Tag Archives: Liberty

Commentary

Indian economist distinguishes between rights and entitlements

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From the Times of India, a good economics article from Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar. (H/T Shalini)

Excerpt:

Politicians and activists constantly propose new rights — the right to work, to education, and now to food. The word “rights” is being twisted to mean entitlements, and there is a big difference.

Rights are freedoms from oppression by the state or by society (through ethnicity, religion and gender). These rights do not entail government handouts.  Entitlements, however, are welfare measures entailing government handouts. Rights are not limited by budget constraints, but entitlements are. So, rights are universal but entitlements are not.

[…]US economists calculate that three welfare measures — social security (for the aged), Medicare (for the aged) and Medicaid (for the poor)—will triple from 7% of GDP to 20% in the next decade, swallowing up virtually all federal tax revenue. Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Cato Institute calculates that, including social security, the US is headed for a national debt that’s 500% of GDP, and Europe of 434%.

Some much for entitlement spending. He then explains the origin of human rights in Britain, America and France, and then says this:

These three countries spearheaded the concept of fundamental rights. In all three, rights were about freedoms, not entitlements

In subsequent centuries, people said this was not enough, and proposed entitlements — which some called second-generation rights. Marxists declared that rights to free speech, elections and personal freedom were bourgeois illusions that did not empower the poor. So Lenin proposed a dictatorship of the proletariat that took away all basic freedoms, and instead offered the right to food, shelter and work. Mind you, nobody could sue Lenin for poor provision. Nobody could throw out Mao for the Great Leap Forward that killed 30 million people. Nobody could topple Stalin for murdering four to six million peasants in the Ukraine.

The communist experience shows that giving welfare rights priority over basic freedoms is the road to serfdom. And the capitalist welfare state now shows that entitlements, although desirable and inevitable in democracies, must be limited and targeted at the needy, so that they do not hog all spending or bankrupt governments.

It’s amazing. He’s more American than the Democrats, because he actually understands America. Thanks so much for finding this article, Shalini!

By the way, if you want to learn what the end-game is for the Democrats, you can read “The Road to Serfdom” by the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, which Swami alluded to in his article.

News

Education reform in India and in Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana

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India is focused on education reform
India is focused on education reform

Consider this article from the Philadelphia Bulletin.

Excerpt:

In 2007, the School Choice Campaign, a New Delhi-based education think tank, designed, funded, and implemented a pilot school choice program in the city. The program randomly selected students to be offered a school tuition voucher, which was taken up by 63 percent of students selected. The money could be used at any qualifying private school.

India’s teacher unions have fought the privately funded program tooth-and-nail. “They fight vouchers [because] they will enable students to leave the malfunctioning government schools and make the teachers redundant,” says Jan S. Rao, director of the School Choice Campaign in Delhi. “It is already happening in urban areas. In Delhi there are schools with more teachers than students, since the students have left.”

Oxford economist Francis Teal examined the effect of teacher unions on academic performance in India for a 2008 study. “We thus have in this data clear evidence that unions raise cost and reduce student achievement,” he bluntly states.

[…]For leaders of India’s education choice movement, the success of this trial is only the beginning. They will not be satisfied, says Dr. Parth J. Shah, president of India’s Centre for Civil Society, until “the Delhi government immediately adopts funding all new government schools on a per-pupil basis through vouchers.” That is already the national strategy in Sweden and Chile.

If I ever go totally crazy and just do whatever I want to do, then I’m moving to Chile. Just to see what it would be like. I’d like to move to India, but I’m told that there are a lot of mosquitoes, and the roads aren’t good. But that could change.

What about Louisiana?

Bobby and Supriya Jindal

Well, Louisiana has an Indian-American Republican Governor – his name is Bobby Jindal, and he is very enthusiastic about education reform. What has he done to make education reform work better?

Consider this study done by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (H/T Independent Women’s Forum)

Excerpt:

The charter environment thrives in New Orleans. Louisiana state law places no cap on the number of schools that can operate, and it provides for adequate funding of both charters and authorizers. The Louisiana Charter School Start-Up fund also provides zero-interest loans for charter schools to use for facilities-an element of charter funding that many states ignore. New Orleans leads the country in its percentage of students in charters at 57 percent.

That’s right – Louisiana is number one in education reform!

And there’s more:

Every city that receives a D or an F in this analysis is in a collective-bargaining state. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the top nine scorers (cities receiving a B) are located in right-to-work states.  All of the cities located in right-to-work states included in this study received a B or C, and none received a D or F.

Right-to-work means that a teacher can work without having to join a union! And that means that they can be fired if they can’t perform – but if they can perform, then they make more money! So they have an incentive to work harder and to make their students learn more – there is no safe job for them if they underperform.

Is South Carolina next? South Carolina has an Indian-American Republican Nikki Haley running for governor, so they’re probably next for major education reforms. I’m being silly, but you have to wonder… is there something about the Indian culture that makes them take education more seriously?

News

Frank Turek lists ten alleged facts about same-sex marriage

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The article is here on One News Now. (H/T Owen)

Excerpt:

When one judge overturned the will of more than seven million Californians last week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, he listed 80 supposed “findings of fact” (FF) as evidence that Proposition 8 violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Many of those 80 findings are not facts at all. They’re lies or distortions.

Here’s my favorite of the 10:

5. “Proposition 8 does not affect the First Amendment rights of those opposed to marriage for same-sex couples.” (FF 62) It’s too bad Judge Walker didn’t look to evidence from Massachusetts for this false fact. If he had he would have seen that court-imposed same-sex marriage has severely affected First Amendment rights. Same-sex marriage may not affect heterosexual marriage behavior quickly, but it certainly affects the free exercise of religion very quickly.

Parents in Massachusetts now have no right to know when their children are being taught about homosexuality in grades as low as kindergarten, neither can they opt their kids out (one parent was even jailed overnight for protesting this). Businesses are now forced to give benefits to same-sex couples regardless of any moral or religious objection the business owner may have. The government also ordered Catholic Charities to give children to homosexuals wanting to adopt. As a result, Catholic Charities closed their adoption agency rather than submit to an immoral order. Unfortunately, children are again the victims of the morality that comes with same-sex marriage.

“But you can’t legislate morality!” some say. Nonsense. Not only do all laws legislate morality, sometimes immorality is imposed by judges against the will of the people and in violation of religious rights. There is no neutral ground here. Either we will have freedom of religion and conscience, or we will be forced to adhere to the whims of judges who declare that their own distorted view of morality supersedes our rights — rights that our founders declared self-evident.

Think I’m overreacting? If this decision survives and nullifies all democratically decided laws in the 45 states that preserve natural marriage, religious rights violations in Massachusetts will go nationwide. In fact, it’s poised to happen already at the federal level. President Obama recently appointed gay activist Chai Feldblum to the EEOC. Speaking of the inevitable conflict between religious rights and so-called gay rights, Feldblum said, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

Read the other nine here. Some of them I’ve mentioned before.

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