Anniversary and a Check-In on How We’re Doing

It’s the anniversary of this blog—14 years this month (the actual date was March 4, 2011, but I was in the middle of something else last week). I often use this time to review what the Spherical Model is, which I also do at year’s end and sometimes other times. This was the end of 2024, with some links to other Spherical Model info. You can also always get a full description on the SphericalModel.com website.

In brief, the Spherical Model is an alternative way of looking at political ideas: rather than right/left, it is a three-dimensional sphere, with tyranny south and freedom to the north. (This is not to say anything negative about Australia or anyplace else in our southern hemisphere; it is a metaphoric way of showing ideas, not related to our world’s geography.) The longitudinal lines represent the level a particular issue or responsibility pertains to, from individual/family, to local community, up to county, state, region, nation, continent, on up to global. So the left-to-right movement is neutral—except that any issue should be handled by the lowest possible appropriate level. If a higher level usurps that from a lower level, that moves the placement on the sphere down toward tyranny.

The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model

And the same spherical model can be overlaid with economic and social ideas. The Economic Sphere has poverty in the south (related to a controlled economy) and prosperity in the north (related to a free market economy—not to be confused with crony capitalism or monopolies, which are south on the sphere). The Social Sphere has savagery in the south and civilization in the north. Civilization is described this way:

In the northern circle that is the goal [above the 45^th parallel on the sphere]—Civilization—families typically remain intact, and children are raised in loving homes, with caring parents who guide their education and training, dedicating somewhere between 18 and 25 years for that child to reach adulthood, and who then remain interested in their children’s success for the rest of their lives.

 

Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.

 

There is a thriving free-enterprise economy. Poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, in a civilized society these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise.

 

Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.

 

People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. Where there are questions about those limits, laws are in place to help clarify boundaries of civilized behavior. When someone willingly infringes on the rights or safety of another, the law functions to protect that victim as well as society from further uncivilized behavior from the offender.

I tend to spend more time on civilization-related topics than actual politics or economics, although they are all interrelated (note the heading for this blog).

Last year was a very active news year. But that has shifted into overdrive since the inauguration in January. So much so that, if there’s not a major announcement—or two or three—in a given day, we feel like we’ve missed something, or maybe things are slowing down.

The question is, are all these changes leading toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization?

There’s a cohort (with friends of mine among them) that are certain each and every change is the end of life as we know it—and they think that’s a bad thing.

There was a piece by Robert Reich (advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama) the other day that got passed along on Facebook. It’s too long to quote entirely; I won’t use up all my available word count on it. But a few quotes will exemplify this alternate world we’re talking about. I will note that this screed against all that President Trump has done since taking office contains no specifics of anything. We’re just supposed to see the self-evident facts, I guess, of this incarnation of worse-than-Hitler. Most of the piece is on how to cope with living under this tyranny. 

Ha! We who have lived under their tyranny—and their attempts to make that tyranny permanent—know about coping by clawing our way back toward the Constitution and civilization. [As an aside, I was looking on Substack for the original but didn't find it, so I'm not including a link. But I did find this other title: "The Trump regime will arrest some of you in the middle of the night because you spoke your mind," apparently with no awareness of the irony.)

Reich calls this a “despicable regime.” He claims, “The choice is democracy or dictatorship. Self-government or oligarchy.” He decries those defeatists who seem to have given up the fight: “Those in this defeatist camp think nothing can prevent us from an apocalypse—the end of America, the termination of civilization, the death of the planet.” And then he adds, “But defeatism is exactly what Trump, Vance, Musk, and Putin want us to feel.”

As for details, the sum total is this sentence: “The reality is that Trump, Vance, and Musk have done truly terrible things over the past seven weeks that are already hurting millions of people.” The “truly terrible things” remain unnamed, however. And a surprising 76% of those polled following President Trump’s speech to Congress approve of what he said. So I guess the horrors are not self-evident after all.

Among the ways to cope, Reich suggests turning to some voices from the past:

People who lived through Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin, or through Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” or Pol Pot’s “killing fields.” Some are keen observers of what occurred (Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism) or historians (William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany provides a chilling account that echoes today).

It's odd that he’d think people who lived through such regimes would approve of Biden’s lawfare, censorship, propaganda, corruption, and warmongering and would instead disapprove of Trump’s corrections of those tyrannical things.

So, what has been happening, and, maybe, where would such policies be placed on the Spherical Model?

