Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Obama’s 6 Worst Policy Decisions

Here's an article worth reading that outlines Pres'ent Obama's six worst policy decisions (so far!) in light of free markets, limited government and sound monetary policy -- among other concerns.

» Obama’s 6 Worst Policy Decisions - Big Government

Read it. Think about it. Do something.

...

Friday, December 18, 2009

Job-killing Health Care Reform

Job-killing Health Care Reform

Eric Staib, writing in The Free Market magazine, calls Obamacare what it is, a new "tax" on labor that will lead to increasing levels of unemployment and lower net earnings for employees all across the U.S.

"According to pages 269-273 of the [present version of the] bill, employers of full-time workers will be required to cover at least 72.5 percent of the premium of the least expensive health-insurance plan available that fulfills the bill's minimum criteria of 'acceptable coverage.' In cases in which family coverage is provided, 62.5 percent of the premium is to be borne by the employer," reports Staib. "Depending on the specific plan and other variables such as location, this amounts to a direct labor tax of approximately $300 per month for an individual, or nearly $700 for family coverage."

When a company hires an employee, they negotiate a pay arrangement in which the value of the employee's efforts on behalf of the firm must meet or exceed the amount of money paid out by the firm to retain the employee. In the final analysis, it makes no difference to the employer whether some of the money, all of the money, or none of the money paid out actually ends up in the employee's hands. Consider the following scenarios:


Scenario
Expense Category
No. 1
No. 2
No. 3
Base Wages
$ 1,733
$ 1,433
$ 1,033
Employer-paid Taxes
$ 133
$ 133
$ 133
Cost of Fringe Benefits
$ 43
$ 343
$ 743
Cost of Training
$ 26
$ 26
$ 26
Cost of Safety Equipment
$ 6
$ 6
$ 6
Other Costs
$ 67
$ 67
$ 67
Monthly Cost of Employee
$ 2,008
$ 2,008
$ 2,008


In these scenarios, we are considering an employee that is worth at least $2,008 per month to his present employer. In the scenarios 1, 2, and 3, the only two factors that change are 1) Cost of Fringe Benefits (e.g., adding in mandated health-care insurance coverage costs) and 2) Base Wages (which are adjusted downward so that the "Monthly Cost of Employee" remains steady.

Scenario No. 2 represents the addition of $300 per month in individual health-care coverage costs. The increase in fringe benefits costs for this typical $10-per-hour employee from $43 per month to $343 per month calculates to almost 700% (698%). For the employer to stay par on the total cost of this employee, the employee's wages would have to drop from $10-per-hour to $8.27-per-hour, a decrease of 17%.

Scenario No. 3 looks at the addition of $700 per month in family health-care coverage as mandated under the Obamacare legislation. Adding in this $700 per month in fringe benefits (really, a "tax", since it will be mandated by the federal government) is a leap of more than 1600% (1628%) in the cost of fringe benefits for this employer. Again, for the employer to stay at par (i.e., the total cost of the employee remaining at $2,008 per month), the employee's wages would have to be slashed 40%, from his or her current $10-per-hour to $5.96-per-hour.

Most rational employers know that an employee that is presently making $10-per-hour is not likely to accept a 17% pay-cut simply because of this new government mandate, the likely outcome is that the employer will lay off the present employee and hire two or more part-time employees not covered under the Obamacare mandated "tax." In the alternative, the employer may lay off the existing $10-per-hour employee and seek to hire a replacement employee that is willing to work for $8.27-per-hour or less but still deliver at least $2,008 in value to the business. A third choice would be for the employer to simply lay off some of its $10-per-hour employees and try to make the remaining employees simply produce at higher levels. If all three of these options fail to sustain profitability in the firm, the employer will ultimately be forced to close its doors and lay off all of its employees.

Under any of these options, real wages in the U.S. economy will plummet and unemployment level will dramatically increase (at least for full-time workers). This is just bad economic policy.

Works Cited

Staib, Eric M. "The Health-Care Tax." The Free Market, December 2009: 1-3.



©2009 Richard D. Cushing

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Stop Cap And Trade by Signing This Petition

No Cap And Trade » Petition

Click the LINK above to sign a petition to stop the folly of cap-and-trade legislation.

Thank you.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Health care message I just sent to several Senators

Here's the message I just sent to several Democrat "bluedog" Senators:

Senator, you are too smart to be bullied into doing something that you KNOW (in your heart) is BAD FOR THE UNITED STATES, BAD for the U.S. TAXPAYER, and is merely taking this great nation further down the road to SOCIALISM.

Socialist/collectivist philosophies have NEVER BUILT a GREAT NATION! The only evidence of history is that socialist/collectivist thinking is ONLY capable of CONSUMING the wealth of nations built through individual efforts and initiative.

Take another look at all the FRAUD AND WASTE in the current Medicare program and tell us (voters) that you REALLY WANT TO ENLARGE that kind "government efficiency" for more Americans?  And at what cost?

Medicare ESTIMATE (1967) for spending in 1990 = $12 billion; Medicare ACTUAL spending in 1990 = $110 billion (off by a factor of 900%)!

Medicaid DSH ESTIMATE (1987) for spending in 1992 = $1 billion; Medicaid ACTUAL spending in 1992 = $17 billion (off by a factor of 1700%)!

What makes you think that ANY ESTIMATE OF SOME TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS TODAY for health care will be any more accurate than the boondoggle estimates of the past?

Stop and think, Senator.  Vote AGAINST one more hugely expensive boondoggle that will only help DESTROY the U.S. as we know it.

Thank you.

/s/ Richard D. Cushing

The difference between a million and billion -- or a trillion

"We have a lot of senators in there that have been elected on nothing but a slogan. But what have they cost us after they got in? You take a fellow that has never juggled with real jack, and he don't know the value of it; a billion and a million sound so much alike that he thinks all the difference is in the spelling."
-- Will Rogers

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Swing voters...

The wonderful thing about swing voters is that they are...
  • Clueless,
  • Apathetic,
  • And every 4 years, they decide the fate of the free world!

