Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. (Read more)

Main stream writer “discovers” what libertarians have been saying all along:

The public is in a foul mood over increasing college costs and student debt burdens. Talk of a “higher education bubble” is common on the contrarian right, while the Occupy Wall Street crowd is calling for a strike in which in which ex-students refuse to pay off their loans.

This week, President Barack Obama held a summit with a dozen higher-education leaders “to discuss rising college costs and strategies to reduce these costs while improving quality.” The administration plans to introduce some policy proposals in the run-up to the presidential campaign.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: “There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.” (Read more)

Perhaps the illustrious author encountered Peter Schiff’s videos, one of which I posted and summarized here.

I don’t think this article reaches the right conclusion, namely, to let markets do the regulating, but it does point out the absurdity of government regulation:

Government oversight of day care seems like a good idea—you wouldn’t want children cooped up in an airless basement—but this proposal went far beyond basic health and safety.

The new rules would dictate exactly how to do just about everything: how many block sets (“at least two (2) … with a minimum of ten (10) blocks per set”), where the children can play with the blocks (on “a flat building surface” that is “not in the main traffic area”) and when caregivers must wash their hands (before “eating food,” “after wiping a child’s nose,” etc.).

This is the way regulation works in America: Regulators try to imagine every possible mistake and then dictate a solution. The complexity is astounding.

Under a recent federal directive, the number of health-care reimbursement categories will soon increase from 18,000 to 140,000, including 21 separate categories for “spacecraft accidents” and 12 for bee stings. There are over 140 million words of binding federal statutes and regulations, and states and municipalities add several billion more.

. . . .

Consider our federal special-education laws, passed in the mid-1970s to end the shameful neglect of the small percentage of students with special needs. Special ed has now grown to consume 20% of the total K-12 budget in the U.S. Programs for gifted children, by contrast, get less than half of 1%.

Is this the correct balance? No one is even asking the question, because the regulations dictate the outcome.

I love the beginning of this video. Favorite moment at @ 5:45 – “Polysyllabic, masturbatory wack-jobbery!”

The militarization of the school system:

According to the USDA’s website, in 1945 it took 14 labor hours to produce 100 bushels of corn on two acres. By 1987, it only took 3 labor hours and one acre to produce the same amount. Now, it takes less than an acre.

We have a wider array of food available to us than ever before. Created by fewer people. The division of labor continues to work wonders. Thank goodness we’re not all stuck on the farm. According to the occupational employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 419,200 were employed in the farming, fishing, and forestry occupations in May of 2009.

The same May 2009 report listed 8,488,740 people employed in education, training, and library occupations. So more than 20 times more people are needed to educate a small portion of the population than to grow food for everyone. But what about serving the food? Yes, food-preparation and food-serving occupations totaled 11,218,260 employees, serving the entire population of over 308 million.

Meanwhile, it takes more than 8 million to educate the 81.5 million that are enrolled in school. History and technology would say this surely can’t last. A proud father recently told me of quizzing his kids about scurvy. And while his young daughter gamely took a wild guess, his crafty teenage son ducked into the next room to google it, quickly emerging to give the correct answer that the disease that killed so many centuries ago is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C.

What schooling is for many is a 12- or 16-year sentence wherein young people are penned up, talked at, cajoled, quizzed, and tested, for the most part on facts and figures that can now be retrieved in seconds with a handheld device.

The budget for education in the United States was $972 billion in 2007, according to the 2009 Statistical Abstract of the United States — all of this money and all of these people for the promise that a life of employment success follows. Just as buying a house was the surest of investments, investing in an education is thought to be a sure bet. But the housing bubble has popped, and the education bubble is afloat, looking for a needle, according to PayPal founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel.

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” says Thiel. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.” (Read more from mises.org)

The possibilities and diversity of educational approaches are what we lose through coercively funded public education.

1) How government drives up the cost of tuition:

2) How the Fed rescued the student loan market and ensured tuition costs continued to increase in 2009 (start at 4:15):

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/10-more-reasons-why-parents-should-not-send-their-kids-to-college/

What kind of privileged, conservative, white, tea-pary mayor would do such a thing? His name is Angel Taveras, and he’s an alumni of Providence’s public schools.

(Read more from npr.org)

Many socialists, including Wisconsin’s Noddlez revolutionary are rejoicing that the people’s revolutionary masses are now on the march from Tunisia to Wisconsin.