Cabinet

President Trump’s cabinet and leadership team are now fully assembled. [Full list here.]  To name a few:

·        Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

·        Tom Homan, Border Security

·        Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense

·        Pam Bondi, Attorney General

·        Kash Patel, FBI Director

·        Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Secretary of Health and Human Services

·        Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence

·        John Ratcliffe, CIA Director

Trump Cabinet and Officials
images assembled from Wikipedia

On Friday, March 14, speaking at the Department of Justice, President Trump said that people ask him what he’s done about all the problems, and he said he’s appointed the right people, who will do the job of making things right.

As I was watching the speech online, an ad came on, a Democrat candidate, saying “Trump doesn’t want to lead this country; he wants to rule it.” That seems to be the propaganda line they’ll keep going with, regardless of reality.

The amount of alarm from the opposition to any given leader is an indicator of their likely effectiveness. So far, in just a few weeks, border crossings have dropped 90%, without any change in law. That means the flood of illegal immigrants under Biden was intentional. As President Trump quipped, “All we needed was a change in presidents.” And a very stern Tom Homan is helpful too.

Keeping our border secure is one of the essential duties of our federal government; it’s about time.

We see some evidence of improvement in law enforcement from Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, but we haven’t yet seen all the file dumps we have been anticipating. We’re waiting and watching. The opposition claims they are going to weaponize the judicial system. No. That’s what the previous administration was doing. What we want is transparency and accountability. If people did illegal, unethical, corrupt acts, we want to see the evidence publicly, and we want them held accountable. That isn’t a matter of revenge; it’s a matter of deterrence. If they get away with what they’ve done, they and others will keep trying to do those things. I believe we’ll see what we’ve been promised.

RFK Jr is just getting started. But we’re looking forward to better information, no more government-controlled propaganda and censorship. We’d like to see more real science, instead of claims that “the science is settled” and “I am the science!” BTW, we’d like to see the octogenarian Fauci held accountable for COVID deaths, for the shutdown and masking, for forced vaccinations, for deaths by Remdesivir, and a full list of his crimes against humanity. I expect God will take care of final justice, but for this life maybe RFK Jr can send that evidence over to Pam Bondi.

All of them (including the couple of former Democrats mixed in there) are more capable and more trustworthy than anyone from the Biden administration. We’re definitely moving northward on the sphere, away from tyranny and toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

 

DOGE

You may have noted that Elon Musk was not on the list above. That is because he does not hold a cabinet-level position. He was tasked with heading DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), an existing department that used to be called United States Digital Services (USDS), and comes under the authority of the President, directed by the White House Chief of Staff (which is Susan Wiles, by the way). He and his team have access to digital information made available to them, with which they look for waste, fraud, corruption, and possible savings. Then they make recommendations.

There have been a lot of recommendations. And a lot of money we can save going forward. Musk does not fire workers in various other departments; he makes recommendations, mostly in general rather than specific individuals. And then the head of the targeted organization makes the authorized decision on hutting workers or programs. If the head of the organization is not convinced by DOGE’s evidence, they don’t have to follow the recommendations.  So those clamoring about Musk not being duly authorized are either misinformed or, possibly, in favor of (benefitting from) the waste, fraud, abuse, or corruption that has been uncovered.

Musk is working as an employee—although, as is the President, he is doing it without compensation, which he does not need.

Is there reason to be suspicious of Musk? Maybe. He’s very rich, which, in his case, seems to draw the ire of the opposition. I wouldn’t offer the same trust to Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, or a number of others. Musk isn’t what I’d call a Constitutional Conservative. But he is smart, and effective, and has a good track record.

And I think his purchase of Twitter (now X) was a turning point; government shouldn’t be censoring a free-speech platform. Maybe, now that he has accomplished so much in his life, he’s interested in doing the good that interests him, and that he’s particularly well-suited to do. I think he’s enjoying himself.

What he is not doing is setting up shell corporations and law loopholes to enrich himself later. I think—and I believe he thinks—that enriching will come naturally, for him and the rest of us, when the waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption are excised. I don’t see that leading toward fascist tyranny. If we get rid of enough of the corruption—and enough of the anti-constitutional regulatory state—we’ll move solidly northward on the sphere.

 

USAID

There have been other targets of DOGE, but USAID (United States Agency for International Development) has been hit hard. It is not, as the acronym implies, foreign aid; that is handled entirely separately, by the Office of Foreign Assistance, which also comes under the State Department. USAID has been used, frequently, as a means of changing policies—and even regimes—in other countries. And the policies it was intending to change to coincided with the Obama-then-Biden regimes: DEI, ESG, LGBTQ, and also a lot of old fashioned money-laundering schemes. DOGE is finding those things, following the money trail. Will there be some errors, some things recommended to be cut that were maybe doing some good? Maybe. If we find those things, they can be corrected later—assuming those things qualify as constitutional.

