My politics
Andrew Sullivan savages David Brooks’ opinion piece in today’s New York Times. If you want to see a pretty close approximation to what my politics are, this fisking by Sullivan lays them out pretty nicely. Money quote:
But bigger government always means less personal liberty. This is simply a fact, not an opinion. The trade-off is always there. It may be worth it in some instances – which is why I’m not a libertarian. But it is simply true that every dollar taken by the government is one dollar less for you and me to spend on what we decide is best; every freedom removed or infringed by the government is one less for you and me to enjoy. You can defend the trade-off, and should at times, but please don’t pretend it isn’t there.
I’m a small government Goldwater conservative, but I think compulsory high school education is worth the trade-off of freedom. I think universal healthcare insurance is an infringement of liberty, but since we have committed to providing emergency healthcare for all, it’s a trade-off worth making for fiscal and moral reasons. Small government conservatives don’t want to abandon government. We want it small – but strong and focused on what government really ought to do. And we have learned from experience that the bigger government is, the less effective it often is; and the more confusing and massive it is, the less accountable it is.
Brilliantly done!
Hi Mike,
As I see it there are more flaws in your way of thinking! J
Before we continue this discussion (which I’m more than happy to do), you might need to give me a heads up when you respond as this post is getting buried.
OK, Unicorns! Well of course there are flaws in the democratic process – but before you throw your hands up and give up, don’t you think you should suggest an alternative? Lets see … anarchy? No? – some form of benign dictatorship, with perhaps you as the dictator? – Sounds tempting but would you want the job (I wouldn’t) – and of course that ignores the process of achieving that goal (I imagine quite a few deluded supporters of democracy (however flawed) would need to be shot). No?
So where does that leave us? – Oh I know, the perfectly functioning free market model – but wait, that looks very much like a unicorn!
I may be repeating myself, but wouldn’t it be better to do everything possible to make the system we have function better (at the very least until an alternative is found)? If that is a ‘yes’ then the better educated the whole population is (not just you and your children) the better the political system will work. Is ever going to be perfect? Of course not, but all of us benefit, however incrementally. A simple example would be fear. Politicians have learnt a simple message from religion – if the great unwashed are ignorant enough you can get them to believe in just about anything, and not only that, once you have they will happily conform to whatever your agenda requires simply by fermenting fear in the unknown – xenophobia, fictional justifications for pre-emptive attack, religious ignorance/intolerance are current (Iraq) but perennial favourites. A population schooled in critical thinking could not be so easily led.
I also have a friend who works for the State system (he is the head master of a local primary school) He earns over 80k. Ask him (or your friend) if his school is chronically under funded by comparison with the private schools and I’m sure the answer would be an emphatic ‘yes’. Sure they earn good money these days – but ask yourself why? Would you want to do their job? (I know I wouldn’t!) So the free market says that is the sort of salary you have to offer or nobody would do the job – or at least nobody qualified. But is that the extent of the unicorn? What about facilities, equipment, staffing levels …? My friend tells me the sort of budget decisions he gets involved with are of the ‘we could sack the part time librarian so we can have a few dollars to do some of the essential maintenance’ variety – after all we can’t afford many new books. Ask your friend how many students are in her class compared to the nearest private school? How much support does she get for dealing with kids with learning difficulties, with physical disabilities, with behavioural problems which affect the learning opportunities of the rest of the class? Again if she worked down the road would her experience be the same? It isn’t a unicorn, and it is getting worse (the divide) – at least here, and in the end we all pay the price – in fact there are no shortage of studies that show that investment in education produces outstanding returns when all the long term benefits (criminal, social and health) are factored in.
I’m not sure about you, but I have seen both sides in my own education, in fact the first school I attended was a public one in New York City (my father was doing a sabbatical at what was then the Rockerfeller Institute). Since then I have attended public and private schools and a public university. I can’t say that the standards and the commitment of the staff varied a great deal between the two – and I imagine the same would be true today, but the ideological push for private education at the expense of the public system has no doubt had its effects.
Again where is your model? Where in the world has this proven to be the case? Go anywhere around the world where the state is not involved in providing education and you will find even basic schooling is regarded as a luxury for the rich. Just reducing taxation will not mean that parents will suddenly see private education as the most pressing use for the extra money. Reducing taxation and running down the public school further (or abolishing it completely) will no doubt provide more incentive for more parents to do so, but the effects on the society in which we live are not going to be positive, whatever the choices that you and yours make as a consequence.
