work. Instead, they actually cause harm.
* The Federal State is headed toward bankruptcy and needs to cut spending.

Statist schools don’t work because they have no incentive to perform adequately. Unlike businesses in the Voluntary Sector of the economy, Statist schools can’t be fired or replaced by the people they supposedly serve.

This is the nature of Statism. It constantly compels the masters (citizens) to serve the servants (politicians and bureaucrats). As a result . . .

You’re now spending more than twice as much for the Feds to meddle with education as taxpayers did in the 1970′s, but student performance hasn’t improved.

Instead, costs have soared. For instance . . . Read More »

Governor Jerry Brown is known for short speeches, and most people who watched Monday evening’s State of the State address were no doubt appreciative of that. I know I was, but I would have liked an additional few moments for consideration of a state budget problem that is currently beneath the public radar: In spite of California’s $25 billion deficit, we are about to pour $1.6 billion down the drain.

That’s the estimated cost of replacing the California education standards with President Obama’s Common Core Standards (CCS). The Schwarzenegger appointed State Board of Education voted last summer to make the switch in pursuit of Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) education grant. Our RTTT application was rejected and we will not receive a dime of the grant, but as all eyes are focused on California’s dire budget options, we are still blithely planning to spend $1.6 billion of state money on testing companies, publishers, and school staff training, for no apparent reason.

To all appearances the Governor has what it takes to tackle such a gravy train. His speech made reference to his proposal to reduce the deficit through reversion of Community Redevelopment Agency funds, derived from property taxes, to their original uses, e.g. support of schools, police and fire fighting. Brown’s stand is brave, considering the clout of CRA defenders, headed by major players like L.A.’s mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a critic of excessive public sector wages and benefits who is apparently unperturbed that CRA secretaries make $80,000 a year. The question then becomes: Can Brown face-off against the clout of the education service industries, as he has with those who feed off the CRA?

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The “civil asset forfeiture” laws are inherently corrupt. They empower law enforcement officers to take and keep your property, even if they haven’t charged you with a crime.

It gets worse.

It’s your property that’s actually charged with a crime, and your property is considered guilty until proven innocent. This makes it virtually impossible for you to regain your possessions once they’re seized.

But it gets even worse . . .

This scheme of legalized theft actually fosters additional corruption, as demonstrated in the sample letter below. Please use the new evidence we provide to send Congress another letter arguing that . . .

Civil asset forfeiture laws should be made illegal.

You can send your letter using our Educate the Powerful System:

You may borrow from or copy this sample letter . . .

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Why is it, I’ve often wondered, that when I tell people at parties that I’m a high school English teacher, even adding, since June, that I’m retired, I note a brief wave of anxiety cross their faces? You’d think people would be delighted to have the opportunity to talk to someone who really knows which predicate nominative to use after a copulative verb. But something dawned on me yesterday, during a silence after I’d said, “This is he” to someone who’d asked for me on the phone. Had I really just burdened some poor sod with the equivalent of “This is he whom you’ve called”? Far from erudite, it sounds like Lily Tomlin’s operator asking, “Is this the party to whom I’m speaking?”

It got worse later in the day when I was reading an article about California Governor Schwarzenegger’s attempts to find the state ways to save money. The Governor was quoted as saying, “We literally have to take the ladder from the tree and shake the whole tree.” My response: “Really, you’re going to literally shake a tree?” Wouldn’t a normal person have wondered how we could balance the books without impacting the needy? Is it really necessary to put Arnold back in the 8th grade for a lesson on the difference between metaphorical and literal?

Here’s the horror of it: “Yes,” I think, “he should be taught the difference.” No kidding, a little creature within me believes someone should advise Arnold about his violations of figurative speech. “That settles it!” you say, “English teachers are like cops who give you a ticket for being the third car in the intersection to turn left while five people just ran a red light with impunity. They’re like robots turned loose on society to keep anyone from saying, ‘She went to the mall with my friend and I.’”

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The U.S. Department of Education was established on May 4, 1980 with its primary objective being to “[assure] access to equal educational opportunity for every individual,” as well as to improve educational quality across America. One of the largest arguments for the creation of a federal department, however, was to coordinate the federal loan programs set forth in LBJ’s “Great Society” program. Johnson proudly signed the Higher Education Act of 1965 into law, proclaiming that the loan programs would “swing open a new door for the young people of America” by making higher education more affordable.

Flash forward several decades from these grand government schemes and these proclamations seem dubious at best. The average cost of attendance at a public university has increased from $950 per year in 1965 to $2,165 in 1980 to $11,034 in 2007 – to say that the federal loan program has failed to make college a more attainable goal for lower-class families would be an understatement. This rising cost spiral has been discussed at length elsewhere, however; the other issues inherent in the federal micromanagement of education are less often mentioned and are perhaps of more importance in our society.

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We live in a time when government is a form of theater; that is, it manages us by appearing to manage us. The current administration, perhaps because it came in with so much support, has broken new ground in what I’m calling Fantasy Government. It rails against health insurance companies, after giving them everything they want; it makes a show about debating our presence in Afghanistan, when all that is debated is the number of troops; it bemoans excessive bonuses on Wall Street, after making those bonuses possible. And now, it demands that public schools “reform” themselves, in terms so vague that any school can appear to comply while doing nothing.

The latest administration push is to promote merit pay for public school teachers rather than the guaranteed pay scales achieved by teachers unions. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is using the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” funds as incentive for “progress towards” merit pay.

It is at this point that the reader will be wondering whether I’m a pro-union stooge defending the status quo or a “change agent” who sees how merit pay works in the private sector to enhance performance, and wants to extend that benefit to teaching.

Sorry to disappoint: I’m not really in either camp. I write here to suggest only that the Obama administration, and the states reacting to its efforts, are not promoting a policy on teacher merit pay, but merely broaching the subject, or, if you will, making noise. In pursuance of the Race to the Top funds, the California state legislature and Governor Schwarzenneger have eliminated a law that forbade use of student test scores in evaluating teachers. That’s the easy part.

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by John Browne – Senior Market Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital

Over the past two years, the federal government and the Federal Reserve have dispersed trillions of public dollars, run up enormous deficits, and kept interest rates at zero. In just about any economic textbook, this combination of policies would be described as the perfect recipe for inflation. Yet, with the exception of the usual increases in health care and education, prices by and large are not rising. Many have concluded that our economic leadership has simply outsmarted the textbooks.

The benign CPI figures are serving as a rallying point behind which the financial talking-heads are forming a parade of optimism. The low CPI is their ‘proof’ that inflation is not a pressing concern. This view is two dimensional.

Inflation is classically described simply as an increase in the money supply. Although these changes will impact price levels, it doesn’t necessarily follow that prices will rise when inflation is high. Instead, inflation may merely result in stable prices at a time when prices would otherwise be falling.

In the popular mentality, however, inflation is simply defined as prices rising. After decades of steadily rising prices, people seem to have forgotten that prices sometimes fall. In light of the bursting of a number of record-breaking, government-fueled asset bubbles, prices should be declining across the board (as they did in the Great Depression). The fact that prices are stable, or have even rallied in some sectors, indicates that inflation is already spreading across the economy.

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