The opposition has been straining to find examples of mistakes, in an effort to claim the whole of what DOGE is doing is just unjustly flexing power, or something.

As an example—this one from NIH, not USAID—there was something about transgenetics that got interpreted as “transgendering” mice; the explanation was supposed to be that it was about genetic therapy research. However, a fact check showed that the experiments were not aimed at making mice transgendered per se; they were about studying various effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy, and using mice (and probably other animals) in those experiments. Some of the outcomes seemed to show harms from the hormone therapies, and that might be worth knowing. But if the purpose was to assume gender-affirming hormone therapy as a societal good, then we’ve still got a problem. So, we’ll see.

But I think we’re still going to have trouble with paying our tax dollars for a transgender opera in, say, Peru, or for Sesame Street in Iraq. Getting rid of these ridiculous drains on our prosperity—and on our morality—will definitely move us northward on the sphere.

 

Ukraine and Russia

Things are serious in international diplomacy. What we have is a hothead, installed, dictatorial president of Ukraine demanding (and so far receiving from the Biden administration) $350 Billion to fight an unwinnable war, because the bad guy Russia invaded. In other words, you’ve got two bad guys. Ukraine is definitely the underdog. In a civilized world, Russia would not have invaded. But in a sane world, you would not have the US tossing out NATO memberships to Russia’s close neighbors, against our word.

And that $350 Billion? That amount—close to half of the entire US military budget for a year (including underpaid troops)—has disappeared, quite probably to oligarchs and other corrupt actors, including Zelensky himself (I don’t have the receipts; I’m just repeating what I’ve heard). I have sympathy for the Ukrainian people. I’d like to see them liberated.

President Trump has brought the two leaders into negotiations. Peace would be best for both. Neither will get all that it wants. But Russia is likely to get the ethnically Russian portion of land taken, plus a promise that NATO will not expand to threaten Russia, which will mean no Ukraine in NATO. Ukraine will stop losing its male population and get peace. It may also get protection through complying with the US’s desire for rare earth mining. We’ll see.

The opposition will call this colluding with Russia. But let’s remember: the whole Russian collusion hoax was a product of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC; they were charged and convicted—but only fined, which is why they’re willing to keep using that line. They think it works. And, on those who already assume Trump is evil, it does work.

As of Friday, Putin and Zelensky have agreed to a cease fire. I don’t know how this will turn out. But seeking peace and negotiating for fairness seems to at least move us northward on the sphere, away from tyranny, which would benefit all involved.

 

Israel

What we know is that Israel was mostly peaceful during the first Trump administration, and surrounding countries were signing on to treaties. We got the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, because a weak Biden was in office.

Trump has offered suggestions. About rebuilding Gaza from scratch—which would require neighbors to take in refugees, something they’ve been unwilling to do for many decades. This would eradicate Hamas from Gaza. There’s certainly something to be said for that outcome.

 

Department of Education

The Dept. of Ed put out an announcement on Tuesday of a 50% reduction in force. That’s a start. For those gasping that Trump is against education, I remind you that since its inception in the Carter administration, education levels have been in decline. We didn’t need it before, but it hasn’t been improving things.

As we often say at the Spherical Model, whenever government attempts to do something that is not the proper role of government, there will be unintended consequences, and they are likely to be the exact opposite of the stated goal of the policy. So, if we want a good education for the upcoming generation, government taking that on is a pretty sure way to interfere with that goal.

The opposition is panicking nevertheless. But the press release included a response to most of their fears: 

The Department of Education will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, including formula funding, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking.

Getting rid of the entire department—eventually—will be better. But a 50% cut in the first two months of the administration is a good start. At least there’s a level change from nation to state. The closer we get to local community and family, where this responsibility belongs, the better our education will be.

 

In summary, we’re moving northward on the sphere, away from tyranny, not toward it. That might be shaking up some would-be tyrants, but the rest of us can be happy at what we’re seeing so far.

Another Education and Homeschooling Post

This will be a part II of an education post. In the last post, I offered the first part of my presentation, on  homeschooling, but making the point that, when you look at the entire 6000 years of the history of education, homeschooling is what has been traditional—because it works. And the public school experiment, using a factory model, has only been underway for about a century. And it’s a failing experiment.