Cheers,
Malcolm
Hi Malcolm–
You’ve got in backwards as far as the private versus public school situation in the United States. Here teachers in private schools are paid significantly less than those in public schools. Why? Because people who teach in private schools don’t have to deal with the discipline problems that those do who teach in public schools. Enlightened individuals (such as yourself) have made it so that it is virtually impossible to discipline children in public schools without cries of racism or whatever the ism of the day is. Most dedicated teachers want to teach, that is they want to help children learn things of importance, not spend their entire day dealing with disruptive, unruly children who can’t be disciplined for fear that it might injure their little psyches. As a result, these quality teachers often opt for the private school system where the pay is less, but the job satisfaction is much greater.
And, BTW, I don’t really believe that either one of us is indulging in flawed thinking although that’s what I wrote. We come to it from two different world views. Yours is a statist, collectivist model that says I and others that are as smart as I know what’s best for everyone else, therefore we will use the threat of violence to ensure that everyone follows our model. (In other words, we establish the programs that we in our wisdom ‘know’ will work, we will put them in place, we will tax you to pay for them because even thought you are too foolish to see the reasoning we do know what’s best for you, and if you disagree and refuse to pay your taxes we will send people with guns to arrest you and put you in jail (the threat of violence).) My world view is a more libertarian one that posits that it is each individuals responsibility to provide for himself and his own, to make the best selections depending upon his own ideas of what constitutes proper schooling (I read an article a couple of months ago in a major newspaper – I can’t remember which one because I read so many – that said that children who were home schooled had significantly higher scores on the SATs than those who went to either public or private schools.), proper behavior (as long as it doesn’t harm others), and life in general. If you want to see my views on these things pretty much encapsulated, read The Law by Frederic Bastiat, which is a little book that, in my opinion, should be taught in every school, but alas the teacher’s unions would never allow it. So neither one of us is indulging in flawed thinking based on our own particular views of how things should function.
Cheers–
MRE
Hi Mike,
I was joking when I echoed your flawed thinking remark, but I not sure how you arrived at the conclusions you have made about my ‘world view’ – either way the result is certainly faulty! Apparently I hate discipline so much that it can form no part of the school process, but if anyone disagrees with me I will be around in a flash with my gun to enforce my view! I certainly can’t recall suggesting anything of the kind.
OK lets be clear – I have no issue with private education (did I mention I was privately educated?). I totally believe parents should have a choice as to where their children go to school. Here if parents choose the private option, some of the costs of doing so are borne by the government as a reflection of the lessened burden on the public system. I support this.
I support discipline in schools, regardless of the system. The private school I attended was a Quaker one. Now whilst they showed admirable restraint in not shoving religion down the throats of students, shortly after I arrived the school decided that as a pacifist order the use of the cane was inappropriate and should be discontinued. The joy of the students was short lived when it became clear that this edict simply meant they would hit us with anything else that came to hand! Nowdays corporal punishment isn’t permitted in any school – and I support this, as I don’t believe it is necessary to maintain order and it also sends the message that violence is an acceptable response – and the results since the ban bear this out. We have filmed in a number of schools over the last few years and discipline is remarkably similar between systems – remarkable because many of the public schools are situated in much more challenging areas and any problem students (which the private schools reject) end up in the public system. So if you have issues with discipline in your state schools perhaps you might consider lack of resources is a much more likely reason rather than some supposed handicap state run education of itself imposes.
Here private schools pay as much or more to attract the best teachers (as I’m sure at least the elite schools do in your area – and if they don’t, why not?). My friend (who is a gifted teacher) was tempted to take a private school job because of the substantial resources available, the much smaller class sizes, and much lower workload (he would no longer have do administration, fund raising, counselling, ground work and maintenance on top of his teaching time – as the private school had dedicated staff to attend to each of these tasks). He eventually (and regretfully) decided he couldn’t teach within the rigid confines expected from a religion based school and recognised that the challenges and rewards working with disadvantaged students were a major reason he decided to become a teacher in the first place. It is this sort of dedication that you find in public schools here, and as I say, in my experience the standard of education, and the calibre of the teachers was about the same – but that was in the days where the money/resources divide was not as pronounced as it is now (and it as it increasingly will be if your views are accepted).