Monday, December 14, 2009

Congress meets tomorrow morning

"Congress meets tomorrow morning. Let us all pray: O, Lord, give us strength to bear that which is about to be inflicted upon us. Be merciful with them, O, Lord, for they know not what they're doing. Amen." -- Will Rogers

Friday, December 11, 2009

On teaching the education establishment Communist democratic ideals

"[V]erbatim notes from the required course, Education 200Fa, Foundations of Education, given at Teachers College, Columbia University:
  1. Democracy is not a form of government (the idea that the United States of America is a Republic was ridiculed). Democracy is a way of living, a social panacea. The all-inclusive definition of "democracy" given in this course defined, not American democracy, but Communist democracy.
  2. "You won't get democracy," said Professor Rugg, "until you change the economic base."
  3. The capitalists waste and exploit and their only desire is for profits. Individually operated business enterprises must go and our economy must be "planned" for us by the central government.
  4. Private property now means "use for all the people."
  5. There must be redistribution of wealth as, for example, by governmental deficit financing. Since some of our national income is held by people who do not spend it, the "government has to step in and spend it for them."
  6. The agencies of communications (press, radio, TV, etc.) must be controlled by these believers in "democracy." Professor Rugg: "If you control these you can raise a barrier between people and other sets of ideas."
  7. A plan for full employment (such as the Beveridge plan) would comprise government control of housing, fuel and food, control and regulation of all private industry, extension of public industry, full production by spending, and complete organization and mobility of labor.
  8. The United States Senate is a bottleneck to worldwide economic planning.
  9. The prejudice against negroes in the United States is "fraught with the greatest threat to our national life."
  10. Ideas and values in American life are happily "changing." Such items as moral values and the "changing role of government" were stressed.
  11. Education must be based on "our changing world" and the four curricular areas should be: Work (vocational), Health, Leisure, and Creative Activities. Education must be directed toward producing the kind of men and women they (Teachers Colleges) want. Some of the means at hand are sociology, psychology and expressions of art which have a "social message." Youth must be given a "sense of indubitable obligations."
  12. Education of the last generation was inadequate because it was standardized (a child in a particular grade moving to another community would find the same work going on); it was inadequate because there was too much stress on the past rather than being "an enterprise in living"; it was inadequate because "discipline and control were imposed by the teacher," "order and quiet were imposed by command," the goal was "a gentleman educated in the classics," and control was "in the hands of the upper classes."
 -- Jones, K., and Olivier, R. (1956). Progressive Education is REDucation. Boston: Meador Publishing Company

Thursday, December 10, 2009

It was bad already in 1955, and it has gotten worse, I suspect

In 1955, the Daily Worker (official publication of the Communist Party USA) reported with some pleasure the results of a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey of 1,200 seniors, in 86 high schools, throughout the U.S. that showed that six in ten seniors believed that profits are unnecessary to making the economy work.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Political control and school curriculum

"Political control is... by its nature, bound to legislate against statements of both fact and opinion, in prescribing a school curriculum, in the long run. The most exact and demonstrable scientific knowledge will certainly be objectionable to political authority at some point, because it will expose the folly of such authority, and its vicious effects. Nobody would be permitted to show the nonsensical absurdity of 'dialectical materialism' in Russia, by logical examination... and if the political authority is deemed competent to control education, that must be the outcome in any country.

"Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language, and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, there will be considerable variation in different schools; the parents must judge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum offered. Then each must strive for objective truth.... Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the 'supremacy of the state' as a compulsory philosophy. But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the 'will of the people' in 'democracy.' Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey.

"A tax-supported compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."

-- Paterson, Isabel (1944). The God of the Machine. London: Freedom Press.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

On private initiatives in education

By John Taylor Gatto

The government began to compel us all to send our children to school in 1952 in the state of Massachusetts, and from that state the compulsion spread south, west, and north. But did you know that in 1818, 34 years before compulsion laws began, Noah Webster estimated that over 5 MILLION copies of his Spelling Book had been sold? That's pretty good in a population of under 20 million, don't you think? And every purchase decision was made freely, by an individual or a family, and there were no federal, state or city tabs to run bulk purchases on -- each decision was made privately, and in each somebody forked over some cash to buy a book.

That would seem to suggest that most folks don't have to be compelled to learn, they do it on their own, because they want to.

Here's another 5 million copy fact. Did you know that between 1813 and 1823, a fellow named Water Scott sold 5 million copies of his novels in the United States? That would be about equal to a writer selling 60 million books today, but we all know that could never happen. The puzzle becomes even denser when you pick up a Walter Scott novel and try to read it. Let me quote from the opening of Quentin Durward, published in 1823, and read by a lot of kids back then?

"The latter part of the fifteenth century prepared a train of future events that ended by raising France to that state of formidable power which has ever since been the principal object of jealousy to the other European nations. Before that period she had to struggle for her very existence with the English, already possessed of her fairest provinces, while the utmost exertions of the King, and the gallantry of her people, could scarcely protect the remainder from a foreign yoke. Nor was this her sole danger..."

That's pretty heady stuff, isn't it? I've never read an adequate explanation in John Dewey how an unschooled agricultural mob could manage such material, but I assure you the sales figures are accurate and drawn from the research of a well-respected American historian, Merle Curti. And remember, there was no compulsion then so the readers had to pretty much want to tackle stuff like that in between plowing and strangling the chicken.

It seems almost unfair to tell you that there was another writer beloved of common Americans before we had government compulsion schools, but there was; he was a man from upstate New York who sold millions and millions of books, and who currently has a box-office bonanza movie on the boards called "The Last of the Mohicans." His name was James Fenimore Cooper and he wrote material like this for ignorant, unschooled Americans:

The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745, when the settled portions of the colony of New York were confined to the four Atlantic counties, a narrow belt of country on each side of the Hudson, extending from the mouth of the falls near its head, and to a few advanced "neighborhoods" on the Mohawk and the Schoharie...A birds eye view of the whole region east of the Mississippi must then have offered one vast expanse of woods, relieved by a comparatively narrow fringe of cultivation along the seas... In such a vast region of solemn solitude..."

Well, I'm sure you get the picture. Such attention to detail would take an ambitious college professor to attend to these days, a mere lecturer wouldn't have the span of attention for it. A transplanted Englishman, John Bristed, wrote in 1818 that the mass of Americans excelled every other people in the world in shrewdness of intellect, general intelligence, versatility and readiness to experiment with untried things. William Cobbett on his return to America in 1817 observed that every farmer was a reader, unlike the European peasant. How on earth did that come to pass and why isn't it true in our well-schooled era?

You and I are confronted with a great mystery: we had a perfectly literate country before 1852 when, for the first time, we got government schooling shoved down our throats. How we achieved this amazing literacy is wrapped up in the secret that reading, writing and numbers are very easy to learn -- in spite of what you hear from the reading, writing and number establishments. We aren't in the mess we're in today because we don't know how to do things right, but because "we" don't want to do them right. The incredibly profitable school enterprise has deliberately selected a procedure of literacy acquisition which is pedagogically bankrupt; thousands of years ago Socrates predicted this would happen if men were paid for teaching. He said they would make what is easy to learn seem difficult, and what is mastered rapidly they would stretch out over a long time.

The first thing that an effective system of school choice would demonstrate is that our children have been held captive by a method of literacy transmission that ignores reality -- and makes a very large fortune each year doing so. Eventually, with choice, the present system would run head-on into efficient competition that would destroy it. That would be inevitable because profitability would vanish once literacy is managed correctly.

Let me guide you to a few private businesses where literacy is managed correctly right now -- at a fraction of the public school cost. Before I do I want to caution you that the two places I'll cite use radically different methods from each other, are based on radically different theories -- but the outcome in both places is very impressive. We'll start at 8801 Stenton Avenue in Philadelphia in a place called "The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential" which has been teaching babies to read, and teaching mothers t teach their own babies to read, since shortly after the Second World War. Babies. By the time these kids are 4 what they can do would cause you to think murderous thoughts about your local government school. And what is diabolical is that the kids have a great deal of fun learning. Study sessions only last a few minutes, and the kids learn all the mathematical operations, too, fluency in several languages -- and the violin!

