The Great Society—Not That Great

One truth we often say here at the Spherical Model is,

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

I should count how many times I’ve said that. Anyway, it’s something you can count on.

So, back when President Lyndon Johnson developed the Great Society, what did he actually create?

That was the subject of Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s podcast last week with, as his guest, historian Amity Shlaes. You might know her from previous works, The Forgotten Man, about the Great Depression, and her biography on President Calvin Coolidge. Her latest book is Great Society: A New History.

cover image from here

Dan Crenshaw tends to ask a question and then just listen as the guest informs. They went back a couple of decades earlier, to see what was going on. We had won World War II. We were a prosperous nation. We felt omnipotent. So when President Kennedy set a goal to reach the moon, we thought, of course we can. So why not tackle the poverty problem?

Shlaes paraphrases Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, as saying,

AS: “Well, I thought cleaning up poverty would just be basically a mopping up action in the United States,” because he’d seen the achievements of the US in World War II as a soldier. It just didn’t seem like such a big deal.

Dan points out that Kennedy didn’t look like a Democrat of today, so he asks her about that:

Dan: Do you think Kennedy would have, if he was still president, do you think he would have enacted something like The Great Society? You look at a lot of his rhetoric on free markets. He enacted tax cuts and pursued free trade policies and sound budgets. Pro-Second Amendment. It’s hard to see him as a modern-day Democrat. Would he have gone this direction?

She says there are people who have explored that very question. Ira Stoll, in a book called JFK, Conservative. Also Larry Kudlow. Her personal opinion is, no, Kennedy would not have implemented the programs of the Great Society.

He was more conservative than the impulsive progressives around him: his brother Robert Kennedy, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson, his brother-in-law Sergeant Shriver. But once Johnson saw his opportunity, he took it.

Johnson had been involved, years earlier, with President Roosevelt’s New Deal. He thought FDR didn’t get enough done. So he set out to finish. By means of the federal government, of course. And he was very ambitious.

As Shlaes explains,

AS: Lyndon Johnson was a New Dealer. He worked for Franklin Roosevelt. He led the National Youth Administration as a very young man in Texas. So, he said to himself, and to others, “I will finish what Franklin Roosevelt started. He started the New Deal. I will finish the work with The Great Society, and poverty will be cured.” C-u-r-e. That is the verb Johnson used. He didn’t say reduced. A very ambitious goal. And, because we were so wealthy, it seemed eminently possible—get to the moon, cure poverty.

So, what do the metrics say actually happened?

There was poverty. It wasn’t well defined. There wasn’t a metric until a woman in the Labor Department, Molly Orshansky,  invented one. But there were poor people. Shlaes recommended a book, similar to the recent Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, also about Appalachia, called The Other America, by a Catholic idealist named Michael Harrington. He described the people as really poor. Shlaes says,

AS: And it was true; they were really poor, and they had terrible problems. “So, let’s do something. Surely we can,” was the attitude.

Poverty, nevertheless, was on a downward trend, even in the 50s, because of economic growth. So there was something of an effort to step in front of a trend to take credit for it. Estimates show that the poverty rate was declining downward from 20% toward 10%. It hit 11% in 1973. Dan asks, did that mean the Great Society policies were working? Shlaes says no.

cover image from here

AS: John Cogan wrote a whole book about this, at Stanford. I recommend it. It’s about entitlements. [The book is The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of US Entitlement Programs.] And what he shows is that, overall—some years you get a different picture—but overall the reduction in poverty decelerated. And then it stalled. So, you look at the result, once all the programs are in place, and in the 70s we kind of got stuck at 10% or so. What does that mean? Maybe 10% of people will always be poor. OK. That’s very sad. But what’s much more important is what we did… and that was to train people to believe they will always get entitlements.

That’s the point that caught my attention. If you want to create a truly great society, how can you get there by incentivizing people not to work?

Shlaes illustrates with the story of a talk she gave at a charter school in Arizona:

AS: I was mentioning food stamps, which exploded at the end of the 60s. And I talked about that. And a student got up and said, “Don’t you care about the poor? My family is on food stamps. We’re not ashamed. How dare you shame us?”

I wasn’t shaming them. The answer to that is, everyone comes to want from time to time. Some people need food stamps. No one would deny them that. It’s not a shame. But what is a shame is to expect, not only yourself, but your children and grandchildren to be on food stamps.

