Tag Archives: Capitalism

News

Walter Williams evaluates American academic performance

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The article is here in Townhall.com. The left is always complaining that they need more money to raise test scores, and that schools are underfunded. But is more money the answer?

Excerpt:

The teaching establishment and politicians have hoodwinked taxpayers into believing that more money is needed to improve education. The Washington, D.C., school budget is about the nation’s costliest, spending about $15,000 per pupil. Its student/teacher ratio, at 15.2 to 1, is lower than the nation’s average. Yet student achievement is just about the lowest in the nation. What’s so callous about the Washington situation is about 1,700 children in kindergarten through 12th grade receive the $7,500 annual scholarships in order to escape rotten D.C. public schools, and four times as many apply for the scholarships, yet Congress, beholden to the education establishment, will end funding the school voucher program.

Teacher’s unions are not interested in being paid to perform, they want to be paid regardless of whether they perform. That is why they oppose voucher programs, which give parents a choice. If parents can choose, then schools that insist on retaining teachers who can’t teach will finally come under pressure to fire those teachers and find some better ones. More money thrown into the fire is not the answer.

Williams continues:

Any long-term solution to our education problems requires the decentralization that can come from competition. Centralization has been massive. In 1930, there were 119,000 school districts across the U.S; today, there are less than 15,000. Control has moved from local communities to the school district, to the state, and to the federal government. Public education has become a highly centralized government-backed monopoly and we shouldn’t be surprised by the results. It’s a no-brainer that the areas of our lives with the greatest innovation, tailoring of services to individual wants and falling prices are the areas where there is ruthless competition such as computers, food, telephone and clothing industries, and delivery companies such as UPS, Federal Express and electronic bill payments that have begun to undermine the postal monopoly in first-class mail.

Here is an article from the extremely left-wing Los Angeles Times that explains what it takes for a school to succeed. A school needs stay away from unions and educational bureaucrats, and stick with the basics: math, reading, writing and discipline. Let’s take a look at an Oakland school that serves the poorest, underprivileged minorities, but still manages to deliver the goods.

What kind of teachers teach in the American Indian Public Charter schools?

“We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”

Good start. But are they “progressive”?

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television’s “Colbert Report.” They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

Well, surely they must embrace teacher’s unions?

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded “self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort,” to quote the school’s website.

But what about the need for compassion, tolerance and empathy?

Conservatives, including columnist George Will, adore the American Indian schools, which they see as models of a “new paternalism” that could close the gap between the haves and have-nots in American education. Not surprisingly, many Bay Area liberals have a hard time embracing an educational philosophy that proudly proclaims that it “does not preach or subscribe to the demagoguery of tolerance.”

The LA Times article shows that conservative, anti-union schools work for the poorest children. But there are challenges that are blocking the expansion of charter schools, such as “hostile state legislatures and arbitrary caps”, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Their article cites Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) as follows:

These caps are often the consequence of legislative trade-off – representing political deal-making designed to appease special interests who prefer the status quo rather than reasoned education policy. As a result of the caps, children across the country now languish on daunting wait lists, just waiting to enroll in the public school of their choice, simply because it happens to operate as a charter. An estimated 365,000 students are on charter school wait lists today. That’s enough students to fully enroll 1,100 new averaged-size charter schools.

As I discussed before, there are almost no males involved in education in the classroom, which means that the classrooms will emphasize compassion, tolerance, equal outcomes, non-judgmentalism and self-esteem. Competition and excellence are definitely out. In order for Americans to continue to have the same level of prosperity, we need to focus on academic excellence, not secular-leftist indoctrination.

News

Obama’s corporate tax hike would cause Microsoft to outsource jobs

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This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)

News

Why social conservatives should be fiscal conservatives

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from the Maritime Sentry! Thanks for the link!

We socially-conservative men need lots of things in order to have a successful family, and those things are all supported by free market capitalism.