Well, don't believe me -- you have the address -- write them a letter and go see for yourself. IAHP isn't going anywhere, it's been there for decades. You might want to ask your local school superintendent why you haven't heard of this place -- presuming you're as impressed as I was.

Place number two is 20 miles West of Boston, a few miles from Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous Wayside Inn on the outskirts of Framingham. It's the beautiful Sudbury Valley School, in the old Nathaniel Bowditch cottage, which looks suspiciously like a mansion to 20th century eyes. A place ringed about with handsome outbuildings, private lake, woods, and acres and acres of magnificent grounds. This place is a private school, of course, with a tuition of $3,500 a year -- about 63% cheaper than a New York city public school seat costs.

Sudbury teaches a lot of things, but two things it does not teach anybody is reading and numbers -- and its kids range in age from 4 to 18!

Kids learn reading and calculation at Sudbury at many different ages (but never as babies), but when they are ready to learn they teach themselves. Every kid who has stayed for long at the school over the past 25 years has learned to read and compute, about 2/3rds of them go on to college without ever taking a standardized test or getting a report card, and the school has never seen a case of dyslexia. They don't even believe such a condition exists outside of a few physically damaged kids and the fevered imaginations of compulsion school reading specialists.

They don't teach reading and yet all the kids eventually learn to read and even to like it? A frustrating puzzle for many observers, but no more frustrating than trying to explain how Thomas Paine's Common Sense sole 600,000 copies in the year 1776 to a nation of two and a half million people, about 70% of whom were African slaves or indentured servants. It just boggles the mind to see today's graduate students in political science seminars wrestling with Paine (no pun intended) when young farmers whizzed through it with exhilaration over 200 years ago.

One final, more or less modern, example of how easy it is to learn to read well -- is myself. In 1941 when I went to first grade in Swissvale, Pennsylvania, a borough of Pittsburgh, at the age of 5, I could read fluently. For the first 200 years of our history most schools wouldn't accept children who couldn't read and count, so they must have learned it where I learned it, and where the Human Potential Institute children learn it -- at home. My first grade teacher, Miss Dane, came to our home on Calumet Street shortly after the term began to protest, "Mrs. Gatto," she said, "your son reads, I would guess, on the 6th Grade level. He is ruining my class and I want you to make him shut up, keep his hand down, and not answer any questions in class." How's that for pedagogy? I loved Miss Dane who was a wonderful woman so I'm not telling this story to insult her, just to give you something to think about.

I suppose the skeptical among you are wondering who this miracle woman was who taught me to read so well before I went to school at the age of 5? Well, her name was Frances "Bootie" Zimmer, and she graduated from Monongahela High School in 1929, the same high school that Joe Montana, the great San Francisco quarterback came out of about a half century later. There wasn't enough money to send Bootie to college but nobody despaired about that in those days because the country seemed to run very well without college graduates.

Did Bootie know some secret method of teaching that could have made her a fortune if she turned professional? I don't think so. What she knew was how to read to me every single day from the time I was 2 years old -- reach to me with me on her lap and her finger running under the words -- read tome from increasingly difficult stuff, none of which seemed hard because I was having so much fun. She read real fairy tales, not scientifically simplified ones; she read real history books and real newspaper stories and real grown-up storybooks including some tales from The Decameron. What she didn't read were scientific readers of any sort, the books with 364-word sanitized vocabularies and a lot of pictures.

Well, there we have the raw material for a revolution: the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the Sudbury valley School, Frances "Bootie" Zimmer...these are important clues to how deep the mess we are in really is, clues to what its nature is. Here is evidence that we already possess the engineering know-how we need to revolutionize schooling. And if you look closely, here too is a warning that the trouble we are in is not what it appears to be (an avalanche of dumb kids), but instead an avalanche of kids who have been deliberately dumbed down by an industry that will not stop what it has been doing just because it is killing us. When we consider the course 20th century government schooling has taken deliberately it is clear we are in the presence of no simple mistake in engineering but that of a powerful ideological agenda, one so passionately and grimly held by its proponents we might almost see it as a religion.

To understand how this happened, a brief tour through history is essential, otherwise you may continue to think that some tinkering or, God forbid, some more money will cure the disease of bad schooling. Come back with me then to 1812, when one of the founders of the immense DuPont fortune, a man named Pierre DuPont deNemours, published a book called Education in the United States. DuPont was many things but no one knew him as a soft-hearted fellow used to flattering people, so we can assign some credibility to his amazement at the phenomenal literacy he saw all around him compared to the European models he was familiar with. 1812. Forty years in advance of the passage of our first government compulsion school laws. Mr DuPont said that less than 4 people out of every thousand in the new nation could not read and do numbers well. He saw a world in which nearly every child was trained in argumentation (the old fashioned term for "critical thinking'). How would that be possible, do you suppose, without forced schooling?

And yet two decades later French aristocrat named deTocqueville wrote a book that's still in print, Democracy in America, in which he characterized us as the best educated people in history. And in 1838, still 14 years before the militia began marching recalcitrant children to school, another French aristocrat, Michael Chevalier, wrote a book that ranked the American farmer with the immortals of history, a book which said in effect that the farmer went into the field with his plow in one hand and Descartes in the other.

So from 1776, when Common Sense was selling up a storm to unschooled colonists, until 1838, when farmers were observed reading Descartes, the American people seemed to be doing fairly well for themselves educationally, making their own education decisions, using, inventing, or substituting for schooling -- as Ben Franklin did -- as best they saw fit. Individuals made their own decisions, not government experts. this was America, after all, not Prussian Germany.

How on earth did they do it? Almost immediately after the effective start-up of government factory schooling before the first world war it was obvious to anyone who cared to look closely that literacy was not what they were about, but that a redefinition of growing up was what was afoot. Growing up was not to be a socialization of the future labor force to suit some bureaucratic design determined by political experts. As the earlier lightly schooled America had proven, competency was not a scarce thing however you measured it - but the world of the government monopoly school set out to make it so. But the earlier, catch-as-catch-can entrepreneurial form of instruction offered abundant choices of useful ways to grow up, useful ways to read, write and think. Earlier schooling was about literacy, and that is why it succeeded. Literacy isn't very difficult to learn when the child perceives that the adults about him think that it's something important.

I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little, as schooling people contend. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up -- and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from their homes and families and neighborhoods and private explorations -- gets in the way of education!

That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. Surely. And yet last year in St. Louis I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to discuss the process of redesigning teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.

MIT said a few years back that formal equipment seemed to play almost no role at all in scientific discovery and that inventors presented with state of the art equipment usually went sterile from then on! So MIT and IBM, which are both tied to being judged on outcomes, think one way, and compulsion schools which are tied to rhetoric about inputs, think another. If you're input-paralyzed you tend to stare at your abstract system when trouble arises, but if you care about results you tend to look at what makes Joe do best and you don't make the mistake of thinking that Joe is Sally.

Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces: Sixteen million people in a nation that makes its voice heard all over the planet to such an extent that if you didn't know it was so small you'd swear it must be a world power. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do about it.

Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and second grades here, is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers t home too early. Does that sound radical, or is what we do the radical thing? It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can't be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12 years either -- it's 9. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the U.S. would be 75-100 BILLION dollars, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education.

Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan, and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbor with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you? Isn't that the question we should be asking?

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. IF that sounds like a shocking contention, it derives from a conservative reality that school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise, or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned -- as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out.

The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders. I don't know how much you know about Prussia, but it's instructive to consider that Prussia began to police the female womb in the year 1735, long before the French and Indian wars. In Prussia unmarried women whose menses ceased had to register with the police.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

  1. Obedient soldiers to the Army.
  2. Obedient workers to the mines.
  3. Well subordinated civil servants to government.
  4. Well subordinated clerks to industry.
  5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
School should create an artificial national consensus on matters which had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the heads of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty six years after this form of schooling began the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, at the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose -- which was to create a form of state socialism -- gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

The Prussian purpose was collective, the American purpose, as it had come down from history, was singular. In Prussia the purpose of the Volksschule, which educated 92% of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8% of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles. For Prussia the ideal model society was not intellectual Greece or muscular Rome but solid, settled Egypt -- a pyramid of subordination where only the top leadership understood the big picture. Below this class were descending service classes, each larger than the one directly above it, each knowing less than the one above it until at the bottom almost nothing was known except how to do a small part of a larger task only dimly understood.

Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions. There were many more techniques of training, of course, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy markers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Let me cite two German thinkers on that subject. Erich Maria Remarque, in his classic, All Quiet on the Western Front tell us that the first world was was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the second world war was the inevitable product of good schooling. It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically -- schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyzes the moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped.

We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system, and relentlessly proseletyzed for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shoes. If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence.

In this fashion compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's Republic, a bad idea that New England had tried to enforcfe in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed home through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner", whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing" -- hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party".

Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this -- the children who could afford to be privately educated. They could avoid the American version of Volksschule if their families were prosperous or canny enough to catch on to the new game. By 1990 88% of all our children were being "public" schooled.

Three major ideas were transferred almost intact from Prussia and slowly worked into the final structure of our national schooling. Each of these ideas had, of course, to overcome major resistance. This seldom was done by direct confrontation but instead by a gradual process of wearing away the opposition. It was not until the conclusion of the first world war that the last avenue of escape from the trap was closed.

The first of this triumvirate of Prussian principles was the very sophisticated notion that State schooling did not exist to offer intellectual training, but to condition children to obedience, subordination and collective life. These social theorists included some of the greatest minds in history, including the most influential philosopher since Lord Bacon, Frederich Hegel. Each in his own way taught that general intellectual development will make central political control impossible, hence it is to be avoided. The will in children must be broken in order to make them plastic material. If the will could be broken all else would follow. Keep in mind that will-breaking was the central logic of child-rearing among our own Puritan colonists and you will see the natural affinity that existed between Prussian seeds and Puritan soil. Will-breaking had been carefully studied from time to time in European history, so to a leadership inclined that way, various devices proven in action were available -- best known of these was the English practice of "boarding-out" where children were sent to live with and work for strangers at an early age -- the constant stress of adapting to strange customs and practices usually produced a compliant, surface personality, easily manageable.

In the Prussian system, imposed over 50 years by the new State Education Departments, a Prussian management concept heretofore unknown in the U.S. was adopted. Children were not to be taught to think, but to memorize. They were to be discouraged from assuming responsibility for each other, because that weakened the grasp of authority, and they were to be intimidated away from the pursuit of their own natural interests for the same reason. Henceforth, teachers would define what their interests were. From this new logic of school management arose the need to eliminate the familiar one-room schoolhouse, the main vehicle of schooling during the first 40 years or so of the new government monopoly. The on-room school invested too much responsibility in the children themselves -- from such practices too much of the old, self-reliant, neighborly ways would be preserved.

The second important discovery of the Prussian method was that extreme fragmentation of thinking into subjects, fixed time periods, sequences, units, externally imposed questioning, etcetera would simplify the problems of leadership. Thoughts broken into fragments could be managed by a poorly trained, poorly paid teaching force; could be memorized even by a moron who made the effort; and lent themselves to the appearance of precision in testing and delivered beautiful distribution curves of "achievement". This form is curriculum (suggested by machine operation) was beginning to permeate Prussian factory operations, mining, and military life. It brilliantly solved the historical dilemma of leadership dependency on skilled craftsmen, too. A simplified workforce could be replaced quickly without damage to production. Such a workplace creates great psychological and social problems for the workers, true, but worker welfare was not a factor in this scheme.

That we have created such a workforce in the United States through our schools was never better illustrated than in the strike of the air traffic controllers some year back. These supposedly "highly skilled" men and women were replaced overnight without any increase in accidents through the system. The social costs of such a system, in alcoholism, suicide, broken homes, violence, despair, etcetera are not, as I inferred earlier, factored into the balance sheet.

The third premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children -- the State is sovereign over the family. In Western law that idea is known as the Parens Patriae power, I think, and at the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. You can see this philosophy at work in court decisions which rule that parents need not be told when schools dispense condoms to their children, or consulted when daughters seek abortion.

What is the evidence that a Prussian system of dumbing children down took hold in American schools? Actually the evidence is overwhelming. Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts f Germany during the 19th century and brought home the PhD degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins.

Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous '7th Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these, but Calvin Stowe's report, and Dallas Bache's report, Henry Dwight's report, and Henry Barnard's report, the reports of Dr. Julius and Drs. Smith, Griscom and Woodbridge all sent the same signal: Follow Germany.

By 1889, a little over one hundred years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. Harris is dead now, so we can't ask him what he meant by "over-education", but we can make a shrewd guess because Mr. Harris was among the leading German scholars in the nation. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the Commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role.

In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations -- the groups they belonged to -- not by their own individual accomplishments. In such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know hot to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts.

Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers are produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radical disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams.

Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was an important intermediary in the birth of modern American systematic schooling, one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations COMBINED!

G. Stanley Hall is a name to conjure with in many ways; he was the first American PhD out of Wilhelm Wundt's psychometric laboratories in Germany and subsequently a major eminence grise in the rise of American behaviorism, as the American promoter who brought Sigmund Freud to the United States to promote his theory that behavioral problems in later life can be traced to bad parenting and alleviated by expert interventions. Hall is also an important reason we have standardized testing in our schools.

But back to Dewey. Learning to read too well, said Dewey, caused children to turn inward and made them competitive and independent. The phonics method of teaching reading provided no motives to follow a teacher's lead for very long; it was selfish, even if it did work. It only appealed to the intellectual aspect of our nature -- the desire to get control of our own mind.