That’s what we did to them. We, the voters, did to poor people. We trained them to dependence. And they don’t deserve that. They’re more talented than that. We trained them to sell dependence rather than look for opportunity. We trained our own children to that. That is a shame.

There was a point where they mentioned Andrew Yang and his universal income. It sounds appealing. But—remember, the consequence is probably going to be the exact opposite of the intention. So what is the intention of a universal income? To alleviate poverty, along with the worry about not having the means for food and shelter. You want people who are free from that worry.

What you will get are people who are not capable of working their way out of poverty—because you take away the incentive. Why work if it doesn’t matter?

I’ve heard the theorists, including Yang, make a relatively convincing argument that changes in technology are going to affect the jobs available—and the level of thinking necessary to do those jobs. Jordan Peterson has talked about this to some extent. There are people that not even the military will accept, because they aren’t trainable. Their IQ is simply too low. It’s a relatively small percentage of the population. Some have a mental defect. Some are simply mentally well below average. Technology could make it so a larger segment of the population fits into that “can’t be trained” category.

But I don’t believe it. We have Down’s Syndrome people among us. Many can be trained. We see them working productive jobs at Walmart and Kroger near us. Can they do all jobs? No, but they can do something worthy of pay. If we didn’t have a minimum wage, there would be more jobs employers would be willing to hire them to do—something commensurate with the value they bring to the employer, so it isn’t merely charity on the employer’s part.

No matter how good technology gets, there’s still a whole lot of menial labor that needs to be done. I think Yang and others overestimate the ability of technology to clean up messes or do physical labor.

But, for argument’s sake, what if we did provide a basic income for those who can’t earn enough—because of their very real limitations? For some, that would mean they’d still need to live with someone who could supervise their daily living. But for the remaining few low-IQ untrained people, it would mean aimless and purposeless lives, to replace their meaningful labor. I don’t think that is a way to improve their lives.

And then you do it for everyone? Universal basic income?

Yang at least does that as a replacement to each and every poverty program now in place. But still. Not a good idea.

Shlaes offers a little history lesson, to show what we’ve already considered.

AS: We tried to do that with the universal income program led by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was actually Richard Nixon who led it. It didn’t pass, because Congress saw it was unbelievably expensive. But also because Congress saw it—Congress didn’t want people to think they—it didn’t want to put into concrete the entitlement that you’re supposed to be paid. So, I’m concerned about that, because I do think it’s bad to honor the idea that you should always pay people.

Not to mention, Dan says, “Why would you basically tax people, run that money through a bureaucracy, and then just give them back that money? That doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

What have we learned? What could actually work? Shlaes suggests education and training. She has come to like a historical black civil rights leader named Robert Paris Moses, from New York:

AS: He was a math teacher, and he developed a program called the Algebra Project on the hypothesis that all 13-year-olds should learn algebra. And maybe trig, right? And that all can. And the truth is that almost everyone can learn algebra. They might learn it more slowly than other people.

Almost everyone can be OK in trig. Most of us can’t do calculus. We pretend to, but we can’t. So, we’re all closer to being alike than we imagine.

And, I thought that was a great project. He said African-Americans will have a better life if they can get a skilled job. And, this project, the Algebra Project, won a McArthur grant, a genius grant. It never went scaled. And I think that’s a pity. I liked also about it that it was extremely empirical. “You can learn algebra; let’s be sure you do. And let’s spend endlessly to be sure you know algebra.” If you have algebra and you can talk, you can get a job.

Dan asked about the gap between black and white unemployment, because the Great Society actually made that worse. Shlaes talks about that, reiterating that education point:

AS: We undertook many measures that focused on the black community. And we hurt them. In fact all poor people, but poor people who happened to be black, we accustomed them to the welfare story. And then the question is, why are they unemployed? Some of that is, skills are very important now. We didn’t emphasize skills; we emphasized need. That was a problem. That’s why I like Robert Paris Moses. If you have enough skills, and you can talk to grownups—and that’s important—you can get a job in the United States.

It may not be a good job, but from that job you can learn. And then you move towards the job that you want. That whole culture is gone.

She then mentioned that unions, another outgrowth of the Great Society, added to the problem:

AS: Unions were a big problem in the period too. Unions demanded very high wages. Who loses when unions are powerful? Underskilled people. New arrivals. That’s very sad. So, I’m mainly concerned about education and looking forward.

image from here

Dan, as a legislator, questioned what is the federal government’s role in that. He mention some successes of the private sector, in his Houston area district.

