Education thoughts

I have to give lefties thanks when it's due for bringing things onto my radar that might not otherwise show up.

Today, several rants showed up on my Facebook newsfeed about Betsy DeVos and her views on budget and funding matters for her department. I'd been busy thinking about Kim Foxx and the implosion of the Southern Poverty Law Center and missed coverage of DeVos' appearance before a House committee.

Here's a fairly objective report about it:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday defended deep cuts to programs meant to help students and others, including eliminating $18 million to support Special Olympics, while urging Congress to spend millions more on charter schools.

"We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results," DeVos said in prepared testimony before a House subcommittee considering the Department of Education's budget request for the next fiscal year.
It was the first time that DeVos, a wealthy former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and school choice advocate, had been called before a Democratic-led panel in the U.S. House to explain President Donald Trump's spending priorities.

While proposing to add $60 million more to charter school funding and create a tax credit for individual and companies that donate to scholarships for private schools, DeVos' budget proposal would still cut more than $7 billion from the Education Department, about 10 percent of its current budget. President Trump proposed a $4.7 trillion overall budget this month with an annual deficit expected to run about $1 trillion.

It calls for eliminating billions in grants to improve student achievement by reducing class sizes and funding professional development for teachers as well as cutting funds dedicated to increasing the use of technology in schools and improving school conditions. In many cases, DeVos said the purpose of the grants has been found to be redundant or ineffective.

In the case of the $17.6 million cut to help fund the Special Olympics, a program designed to help children and adults with disabilities, DeVos suggested it is better supported by philanthropy and added, "We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget." 

A fair number of the FB rants focused on the Special Olympics cuts.  I did not see any of the ranters address her assertion that that enterprise is better supported by philanthropy. And that leads me to a very basic question: Why should the federal government be in the Special Olympics business at all?

Seriously. What the hell does it have to do with the core functions of government outlined in the Constitution?

Which in turn leads to the larger question I've asked for years: What justification is there for a federal Department of Education?

In my coverage of local government for some radio stations and a website, I am constantly amazed at the number of local things that happen - some in the education area, but also in stuff like bridge construction and community corrections staffing - as a result of federal grants.

I suppose there's a tilting-at-windmills element involved in asking why that money couldn't stay in our city and county in the first place and not be run through the DC filter where various layers of bureaucracy take their cut for - well, indeed, for what? I guess to come up with the acronyms for the programs by which they send it back to us. The whole scheme is so entrenched in our way of operating as a nation that no one seriously proposes looking at dismantling the whole apparatus, even though it would be the sensible way to proceed.

With the table thus set, may I recommend a piece by the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess at Forbes entitled "The Problem With Senator Harris' Proposal to Have Uncle Sam Boost Teacher Pay." He says that teachers, many of whom do indeed deserve more pay, ought to look at what really erodes their chances of getting it: good old administrative bloat:

. . . here’s the bizarre dynamic at the heart of the challenge: Teachers have a legitimate gripe about take-home pay, even though school spending has steadily gone up over time. Nationally, after-inflation teacher pay actually declined by two percent from 1992 to 2014, even as real per-pupil spending grew by 27%. This disparity is mostly a product of two realities. The first is that schools have added staff—particularly support staff—at a rate that far outpaces growth in student enrollment. Nationally, between 1992 and 2014, student enrollment grew by 20%, the number of teachers by 29%—and non-teaching staff by 47%. The second is that the cost of teacher pensions and health care have eroded paychecks. Nationally, between 2003 and 2014, even as teacher salaries declined, the per-teacher cost of benefits rocketed from $14,000 to $21,000. That’s $7,000 a year that would, other things equal, be showing up in teacher paychecks.

And federalizing teacher pay is only going to add more bureaucrats to the mix.

The first step in curing post-America's education problems is for someone somewhere to quit taking for granted that the federal gravy train ought to be ridden, since it's there. It would take guts, but everything about returning post-America to its previous identity as the United States of America is going to take guts.

And I daresay that hopping off the gravy train would go a long way to rectify the damage being done by the social-justice jackboots. They'll get weeded out as local taxpayers insist on some accountability. Teachers aren't going to be as likely to stand at the front of the classroom and prattle on about gender fluidity and the global climate being in some kind of trouble if no one is goading them with federal dollars.

And people who personally know Special Olympic athletes and care about them and cheer them on in competition would feel a greater sense of connection, since there would be no faraway filter between their dollars and the games and meets.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to any alternative. It also has a far greater human touch.

Gender: the turf on which the pointy-headed overlords gain the most ground

As you know, yesterday was International Women's Day, and all the lefties milked it for all it was worth.

I was heartened to see a couple of expressions of concern for what, in post-America anyway, is a more immediate problem: the villainization of masculinity.

On his FNC program, Tucker Carlson used a segment to cite some of the effects of this: Girls get better grades on balance. They smoke less marijuana. They are more likely to show up on time for their jobs. Men on average die five years before women, due to addiction. There was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among men between 1997 and 2014. Women outnumber men in graduate-school enrollment and the attainment of doctoral degrees.  (H/T: Caffeinated Thoughts.)

