Category Archives: ethics

Who Restricts What in K-12 Education?

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Cogently put by Keri Ingraham, Discovery Institute’s American Center for Transforming Education Director in her Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

[M]ost “public” schools aren’t public at all.
In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have academic, behavioral or other admissions standards, but they don’t keep children out simply based on where they live.

There’s this bit, too:

The cost of tuition is the primary barrier to parents who want to enroll their children. Nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia—have enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law, thus the financial barrier for families to enroll their children in private schooling—whether traditional, online, hybrid or micro schools—is crumbling.

But the Left and their teacher unions coterie object to lowering those cost barriers, which would free children from the chain link fencing around cheap, but badly ineffective, public schools. It’s those schools with their heretofore captive populations, after all, where the unions hold sway and collect their vig.

The Left and those unions bleat about how a child’s education ought not be based on the child’s family’s ZIP code.

Yet here they are.

Wrong Way to Punish the FBI?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are concerned that doing away with FISA’s Section 702 would be the wrong way to punish the FBI.

I agree. But the editors are missing the point. They too narrowly justify 702 with this:

Congress created Section 702 after 9/11 to address intelligence-gathering gaps. It lets the government collect information without a warrant on non-US citizens living abroad.

That’s a worthy purpose; although the realization has demonstrated the difficulty of using the capability to good effect, and without abusing it. Or the impossibility of that with the current regime. The FBI has demonstrated that, as an institution, it cannot be trusted with 702 output, and the FISA Court has empirically demonstrated that cannot be trusted, either—not after squawking about FBI lies in the latter’s filings and then proceeding to accept unquestioningly further FBI blandishments and warrant applications.

Answering those deficiencies, though, is a separate matter from applying the appropriate responses to the FBI’s misbehaviors and the FISA Court’s yapping about those misbehaviors.

The FBI is irretrievably broken—its lies to a court are only part of the institution’s failures; its stonewalling of Congress under the risible rationalization that its internal procedure policies are superior to Congress’ constitutionally mandated oversight obligations are another—and it needs to be erased from our government altogether. That, not dealing with 702, is the correct response to the FBI’s institutional dishonesty.

The correct FISA-related action is to make the FISA Court a public proceeding court or itself eliminated as well. That’s not punishing anybody; that’s simply getting rid of the stain of a secretive Star Chamber and forcing “court” activities out into the sunlight, or bringing the warrant application/granting process back into a proper Article III court. Those courts, after all, are fully checked out on the process of keeping warrants sealed until execution.

Be More Obsequious

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Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is tired of the Republican Party.

I wish the Republican Party would be—somebody would take it back, that we’d have a real Republican Party.

The Progressive-Democratic Party position, as demonstrated by Pelosi, is that the Republican Party should go back to being satisfied with being the loyal opposition and stop being so uppity.

Unionized Laziness

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The United Auto Workers union is bent on being the epitome of it. UAW’s President Shawn Fain:

I think we should push a 32-hour work week.

In return for working less, the union is willing to settle for

  • Increased paid time off
  • Double-digit raises

In an ideal world, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, along with the other major car companies that assemble their cars in the US, will have the stones to tell the union to take a hike. American companies are not job welfare entities, they exist to produce goods and services for consumers and to make profits for their owners.

If the union wants to have a light work week and big pay, it should start its own car company and operate within those parameters.

The Quiet Part…

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…out loud, to coin a hackneyed, but cogent, phrase.

On the matter of Federal government industrial farm policy, the Biden administration has made itself crystalline. This is the backdrop:

In January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, followed by other trade pacts, which significantly increased commercial opportunities for American farmers. Those arrangements have borne great fruit: US agriculture exports stood at $196 billion in 2022, up from $62.8 billion in 1997.

President Joe Biden’s (D) National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, doesn’t like that, but in a recent speech, Sullivan went even more broad than just NAFTA, to openly disparage the general policy environment surrounding the development of that treaty. Sullivan lamented that this era of policy was one that

championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.

Because leaving more money in the hands of us ordinary citizens by taking less of it as taxes, by reducing our cost of doing business by getting regulations out of our way, is inherently bad, says this maven of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even more: public action must take precedence over private action—because, apparently, Government Knows Better than us ignorant ordinary citizens. And trade liberalization, which further reduces our costs, is a bad end in itself.

This demand that Government must control what our private enterprises produce is a well-understood and textbook…ideology…regarding the importance of government control over our lives. And it’s a central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party platform.