Dan: There’s a lot of private sector places, especially around the Houston area that do really incredible training programs, and they basically want us to just leave them alone. Which seems right. But how do I encourage more companies to do what they’re doing. They’re putting people through—these are definitely low-income, low-skilled people—through a training program that ends up starting, I think, $70,000 a year. Maybe welding pipes or whatever it is. And it’s incredible.

That is incredible. These are jobs people who don’t go to college are getting. Shlaes told another story about free-market solutions.

AS: In New Mexico, a lot of the Great Society was for Native Americans as now. Poverty was sometimes appalling, and people improve that on reservations. The company called Fairchild, whose executives later became the leaders of Intel, the chip maker, decided they were going to open a factory in the reservation area in Shiprock, New Mexico. They even had some cooperation from the government. And they quickly became the largest private sector employer of Native Americans in the United States. They employed hundreds and hundreds of Native Americans in chip making.

It was actually something that Native Americans were really good at, because they had worked with their hands on needlework. And, you know, that was opposed to having a factory abroad.

Eventually… the more left-leaning radicals tried to take over the factory, and the company did what companies always do, which is to withdraw and make the chips elsewhere. Because companies can’t handle big trouble.

But the point was, the private sector generally comes up with great solutions to help poor people by giving them work and training them.

That is the alternative to the Great Society programs: free market innovations. She summarizes the actual solution—instead of federal Great Society programs, which haven’t worked.

AS: A strong economy is the best way to help people out of poverty. It’s actually a fact.

Imagine if the interferences of FDR had never happened. Then imagine that the interferences of LBJ and beyond hadn’t happened. Then add into the equation the boom that happened in the first three years of the Trump administration, after the Obama malaise—and despite the still existing interferences. What if we allowed growth to just keep happening?

You want a truly great society? Follow the rules for freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Limit government to its proper role of protecting life, liberty, and property. Get out of the way so a free market can innovate solutions to problems. And, I’ll add, for when there are times when people need a temporary help—or long-term help that is due to circumstances beyond their control: charity and philanthropy. 

That system works. It takes a self-governing people to do it. But it works a whole lot better than government programs.

Soaring on the Trampoline

Obama's tweet, image found here

Earlier this week, former president Barack Obama celebrated the 11^th anniversary of signing of the “Recovery Act,” a piece of legislation that he claims resulted in our current booming economy. And he has rightly been scoffed for it. 

But it’s a good opportunity to exemplify the trampoline effect, so let’s do that.

The trampoline effect—a term invented by my son Political Sphere—is what happens when there’s interference in the economy. When government reaches in to “help,” it takes the energy out of the natural rebound. It’s like a trampoline, when the jumper is going up and down. After a normal down, the energy pops the jumper back up, at least as high as he’d been before. But if someone reaches in, touches the trampoline and says, “Here, let me help you” while “steadying” the bouncy mat or adding a push that’s out of sync with the jumper, the expected bounce doesn’t happen. Instead there’s kind of a thud, and then tiny bounces leaving the jumper sitting there needing to start over.

The economy is the jumper. There are ups and downs. But natural recoveries follow the downs, so they’re not something that needs fixing, or “help.” Left alone, a down recovers to an up pretty quickly.

When we were all on the trampoline together, "interfering" with each other,
there wasn't a lot of soaring. It was hard enough just to stay upright.
(Yes, the big kid on the trampoline is me.)

Economists might call the trampoline effect an L-shaped recession and recovery. Instead of the expected parabola (a U-shape), the down is followed by a sideways stutter. I’ve written about this here.

An L-shaped recession looks like this, instead of
the mirror-image parabola you'd expect.

In terms of the trampoline, when Obama said we would just have to get used to less growth and high unemployment, because that was the new norm, he was saying, “You’ve got to get used to less bounce in the trampoline; it’s just flatter now and doesn’t go up the way it used to. But imagine how bad it would be if we weren’t doing all the help we’re doing?”

Then Trump comes in and blows that theory away. “Get your hands off, and let’s see this thing fly again.”

