The Constitution was a really bad idea to begin with, but it doesn’t even do what its supporters claim it could do. If the US fe(de)ral government was once “limited” by the Constitution, then I guess I don’t understand what “limited” means. “If only we had held the government to it“. Ha ha ha!
Tag: reading
In Praise of Political Apathy
My children are both non-voters. They have little to no interest in politics. To them it is a big waste of time. They have more important things to do – like develop careers, enjoy the company of friends, have a good time and just live their lives. Some, on both the left and the right, would condemn them as apathetic.
Setting Myself Up To Fail?
I’m doing it. I’m making a New Year resolution. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind that I find easy to make stick, but the other kind. I’m still going to give it a shot and, toward the long-term goal, I give myself permission to slip sometimes (although I will expect to be scolded if I do).
Fuzzy Thinking Creates Fuzzy Communication
Unclear thinking creates unclear communication. The majority of “debates” I see consist of one person saying something (whether true or false, smart or stupid), followed by someone else misunderstanding and/or misrepresenting what the first one said, and then flinging back something logically irrelevant. I see two main causes of this.
Why Does the Minimum Wage Debate Never End?
Has any science ever devoted so much time, effort, and cleverness to elaborate attempts to determine whether or not a central and indisputably correct tenet of that science – a tenet used without question to predict outcomes in general – fails to work as an accurate predictor for one very specific, small slice of reality as has been devoted by economics over the past two decades to determine whether or not the law of demand works to accurately predict the effects of minimum wages on the quantity demanded of low-skilled labor?
Collective Intelligence in Action: The Self-Directed Education Movement
We humans form institutions for the value they offer to society. Collectively these structures function with an intelligence based on what works. Ideally, whatever works persists and whatever doesn’t work fades away. But sometimes institutions become resistant to change or change in ways that make them more rigid and therefore less responsive. When that happens, people who work for or are served by that institution tend to suffer.
Unschooling: Personalized, Self-Determined Education
Unschooling has been around for at least 95 years, ever since Summerhill, the first “unschooling school,” was established in the UK in 1921. Unschooling really came into fashion in the 1970’s when the term was coined by John Holt, a prominent leader of the secular home education movement.
Taxation Isn’t Only Theft, It’s Destruction
Where the state is, there also is the growth of the state. Why does a state’s scope enlarge? One theory is that interest groups seek to use the state’s taxing power for their own benefit. I would like to suggest a complementary theory. When the power to tax is conferred upon rulers, many harmful incentives necessarily are conveyed with it. These encourage the rulers to expand their destructive acts.
How Work Became Drudgery Once Again
Young people, college graduates especially, are not feeling hopeful about their careers. Mired in student loan debt, facing a labor market that has been stagnant for as long as they can remember, and deciding between a job where they’ll be miserable and moving back in with their parents, millennials have grown skeptical toward market capitalism. Yet, if they looked at the history of the matter, they would be amazed how far we’ve strayed from a free market in labor in the past century. Their plight is not due to economic freedom, but to a century of centralized efforts to regiment and regulate the labor market and the very mind and soul of the worker.
Compulsory Education
Everyone loves learning. The thing is that not everyone likes studying and what’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see the blatant problem with it – the deprivation of freedom that prevents the flourishing of precisely those who have the most potential in society; children.