Rounding out the news I read this morning, Mr. Pat Buchanan wrote an article on the debt forgiveness proposal that bears commenting on.[1] In a couple respects he is correct. He is correct that the clause talking about the need to take anti-corruption measures is a joke. It means that either no debt relief will occur, or that no reforms will. He is also right when he says that we the tax payer will ultimately bear the burden for this.

But he utterly ignores the fact that we would be doing so anyway. These debts are beyond the resources of the current, admittedly corrupt, governments to pay. With the current financial structure, the presence of these bad loans would have served as reason to further prop up these governments, lest they get overthrown and the new government not agree to honor the debts. Further, for the most part, only interest was being paid anyway, the debt was not decreasing.

While it would be nice to see the IMF and the World Bank held accountable for these loans, it is useless to say that it should happen just as it would to “any U.S. government bank” for two reasons. One, there ARE no “U.S. government banks. The Federal Reserve bank has a U.S. mandated monopoly on the production of money, and uses government resources to do so, but it is a private bank. As are all the other banks. Secondly, only small banks are allowed to fail anyway. Bigger banks get rescued by the Federal Reserve or by Congress directly just as big corporations such as Lockheed or United Air have been. This is exactly the same thing.

It is also the right thing to do. Yes, these loans should never have existed. And yes, the governments are corrupt. But that does not excuse us crippling any chance these countries have for even minuscule advancement under the heavy debt burden that currently exists. If we do not accept what are ultimately our own mistakes (through our elected and appointed officials), these countries will never have a chance to give their people a decent life. And that alone tells you what the right course of action is. It is our fault they have these loans, our fault that the interest cripples them. It is thus ours to bear the default on them.

[1] http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44789

Ms. Phyllis Schlafly has some interesting facts on the way the courts have furthered the destruction of the concept of fatherhood in our society.[1] You see a similar dynamic in the areas of sexual assault and domestic violence: you are considered guilty from the moment the charge comes out. You are considered guilty even if found innocent. Your attempts to defend yourself will just earn you greater enmity from society, from your persecutors, and from the legal system. Both crimes are real. Both deserve severe punishment. But we have forgotten that not all men accused are guilty. We have even forgotten that not all men are even accused of them.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20050613.shtml

Mr. Robert Novak provides some details on the Kyoto accords that I had not previously heard.[1] I have been against this treaty simply because I think it is utterly misguided. From what I gather, it does not seem that we can undo the damage of global warming that we have done so far, whatever amount of damage is our fault. The push then seems to be couching a desire to minimize future damage in terms of preventing inevitable catastrophe. This seems wrong-headed. If the catastrophe is coming, we should push forward as best we can to have the technology on hand to survive it.

Mr. Novak asserts that this treaty is about more than environmentalism however. If he is right, it is also an explicit attempt to use environmentalism to cause Americans to accept a decrease in our standard of living. This causes a blip in my radar screen because it was one of the things that was predicted in the Federal Reserve book that I never finished. It had some kooky Lockness Monster type name. Anyway, one of the ideas of the part of the book that I did read was that various situations would be used not to raise the third world up to first world lifestyles, but to level the playing field by bring down the average. Were this to actually happen, it would not surprise me to see it coming with heavy European and Chinese pressures, as these are socialist and communist governments already. I am not saying that the book is right, just that this sort of tendency bears watching.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20050613.shtml

Mr. Jeff Jacoby is an idealist. He thinks that the states might be persuaded to give up their right to indoctrinate the majority of children for the first thirteen years of their education.[1] He is absolutely right, the public school model is not the only model that would ensure the education of our children. If we privatized the public school systems and repealed the taxes that pay for them (primarily the property tax), we would all have enough money to pay for their schooling. If someone worries that this might not be enough, we can provide further tax credits for it as well. And of course religious schools could provide scholarships, and so on.

Further, the public schools currently get several times the amount of money per student that the Catholic schools do, and yet no one can seriously say that the Catholic school systems do worse at providing education. In fact, many parents say they do a better job. This leads to an interesting line of thought: where does all that extra money go? Well, some of it goes to higher salaries for teachers, the fact that you take a pay cut choosing to work in a Catholic school is well known. But some of it also goes to the higher levels of beurocracy in the public school system, the teachers’ union, so on. All fat that could be cut from their budget to make the schools more competative. This is the sort of thing that has led to the success of so called “charter schools” in some school districts, where a private firm gets a contract to run a school as long as they can improve the results the school gets on the SOLs (I might be somewhat inacurate here defining charter schools. I do not know too much about them).

Another important point to remember is that universal public schooling is a relatively recent invention. One of the reasons that you see the use of public funds to provide bus service to Catholic schools in some north eastern states is because these schools were the “public” school system for a long time, until the states had the political preasure to build their own. In the South on the other hand, you did not see this development of schools. The richer families home schooled, and the poorer simply did not learn much. As a result you had the rise of the white cracker subculture in the south, that closely mirrors the black culture today[2]. Going into the Civil War then, you see that the illiteracy rate in the south was very high, much higher than in the north, though neither had what we would understand today as public schooling.

But the failure of the south to educate really does not argue for the existance of public schooling. Rather, it speaks to the simple fact that education was widely believed to be unnecessary in the society constructed in the south. The sustinence farmers certainly did not need it, and the plantations needed only a few who could read and write. Similarly, in the small town, one’s word was either good or not, reguardless of the form an agreement took, and everyone knew it.

On the other hand, the failure of the public school system to adequately educate is pertinent. Illiteracy is still higher than it should be, especially amoung inner city students. Even where literacy exists, understanding of history, math, and science often lags. Critical thinking is nearly universally unknonw. We have gone from a culture that nearly requires a highschool diploma to succeed, to one that nearly requires a college dilopma to succeed. From men being ready to take on responsibility at 18 and 20, to men still in some sort of extended adolecence nearly till 30, assuming they ever grow up and embrase responsibility. Clearly we are failing. It should then be just as clear that the system does not work, and simply throwing more money at it, to do the same thing, will not work.

Still, common sense tells us that this will not happen. The teachers’ union is one of the more effective lobbying efforts on the left, and it would be political suicide to try to privatize education. Further, even were a state to try to do so, the federal laws would likely “preempt” and require state spending on it anyway. The political cost then, in terms of careers burned, for something with no grassroots preasure, is prohibitively high, and this post, like Mr. Jacoby’s column, is very nearly a waste of space.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/jj20050613.shtml
[2] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050610.shtml