Reading, writing and arithmetic were not the purpose of this new form of American schooling, a form which substituted memorization for thinking and which we still have with us. In 1923 Dr. Cattell, of "The Psychological Corporation", a private entity composed of the inner circle of american schoolmen like John Dewey, announced the purpose of schooling to its clientele who were expected to support its enterprises in testing and teacher training. Dr. Cattell said this about the purpose of government schooling in 1923: "The scientific control of conduct is what schools are about. The scientific control of conduct is of greater economic importance than the use of electricity or steel."

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point.

Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, making people dumb for their own good became the point of our national forced schooling exercise. If you find that hard to believe, use the evidence of your own eyes and ears to confirm it. Do you think you can find a better way to teach? You're right, of course you can --but not a better way to teach obedience. Throughout the 19th century to a crescendo achieved at the turn of the 20th century, a small band of very influential people, substantially financed by money and ideas from the Rockefeller foundations and the Carnegie foundations, introduced a system of state socialism into our national education picture. Privately they had determined that this was the best course for the American democracy and with little wasted motion, and no public discussion, they pointed our nation toward that end.

Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. You keep the games and songs and pretty colors in balance with the soberer purpose. That's if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.

When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be, and was quietly celebrated as, a way to break the influence of mothers on their children once and for all. I note with interest the growth of day care in the U.S. and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds. The movement toward state socialism I've been speaking to you about today is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children's lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that its control requires. Herr Froebel disliked his own family intensely, a fact that may be useful to you when you come to regard the encroachment of school institutions on infancy.

A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake-down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.

While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people, and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts, next to the Defense Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies from positions apparently outside the loop until an analysis map of special interest is drawn. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to out-last any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.

An overview of the short history of this institution reveals as pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case. The net result of public alarm has been to diminish worthwhile alternatives, surely the richest of all the ironies, a cosmic reversal testifying to the secret systems of nourishment available to schooling, exactly as it is.

After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good and some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. The structure is too brilliantly designed to allow that. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change, or degrades it, and no watchdog mechanism exists to effectively combat how that happens -- nor is it possible, in my opinion.

Teaching the way children learn involves a dynamic too complicated to bureaucratize. Failure to see that simple truth, or our simple inability to act upon it in a monopoly situation when it is seen, dooms all in-system reform to trivialization. There are no incentives for the "owners" of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition. Indeed, I'm afraid that competition too tightly monitored from a central point, as it would be in a national test situation (which involves wildly incorrect assumptions about learning that are too complicated to go into in this essay), will not touch the existing monolith.

What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that nobody of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favorable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast in a material sense. We all eat whether we do this school thing right or not.

But the future is not so clear. Perhaps materially a case can be made that our position of advantage is too great at this point to squander, but when we enter the arena of emotional capital, of simple satisfaction with life and joy in living, our relative position has been slipping for many years. That holds true whether we compare ourselves to certain other nations or to standards we set for our own lives based on values, traditions and myths.

Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the day-times of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.

And the courtroom of the people is the free market. Over 50 years ago my mother, Bootie Zimmer, chose to teach me how to read. She had no degrees, no government salary, no encouragement, yet her non-expert choice has given me a wonderful and interesting life. I have never been a public charge.

Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation.

CONFERENCE ON PRIVATE INITIATIVES IN EDUCATION

Indianapolis, Indiana November 13/14, 1992

Sponsored by: Educational Choice Charitable Trust, The Philanthropy Roundtable, Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the State Policy Network.

Attended by educators, legislators, corporate executives and other interested parties from 25 states and the U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.

KEYNOTE SPEECH: John Taylor Gatto

Author, Educator, Teacher of the Year (New York, 1989), Lecturer.

Monday, December 7, 2009

On the problems of those returning from the war fronts

The collectivist one-world thinkers of the left, who have invaded our state-run education system (over the last 100+ years) have much to do with the problems encountered by those in the military today when they return from their sometimes protracted service in Iran, Afghanistan or elsewhere.  They have led us to a society that is much different in the U.S. than it was, say, in the days of World War II.

Those fine soldiers who went off to fight in WWII against the Nazis and the Japanese were (for the most part) very clear on what the U.S. stood for in the world.  They understood that we were engaged in a fight for "liberty" against expansionist military threats in Europe and the Pacific theaters.  And, as Eisenhower put it, after exposing his troops to the discoveries in the Nazi concentration camps: "They may not know what they were fighting for, but they sure as hell will know what they were fight against."

Furthermore, those soldiers knew clearly that they were being fully supported back home -- not by "some Americans," but by virtually "all Americans."  They knew that, partly due to the U.S. citizen's clarity on the issues at stake in the war effort and partly due to social norms of the day, that their spouses and sweethearts would (with great likelihood) be true to them until they returned.

And, when they did return, these men (and women) were treated as the genuine heroes that they were.  There was no mish-mash of opinions about the nature of their service.  There was no question about whether they were "liberators" or "occupiers."

War places tremendous strains on human relationships (e.g., marriage, family) and our culture today simply does not honor those relational commitments the way it did 60 years ago.  Marriages and marital fidelity frequently does not have the strong support from family and friends that it had then.

So, what do you expect from those returning from a war zone?  They come back having seen and done the necessary but hellish things often required of them by the nature of war.  They have been changed, undoubtedly.  Some of them have been seriously injured, having lost a limb, suffered brain injuries, or been permanently scarred or otherwise disfigured.

Meanwhile, they too often return to wives (or husbands) or sweethearts that have not been faithful to them in their absence.  They too frequently find that friends and family are more than ambivalent about the purpose of the war in which they had been engaged.  They are not heroes in the minds of many, and they find themselves being merely "acquaintances" with those who were once their mothers, their fathers, their spouses or their children.

It is no wonder that some of them they suffer mental breakdowns that may lead to divorce, hostility (when turned outward) or suicide (when turned inward).  This is not the fault of war, nor is it the fault of the military.  If anyone is to blame, it is our American society that has lost its "roots" and fidelity in so many, many ways.

...