On Saturday we had a presentation on the structure of education first. The presenter, Colleen Vera, a retired teacher, has spent years as a watchdog on school issues. One of her specialties is the HarrisCounty Department of Education (which we agree should not exist), and we count on her to attend their meetings, let us know what’s going on, and let us know when we need to take action.

She provided us with this flow chart of the parts of government that make decisions over education. Down at the bottom, with the least influence, are teachers in the classroom and their students.

The summary flowchart of Texas government in education,
from Colleen Vera's presentation
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019

One fascinating example was her seating chart. Teachers have requirements for seating children based on various rules placed on them. Well under half of the seats are for regular kids. GT (gifted and talented) are used to help the teacher, not the GT student. They’re seated next to the struggling to help them out. Which means the gifted students are placed with the slowest, holding them back, rather than challenging them to move ahead at a rate suited for them.

assigned seating chart based on government requirements
from Colleen Vera's presentation 
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019 

Note that in middle and high schools, this seating chart is set up for one period; the teacher has to sort through the students like this for every hour of the day. Why? To avoid lawsuits. Not to get better educational outcomes.

As Colleen went through the history of educational initiatives that—as she pointed out before I had a chance—the federal government was not empowered to do by the Constitution, I’m reminded that the federal Department of Education was non-existent until 1979. I went through my entire public school experience without any federal oversight. Somehow we muddled through better than we’ve done since its inception.

SAT scores under Department of Education, begun 1979
from Colleen Vera's presentation
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019

Colleen offered this chart, showing average SAT scores over the years. The * in 1996 indicates the year they changed the way they scored—in other words, in order to cover the data that showed results were going steadily downward, they cheated. So you can’t measure apples to apples.

Still, there’s a downturn from the beginning of the Department of Education until 1996. And, depending on your state, nothing better than mixed improvement or standing still since 1996.

Why did they institute a federal Department of Education in the first place? Because there was a crisis in education. At first that excuse was for “national defense and social responsibility.” That’s kind of a stretch—past the point of elasticity—of the actual Constitution. But now it’s worse. The new excuse is, “to fix society’s ills.”

She ended her presentation with some suggestions of actions we citizens can take—along with the warning that you can’t single-handedly do it all, so you might want to figure out where your interests lie and focus there. So, here are the actions:

·         Volunteer in public schools (VIPs)

·         Join PTA/PTO

·         Volunteer for Texas Book Review

·         Apply to be on local committees (school growth, bonds, etc.)

·         Apply to local councils (ex: School Health Advisory Council)

·         Start local conservative education PAC

·         Educate yourself on ONE specific area of concern:

o   Research

o   Advocate local school board

o   Advocate State Board of Education

o   Advocate Texas Legislature

o   Advocate Congress

·         Become a Watch Dog

As citizens, we’re in a difficult place. We know the public schools are failing in their mission. We know the federal government has no business involved in education at all. But we’re up against a monopoly. You can’t get out of paying your tax dollars for public schools—even if they do not serve your children, and in fact you have to pay elsewhere for their actual education.

It’s like Canadian health care. You get what you get under the national system. Or you make financial sacrifices to come to America for care. 

We can go to private schools and homeschools—if we’re desperate enough and have the resources over and above what we pay toward schools with our taxes. Education is, by the way, 35% of the Texas budget for 2020.

So the question comes up—and isn’t often answered the way I would prefer—do we leave it alone and let the schools fail, or do we work tirelessly to change any little bit we can affect?

Maybe the answer is, first of all, meet our own children’s needs; then work to have education money spent more wisely. And, if there’s energy left, create a revolution toward free market + philanthrophy solutions.

That isn’t as outlandish as you might think. There’s a portion of my presentation where I compared costs. I toted up what I estimated that we spent. I’m sure I missed some things, but I got most of it. This was our cost breakdown for 3 students for 10 years (only our youngest was homeschooled for the full 10 years):

• Elementary Math: $350

• Secondary Math through Algebra 2 $450

• History and general: about $300

• Lonestar tuition: maybe $1000?

• Kaplan ACT prep (used for progress evaluation): $35

• Museum memberships: $80/year, 7 years = $600

• THSC and homeschool group memberships: $600?

• Driving to homeschool events/activities: unknown

• Books: Who knows? We’d have bought them anyway.

• Loss of income: unknown and unimportant

• Estimated total for 10 years, entire family: $3,335

• Average per year: $333.50

Compare that to the average cost for the State of Texas to educate a child. Stats weren’t all consistent. According to the NEA, Texas spent $10,456 per student for the 2017-18 school year—about $2,300 below the national average. The Census Bureau puts the cost at $8,861 per student per year—still $2,531 under the national average. 