Home schooled kids do better? I’m sure children of parents that committed to being involved in their education do much better regardless of what form of schooling they have (in fact many would say that the private school ‘advantage’ is just that).
I have a statist, collectivist model? Well if you want to call it that (I certainly wouldn’t) – I strongly believe in civil liberties (like freedom to choose in education) and the last thing I want to see is violence or the threat of violence being used to impose my ideas (I’m really not sure where that came from!). But one thing I do value is quality education being made available to all – even to those children whose parents either can’t or won’t make the sacrifices required to achieve this end. Now this is not just a ‘statist and collectivist’ viewpoint because I recognise that a society that shares this goal is also one in which my civil liberties are much more protected than a dog eat dog free market society where children with less enlightened or less wealthy than yours or mine are thrown on the scrap heap of an under educated under class – the mere existence of which threatens our freedoms. With respect, your model of simple individual responsibility (which again I support) does not attempt to address the costs to society you might aspire to live in, when so many will fall short of accepting that responsibility without assistance.
Cheers,
Malcolm
Hi Malcolm–
You made the following statement:
If you value quality education as much as you claim to (and I have no reason to suppose you don’t), then how do you propose we bring this about? I could be wrong, but I assume that you would believe that we should tax people to raise the money to provide this education to all because you are convinced we will all be better off with an educated populace. (Forget for a minute whether or not that last statement is actually true–I can think of instances where it might not be, but for now, let’s not argue about it.) You believe this with all your heart and are all for imposing a fee on everyone (i.e. taxes) to bring this about because you believe it to be right and noble irrespective of whether others feel the same way. You know it to be true. You’re not pretty sure it’s true; you know it deep in your core. (BTW, ‘knowing’ something to be true that is in reality an unknowable social issue is the hallmark of a fundamentalist.) If I, or anyone else, feel differently about it, I still have to pay the tax imposed by people who believe as you do. If I don’t pay the tax, or if I subtract the portion of my tax bill that goes for funding public education, then the taxman comes after me and forcibly takes my property. If I try to resist, the taxman shoots me or arrests me and puts me in jail. What is this if not violence?
Is it okay in your world view for me to opt out of paying taxes to support public education? If your answer is No, then you support violence to impose your ideas.
Have I made a mistake in my logic somewhere? And remember before you answer, that we’re not debating whether public education is good, we’re debating whether it’s okay to impose one’s world view on another by the use of violence.
Cheers–
MRE
Hi Mike,
We ARE debating the value of public education because, if you insist in putting it in those terms, we both believe in the threat of violence to impose our world view – although I can’t recall the last time anyone was shot for tax evasion here – perhaps the IRS are a tougher breed. Before you object, the only difference between us is that you believe people should be forced to contribute at least for the costs of state run police force and army, whereas I think there is a role for government in other areas that the free market won’t or can’t fill. But remember that these ideas are not just mine, they reflect the will of the majority of people in this country. Any time someone wants to run on a policy of lower taxes and no public education at all – they are free to do so and if the majority agrees, the policy changes and your ideas are adopted with no violence or bloodshed of any kind. This is what we call a democracy – I’m still waiting to hear details of your alternative – if it’s better I’m all ears.
You refer to me as a fundamentalist – a scurrilous charge if ever there was one! Well lets see, the fundamentalists I encounter believe things solely on faith – evidence is immaterial, in fact they seem to regard it as a badge of honour to believe things that actually fly in the face of the evidence. Well I have personally experienced both sides of the public/private educational divide (have you?), I have seen first hand the changes wrought to an education system in which high quality school and university education used to be available to all, but now neglect and idealogical purges have seen many of those features stretched to the limit or stripped away completely. I can see directly the damage that process has caused, and I don’t agree it requires faith beyond the evidence before me to expect that damage to continue. There is also plenty of research if you choose to look, pointing to the long term value to society of a comparatively minuscule investment in public education, but as I understand it the nature of the society in which you live doesn’t concern you as it does me.
OTOH despite requests you seem unable to point to a society or group that has adopted your ideals with success. You apparently don’t want to live in a democracy, but can’t quite suggest what might replace it and how you might bring that about with or without the imposition of your idea with violence. And you don’t provide any evidence at all that suggests your ‘solution’ would benefit anyone other than yourself – and only that if you (despite the evidence to the contrary) assume you live your life in a vacuum completely isolated from the fate of others.