He then had as his guest the great Jordan Peterson, and their exchange was must-see viewing. He asked Peterson why he thought men were afflicted with these pathologies. Peterson replied that it was the result of policy, the outlawing of masculinity itself. The demonization of "competition as a valid form of human interaction." Tucker winds up their conversation by asking Peterson how we might counter this trend: "If you have your children in a school and they talk about equity, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege, systemic racism, any of that, you take your children out of the class." Carlson says, "We might run out of schools pretty quickly," to which Peterson responds, "That would be just fine."

Heather Wilhelm at National Review cites a few recent salvos in the war on masculinity:

“It’s tempting to believe that boys are not ‘hardwired’ to care about feelings or friendship,” notes a recent New York magazine piece, part of a larger and questionable chin-stroking series called “How to Raise a Boy.” Really? Who finds this belief tempting, and has that person ever interacted with a real live boy? Further in the piece, we are told that boys need forced female friendship to curb their aggressive instincts, and that “by the end of elementary school,” boys are “starting to sexually objectify girls.” In other words, by going through puberty, they’re automatically oppressing women. Ah. Okay.

“The power white American boys have been taught to seize for generations comes from the already powerless, women, people of color, everyone who isn’t us,” notes another piece in the “How to Raise a Boy” series, written by a man. “Which is why, in a macro sense, the lessening power of men (straight and white particularly) is an unquestioned societal good. When others rise, we must fall.” I could point out that this is an almost flawless example of Milton Friedman’s fixed-pie fallacy — the mistaken assumption that “one party can gain only at the expense of another.” Ideally, we should work together to grow the proverbial pie and lift all proverbial pie-stocked ships, but hey, why bother? That’s apparently no fun at all.

“Teenage boys and men are almost entirely the bad actors in certain crises the nation is facing, like mass shootings and sexual harassment,” noted a recent New York Times piece, detailing a growing American parental “bias against boys.” Michael Thompson, a “psychologist who studies the development of boys,” told the Times that “there is now a subtle fear of boys and the trouble they might bring.”

Yesterday, I covered an event at a downtown Indianapolis hotel for a central Indiana newspaper. Cummins, a Fortune 200 company that bills itself as being in the power-generation business and is best known for its diesel engines, was sponsoring a two-day women's conference, the centerpiece of which was a luncheon at which the company announced the launch of an initiative called Cummins Powers Women. It involves partnerships with a number of nonprofits in the design and implementation of female-empowerment programs in countries around the world.

The opening remarks of the announcement proceedings were given by the Vice President of corporate responsibility.  After comparing the magnitude of the initiative to South Africa getting rid of apartheid and the August 1963 march on Washington in the US, she introduced the featured speaker, the founder and executive director of an organization that is going to be one of the partners in the initiative. It's called Rise Up. The speaker recounted some of Rise Up's undeniably laudable achievements, such as getting child marriages banned in Guatemala and Malawi. The touting of Rise Up's kindred spirits, however, couldn't escape notice. Boasting of working closely with the UN on its "sustainability goals," and name-dropping the Clinton Global Initiative. An overhead projection of the logos of media outlets that have given Rise Up coverage: The Guardian, The Huffington Post, NPR, the New York Times. The odor wafting off the whole presentation was unmistakable.

Pro that I am, I wrote my story with impeccable objectivity. I haven't stopped thinking about the layers of implication, though.

There's something - dare I say it? - paternalistic about the whole undertaking. For an Indiana-based engine maker and a San Francisco-based nonprofit to presume to be able to radically alter entrenched cultures in far-flung lands there is a palpable measure of hubris involved.

One of the categories with which I'm going to tag this post is "corporate acquiescence to the Left." It's one of the first categories I established when I started LITD, and one that gets frequent entries.

You see, contrary to the leftists' illusions that big corporations are hotbeds of greed and obsession with quarterly-report-bottom lines, they are actually their allies. Witness the displays of cowardice on the part of various major retail chains in the face of gun-control outcries post-Parkland. Or, speaking of Indiana, the position taken by Lilly, the Ball Corporation, Angie's List and the aforementioned Cummins during the 2013 religious-freedom dustup.

Once again James Burnham's prescience in the penning of his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution is in our faces.

For the unacquainted, I think an Amazon reviewer sums up Burnham's thrust effectively:

Burnham's central argument will repulse both leftists--who think that the modern world is suffering an excess of free market capitalism--and conservatives/libertarians, who think that America is one more Obamaphone away from communism. It certainly ticked off his old Marxist buddies, drunk as they were in the 1930′s on their unbelievably arrogant belief in the "historical inevitability of socialism." Burnham's view was that the dictatorship of the proletariat would never happen because the pincer of technological advances and increasingly complex societies meant that ruling a nation required a skill set that the proles simply did not possess.

Burnham observed that Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt were developing along parallel paths, creating an economic system in which power rested not with capitalists or workers, but managers; administrators, HR ditzes, engineers, bureaucrats, civil servants, CEOs and other figures who exist outside of the capitalist class yet are not of the proletariat. Stalin's nomenklatura, Hitler's vast patronage network, and the myriad agencies created by the New Deal represented this shift in power, as they were controlled neither by capitalists or by workers. The trigger for this transition was the mass unemployment sparked by the Great Depression and capitalism's complete inability to solve it, but the foundations had been laid beforehand in the increasing scale of society and scientific advances that made large-scale organization easier.