The contrast is significant. My results are anecdotal, but it worked out for us. A sacrifice we were willing to make.

It’s actually getting cheaper.

For example, the $350 elementary math we used, CSMP. Our boys had used it in the gifted magnet school they attended before we moved to Texas, so when I started homeschooling, I called up those teachers and got the information to get it. I got a teacher’s edition, which you only need one of per classroom. There’s also a set of consumable booklets for each student, of which I just got one. We’d been told that program was only used for gifted students, because it was so expensive. But you buy the teacher’s book one time per decade or so (math doesn’t really change). So you’re only buying the consumables. And maybe there’s a better way. But it didn't seem to me that costly per student.

Anyway, that whole thing, 3rd grade through 5th grade, cost me $350 in 2000. It’s now free online. The distributor decided not to continue printing and selling the program, so some enterprising parent asked permission to post everything online and combined with Buffalo State to preserve it. It’s all there now, for free—all years, not just those I had needed.

I compiled a list some years ago on free and very low cost online learning, which I’ve added to a bit here. I’m sure there are many opportunities I’m missing. You could easily accomplish a high school and possibly college education online, where the only thing you’re not getting is the social experience and the debt—oh, and the diploma. So, if we let go of the diploma and other locked doors into the middle and upper class, we’d have much cheaper—and often better by every measure—advanced education. Here’s the list:

•       Hillsdale College Online Courses 

•       PragerU videos 

•       MIT (MIT OpenCourseware)

•       Harvard (Harvard@home)

•       Berkeley (webcastBerkeley)

•       AbeBooks.com 

•       Alibris.com

•       OpenCulture.com 

•       ITunes U 

•       Lynda.com

•       Udemy.com

•       AcademicEarth.org 

•       YouTube EDU

•       VideoLectures.Net 

•       TedTalks 

•       WebMD 

•       BBC video language 

•       GreatCourses.com (about $100 per college level course)

One thing the free market does really well is bring more and better products and services at lower prices. In technology there’s a formula, called Moore’s Law, relevant mainly to transistor size and power, for how technology keeps getting better and cheaper. There’s something like that going on with information. It’s getting more widely available at less cost.

In short, when we’re dealing with the public school system, we need to stand firm on the knowledge that the system is not indispensable. There are alternatives. And when we truly want good educational outcomes for our children, we’ll do what it takes to use those alternatives. 

The more we go to the alternatives, the more the market will follow with even better—and less expensive—solutions.

We'll be doing another Tea Party meeting on education next month, hearing from a couple of conservative members of the State Board of Education. I expect we'll learn even more.

Nonequivalents

Some things have been spun as equivalent that are not. Here are a few:

·        Defunding NPR ≠ killing Big Bird, or closing down that communications company; it simply means funding would need to come from someplace other than taxpayer money.

·        Medical insurance ≠ medical care. In fact, medical insurance—especially once mandated as an employee benefit, interfered with the market and raised prices so that medical care became harder for the patient to pay for.

·        Repealing Obamacare ≠ eliminating health care. It means that we would eliminate the expensive mandates and other coercions that have made it harder for people to pay for the insurance they want or the care they need.

·        Being against illegal immigration ≠ racism; it is not even equivalent to being anti-immigration. It is likely equivalent to favoring law-abiding immigrants.

·        Being against a higher minimum wage ≠ keeping families in poverty. It is, rather, being in favor of a free market in which entry-level workers get opportunities to earn entry-level wages while gaining valuable experience that will help them become more valuable employees in the future. Conversely favoring a higher minimum wage = outlawing jobs for many entry-level workers.

This list could do on. But I’ll add one more, that I’d like to spend time on today:

·        Favoring school choice ≠ being against educating all children. Just the opposite, in fact. And I’ll add, eliminating the US Department of Education ≠ eliminating public schools. After all my entire public education happened before that political entity was established, so I know it can be done.

In the December issue of Imprimis, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn speaks about “A More American Conservatism.” The overall piece looks at the question of whether the new president can be identified as a conservative (answer: we’ll see what he does, but there are some reasons to be hopeful). But a large section talks about education, which is a specialty of his, as president of an influential liberal arts college. And I’d like to share some of that.

Dr. Arnn mentions that he approves of the appointment of Betsy DeVos. He says, “Trump has nominated the splendid Betsy DeVos to be secretary of the Department, and she is a fighter for every kind of school choice.” These words are comforting. She has now been sworn in, after a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Pence.

