Posted on 08/05/2013 9:26:13 AM PDT by jazusamo
It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new "solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
San Francisco and New York are both plagued with large "homeless" populations today, largely as a result of previous housing "reforms" that made housing more expensive, and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built.
The solution? Spend more of the taxpayers' money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for more people.
Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values.
Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students who are slower learners.
By federal law, even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into classes for other students — often in disregard of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
In 2010, Barack Obama called for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top,”
which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”
which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”
which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”
which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,
which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
ObamaCare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health insurance companies.
Sowell has a rare—very rare—talent for going directly to the heart of the matter and stating the facts in a few words.
Classic Sowell wisdom.
Excellent post! Thanks.
The theme of his The Vision of the Anointed in a nutshell. If you haven’t read that book, go do so.
How much of ‘homelessness’ is the result of expensive housing vs drug addiction, mental illness, lifestyle choice, etc?
Also, the smart ones are probably the ones less likely to buy the indoctrination without question, plus indoctrination is inherently boring, which is liable to get the smart kids labelled behavioral problems again. Shoot, just the saving in Ritalin alone would probably pay for the separate classes.....or, the smart kids might prefer to just do away with the NEA drone, who's of limited value anyway, and be mostly self-directed. Course, I realize everything I just said is anathema to edumacators (which just goes to show I'm probably right).
Here's an OLD solution...."Follow the 10 Commandments!!!"
Sixty years ago, we had alcoholics. We also had places where the alcoholic could get a bed to sleep in cheaply. They were called flop houses and "single room occupancy hotels".
Then housing regulations outlawed them, and the people who could have slept in a flophouse for what he could beg on the street, had to live on the street.
Reminds me of when Ross Perot was running against Bill Clinton, whose experience was that he had been Governor of Arkansas. Perot said, "That's like being manager of a WalMart." LOL!!
I loved that guy, and his illustrated charts. Such a shame he could not put together a good team. Everything might have been different today.
bttt
Many people say:
Ross Perot ran with Bill Clinton
in order to get the contract for
the computer systems for HilleryCare.
Ditto
Wow. Never heard THAT before. You never know; but I doubt it.
One of the things I remember so clearly is his outrage that "everything is for sale in America" -- he was decrying the lack of integrity and honor, and he also said, IIRC, something along the lines that America was becoming "not a culture, but merely an economy."
And don't forget that the lying and trashing of Republican candidates has been going on for my entire lifetime -- since Eisenhower -- and probably before that.
Dr. Sowell has effectively ripped the sheets off the stinkin’ commie rats’ agenda.
We’re all familiar with their “break something and then leap in and claim it’s their way or the highway to fix it” scheme.
As Dr. Sowell says, it’s never fixed, it’s just a way to churn money out of the American people. It’s a scam.
Absolutely my FRiend, throwing money at all these programs is the politicians way of buying votes.
The term he’s looking for is “polypragmonocracy”: government of busybodies.
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