One economic indicator is unemployment. This one has the L-shape upside down, since high unemployment is bad and low is good. You can see that the pre-recession low was 4.7 in November 2007. That level wasn’t seen again until November 2016, nine years later later (coincidentally coinciding with the end of the Obama presidency). Even that was somewhat distorted by people leaving the workforce because of chronic unemployment. So, even though there was some steady improvement following a high of 10.0 in October 2009, recovery to the beginning level was still 7 years away. A parabolic recovery (what happens naturally, without interference), should have been an approximate mirror image of the spike, which wouldn't have risen so high and could have recovered around June 2011. Obama's interference added on half a decade of additional pain.

F.R.E.D. unemployment data, found here

It wasn’t a chronic “new economy” to get used to; it was interference taking the energy out of the economy's natural ability to recover. Eventually, businesses and investors had to do what a trampoline jumper does: put some initial energy in again, and get a little going at a time, to try to overcome the interference. And the promise of less interference—lower taxes, less regulation—that accompanied the 2016 election campaign promises followed by policy changes led to economic soaring in the form of unemployment rates not seen in 50 years. And the newer unemployment numbers include hundreds of thousands of people returning to the workforce, which could have made unemployment numbers seem higher.

In other words, in Obama’s L-shaped recovery, unemployment was higher than statistics showed, and under Trump, unemployment is lower than statistics show.

We’ve seen this before. Remember the malaise speech by Jimmy Carter? We just have to get used to high unemployment, high inflation, and low economic growth, because that’s the new normal. But then Reagan came in and cut taxes. And then the economy took off again.

Back in 2011, 32 years after President Carter’s malaise speech, Laura Ingraham put together an audio montage of that speech and Obama’s, to emphasize the repetition. It’s as though they used the same speech writer. 

Why would we resign ourselves to malaise, when we know it’s the interference that’s causing it, and all we need to do is get government out of the way?

What did Obama do to interfere? He grew government, attempted a government takeover of entire sectors of the economy, such as healthcare—and, temporarily, the automotive industry. He raised taxes. He imposed regulations galore. He made planning difficult for businesses, whose plans could be swallowed up in a suddenly imposed new rule change.

He never saw a problem (often government-caused problems) that he didn’t want to "fix" with bigger government.

What did President Trump do to stop the interference? Nowhere near getting government totally out of its overreach habit. But what he has done so far is working:

·         Cut corporate taxes—down from highest rate in the world of 35% to a more middle-range 21%.

·         Cut tax rates for individuals and families (which could, however, expire in 2025).

·         Cut regulations. In his first year, regulatory activity decreased 74%.

o   Dodd-Frank rollbacks affected regional and community banks.

o   EPA regulations that harmed businesses were cut.

o   Departments of Education and Labor are doing some deregulating.

The Trump presidency brought a 74% drop in new regulations its first year.
Chart found here.

·        I saw a quote on Facebook today, along with a question about what we thought of it:

I submit that the government exists to provide for the needs of the people, and when it comes to choice between profits and property rights on the one hand and human welfare on the other, there should be no hesitation whatsoever in saying that we are going to place the human welfare consideration first and let property rights and financial interests fare as best they may.—J. S. Woodsworth

So I responded with the Spherical Model answer:

Government does not exist to provide the needs of the people. The proper role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. Attempts to do anything else will result in unintended consequences, usually the exact opposite of the stated goal.

If our government would resist interfering to “provide for the needs of the people,” or any other intention beyond its proper role, we’d have a lot more soaring economy, and a lot less thud and malaise.

I’m in favor of soaring.

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.

Emotion Doesn't Equal Caring

Emotion is part of being human. It tells us something about our environment, about what we’re experiencing. But it isn’t truth.

You can be angry for someone slighting you when that person had no intention to slight, wouldn’t have intentionally done such a thing, and in fact did nothing wrong, but you emotionally interpreted the slight based on some previous experience in your life or even someone else’s story.

Emotion is no basis for problem solving.

Problem solving happens another way:

·         You identify a problem.

·         You identify cause(s) for the problem.

·         You address the cause(s).

o   This will be based on whether the problem is within your circle of influence.

o   And will be based on whether the problem is solvable within your time frame (lifetime, possibly),

o   Or whether the problem is likely to resolve itself regardless of actions you (or others) take.

What will certainly not solve the problem:

·         Hysteria.

·         Haranguing others for not already having solved the problem.

·         Claiming righteousness based on your hyper-emotionalism about the issue.