Dr. Arnn says this about the Department of Education:

The federal government spends seven or eight percent of its money on education, and its method is typical of the federal intrusion into local matters: it gives money from the federal treasury to state and localities on condition. The conditions are myriad, confusing, and usually ugly when they can be understood. Title IV of the Higher Education Act governs federal student aid, and it numbers around 500 pages. A lawyer for our college told me once that I would be unable to read it, because he himself cannot read it, for which reason his firm keeps a specialist who is the only person he knows who understands what it says. For this reason alone, it would be a grand thing to get rid of the Department of Education.

Someone quipped that, if you really hate DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, support the bill to eliminate that department—and she’s gone.

Here’s another nonequivalence:

·       The Department of Education ≠ better education outcomes for students. In fact, there have been no appreciable increases in education outcomes since this bureaucracy was established, but costs per student have skyrocketed.

Dr. Arnn shares a basic principle about education:

The first thing to understand is that human beings are made to learn, and they desire to do it naturally. This means the job of teachers, like the job of parents, is to help children learn, not to make them or cause them to learn. Good schools are built around this fact.

One of the arguments for a national bureaucracy over education is that every student, in every state, ought to have the opportunity for education as some minimum standard, and so national standards and testing are necessary. But testing ≠ meeting a standard. In fact, setting a minimum standard ≠ better education outcomes.

Dr. Arnn talks about a kind of standard that would be useful:

The chairman of our education program at Hillsdale College has written a series of standards that states might adopt for K-12 education. For each grade, they take up about half a page. But if a child can do the things on that half a page, the child has earned a lot. Here is a way for higher levels of government to be sure that any money they give to lower levels is well spent in education. It involves hardly any management of details. That is the constitution model, the model that comes from our Founding.

To follow this practice would liberalize the system. It would mean that there would be plenty of bad charter schools, just as there are plenty of bad schools now. But it would also mean that there would be a proliferation of good ones.

Charter schools are just one type of school choice. At this point there are not enough of them. 

Here are some of the numbers in Texas. There are 5.2 million K-12 students (10% of all kids in US). Of that 5.2 million, 250,000 attend private schools, 300,000 are homeschooled, and 250,000 attend charter school. There’s a wait list of an additional 130,000 for charter schools. That’s why there must be lotteries to settle who attends a charter school (which is a public-school-funded entity that operates on different principles with different, often innovative practices).

Of those 87% attending public schools, 900,000 (20% of public-schooled students) are stuck in 1,032 failing schools—schools that have failed to show progress for three years in a row. There are considerably more students stuck in hopelessly failing schools than there are students being taught by parents, private schools, and charter schools added together.

That is what bureaucracy has wrought. To want that status quo = not caring about the education of the next generation. There ought to be a better choice for every family with a student they care about.

Dr. Arnn talks about what the 16 successful charter schools Hillsdale College operates look like:

Everybody wears a uniform and signs an honor code. Everybody studies mathematics at least through pre-calculus. Everybody learns Latin, history, literature, philosophy, physics, biology, and chemistry. Everybody is admitted by a lottery system. For the inner-city schools, care is take to advertise only in the immediate area, to make the opportunity available to the children who live in poor areas. The students in these schools make on the average excellent scores on the ubiquitous state standardized tests, and they do this without class time or curriculum set aside to pare for those tests. They do very well even in relation to the legions of public schools that now take months to cram only for those tests.

While these schools work well, he does not recommend making every school like this. It is the choice that makes the difference. Standards are high. Everyone is there voluntarily. The same is true at Hillsdale College. He says,

At Hillsdale College the curriculum is rigorous and the standards of behavior are high. But they are not imperative. The ultimate penalty is simply this question: are you sure you want to be here, when there are so many other options, options generally not quite so difficult or strict? The student who responds yes to that question is self-governing, which is the aim. That is why we at Hillsdale would not support a national law that everyone had to do what we do. We know too much about human beings to think that would work.

Knowing about individual human beings is something distant bureaucracies are particularly not good at.

Dr. Arnn ends his education portion with these hopeful words about a reformed Department of Education:

[I]t would be teaching the governments below not to give people orders all the time. It would be teaching them that parents do after all love their children in the great majority of cases, and that the strongest institutions are built on love. It would be teaching them that schools can do better without a national engineering project to take over their work, to set their tests, to prescribe their behavior.

He admits that such reforms would indeed “lay the ground for the Department’s abolition.” But, again, that ≠ less education; it actually can mean better education at lower costs—which are outcomes that market choices among good, free people, almost always bring.