Friday, December 4, 2009

A challenge to us, the voters

"The fact is that it's unreasonable of us to expect even principled politicians to vote against things like crop subsidies and stand up for the Constitution [because it is political suicide to do so, in many cases]. This presents us [the voters] with a challenge. It's up to us to ensure that it's in our representatives' interest to stand up for constitutional government." -- Walter Williams, "Future Prospects for Economic Liberty." Imprimis, Vol. 32, No. 9, Sep 2009: 1-5

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Diminishing our own economic liberty

"Many manufacturers think that the government owes them a protective tariff to keep out foreign goods, resulting in artificially higher prices for consumers. Many farmers think the government owes them a crop subsidy, which raises the price of food. Organized labor thinks government should protect their jobs from non-union competition. And so on. We could even consider many college professors, who love to secure government grants to study poverty and then meet at hotels in Miami during the winter to talk about poor people. All of these - and hundreds of other similar demands on government… - represent involuntary exchanges and diminish our freedom." -- Walter Williams, "Future Prospects for Economic Liberty." Imprimis, Vol. 32, No. 9, Sep 2009: 1-5

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The blame lies with us

"We can blame politicians to some extent for the trampling of our liberty. But the bulk of the blame lies with us voters, because politicians are often doing what we elect them to do. The sad truth is that we elect them for the specific purpose of taking the property of other Americans and giving it to us." -- Walter Williams, "Future Prospects for Economic Liberty." Imprimis, Vol. 32, No. 9, Sep 2009: 1-5

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

On the legitimate role of government in a free society

“What is the legitimate role of government in a free society? To understand how America’s Founders answered this question, we have only to look at the rule book they gave us – the Constitution. Most of what they understood as legitimate powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8. Congress is authorized there to do 21 things, and as much as three-quarters of what Congress taxes us and spends our money for today is nowhere to be found on that list.” -- Walter Williams, "Future Prospects for Economic Liberty." Imprimis, Vol. 32, No. 9, Sep 2009: 1-5

Monday, November 30, 2009

On mistaking “democracy” for “liberty”

"Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty."

"…[T]he citizens of a democracy have in their hands the tools by which to enslave themselves."

"[The] illusion, that the democratic process is the same as liberty, is an ideal weapon for those few who may desire to destroy liberty and to replace it with some form of authoritarian society; innocent but ignorant persons are thereby made their dupes. Under the spell of this illusion, liberty is most likely lost and its loss not discovered until too late. Liberty can easily be taken from the individual citizen, piece by piece and always more and more, as more and more persons under the spell of the same illusion join the Pied Piper proceedings. Finally, all liberty is gone and can be recovered only by a bloody revolution."

"The right to vote… assures only the liberty to participate in the process. It does not assure that every-thing done by the process shall automatically be in the interests of liberty. A populace may commit both political and economic suicide under a democracy.
….
"There is no certainty whatever that liberty in a country with a democratic form of government is at a higher level than in a country having some other mechanism of government. There is no certainty that liberty will be maintained where the founders of a democracy may have hoped that it would be pre-served."

-- Harper, Dr. Floyd A. Liberty - A Path to Its Recovery. Irving-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, The, 1949

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Wary of the Health Care boondoggle

Here's my latest letter to the editor, sent to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Finance and Commerce, Minnesota Daily, USA Today, and The Washington Post:

Don't be fooled by the unrealistic gimmicks in the Senate heath care plan, such as a "Medicare Commission" or a "Failsafe Budgeting Mechanism." This is nothing more than the absurdity of some empty commitment to being fiscally responsible at some point in the future while spending billions or trillions of taxpayer dollars today.
 
The federal government has never been able to accurately predict health care spending. In 1967 the estimate for Medicare spending in 1990 was $12 billion. The ACTUAL spending in 1990 was $110 billion (off by a factor of 9 times). Similarly, Medicaids DSH (disproportionate share hospital) program had a $1 billion estimate in 1987 for spending in 1992 (just 5 years hence). The actual spending for DSH in 1992 was $17 billion (17 times more than estimated).

What makes us believe that this Congress -- already demonstrated to be profligate spenders -- can estimate any more accurately just because they're starting with $900 billion to $1.2 trillion as their estimates?

Stop them!

Now, it's your turn to write to them -- and to your Senators and Representatives.  Do it now!

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Thanksgiving Story Resonates in Post-Crisis Age: Caroline Baum - Bloomberg.com

Thanksgiving Story Resonates in Post-Crisis Age: Caroline Baum - Bloomberg.com

Here's a story worth repeating as Thanksgiving Day approaches. The story of how the Pilgrim settlers discovered that free enterprise -- NOT socialism -- was the best means of assuring both peace and prosperity for their settlement.

Read it! Share It!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

And they are still wrong today!


"Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

"Tell that to the one-half of Europe that was freed because Franklin Roosevelt led an army of liberators, not occupiers.

"Tell that to the lower half of the Korean Peninsula that is free because Dwight Eisenhower commanded an army of liberators, not occupiers.

"Tell that to the half a billion men, women and children who are free today from the Baltics to the Crimea, from Poland to Siberia, because Ronald Reagan rebuilt a military of liberators, not occupiers.

"Never in the history of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the freedom and liberty of total strangers than the American soldier. And, our soldiers don't just give freedom abroad, they preserve it for us here at home. For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.

"No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this country if he doesn't believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home. But don't waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.

"It is not their patriotism - it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking.

"They claimed Carter's pacifism would lead to peace. They were wrong.

"They claimed Reagan's defense buildup would lead to war. They were wrong." -- Democrat Zell Miller (01 Sep 2004)

And they are still wrong today!




Tuesday, November 24, 2009

No Quick Fix

"[W]e must realize there is no quick fix. At the same time, however, we cannot delay in implementing an economic program aimed at both reducing tax rates to stimulate productivity and reducing the growth in government spending to reduce unemployment and inflation." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Monday, November 23, 2009

A Turning Point

"It's time to recognize that we've come to a turning point. We're threatened with an economic calamity of tremendous proportions, and the old business-as-usual treatment can't save us. Together, we must chart a different course.

"We must increase productivity. That means making it possible for industry to modernize and make use of the technology which we ourselves invented. That means putting Americans back to work. And that means above all bringing government spending back within government revenues, which is the only way, together with increased productivity, that we can reduce and, yes, eliminate inflation." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Friday, November 20, 2009

Work together... act responsibly... a little common sense

"[M]y fellow citizens, let us join in a new determination to rebuild the foundation of our society, to work together, to act responsibly. Let us do so with the most profound respect for that which we preserved as well as with sensitive understanding and compassion for those who must be protected.

"We can leave our children with an unrepayable massive debt and a shattered economy, or we can leave them liberty in a land where every individual has the opportunity to be whatever God intended us to be. All it takes is a little common sense and recognition of our own ability. Together we can forge a new beginning for America." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Judgment Day: We're out of time

"Over the years we've let negative economic forces [like government spending, government debt, inflation and taxes] run out of control. We stalled the judgment day, but we no longer have that luxury. We're out of time." -- Ronald Reagan

See post below to TAKE ACTION TODAY!

Thank you.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Take action against health care reform TODAY! It's easy!

Here's the letter I just sent to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, the NY Times, and more...

The major labor unions have been working behind the scenes since the 1980s to get a "universal health care" provision through Congress.  Contrary to popular belief, this legislation is NOT about the common man, but about payback to the unions for the election of Democrats.

The goal of the unions has been nothing more than to a) place a "universal burden" on all businesses, including non-union shops; and/or b) to reduce the burden of health care on big union shops like the automakers and steel mills so that the unions have more money to go after for increased wages or other benefits.

Now is the time for U.S. citizens to tell Congress to stand up and do what is right by stopping this economically devastating legislation.  We -- the taxpayers -- simply cannot afford what Congress is doing TO us in the name of doing something FOR us.