I came across this post on a friend’s Facebook (a good friend, whose relationship I value and want to continue; she didn’t write this but only reposted). I’m not responding to that friend; I’m responding to the original poster, who is anonymous to me. This kind of thing is usually not worth the energy of a response. But I think it is a useful example of why emotion is standing between us and solutions to problems.

shared on a friend's Facebook page

So that you can see them clearly, here are the hysterical accusations in bullet-point format:

·       I don’t want concertgoers and schoolchildren to be routinely slaughtered in hailstorms of bullets. You don’t care.

·       I don’t want some kid’s first memory to be that of a jackbooted deportation force kicking down their door and ripping their father from them. You don’t care.

·       I don’t want a mother to bury her child solely because she couldn’t swing $600 for a two-pack of epipens. You don’t care.

·       Every day you wake up and deflect, but-what-about, twist, bend, contort, and echo whatever vile, clubfooted rationalization keeps you from having to admit that you’re, not just complicit in, but in fact actively facilitating this nightmare of a reality so many people are experiencing.

·       I care about other people. You do not.

Let me start with the first issue.

Violence

It is not routine for concertgoers or schoolchildren to attend those places and be “slaughtered in hailstorms of bullets.” There was one concert event, in Las Vegas in 2017, when a single deranged gunman set up a gun with a bump stock to shoot many bullets indiscriminately into the crowd. The perpetrator was killed. No such event has been repeated. That incident was an outlier, not routine.

There are more school shootings than any of us would like. We would ALL like that number to be zero. But routine bullet hailstorms?

There are 50.8 million school students this year in the US. I don’t know how many school campuses. Size varies. But if we generically say 500 per school, that’s 101,600 schools. What is the risk per child?

In 2018, there were 24 school shootings, resulting in 35 deaths, which included 28 students and 7 adults (teachers or other adult employees). Of those, all but 8 happened at the Parkland, Florida, shooting or  the Santa Fe, Texas, high school—just two incidents. That means the other 22 incidents resulted in a total of 8 deaths (not all of whom were students).

Of the remaining 101,576 schools, students remained safe from any shooting incident. And of 50.8 million students, 50,799,972 remained alive. An additional 72 students were injured but not killed, so that means 50,799,900 remained both alive and uninjured. As a percentage, that means 99.99980315% remained safe. 

graphic from here

Safe enough? Probably not. Let’s make our schools safer. (And consider homeschooling.)

There was an incident at a local high school—the school son Political Sphere attended before we withdrew him to homeschool. The kids in my Sunday School class experienced the lockdown and told us what they experienced. A student had been expelled, they thought for drug dealing or something similar. Someone had ratted him out, they said. He came to the school angry, with a gun. But someone had reported him to the police. I heard elsewhere later that it was the boy’s mother. The news said it was a parent, but was unclear whether it was his own parent. 

Officers were on the lookout for him when he showed up at the school. They chased him down, apprehended him, with no shots fired. That means even that young man was uninjured.

Twitter post from KHOU 11,
found here

Children and students had been somewhat traumatized. They had followed lockdown protocol—locked classroom doors, covered door windows, blocked doors with furniture, hid in somewhat barricaded area behind the teacher’s desk.  Within 45 minutes the lockdown was lifted. But students had texted their parents about what was happening, and a thousand parents showed up in cars within the hour to reunite with their children, so school had to be dispensed with for the rest of the day.

This kind of incident doesn’t show up in reports. Kids (and teachers, and parents) were upset, but the security system worked—including, and maybe especially, the parent sounding the alarm.

It may be that the perpetrator was seeking only a particular person—whoever he thought was the person who “ratted him out.” There might have been no plan to rain down a “hailstorm of bullets” on the rest of the students. Because he’s alive, maybe officials will be able to find out. (Not to minimize, but a "hailstorm" implies an automatic weapon. Those have been essentially illegal for decades and one has never been used in one of these mass shootings in my lifetime.)

I don’t know how he obtained the firearm—he wasn’t old enough to purchase one. But if he was a drug dealer, chances are high that he was also a gang member—an outlaw. He would not have been thwarted by a gun law that would have confiscated guns from all law-abiding persons. He had to be stopped from using the gun he was unlawfully wielding. Fortunately, others—good guys who had guns but didn’t end up using them—were able to stop him in time.

If the many times the Parkland perpetrator had stepped over the line had been noted, and followed up on, he might have been stopped in time.

I could turn things around on the emotion-laden accuser and say, “You want people more vulnerable, unable to defend themselves. And you want to do nothing about those who have shown a clear danger to society but are ignored, time and again, until they strike. You don’t care.”