Press Delete

I don’t want to talk much about Tuesday’s presidential debate. But that’s the inspiration source for today’s post. Ted Cruz offers a plan to get rid of five federal departments: the IRS, Energy, Housing, Education, and Commerce. (Yes, he accidentally listed Commerce twice in the debate; big deal.) It got big cheers. So maybe it’s worth looking at the suggestion.

Cruz's logo for the plan to get rid of these five departments

Cruz’s point is that the way to get the budget under control requires discontinuing expenditures for things that aren’t authorized in the Constitution, and combine that with major tax reform—to a flat tax. That simplification and relief to businesses would leave more money in the private sector, freed up to be used in a growing economy.

The way things are budgeted in Washington is different from your household. In a lot of ways. One way is that they only look at revenue estimates, not how leaving money in the hands of citizens will affect the economy. So, in Washington, a tax cut must be “paid for” to be revenue neutral. You’re supposed to ignore the Laffer Curve and assume you get less revenue with a lower tax, even when that is known not to be so.

You do spur the economy with a tax cut. And you get more taxpayers willing to pay the tax rather than find tax shelters. So you can get more revenue. But the government will still have trouble making ends meet if it keeps up the same spending rates.

The Spherical Model suggestion all along has been to spend only on what the Constitution enumerates as part of the federal government. So I’m happy to see a candidate who agrees, and spells out some of the first steps toward that end.

Cruz additionally suggests other means of eliminating extra-Constitutional expenditures. But for today’s discussion, we’ll just look at the five biggies he mentioned in the debate.

Do we need the IRS? 

We didn’t have an IRS from 1776 to 1913, when the income tax was instituted. There’s a treasury department, and revenue comes in somehow. The income tax was sold with a promise that it would affect only the most wealthy, and would never go above 7% (the original rate was 1% on income above $3,000 to 7% on income above $500,000). That promise was thrown out the window within just a few years, when it suddenly seemed necessary for everyone, and at a rate up to 95%.

So, anyway, the IRS wasn’t necessary before the income tax. Is it necessary with an income tax? Not if the law is simple enough, which a flat tax is. You still need a way to collect the taxes. How do states do it? There aren’t state-level IRS agencies. What is the mechanism? Probably a revenue department, connected to a department of the state treasury. There will be codes and forms, and formulas. There’s no doubt that a state can come up with a way to collect their revenue.

But there’s no IRS, and particularly no IRS that targets individuals and organizations for political reasons. And no IRS that can used for either targeting or favoring various earners.

I can imagine a country after deleting the IRS, and it looks lovely.

Do we need the Department of Energy?

The stated mission, according to the government website, is: “to ensure America's security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.” 

So the question is, what does the Constitution say about energy? That would be nothing. But, then, gas-powered engines hadn’t been invented at the time, and certainly nuclear power wasn’t being considered.

But, just as the IRS generates no income (it merely confiscates it from citizens), the DOE generates no energy. As for ensuring America’s security, that comes under the Department of Defense, and possible the State Department through diplomacy. Does the Constitution require the federal government to ensure prosperity? Not actually. It does expect the federal government to ensure the right conditions—fair and consistent laws, standard medium of exchange, for example. But it doesn’t require the federal government to get involved in energy development or any other commodity or utility. The government has “volunteered.” It takes our tax dollars, and distributes billions to companies it decides to favor (remember Solyndra). It subsidizes, in an attempt to alter the market, rather than trusting that the market will lead to the greatest innovation and best result for the people.

The DOE became a cabinet-level department in 1977. Its purpose was to combine the Defense purpose of developing nuclear weapons with the possibility of creating nuclear energy. We used to live near the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State—and felt quite safe there. It was part of the DOD when we got there, with both energy purposes and development of nuclear storage (vitrification was the main method, still underway I believe). But it was in the conservative corner of the state, and when Bill Clinton became president, he placed the site under the DOE. If felt much like the oil industry does when gasoline prices drop below $2 a gallon: people get laid off, or leave for other opportunities. Those who stay miss the days of growth, rising pay, and security.

It is likely that the free market, if not stifled by the DOE, would innovate and provide all the energy we need—with plenty to export as well.

We would still have energy—probably more—without the DOE. Let's delete the DOE?

Do we need Housing and Urban Development (HUD)?

What does the Constitution say is the federal government’s responsibility related to providing housing and building urban areas? It’s silent on that too? Hmm.