Here is what I would need to marry and to run a family:

  • a job
  • the ability to to keep almost all of what I earn
  • the ability to spend what I earn on whatever I want
  • complete freedom from government influence across the board
  • the ability to find Christian services and products in the marketplace
  • the ability to find a new job if I get terminated for being a public Christian at work

The best way to achieve my social conservative goals is by voting for the economic system that will allow me to get the money and liberty to pursue the social goals.

Here are some things that raise the price of consumer goods and reduce my opportunities to find employment: (add yours in the comments)

  • workers unions
  • tariffs
  • corporate taxes
  • regulations
  • environmentalists
  • trial lawyers

And here are some others that have other nasty effects:

  • public schools: they substitute PC leftist indoctrination for a real education
  • teacher’s unions: they deny me school choice, protect unqualified teachers and indoctrinate my children with lefty crap
  • welfare programs: they waste tax money and destroy the need for real men and diminish the role of husbands and fathers
  • gun control: they disarm the law-abiding sector of the society in order to protect criminals
  • feminists: they reduce the pool of marriage-minded women by indoctrinating women to oppose chastity, family, men, God and children… and they favor no-fault divorce
  • socialists: they want government to control how I can spend my money on things like health care – they don’t want me to buy health care myself, they want me to pay for everyone else’s health care and then get in line
  • secularists: they are annoyed by the thought that I might spend my money in ways that increases the influence of Christianity and they will try to stop me from doing so
  • naturalists: they waste money speculating about ways to explain the effects of intelligence in nature without implicating an intelligence

Many of these aggravating factors have gotten worse because of the recession. We know why we are in a recession right now: because the Democrats forced banks to make loans to people who could not afford them. Obama himself worked for ACORN to sue banks like Citibank.

Consider this article from the American Thinker to see how Obama has affected the businesses where people work to earn the money they need to fuel their marriage and parenting activities.

Excerpt: (H/T 1RedThread)

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars.  This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service.  There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.
Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.
…This is beyond imagination!  My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN.  We did NOTHING wrong.This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy.  This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families?  This is a total economic disaster.

Obama has destroyed capitalism and the rule of law in this country. What happens to a man who has his means of earning a living, which is the fuel of his marriage and parenting engine, removed? Obama took trillions from the private sector to spend on his own special interest groups, like ACORN and auto worker’s unions.

Wrecking the economy is good for Democrats because their goal is to replace responsible men with the federal government. Single women, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, prefer the guarantee of security from government handouts over the responsibility of having to choose and relate to a moral, responsible husband and father.

Here is the article from the Wall Street Journal:

And the excerpt:

For example, for black males ages 20 to 24, the unemployment rate is close to 50 percent; in the black community overall, men have absorbed 100 percent of the job losses 463,000 jobs since the recession started in November 2007.

And even if the economy grows by the forecasted 1.3 percent, it’s not enough to create job growth, says Mr. Sum, who doesn’t anticipate any net job growth until 2011.

“From a fatherhood perspective, it’s going to have an enormous impact on an already fragile community,” says Roland Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a nonprofit group aimed at “increasing the proportion of children growing up with an involved, responsible and committed father.”

“So much of the traditional view of the father revolves around his ability to provide,” says Mr. Warren, who writes a column for The Washington Times.

…Meanwhile, black women have experienced a small net job gain during this recession, mainly due to the fact that they are overwhelmingly employed in health care and education, two sectors that haven’t experienced huge layoffs since November 2007, Mr. Sum says.

The article tries to make a case that men can have an influence in the family without earning money. In the vast majority of cases that is just not going to work. Men need to have authority in the family to have a positive impact, and that authority that is guaranteed by their role as primary provider.

Let me be clear. Welfare programs that reward people for choosing to have children from the wrong sorts of men come at the expense of good men. Good men pay the taxes for the welfare, and good men are passed over because the government is a substitute – a safety net – which removes the need for women to be choosy about men. When you have compassion on people for choosing bad men, you are encouraging them to continue to do so.

Before you vote, think about whether government welfare programs are an adequate substitute for a husband and father. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. I know an awful lot of single-mothers who voted Democrat in the last election and had no idea that they had just voted to destroy the male roles of husband and father. Ideas have consequences.

Further study

Recently, I blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.