One easily overlooked difference is the fact that the North African uprising AGAINST the government, while the Wisconsin protests are FOR continued government spending.

From mises.org:

In Tunisia, “free” university education is guaranteed to anyone who passes the government’s exams at the end of high school. Largely as a result of this, the number of Tunisians who graduated college more than tripled in the last ten years. This may sound like a good thing, but it has produced a glut of graduates.

Fifty-Seven percent of young Tunisians entering the labor market are college educated. This is while only 30 percent of Americans earn a college degree by the time they are 27. Recent Tunisian college grads have an unemployment rate approximately three times higher than the national average of 15 percent. This is up ninefold from 1994.

. . . .

In fact, the Tunisian protests began after a recent graduate killed himself because government authorities confiscated his fruit stand when they discovered he did not have an “official” permit. The BBC reported that most of the early protesters were unemployed recent graduates.

From the Daily Bell:

originally published in The Times/N.I. Syndication:

“[Mohamed Bouazizi, the] young [street] trader had been in trouble with the authorities before….Under the dictatorship of President Ben Ali, permits were required for every form of business activity, often accompanied by a bribe. Bouazizi’s family would later claim that he had refused to pay the bribe demanded by the officials….According to other fruit and vegetable pedlars, vendors have a choice when faced with a municipal inspector: they can flee, and leave behind both borrow and merchandise; pay a fine equivalent to several days’ earnings, or fork out a bribe. Bouazizi, it seems, was not inclined to do any of these. When [a 45 year old female inspector] Hamdi began seizing his applies, he tried to grab them back, and she slapped him in the face….”

After this event all hell broke loose and escalated and ended, eventually, in the ouster of President Ben Ali’s government. So, by any reasonable account what brought about the Tunisian upheaval is the government’s intervention with freedom of trade, exactly the kind of conduct by government officials that a good many American jurists, political thinkers and politicians claim is constitutional and certainly not dictatorial.

From a correspondence with friends:

I hold the very radical belief that taking someone’s property by force or threat of force is stealing, regardless of whether it’s done by an individual or institution or government, regardless of whether you call it taxation, and regardless of what virtues are invoked to justify the violence.

My apologies for the long-winded reply, but this stuff is my passion. I’m happy to make my case, even if we agree to disagree afterward:

> “Is it wrong to keep a standing army?”

Yes. The United States did not keep a large standing army during peacetime until 1948. Since then, we’ve had a foreign, undeclared war every decade, and never mind the fact that our Constitution requires congress to declare war. The psychopaths in government are having too much fun sending suckers like me off to war and their friends are making too much money.

How you like them apples? You’re a citizen of a country that can’t go a single decade without invading another.

How about the fact that we spend more than the rest of world COMBINED on “defense” which to me looks more like “offense”?

> “With all that you own and all that was given to you just by virtue of being born in the US, don’t you think that is worth protecting?”

I feel tremendous admiration and gratitude to all the entrepreneurs who risk their personal wealth to produce goods and services they hope I will VOLUNTARILY buy.

These are the people we should revere. These are the people to whom we should build monuments, not the power hungry politicians and bureaucrats who are too stupid, lazy, and cowardly to provide us with things we want. They cannot serve society, so they seek to rule it. Entrepreneurs build civilization. They are the ones who need protection, primarily from their government.

> “You use the services of the country, therefore, you have to pay your share.”

1- There are many that don’t use, which I’m also required to pay for.

2- I’d hardly categorize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bank bailouts, the nationalization of General Motors, the TSA’s pornographic body scanners, the NSA’s eavesdropping on my telephone calls, the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment, and the BULLSHIT speeding ticket I got as “services.”

3- I’d absolutely *love* to stop using ALL public “services” in exchange for keeping all the money which people VOLUNTARILY give me for my work.

But regardless, I’m glad you at least used the words “have to.” You acknowledge then that government-provided services are coercive.

Violence will be used against me if I attempt to do without the benefit of infecting unsuspecting Guatemalans with Syphilis, for example. Initially, my refusal to pay for this public “service” will only inspire increasingly menacing letters from the tax collector, but ongoing refusal to pay will be met with physical violence, including lethal force should I attempt to defend my property. (btw, I pay all my taxes — out of fear.)

Please acknowledge the violence.