Of course, a phenomenon that came along some 25 years after Burnham wrote that book was the counterculture. I doubt that Burnham could have foreseen that drastic upheaval, even given his exceptional foresight.

But maybe his foresight prevails anyway. A great number of the hippies, radicals and peripheral admirers thereof have gravitated to the corporate world in the 50 years since the counterculture heyday. They are now spearheading the great project of attempting to give human nature a makeover.

That begins with rendering the question "Why have pretty much all societies been patriarchally structured?" so impolite to raise as to merit ostracizing he or she who raises it.

This is unprecedented terrain onto which we're stepping, and we're being led not by dreadlocked-and-tie-dyed drum-circle types, but fashionably dressed pointy-heads who deign to know what is best for the world's six-billion plus heirs of hard-won human advancement.

A primary law of this universe: Everything is a tradeoff.

I just had one of those situations in which a social-media post about a given subject elicits an interesting, amusing comment thread, and, at a given point of said thread, someone sees an occasion to try to point out a flaw in my conservative worldview.

The thread's primary subject was my attitude and behavior. A secondary subject was the nature of bureaucracy. It's important to keep that order clear. Switching it would amount to excuse-making, as you'll see.

Here's my post:

So, before I made the phone call I just concluded - to a customer-service representative at a large bureaucratic organization - I gave myself a talk: "Okay, Barn, maintain a calm demeanor and a productive attitude. No stuttering, yelling or cussing."

I failed miserably.

I think the situation was resolved favorably, but it was ugly getting there.

There were some comments along the lines of "Man, I can relate!"

I think people liked a comment I chimed in with:

 I know you, like me, are not much for organizational formality, and I find myself put off from the get-go by their tone. They have to wade through all kinds of doo-dah ("So what is the best number to reach you?") and no matter what you're saying, they begin their response with "Mmmm-hmmmm." Hey, toots, how about if we talk to each other like a couple of human beings?

And on it went. A couple of people asked if I had to press one for English. In fact I did.

At one point, a left-leaner chimed in with this:

Capitalism, Barney. It's what you crave: the big, behemoth money engine. No soul, no integrity. Just profit.

I responded that one must remember that I, as a consumer, have an array of choices.

A couple of trains of thought left that station and I've been on them both ever since.

One has to do with her use of the term "big, behemoth money engine." Now, that's just what the company in question is, but that in and of itself does not discredit capitalism. The service that the company in question provides is only offered by a small number of companies, it's true, but why that is so matters very much.

If it's a case of the classic scenario where an industry lobbyist takes a relevant legislator out for a swank three-martini lunch and says, "So what's involved in keeping small upstart competitors out of the picture?", that is not the free market that we conservatives are championing. We're talking about the real deal, not collusion or cronyism. Everybody who wants a shot at the market has to be able to give it a go.

The other train of thought had to do with my end, my role as a consumer. If the above scenario is not in play, if the field is wide open, and due to the start-up capital required or whatever, the field of service providers is just small, then my choices are circumscribed, and, depending on my priorities, may come down to me saying, "The hell with it, I'll go without TV." (That's unlikely, since my wife has a vote on the matter equal to mine.)

After all, I have no right to television service.

There is no right to television service.

For the same reason there is no right to health care.

Television service, health care, haircuts, oil changes for your car all exist because some human beings somewhere have some kind of motivation to provide them. No human beings so motivated, no services.

We're now zeroing in on one of the most primary laws of this universe we inhabit: Everything is a tradeoff. Everything.

No one can guarantee you a satisfactory setup for your life. And it's pointless to talk about level playing fields, and how it's unfair that some people are born into comfortable circumstances and others into conditions of dire need. It was ever thus. The only kind of equality that it makes any sense to talk about is equality before the law.

And any attempt to short-circuit this given about our universe is going to entail curbing someone's freedom. We either have to make somebody provide the service we are interested in, which is called involuntary servitude, or we have to limit the choices of those interested in a particular service, if we're going to collectively try to provide it to them. We've just seen a real-world example of that, in which Charlie Gard's parents weren't able to explore an option outside of what the British Health Service and the European Union deemed acceptable.

This is why conservatism is sometimes called a tragic worldview, as juxtaposed against leftism's utopian quality.

The material world is as it is. We have over ten thousand years' experience with it, and it has yet to yield us any kind of magical endless bounty.

Big Rock Candy Mountain this ain't. But we have our freedom. Well, as long as we value it enough to defend it against those still sure the peak of that mountain is just over the horizon.

The irony involved in the Left's anti-corporate-world rhetoric: their target is correct, but the reason for their sentiment is way off-base

Ben Domenich has a piece at The Federalist today  in which he starts out by pointing out a real semantical problem in our current civil war conversation: We lack a universally agreed-upon definition of "globalism." He then proceeds to zero in on a definition that is very much grounded in reality.