But what I really want to say is, “If you’ll stop being hysterical long enough, and dispense with the name-calling, you might find out that cooler heads not only care, but are better at finding the solutions to the problems you claim to care about.”

Doing something might seem to an emotional non-thinker to mean making guns illegal. But people who really care look deeper, at things like mental illness, fatherless homes, and other evils of a savage society.

What does making guns illegal do? It leaves guns only in the hands of lawbreakers. It does nothing to address stopping lawbreakers from using guns; it only limits the law-abiding, making us defenseless.

People who really care do what it takes to restore civilization.

Immigration

Briefly to address the other accusations, what is a “jackboot,” anyway? According to George Orwell:

"I am still without any clear information as to what a jackboot is. It is a kind of boot that you put on when you want to behave tyrannically: that is as much as anyone seems to know."

So you’re using that language only to inflame, not to inform. When ICE targets illegals for deportation, they target violent offenders, although non-violent offenders are not exempt. They knock on the door. The occupant of the house can ask to see the warrant by having it slipped under the door. Refusal to open the door would not result in a kicked-down door unless there were other circumstances warranting quick action in order to secure the safety of people.

In other words, no jackbooted tyrants kick down doors and tear innocent illegals from the arms of their wailing children. Doesn’t happen. It’s just an image used to stir up hysteria.

If you care about the children of illegals, then you ought to care about enforcing laws that would discourage people from illegally bringing children into the country. Also, as with all countries, illegals with children are welcome to take those children with them back to their home countries.

What you really need to understand is what sovereignty is, and why countries have borders—all countries in the entire history of countries, not just ours. And then you need to see the video “Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs,” which demonstrates why it’s impossible to allow in enough immigrants to solve the world’s problems.

screenshot from "Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs"

We need to help people solve their problems in their home countries—by teaching them the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization, while giving charitably as we feel able. Or don’t you actually care?

Medical Costs

About epipens. That price is accurate—but not. As with many things medical in a non-transparent non-free-market sector of the economy, things are not always as first quoted. You can pay the full price, but almost no one does. Insurance drops the price down around $100, and depending on your plan could cost you nothing. For those without insurance that covers prescriptions, you can get a discount card that saves you more than 50%. And if you make less than $100,000 as a family, you can apply for assistance that might leave you paying zero. If you’re on Medicaid (low income, can’t afford coverage, so government pays it for you), you pay zero. 

So there isn’t a mother out there who has to bury her child solely because “she couldn’t swing $600 for a two-pack of epipens.” That’s a lie you tell to raise hysteria.

If what you’re saying is that we all should pay for each other’s medical care, and the only way you can persuade people to do that is to get them hysterical enough—ah, then we understand each other.

But if you actually want to lower costs and improve service in the medical sector, then get government out of the way and implement free-market solutions. For anything that doesn’t get solved that way, we have voluntary charity and philanthropy.

We have less charitable problem-solving than we need because of government interference in healthcare. And because you "caring people" and your government keep coercively taking from people while calling them cold-hearted—using their money while calling yourself charitable. I could say, “Why don’t you donate $600 a year for one stranger’s epipens? Don’t you care?” But that doesn’t get us very far.

You’ve said I, and people like me, deflect, “but-what-about” (which is not a verb that I understand), twist, bend, contort, and echo vile, clubfooted rationalizations (can rationalizations be vile and/or clubfooted, or are you using a vile metaphor that belittles actual people with a real physical condition?) And you’ve said I am complicit in—and not only that, I’m actively participating in—the nightmares so many people are experiencing.

Or, it could be that I’m not. But those accusations might actually apply to you. Because you think government is god, and the more power that god has, the more virtuous you feel in appeasing it. It’s not about caring at all; it’s about power.

But government isn’t god. It’s just a tool for us free people to use to protect our lives, our liberty, and our property. As we say here often:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

Any time we allow more power to fall into the hands of government than it should have, we are causing harm, rather than solving problems. If you were less hysterical, I could show you how to read and understand the Constitution, which lays out the best way in history for a people—any people—to deal with the “nightmares so many people are experiencing.”

The rules for freedom, prosperity, and civilization work every time they’re tried. Not instantaneously. And life in a fallen world still happens. But they work. And they include thoughts and prayers, which you obscenely shoved. 

When you calm down and get over the hysteria, maybe you can ask and find real answers from people who actually do care.