It can be justified only if you believe that a peaceful system of voluntary exchanges cannot provide education, security, food for the hungry, housing the poor, transportation, culture, etc.

Then you are faced with a dilemma: Should we leave the poor to their fate or should we violently separate people from their wealth? Should remain ignorant about the advanced stages of Syphilis or should we use the threat of violence to force people to pay for government experiments?

Of course, I believe there is overwhelming evidence that all these things are better provided in a free market (all the ones which are worth doing that is, and none of the ones which aren’t) . Therefore, the dilemma you might feel between violent taxation and some societal need doesn’t even exist.

Because your statist approach is the violent approach, I think the burden of proof lies with you; you must to demonstrate the government’s superiority to the free market. Nevertheless, I’ll make the case that the free market is the better provider, just because it’s so easy to do:

> 1) Security.

If you search for “mall cop tasers” on youtube, you don’t find anything (I didn’t), because privately hired security, unlike security hired by the greedy, lazy, cowardly, power-hungry sociopaths in government is accountable.

You might also be interested in the not-so-wild west where private security flourished, and the murder rate was lower than that of most modern-day U.S. cities:
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=552

Also, gun town USA — where crime nearly vanished, and not a single person has been murdered in the 25 years since a renegade mayor required every household to purchase a gun:
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=41196
(I’m philosophically against the requirement, because it’s coercive, but I think this demonstrates the ability of people to protect themselves peacefully.)

> 2) Transportation

The railroad was build on private initiative in pursuit of private profits. It worked great until government strangled it with regulation, then killed it by FORCING everyone to subsidize an interstate highway system.

The obvious failure of the free market then precipitated the nationalization of Amtrak, a government monopoly, which, if I remember correctly, has lost 32 billion dollars to date.

Despite the best efforts of the statist ideologues, Indiana, Chicago and California are considering selling roads to entrepreneurs who are willing to risk their private wealth in the providing of transportation services.

> 3) need a structured state government to implement changes

Like a hole in the head.

Local governments have either outlawed or required people to kiss the ring of governance, beg permission and pay a hefty licensing fee for the following privileges:
-arranging flowers in Louisiana
-selling coffins in Louisiana, even for monks
-interior designing in DC or Florida
-showing tourists around in Boston
-labeling GMO-free foods “GMO-free”
-selling raw milk
-running lemonade stands in Portland ($120 health department fee)
-selling pumpkins and Christmas trees into Lake Elmo MN
-delivering your neighbors garbage to the dump in San Francisco
-putting signs in your store windows in Dallas
-eyebrow threading in Texas
-training Yoga instructors in Virginia

You risk the violence of government for committing these “crimes.”

4) civil services

How about the fact that poverty in the US fell by 1% a year from 1950 until 1968 when the government’s “war on poverty” began? Since the government’s “war on poverty,” the poverty rate stagnated and remained so despite a quadrupling of the government’s anti-poverty budget.

Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=064YTtSxVSo#t=46m10s

Consider this next time you hear someone say the free market punishes the poor.

5) (I’ll cover education, though you didn’t list it.)

As I said, I believe the burden of proof lies with the advocates of violence. I challenge you to find any evidence that public education has been anything but a pathetic, disastrous failure despite a tripling of the federal education budget, and a doubling of the number bureaucrats per student:
http://www.lostrepublic.us/archives/4630

There’s also the fact that before America’s first public schools appeared in Massachusetts, there was near 100% literacy.

I think all the evidence of the superiority of the free market in providing services generally provided by government is irrefutable. You may find ways spin, question and undermine it, but instead of doing that, can you find evidence that the government approach is superior? Can you find any evidence whatsoever to justify the coercive funding of public “services”?

People in the Soviet Union were standing in line for butter. After several hours, one of them said:

“This sucks. Why does government control food distribution?”

There were some nods of agreement, but the young man behind him, a Phd student, said “the free market is great for the rich, but what about the poor? Who would feed the poor?”

“Can you imagine a system in which food is only grown and sold for profit??? A system in which everything was about MONEY!” said another man. “How barbaric!”

“I can speak to this personally,” said a fourth man, a drunk who wobbled on his legs. “Every day of my life I eat from my government quota of food. If it wasn’t for the government, I would starve!”

“Yes, you’re right, the original dissenter agreed. Perhaps food is too important to be left to the free market.”