He looks at the world-spanning supply chains of big corporations and how they make for a monolith that outstrips the power of any nation to assert its sovereignty in the face of that monolith. The values of a Google, an Apple, a Cummins, will supersede those of the indigenous culture in which such a firm situates a facility.

One of the frequent blind spots for economic libertarians, speaking as one who has personally dealt with this log in the eye, is a tendency to allow principles of how economies work and the beauty of trade to make us ignore perceived threats animating people who value more than just the power to buy and sell. The gigantism encouraged by our modern globalist system has many perks across many industries. But it has also given rise to a global corporate elite. This elite tribe of globalists share certain values: they are more tolerant of regulation, insomuch as it drives out competition; they are more welcoming of government expenditure, insomuch as it buys their products, builds their needed infrastructure, and subsidizes their hospital systems; and they care little about the subjugation of rights to speech and religion, so much as it makes their ability to sell in certain markets inconvenient.

This technocratic global elite will brook no local cultural impediments to its vision:

Today, the centralized power among the leaders of the global tech industry – who have little use for free speech and religion, and are thoroughly onboard with the Messianic aims of the environmental movement and the redefinitional aims of the anti-family movement – are steadily prodding governments to seal up the valves and the hatches. In a world where all the companies agree, what use are they after all?

The implicit motto of the global elites today is “no escape” – no escape valve from a permanently politicized life, where the only legitimate perspective is their monopolistic, secularized, authoritarian-friendly “no gods but science” view. When we do not view each other as legitimate – particularly when decisions are not coming from the people or properly elected officials, but from some other force – it leads to resentment, escalation, and eventually something much worse. We must view our fellow voters as legitimate citizens, and the leaders and policies we choose at the ballot box as legitimate expressions of the views of our fellow citizens. When we do not, we risk disaster. We risk conceding the field to the global elite that views us as a backwards people, who ultimately ought to be dissolved to elect another.

So the ground-level Leftist who sneers and rants at "the corporate world" has the right object of his or her ire, but the wrong reasons for harboring such ire.

But seeing that would require a very disturbing look in the mirror. The suits and muckety-mucks of the world they hold in such disdain are using their clout to impose on the entire world the very values that the Leftist holds dear.

Well-played, Leftists, even if you can't see the nature of your victory.

 

 

Tuesday roundup

The premier issue of American Affairs is out, and it's impressive. It's an outgrowth of last year's Journal of American Greatness, about which I had my doubts, given that its raison d'être was the attempt to codify some new body of principles - ideology, if you will - that some say has emerged in the last few years, and particularly the last year or so. I was so repulsed by the grassroots level of Trumpmania that I couldn't see how there might actually be something to the idea that one might truly speak of evolution on the right side of the political spectrum.

But the editors and writers at AA demonstrate heft and depth in the content of this debut.

I particularly recommend Julius Krein's essay "James Burnham's Managerial Elite." Longtime LITD readers know that I have always felt that Burnham's works, at each point of his post-Trotskyite growth as a thinker, were among the most prescient contributions to twentieth-century cultural observation. Not only does Krein review the evolution from 1941's The Managerial Revolution to 1964's Suicide of the West, but he examines how subsequent thinkers, such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, dealt with Burnham's concept of a technocratic class pervading all sectors of society.  He then looks at the current state of managerialism (what Burnham saw as the takeover of society by an administrative class with a bureaucratic mindset) through the lens of Burnham's enumeration of its pitfalls:

In describing the transition from bourgeois capitalism to managerialism, Burnham outlined nine fundamental challenges leading to capitalism’s failure. Capitalist society’s inability to resolve these structural problems heralded, for Burnham, the inevitable collapse of the old order. And nearly all of them—the sole exception being a decline in agricultural productivity—apply to the current economic and political conditions.

(1) The inability to reduce mass unemployment: although headline U.S. unemployment figures are low, labor participation rates are also at their lowest levels in decades. Broader measures of unemployment that account for labor force participation remain unusually high (from the U6 at 9% to independent estimations at 20+%) almost a decade after the financial crisis. Significant portions of the population have essentially been excluded from the labor force and have no realistic prospects for rejoining it. Furthermore, the few rapidly growing employment sectors are in the low-value service economy and are generally of lower quality than the jobs that have been lost. To quote Burnham, a social organization has broken down precisely when “it cannot any longer provide its members with socially useful functions even according to its own ideas of what is socially useful.”

(2) Economic cycles are no longer trending higher: boom-bust cycles are economic inevitabilities, but when cycles overall trend downward, as the post–financial crisis recovery would suggest, it is a sign that the society “can no longer handle its own resources.” Perhaps an even greater problem of this type at present, however, is the fact that median real wages have barely risen in decades. Neither a capitalistic nor a managerial elite can maintain its popular legitimacy if it cannot provide for increasing consumption.

(3) “The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer,” at least not by any ordinary means. Explanation of this point today seems unnecessary, but it is worth adding that even if capitalism’s moral or economic frameworks concerning debt no longer apply in managerial society, the system’s increasing dependence on borrowing is indicative of deeper imbalances.

(4) Instability and manipulation of foreign exchange: many of the world’s major economies are effectively engaged in an undeclared currency war against each other. In addition, an economy as large as China’s operating under a pegged currency regime is a unique development in recent times that causes further strain on the global system.