Here's what we need to do : Follow the directions closely

1.  Follow this link (CLICK HERE!)

2.  Put in your Zip code. You will be redirected to a page where you enter all your address information.

3.  Check all the boxes for all of your local papers.

4.  NOW CAREFUL THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART! DO NOT CLICK NEXT. Instead Click " 2. Compose Letter " this is in the top middle of the page. This will allow you to compose your own letter to the editor against the healthcare bill.

5. Write your letter to the editor against the health-care bill.

6. Now click Next

7. Preview your letter to the editor and click "Send Email"

8. Pass this on to others and lets flood the papers with anti-health-care opinions.

DO IT NOW!

Stop the sharing of scarcity!

"Our aim is to increase our national wealth so all will have more, not just redistribute what we already have, which is just a sharing of scarcity. We can begin to reward hard-working and risk-taking, by forcing this Government to live within its means." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

There should be only ONE special interest

"I urge those great institutions in America, business and labor, to be guided by the national interest.... The only special interest that we will serve is the interest of all the people." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Monday, November 16, 2009

We cannot continue any longer our wasteful ways... at the expense of our children

"We can, with compassion, continue to meet our responsibility to those who, through no fault of their own, need our help. We can meet fully the other legitimate responsibilities of government. We cannot continue any longer our wasteful ways at the expense of the workers of this land or of our children." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Sunday, November 15, 2009

We cannot delay

"We must realize there is no quick fix. At the same time, however, we cannot delay in implementing an economic program aimed at both reducing taxes to stimulate productivity and reducing growth in government spending to reduce unemployment and inflation." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Saturday, November 14, 2009

YouTube - Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve (HQ)

YouTube - Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve (HQ)

If you are interested in restoring, and then preserving, a sound economy in the United States, you need to watch this -- and learn from it.

Thank you.

Together, we must chart a different course

"[G]overnment policies... [are] responsible for our economic troubles. We forgot or just overlooked the fact that government -- any government -- has a built-in tendency to grow. Now, we all had a hand in looking to government for benefits as if government had some source of revenue other than our earnings. Many, if not most, of the things we thought of or that government offered to us seemed attractive.

....

"It's time to recognize that we've come to a turning point. We're threatened with an economic calamity of tremendous proportions, and the old business-as-usual treatment can't save us. Together, we must chart a different course." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Friday, November 13, 2009

Over-regulated and over-taxed

"Regulations adopted by government with the best of intentions have added $666 [in 1980, that is $1,745.57 in 2009 dollars] to the cost of an automobile. It is estimated that altogether regulations of every kind, on shopkeepers, farmers, and major industries, add $100 billion [in 1980, that is $262.1 billion in 2009 dollars] or more the cost of goods and services we buy. And then another $20 billion [in 1980, or $52.4 billion in 2009 dollars] is [taxed away from you and me and] spent by government handling the paperwork created by those regulations." -- Ronald Reagan (1981)

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Introducing an Athlete of the Rarest Kind

Introducing an Athlete of the Rarest Kind

Here is a story that needs to seen, told, and re-told as a real and practical example of the kind of men to which our youth should look as a model of real manhood.

...

This strategy depends on the will of the people to regain control of their government

"[W]hat I am proposing is a strategy which encompasses many elements -- none of which can do the job alone, but all of which together can get it done. This strategy [depends] on the will of the people to regain control of their government.

"[T]he economy concerns more than mere statistics -- it concerns people, families, human hopes, and human suffering." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Why this long series with Ronald Reagan?

Simply because I cannot say it better, and because so much of what he said still has powerful relevance today.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Out of control

Can those who man the ship of state in these United States deny that it is out of control? Can the Obama administration deny this? Can Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid? Can even any one of our Republican Senators or Congressmen deny that the U.S. government is out of control?

Our national debt is approaching $12 trillion -- that would be a stack of $1,000-bills more than 800 miles high! The budget deficit this year alone is more than $1.3 trillion.

The total of each U.S. citizen's share of the national debt is $38,926 -- for every man, woman and child, while the Gross Domestic Product per citizen barely exceeds that amount ($39,591).

The INTEREST alone on our national debt in fiscal year 2009 was more than $383 billion.

Adding to our troubles is a mass of government regulations imposed on businesses by huge bureaucracies that add more than $250 billion to the price of things we all buy and reduces our ability to produce them.

The government -- at every level -- has become a huge funnel taking money (by force and coercion through taxes) from "producers" (i.e., working people and firms) and giving that money to (mostly) "non-producers." Non-producers are those who contribute nothing to the U.S. economy, adding nothing to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Examples would be politicians, bureaucrats, and most entitlement program recipients.

Not to dream as we once dreamed

"[Some] say we must cut our expectations, conserve and withdraw, that we must tell our children… not to dream as we once dreamed." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Monday, November 9, 2009

Many of us are unhappy...

"Many of us are unhappy about our worsening economic problems, about the constant crisis atmosphere…, about our diminishing prestige…, about the weakness in our economy…, about our lack of strong, straightforward leadership. And many Americans today, just as they did 200 years ago, feel burdened, stifled and sometimes even oppressed by government that has grown too large, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, too unresponsive, too uncaring about people and their problems.

"Americans, who have always known that excessive bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion, want a change in public life - a change that makes government work for people. They seek a vision of a better America, a vision of society that frees the energies and ingenuity of our people while it extends compassion to the lonely, the desperate, and the forgotten.

"I believe we can embark on a new age of reform in this country and an era of national renewal - an era that will reorder the relationship between citizen and government, that will make government again responsive to the people, that will revitalize the values of family, work, and neighborhood and that will restore our private and independent social institutions. These institutions always have served as both a buffer and bridge between the individual and the state - and these institutions, not government, are the real sources of our economic and social progress as a people.

"That's why I've said… that we must control and limit the growth of federal spending, that we must reduce tax rates to stimulate work and savings and investment. That's why I've said we can relieve labor and business of burdensome, unnecessary regulations and still maintain high standards of environmental and occupational safety. That's why I've said we can reduce the cost of government by eliminating billions lost to waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy…. And, because we are a Federation of sovereign states, we can restore the health and vitality of state and local governments by returning to them control over programs best run at those levels of government closer to the people. We can fight corruption while we work to bring into our government women and men of competence and integrity." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Elections will determine what kind of country we'll have

"[Elections are] going to determine what kind of country… millions of… American children are going to grow up in. Will it be a country in which everything keeps on going up in price, and jobs are harder to find and keep? Or will it be a country where, because of our efforts… savings will mean something, prices will be stable, and there will be jobs for people who want to work?" -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Saturday, November 7, 2009

An energy policy for economic growth

"[W]e must adopt an energy policy which will enhance our economic growth. We must implement a balanced energy program that will encourage prudent energy conservation, along with increased domestic energy production." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Friday, November 6, 2009

A personal note: My new grandson

Here's a link to some photos of my newest grandson, Nathan Timothy Corley, born at 10:16 PM (Central Time) on 05 November 2009.