Did we have housing before HUD? Well, government-provided housing was a Roosevelt invention in 1937, and became a cabinet-level department in 1965. We had housing before that, clearly. In fact, housing is what individuals have built in response to the basic need for shelter wherever people settle.

The free market is pretty good at providing “affordable” housing. Intervention, to provide “affordable” housing—as with every other intervention of the federal government beyond its proper role—causes prices to remain high. It interferes with supply and demand. Cities with the most interference tend to have the least affordable housing—putting even relatively high earners in the category of those who can’t afford housing. Without the interference, the market would settle the price at what people are willing and able to pay. What a concept!

So, let’s delete HUD.

Do we need a Department of Commerce?

Again, what does the Constitution say? There is actually a role, referred to as the commerce clause. It refers to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”

So then we need to know what regulate means. Back in the day, when the Constitution was written, it was commonly used to mean made regular, functioning as expected. A well-regulated clock, for example, would be set to the correct time, wound up, and allowed to keep accurate time. A well-regulated militia would be one that had members of the citizenry armed and practiced in their ability to work together in defense.

So well-regulated commerce would mean commerce that happens regularly, smoothly, without hindrances getting in the way. And the federal government was supposed to make sure that regular free commerce could happen internationally, interstate, and with Indian tribes.

Unfortunately, the meaning of regulate has been twisted over time to mean the government micromanages, controls, limits, and makes all decisions concerning. So we’re spending $10B a year to have the government favor cronies around the world.

If we go back to the original meaning, suddenly there’s no need for a cabinet-level department. All we need is an expectation of free trade within the United States, and treaties that lead to free trade abroad.

Deleting the Commerce Department would mean deleting mounds of red tape, and actually lead to the free trade the Constitution intended. Press Delete.

Do we need a Department of Education?

We’ve only had this department since 1980—under Jimmy Carter, not Reagan, who was elected that year but didn’t take office until January 1981. Did we have education before 1980? Yes. I am an example of a student who went through my entire public school and college education before there was a Department of Education.

Does the Constitution require the federal government to educate the populace? No. It’s not mentioned. There are those who can argue that government has an interest, and therefore a role, in an educated populace. But even those who successfully argue that viewpoint can’t justify a federal government takeover of something that is a parental responsibility, possibly aided by local government, or state government as the least local.

As always happens when the government steps beyond its proper role, the goal of more efficiently and effectively educating students is exactly what fails. Scores are lower. Graduation rates are lower. Preparation for the job force is compromised. And the cost for this outcome is triple per student what it was before the Department of Education was created. And lately they make the fallacious claim that Common Core is a national solution—providing standards that will improve our educated place in the world. Whenever the federal government says something like that, you can trust they are heading 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

The Department of Education has also stuck their fingers into higher education, with the purported purpose of making college more affordable. So you know it would do exactly the opposite. Since its “help” began, the cost of tuition has increased at a rate 2 ½ times the rate of inflation. If you’re having trouble with the math, because of your education, that simply means it’s a lot more expensive to get a college education than when the government stepped in to “help.”

If it were only money, we could almost forgive the government for being wrong but well intentioned. But it has overstepped boundaries to impose social engineering. It tries to force schools to allow biological males into dressing rooms with underage females. It controls curriculum and accreditation. And it has a stranglehold on hiring in higher education, so that your young person is at least three times more likely to hear the opinions of a leftist (i.e., southern hemisphere tyrannist) than a conservative (northern hemisphere freedom lover). If education is meant to teach students to think, the Department of Education is meant to force students to think what the government wants them to think. That’s not education; this is brainwashing.

If you value education, delete the Department of Education. Return the money and the decisions to the local level in contact with the actual students, and let the free market, with its innovation, adjust the price.

So, yes, let’s select the IRS, DOE, HUD, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Education, and press Delete. And then empty the trash bin so they can never be brought back.

If you’re wondering how a President Cruz would accomplish this deletion, and how disruptive or sudden it would be, here’s what he says:

To do that, I will press Congress relentlessly. And I will appoint heads of each of those agencies whose central charge will be to lead the effort to wind them down and determine whether any programs need to be preserved elsewhere because they fall within the proper purview of the federal government. I do not anticipate lists to be long.

And in addition to these big five, which he calls “Five for Freedom,” he’s also planning on deleting an additional 25 specific agencies, bureaus, programs, and commissions. And then he’ll look further, and get rid of everything that exists in defiance of the Constitution—which he has known from memory since his early teens. He knows the law. And I agree with him that America thrives whenever it abides by our brilliant, inspired Constitution.