(5) Excess uninvested cash: the “mass unemployment of private money is scarcely less indicative of the death of capitalism than the mass unemployment of human beings. Both show the inability of the capitalist institutions any longer to organize human activities.” The same is true for managerial institutions. The inability of corporate or financial investors to find productive uses for increasing cash hoards—especially in light of unusually low interest rates—signals profound and systemic economic dysfunction.

(6) Failure of advanced nations’ policies toward developing economies: in recent decades, the managerial model for economic development has been “globalization,” or the offshoring of labor-intensive industries to geographies with lower wages and employment costs. This model is now breaking down and not only because of political resistance in Western nations. The so-called low-hanging fruit has already been harvested. Emerging countries are increasingly competing with each other for low-wage manufacturing and many are facing the “middle income trap.” Globalization of this type is unlikely to generate accelerating growth in the manner it once did in either advanced or developing economies.

Meanwhile, developed and emerging nations are no longer converging politically. The failure of “democracy promotion,” both of the hard and soft varieties, is part of a broader failure of managerial foreign policy that both indicates and itself creates a deeper destabilization of the system.

(7) The inability to exploit technological advances: this failure applies not only to hypotheses concerning a slowdown in innovation but also to the likelihood that fully exploiting available technological advances would not positively “disrupt” but rather destabilize society. For Burnham, the fact that capitalism would be unable to implement new technologies without significantly increasing unemployment was a further indication that a new social organization had become necessary. Today the situation is similar. The introduction of self-driving vehicles alone will add meaningfully to unemployment rolls, and automation will continue to erode blue-collar jobs and is beginning to replace high-paying, white-collar professions as well. All of the happy talk about education and innovation offers little of substance concerning the unemployment of an increasingly larger mass of society that is being rendered economically superfluous. Such “technological unemployment” shows, in Burnham’s words, “that capitalism and its rulers can no longer use their own resources. And the point is that, if they won’t, someone else will.”

(8) In place of the 1930s agricultural depression that Burnham described, consider the systemic challenge to managerial society posed by the collapse of the universities. They face two crises. The first is the frequent abandonment of genuine academic inquiry in favor of rigid ideology and mindless political correctness, which progressively degrades the quality of the elite. Moral fanaticism and paranoia are not inherently signs of imminent societal decline, however. The more significant crisis threatening the system is the explosion of student loan debt, a clear indication that the universities are creating more would-be managers than are useful, or at least too many of low quality. Since the main purpose of the universities today is to credential the managerial elite, such failures signal that managerial institutions can no longer organize their human resources.

(9) Ideological impotence: “no one who has watched the world during the past twenty years can doubt the ever-increasing impotence of the bourgeois ideologies,” wrote Burnham, “The words begin to have a hollow sound in the most sympathetic capitalist ears.” This is as true of managerialist ideologies now as it was of capitalism then, as anyone who has listened to Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton speak can attest.

But still we have negotiating tables on one side of which are managers from large corporations asking, "Why should we come to your community?" and on the other side economic-development people saying, "Because we have bike trails, a human-rights council and good restaurants."

As both Burnham and Irving Kristol understood, the legitimacy of the managerial elite is not derived from constitutional or democratic or any traditional authority. It is based, rather, on its ability to satisfy the desires of a hedonistic society, its competence in increasing consumption and “quality of life.” 

A school in California finds out that one way to lose out on federal gravy is to be too pale:

Parents that send their kids to the North Hollywood middle school are outraged after being told the school will be losing significant funding because it has “too many white students,” according to a Los Angeles ABC-affiliate.

“Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body,” reports ABC7. “The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.”

For a long time, Hamas lacked the powerful rockets that Hizbollah has used to menace Israel. Well, they have them now.

Talk about moving goalposts. There's no satisfying these people:

The University of Oregon wants its students to learn certain things during their four-to-six years as undergraduates. One of the ways the school makes sure the right topics are learned is by providing "research guides" for topics essential to their education. One guide, "Transgender Studies & Cisgender Privilege," has raised eyebrows.

For those who haven't been afflicted with this level of political correctness, "cisgender" is the opposite of "transgender." According to Wikipedia:

Cisgender (often abbreviated to simply cis) is a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Cisgender may also be defined as those who have "a gender identity or perform a gender role society considers appropriate for one's sex."

In other words, most people are cisgender, and therefore most people need to recognize and fight their privilege -- and the University of Oregon is here to help. Its guide lists the many things that cisgendered people unfairly enjoy. For example, this statement is one of unparalleled cisgendered privilege:

"My potential lovers expect my genitals to look roughly similar to the way they do, and have accepted that before coming to bed with me."  

Okay, okay. Maybe that one is to be expected, but number six is definitely a surprise:

"Clothing works for me, more or less. I am a size and shape for which clothes I feel comfortable wearing are commonly made."

In other words, being able to walk into a clothing store and buy items of clothing off the rack -- whether you're size zero or twenty -- is a matter of privilege. What's the solution to overcoming this? Thankfully, the guidelines reveal that capitalism is to blame. "Living in a society that is steeped in capitalism is hard," it reads. Not quite as hard as living in a society steeped in socialism, like Venezuela, where people are forced to kill stray dogs to have something to eat, but I digress.