Sounds much more fundamentalist than where I’m coming from.
Cheers,
Malcolm
Hi Malcolm–
First, violence isn’t just being shot. If I refuse to pay my taxes someone from ‘law enforcement’ will come to my house with a gun and take me away and put me in jail. If I refuse or fight, I get shot. If I go along, it’s because I fear the violence. So even though most issues don’t end in actual violence, the threat is always there.
I in a way agree with the idea that a democracy is the be-all and end-all of all political systems, but we must always remember that a lynch mob is a democracy as well. I fear the let’s-vote-in-more-bread-and-circuses crowd and the politicians who pander to them. There are always going to be more infantrymen than their are officers, but the officers are still in control. In the same way there are always going to be more people making little money than there are people making a lot of money–the balance sheets of a country don’t spread themselves out in bell-shaped curve fashion. For example, if you took the average height of 1000 random people you had gathered in an auditorium somewhere, and then the tallest person in the world walked in, the average height on the people gathered might go up by a fraction of an inch. But if you gathered 1000 random people and calculated their average wealth, then Bill Gates walked in, the average wealth would increase substantially. There are always going to be fewer wealthy people than there are unwealthy people, and in a democracy the wealth of those wealthy people is put at risk because the greater majority of the unwealthy can be persuaded to vote to redistribute the wealth of the wealthy to the more numerous non-wealthy. And it can all be done under the pretense of doing good for society.
I don’t smoke, I never have, and I hate being around smoke and smokers. But if I chose to smoke in my own home, what’s the problem? One could make the case that if I smoke, my kids who look up to me will be more likely to smoke, and that will be worse for society. Or that I could contract lung cancer and unless I’m fully insured, my medical bills will accrue to society. Or that my house is more likely to catch on fire, requiring the services of the fire department, which would cost society money. Or that the nicotine would stain my walls requiring more frequent painting and the release of more toxins into the air, thus damaging society. If I had the energy, I could probably come up with a hundred reasons why society could be harmed in some way by my smoking cigarettes in my own home. Then the case could be made that since it’s better for society (and my extension, me, since I’m part of society) I should be forbidden to smoke in my own home.
Were there a demagogue around (a demagogue is one who moves the majority in a democracy), he or she might make the above case and pass a law that outlaws smoking in one’s home because it’s bad for society. Although this is an unlikely scenario, a much more likely scenario is that a demagogue or group of demagogues decide that Bill Gates has earned too much money, and that he should contribute to all these various causes (involuntarily contribute by the way of increasing his taxes) that improve society because he himself will benefit. As the saying goes, he needs to pay his fair share. What these people don’t realize or refuse to realize is that Bill Gates made his money by contributing to society. The same thing with Steve Jobs. And a zillion other people I could name who have made fortunes. If these guys hadn’t been around and had the initiative they did, I wouldn’t be writing this blog and you wouldn’t be reading it. Computers wouldn’t exist. Sure they would, you say, someone else would have invented them. True. But that someone else would have made a fortune as well.
People generally make money by providing goods or services that other people need or want. If a lot of people need or want something, then those providing that something make a lot of money. If people are providing something that not many people want, then those doing the providing don’t do as well. As it works out there are many fewer in the former group than in the latter, but the reason those in the former group get rich is that they provide more of what people want or need. In a unbridled democracy, those vast numbers at the lower end can always vote in laws that pillage those in fewer numbers at the top end of income.
In my opinion, the only way a democracy works are if there are guidelines and rules prohibiting the lynch mob. Unfortunately, because of demagoguery and the difference in numbers of those at the lower end of the financial spectrum and those at the upper end, the rules have been changed. And most of them have been changed under the guise of doing good for society.
As to your being a fundamentalist, I didn’t mean in a religious fashion, I meant that you believe by faith because that’s the only way that sociological issues can be dealt with. Sure studies show this and that, but they aren’t rigorously done studies in the way good scientific studies are done because they can’t be. And, consequently, they can’t be believed. An example is the gun control issue. There are studies showing that controlling handguns reduces gun related crimes. There are also studies showing just the opposite, that allowing home and business owners to have guns reduces crime because the criminals are more afraid. People argue both sides passionately, but they do so on faith. And anyone who believes something devoutly without solid evidence to prove it is a fundamentalist. People on both sides of the gun control debate are fundamentalists, but just of an opposite stripe.
Cheers–
MRE