This video from Reason.tv that ECM found at Big Government explains how unions destroy competition by using political contributions to Democrats. Competition is achieved when consumers like you and me have choices in the marketplace. Without choices, one company (or the government) has a monopoly, and can deliver low quality for a high price – and there is nothing you can do about it.
Here’s the video:
And here’s the blurb:
You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s-and more than twice as expensive.
So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor.
Unions are major, major donors to the Democrat party, and they want to make sure that you have no choice at all about how you spend your money. And that includes government-run education!
And of course, removing competition is only one thing unions do to raise consumer prices – they also advocate for tariffs, which also makes you and I pay more for consumer goods. Unions are against consumer rights.
In 1994, when this debate was held, intelligent design was still pretty new. This debate, more than any other resource, clarified what was at stake in the debate over origins.
Provine makes clear what follows from the truth of evolution: no free will, no objective standard of good and evil, no life after death, no meaning in life. Johnson argues that the Cambrian explosion disproves Darwinian evolution, and the only reason why Darwinian evolution is widely-accepted is because materialism is pre-supposed.
If materialism is pre-supposed, then only atheistic answers to the origins question are allowed, so naturally Darwinism wins – it has to win once you make a philosophical assumption that matter is all there is. (An assumption contradicted by the big bang theory, which requires the creation of all matter from nothing.
Debate before an audience between two professors on the naturalistic vs. the theistic way of understanding human existence.
William Provine, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, cites evidence supporting neo-Darwinian theory and argues that microevolutionary processes account for the origin of all life. He asserts that modern evolutionary theory is incompatible with belief in God; that there are no absolute moral and ethical laws; that free will does not exist; and that human character is merely a result of heredity and environment.
Phillip Johnson, Professor of Law at the University of California in Berkeley, agrees that modern neo-Darwinian theory is atheistic and scientific; however, as a general theory it is a philosophical dogma that is inconsistent with the evidence.
Provine and Johnson debate basic questions: Do we owe our existence to a creator? Can the blind watchmaker of natural selection take the place of God? Moderator is Timothy Jackson, Dept. of Religious Studies, Stanford University.
And here’s a couple of clips from the opening. (H/T Uncommon Descent via ECM)
This is very much worth watching, especially for atheists who typically are not aware that evolution rests on a philsophical assumption that is assumed, and that contradicts astrophysics. That has to stop. And the best way to stop it is by calling it out into the open using debates like this one.
And don’t forget about my recent post about the role of pre-suppositions like the pre-supposition of naturalism in historical Jesus research. The post contains debates where this is actually discussed as well.
Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.
Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don’t attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.
Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. “For every one percent of a public school’s students who leave for a charter,” concludes Mr. Winters, “reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative.” It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.
[…]One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.
Conservatives love choice and competition, especially in education. We oppose equalizing outcomes regardless of individual liberty and responsibility. Liberals want government to run everything to make sure that everyone gets the same crap level of service. This is what the lazy teacher unions prefer. But conservatives want teachers to be responsive to their customers – the children.
WINTERY KNIGHT 