In order to make life better for the transgendered, the guide advises disrupting capitalism and "sharing what you may have to help your kindred!" If we all pitch in and do this right, soon we'll live in a society in which no one is privileged!

Speaking of federal largesse flowing to various locales, Attorney General Jeff Sessions serves notice that if a city wants Washington's help with law-enforcement resources, it has to actually adhere to the law:

Is this just a “distraction” intended to draw attention away from the Russia investigations (as some morning show hosts were speculating today) or the opening salvo in a new set of executive actions? Our Attorney General had some tough words for the nation’s so-called “sanctuary cities” this week, suggesting that their federal grant money for law enforcement could soon be in danger if they don’t cooperate with ICE on matters of deportation of illegal aliens. That has the usual list of suspects setting their hair on fire in predictable fashion, so if it’s a distraction, it’s working so far. (Associated Press)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday warned so-called sanctuary cities they could lose federal money for refusing to cooperate with immigration authorities and suggested the government would come after grants that have already been awarded if they don’t comply.

Sessions said the Justice Department would require cities seeking some of $4.1 billion available in grant money to verify that they are in compliance with a section of federal law that allows information sharing with immigration officials.

His statements in the White House briefing room brought to mind tough talk from President Donald Trump’s campaign and came just three days after the administration’s crushing health care defeat.

What’s ironic here is that Sessions was only repeating the same thing that Barack Obama said last summer. But back then the media backlash didn’t seem quite so intense, did it? That AP report immediately jumps into a list of the most popular programs they can think of which are funded by the grants, including “victim services, body cameras for police and tools to cut rape kit testing backlogs.”

See how horrible Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions would be if they did exactly what Barack Obama threatened to do?

Dana Loesch is not going to stand for any talk of the House Freedom Caucus being to blame for last Friday's repeal-and-replace impasse. Thank you, Dana.

Thoughts on the nature of bureaucracy

This is the transcript of the podcast I did this afternoon, but for those who prefer to read than listen, I offer it herewith:

Clearly, most people have a strong aversion to bureaucracy.

But there are certain types of people who seem to be comfortable with it. Some of them are on the end that provides whatever it is that the bureaucracy in question offers, and some are on the receiving end.

Have you ever, when dealing with someone in a bureaucratic organization, asked yourself, What kind of person can tolerate doing this for a living? I know I couldn’t. 

Have you noticed how they respond to pretty much everything you have to say?

It’s with this clipped little, “Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Your organization left me a message saying I hadn’t paid my latest bill, but my bank shows that my check for it cleared.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Your organization’s website didn’t recognize my password, and I know that it’s my password.”

“Mmmm-hmmmm.”

“The technological service I get from your organization gets interrupted frequently.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

I’ve even gotten the “mmm-hmmm” treatment from organizations that are hitting on me for something. Recently, a book-promotion outfit called me regarding a novel I’d had published by a print-on-demand house eleven years ago. Wanted me to sign on to some deal where my book would get featured prominently in the outfit’s booth at some big trade show in New York. The lady who called me asked me what I’d like to see happen with my book.

“Well, I’ve always thought it would lend itself to treatment as a play.”

“Mmmm-hmmmm.”

“You know, the curtain going up on the opening scene to show a very atmospheric street scene in the late 1940s lined with nightclubs. Neon lights. Guys in pinstripe suits and fedoras.”

“Mmmmm-hmmm.”

“Since you called me on the basis of the particular appeal of my novel, I assume you understand what I envision.”

“Mmmm-hmmmm.”

Needless to say, I did not do business with this organization.

And they always have to pound away on their keyboard for a good minute after you give them some new nugget of information, however miniscule. And then stare at their terminal screen for a while.

And there’s always the boilerplate, and the jargon exclusive to their organization.

You know what? I think a job like that appeals to people who need safety, people who are naturally predisposed to impersonal interactions even in their private lives. People who are afraid to take responsibility for how productive the exchange is turning out to be.

I will confess that a few times - usually in a tech-support situation, but sometimes having to do with matters of billing -  I’ve been responsible for things deteriorating to the point where the exchange cannot be saved.

“Mr. Quick we’re not going to get anywhere if you yell.”

One time a guy even hung up on me.

And part of me feels bad about these instances. But you know what? I’ve also considered it from the perspective that it was a breakthrough. I’d finally gotten the other person to go off-script, to engage in genuine interaction with me.

I also think that faceless bureaucrats are afraid of their own dreams. They don’t want to take charge of too much of their own destinies.

And what’s really scary is that bureaucracy is so pervasive in our society as to be ubiquitous.

It’s always been a feature of civilization. It’s customarily been used to give certain people and groups of people advantages over others. The whole notion of licensing goes back to the trade guilds of a few centuries ago, for instance.

The first wave of the progressive movement, in the early 20th century, spearheaded by the likes of Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson gave us the notion that American government ought to have a far larger role than that envisioned by James Madison, that modern industrialized, urban society was so complex that the executive branch ought to have on its payroll “experts” in various areas such as  health care, stewardship of natural resources, workplace conditions, and the quality of citizen’s lives in the post-work years.