Thanks.

Sound, stable, and predictable monetary policy

"[A] sound, stable, and predictable monetary policy is essential to restoring economic health." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Thursday, November 5, 2009

A Real Plan for a Real Future...

"My plan… is rooted in a strategy for economic growth, a program that sees the American economic system as it is - a huge, complex, dynamic system - that can work if the American people get a chance to work….

"At the heart of [my] strategy for economic growth are eight major steps:
  1. We must keep the rate of growth of government spending at reasonable and prudent levels.
  2. We must reduce personal income tax rates and accelerate and simplify depreciation schedules for business in an orderly, systematic way to provide incentives to work, savings, investment, and productivity.
  3. We must review regulations that effect the economy, and change or eliminate them to encourage economic growth.
  4. We must establish a stable, sound, and predictable monetary policy.
  5. We must promote the export of American products abroad.
  6. We must revitalize American industry.
  7. We must adopt an energy policy that will allow our economy to grow, and our standard of living to rise.
  8. And we must restore confidence by following a consistent national economic policy that does not change from month to month." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

American economic progress... silenced

"[T]he mighty music of American economic progress has been all but silenced by [what has gone on in Washington]. [Elections] will determine whether the nation and the world will ever hear that great sound; will determine if the dinner table of your home and the supermarkets of your neighborhood will ever again be places where plans can be made and necessities purchased without the gnawing doubt and, yes, fear, brought by… inflation and unemployment." -- Ronald Reagan (1980)

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

To see the American spirit unleashed once again...

"I would like to see this country become once again a country where a little six-year-old girl can grow up knowing the same freedom that I knew when I was six years old, growing up in America. If this is the America you want for yourself and your children; if you want to restore government not only of and for, but by the people; to see the American spirit unleashed once again; to make this land a shining, golden hope [as] God intended it to be...." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Monday, November 2, 2009

We created government as our servant, not our master

"[In America], we gave birth to an entirely new concept in man's relation to man. We created government as our servant, beholden to us and possessing no powers except those voluntarily granted to it by us. Now a self-anointed elite in our nation's capital would have us believe we are incapable of guiding our own destiny. They practice government by mystery, telling us it's too complex for our understanding. Believing this, they assume we might panic if we were to be told the truth about our problems.

"Why should we become frightened? No people who have ever lived on this earth have fought harder, paid a higher price for freedom, or done more to advance the dignity of man than the living Americans - the Americans living in this land today. There isn't any problem we can't solve if government will give us the facts. Tell us what needs to be done. The get out the way and let us have at it." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Quality has declined as federal intervention has increased

"Schools - in America we created at the local level and administered at the local level for many years the greatest public school system in the world. Now through something called federal aid to education, we have something called federal interference, and education has been the loser. Quality has declined as federal intervention has increased." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Those who have become a part of the problem...

"I don't believe that those who have become part of the problem are necessarily the best qualified to solve the problems." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Friday, October 30, 2009

Energy independence... so they said then

"[In 1973] we were lined up at the gas station - turned our thermostats down as Washington announced 'Project Independence.' We were going to become self-sufficient, able to provide for our own energy needs. At that time, we were only importing a small percentage of our oil. Yet, the Arab boycott caused half a million Americans to lose their jobs when plants closed down for lack of fuel…. [T]hree years later… 'Project Independence' [had] become "Project Dependence." Congress [had] adopted an energy bill so bad we were led to believe Mr. Ford would veto it. Instead, he signed it. And, almost instantly, drilling rigs all over our land started shutting down. [So], for the first time in our history [in 1976] we [were] importing more oil than we [were producing]." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Thursday, October 29, 2009

It's time to elect a Congress that will...

"[L]aws passed by Congress can be repealed by Congress. And, if Congress is unwilling to do this, isn't it about time we elect a Congress that will?" -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

We'll never build a lasting economic recovery...

"The fact is, we'll never build a lasting economic recovery by going deeper into debt at a faster rate than we ever have before." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Down the road under the banner of Marx, et al

"[B]ack in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banner of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin." -- Ronald Reagan (1964)

Monday, October 26, 2009

Who can stop the advance of socialism now?

"[On] February 19th [1963] at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States." -- Ronald Reagan (1964)

Sunday, October 25, 2009

The trouble with liberals...

"[T]he trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." -- Ronald Reagan (1964)

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Wrong perceptions... wrong solutions

"We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning." -- Ronald Reagan (1964)

Friday, October 23, 2009

Why TERM LIMITS are essential to reform

I have a CURRENT REALITY TREE (CRT -- one of the Thinking Processes tools) entitle "Washington Establishment" that clearly depicts why term limits are essential to achieve any long-lasting and meaningful political reform in the U.S.

Contact me at rcushing(at)ceoexpress(dot)com to request a PDF copy of the CRT.

My hope is that there will be wide distribution and discussion of this logical tree in support of term limits.

Thanks. I hope to hear from many of you soon.

There's only UP or DOWN

"[T]here is no such thing as a left or a right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old, old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on a downward course." -- Ronald Reagan (1964)

Thursday, October 22, 2009

This is the issue... self-government

"This is the issue…: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves." -- Ronald Reagan (1964)

Monday, October 12, 2009

The lie of the "advance" of socialism

Communist socialism was responsible for turning the world's largest wheat exporter (Russia) into the world's largest wheat importer in a few short decades. That same Communist-socialist form of collectivism was able to turn the African continent's wealthiest nation (Ethiopia) into that continent's most destitute nation in only 17 years.

As F.A. Harper has rightly said:

"[Socialism]... due to its inability to generate any accumulation of the tools required for an advanced society,... must subsist on the confiscation of what has already been produced under some other plan; it has to parasitize something. The confiscation of private property is civilization in retreat."
The leftist avant garde is, despite their motives and intent, taking this nation and the world back to the caves and jungles, not forward to utopia.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Becoming a bee...

“The social insects [such as ants and bees] demonstrate a near approach to the ideal of the socialist society…. The wishes of the individual insect are not allowed to come in conflict with his bounden duty to the colony. Unlimited cooperation, with a total lack of competition within their society, seems to prevail. In fact, the individual insect seems incapable of either a thought or a wish.

….

“These insect colonies are highly materialistic. Moral and spiritual considerations play no part…. Population is rigidly controlled. By killing those that do not work and by ruthlessly destroying the ill and the aged, full employment and ‘high’ productivity is maintained…. A high ‘national income’ is maintained by imposing compulsion of labor at an early age, by compulsion of long work weeks and by prohibiting vacations either with or without pay. Whereas the individual insect exhibits no self-interest, the self interests of the colony are substituted therefore; the two are in one sense similar, though the colony-selfishness operates on a huge scale whereby the mass of insects are driven into supporting it by blind allegiance.”


Harper, Dr. Floyd A. Liberty - A Path to Its Recovery. Irving-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, The, 1949.

All this is becoming much too real a possibility to me. Keep writing your Congressmen and Senators. Many of them have forgotten the first principals of these United States.