And as government grew, so did corporations and labor unions. And a good many people maneuvered through revolving doors between these sectors, as well as the universities where the “experts’” proposals were hatched. The great James Burnham saw what was happening and alerted us about it in his seminal 1941 work, The Managerial Revolution.

The civil-rights movement got bogged down in bureaucracy after its initial strides. I remember those locally produced television shows that used to air on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s, with names like “Urban Focus,” on which somebody from some agency would get asked by the host about some new program the agency was getting going, and the interviewee would say, “Well, yes, we obtained a grant under Title Such-and-Such and additional funding from the Commission for This and That, and qualified individuals can fill out our eleven-thousand page form.”

The countercultural types that have been with us since the 1950s have seemingly put up a resistance to the stultifying conformity that characterizes large bureaucratic organizations, but ultimately have cast their lot with them, calling on government to impose draconian regulations on matters ranging from energy use to human sexuality.

Which brings us to the current impasse over health care in America. You know the basic lay of the land: The “Affordable” Care Act was rammed through the 2009 Congress in the dead of night without a single Republican vote, and Republicans of a conservative stripe have been promising its repeal ever since. There had always been some excuse for it not being feasible though.

“We only have the House. We need the Senate.”

“We have both houses, but we need the executive branch.”

And now it’s that they only have 51 votes in the Senate, and that, in the House, only certain provisions of it pertaining to matters of funding can be dealt with using reconciliation.

But, at a time of their maximum power, this latest round of excuses reeks of flimsiness. These are rules that could be change, if the will could be mustered.

And so we get this soggy cookie that Paul Ryan wants everybody to get on board with. But several lawmakers, including Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Tom Cotton, as well as the country’s most principled pro-freedom activist groups, such as Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, give it a big thumbs-down.

And the reason is quite basic: It is still predicated on some kind of necessity for bureaucracy.

And that’s the only reason on God’s green earth why any of this is “complicated.”

Freedom is always elegantly simple.

You offer a product or service to particular organizations or people you've determined most likely to be interested in it. (This is your market.)

When interested parties approach you, you have a conversation and arrive at an agreement as to what the product or service is worth.

You provide the product or service.

You get paid.

You cover your costs, and put your profit in the bank, or spend it however you wish.

The above scenario covers every type of economic transaction in which human beings engage.

But freedom requires a bit of courage. All those who have made careers out of saying “mmmmm-hmmm” and letting loose with a flurry of keystrokes after your every utterance are going to have to find something meaningful to do with their lives. They’re going to have to ask themselves the big, deep questions about what they see as their true mission in this world.

Mediocrity gets squeezed out of a truly free society.

This can be a pivotal moment for this country, and for Western civilization. We could really humanize ourselves, really come alive. It’s going to require a leap of faith, though. We will have tossed away the script. We’ll have to learn to put actual thought, not to mention listening skills and compassion, behind what we say. 

We’ll have to have some original ideas.

But how about it? We have nothing to lose but our forms and our jargon.

The real-world effects of gummint's sclerotic involvement in a society's economic life

Perusing the morning's array of news and opinion pieces, I was struck by the parallels between Andrew Browne's WSJ comparison of the regions of China that are in deep recession and those that are humming along, bringing general prosperity and vitality to their inhabitants, and Kevin Williamson's analysis of why Detroit, Michigan died.

In China, because its socialism is more monolithically and ruthlessly applied than is the case in post-America, you have a tier in the economy of enterprises that are actually state-owned. And that's the problem:

China’s economic slow lane is choked with state-owned industrial firms in sectors linked to real estate—steel, cement, coal and construction equipment—all suffering from massive overcapacity. Many get by on bank loans, endlessly rolled over, and orders for boondoggle civil-works projects. They are zombies in a phantom economy. Lawmakers gathered at the Great Hall of the People are likely to review government plans to reduce industrial capacity somewhat and to gradually lay off several million workers while offering them help with relocation and retraining.

Zipping along in the economic fast lane are private companies producing goods and services for a burgeoning consumer market that has taken over from manufacturing as the engine of China’s growth. These corporate leaders are mainly clustered in megacities along China’s eastern seaboard—Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing—linked to global networks of knowledge, finance and talent.

Lopsided growth in a nominally socialist country is an especially thorny problem. Deng Xiaoping resolved the issue by turning Marxism on its head: “Let some people get rich first,” he famously declared. But today’s Internet-empowered industrial workers won’t be treated as second-class citizens. Some hanker for a return to socialism. Others find solace in religions and cults that challenge Communist Party control. Widespread anger at wealth disparities could further sap the resolve of China’s leaders to press ahead with economic reforms—and might even encourage them to launch  military adventures to deflect popular frustrations.

The same basic pattern played itself out in the Motor City:

Detroit is a big city, or at least the ruins of a big city, but it is economically in much the same situation as the poorest parts of Appalachia: Even if you were inclined to open a factory there and create some jobs in the process, you’d have to bring in workers to fill them. The people in Vance, Ala., like the people in Stuttgart, know that putting Mercedes-Benz automobiles together requires a great deal of high-skill work. The people building Toyotas in Texas know the same thing. Nobody is moving to Detroit, because there are no jobs to be had; good jobs aren’t coming to Detroit, because there aren’t enough good workers to be had. The best you’re going to see in Detroit is Shinola workers shoving Swiss-watch movements into Chinese cases and stamping them “Made in Detroit.” Sentimentality is a form of capital, too, when it can be used for marketing purposes. But we’re going to have to do better than that. 

Detroit is a city in which only one in five black men graduates from high school on time — in a city that is 83 percent African American. You think Google is going to move its headquarters there, or invest in a major facility? Tesla? Apple? Does that sound like a place you would invest in?

How did Motown fall so low?

 . . . civic and corporate myopia left Detroit dependent upon a handful of firms whose production undergirded the entire economic ecosystem of Detroit. A combination of factors deformed the economic foundations of Detroit, from governmental protectionism (which made managements thick and lazy) to union rapacity (which diverted potential investment capital into inflated pay and benefits, creating a lot of multimillionaire union bosses) to our national unwillingness to deal with the fact that Germany and Japan — smoking ruins at the end of World War II — would eventually rejoin the modern industrial economy. Rather than finding its way to its best uses through Schumpeterian creative destruction, capital was locked up in poorly performing enterprises such as Chrysler (executive hipster Lee Iacocca was into bailouts before bailouts were cool) and in malinvestments such as unsustainable pension funds. Because most of us lack sufficient imagination, we do not understand what the price of that was. The price isn’t just bailouts and layoffs and factory closings, as painful and convulsive as those have been in Detroit and throughout the industrial communities that inflicted similar problems upon themselves. No, the real cost — the literally incalculable cost — is the lost value that would have been created had all that capital been liberated and put to its best use. We have forgone generations’ worth of compounded returns on investments that we should have made but did not. Another way of putting that: It is far easier to solve the problems of 2016 starting in 1950 than starting in 2016.

Okay, boys and girls, what is the basic takeaway from examining these two scenarios?


It's real obvious, and has been pointed out by those who understand the relationship between economic freedom and human advancement since at least the time of Adam Smith: When the state controls economic activity, no one has any incentive  to think of better ways to do things, or better products to offer the public.

What I find attractive in someone vying for high public office is an understanding that free-market economics is at its core a spiritual matter. Anybody can spew platitudes about "jobs for the middle class" and "surmounting wage stagnation," but that message's ability to inspire pales in comparison to reminding folks that human beings were designed to be marvelous, powerful, inventive creatures and that they will do great things - if they are free to do so.

The world's self-appointed overlords ink a deal in Paris

Not much time to get into it right now, but first thoughts are that if Bernie Sanders and James Hansen think it's flimsy and insufficient as an instrument of imposing their tyranny, then I'm not inclined to get overly alarmed.

The real fireworks here in post-America will begin as a Pub legislature digs in its heels, a process that could get executive-branch support if there is a President Ted Cruz. (Can't you just hear how Squirrel-Hair is looking at this? "Terrible deal. Terrible. I would have negotiated a much better deal, one in which we would win.")

More later.

Medicaid expansion: how bad an idea?

Two state directors of Americans for Prosperity - representing states in which the legislatures had the good sense to shoot down Medicaid expansion - provide a rundown in today's WSJ of how things have turned out in states that went ahead with it:

Consider the experience of the states that did expand Medicaid. “At least 14 states have seen new enrollments exceed their original projections, causing at least seven to increase their cost estimates for 2017,” the Associated Press reported in July.

The AP says that California expected 800,000 new enrollees after the state’s 2013 Medicaid expansion, but wound up with 2.3 million. Enrollment outstripped estimates in New Mexico by 44%, Oregon by 73%, and Washington state by more than 100%.

This has blown holes in state budgets. Illinois once projected that its Medicaid expansion would cost the state $573 million for 2017 through 2020. Yet 200,000 more people have enrolled than were expected, and the state has increased its estimated cost for covering each. The new price tag? About $2 billion, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Enrollment overruns in Kentucky forced officials to more than double the anticipated cost of the state’s Medicaid expansion for 2017, the AP reports, to $74 million from $33 million. That figure could rise to $363 million a year by 2021.

In Rhode Island, where one-quarter of the state’s population is now on Medicaid, the program consumes roughly 30% of all state spending, the Providence Journal reports. To plug this growing hole, Rhode Island has levied a 3.5% tax on insurance policies sold through the state’s ObamaCare exchange.

Even Ohio, whose Republican Gov. John Kasich is running for president on a platform of fiscal responsibility, finds itself in a Medicaid bind. State spending on the program has grown by $5.8 billion since 2011. The Ohio Department of Medicaid projects that by 2017 spending will total $28.2 billion—a 59% increase during Mr. Kasich’s tenure.

In what universe its it a sane idea to take a citizen's money, run it through the DC bureaucratic filter, send it back to the state where the citizen lives, run it through that bureaucratic filter, invite too many fellow citizens to belly up to the trough to get some of it, and expect anybody's health to get cared for?