Dash of Calabash

Every so often, the idea of some sort of mandatory “national service” program comes up. The basic concept involves young Americans being drafted into something resembling a domestic Peace Corps for a short while after completing high school. In a recent OpinionJournal article, Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy wonders why proponents of this questionable scheme only target the youthful:

“Indeed, the moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of “national service.” Unlike the young, the elderly usually won’t have to postpone careers, marriage and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced-labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare–programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive.”

Tireless foe of the draft that he was, Milton Friedman would be proud. You can read the rest of Somin’s piece here.

…aka “The Boat,” isn’t proving much more successful than the notorious Superferry. One of the commuter ferries meant to carry passengers to and fro Barber’s Point and Downtown broke down this week. Grassroot’s own Cliff Slater recently wrote about The Boat on Hawaii Reporter, and isn’t too optimistic about its future:

“ Once more our elected officials are going to saddle us taxpayers with the upcoming city launch of a commuter ferry, TheBoat, to run from Barber’s Point to downtown to start today. Fortunately, they will only waste a few million dollars so it’s nothing to get too excited about.”

Read more here.

The Economist.com reports on a blow to Beijing’s night owls, bohemians, and landlords:

“Landlords and estate agents in Beijing are bristling over new police rules that forbid them from letting to tenants who lead ‘irregular lifestyles.’ The state-run China Daily reported on September 7th that the regulations affect not just would-be residents who lack legal identity documents or engage in illegal activities, but also those who ‘keep unsociable hours.’ The newspaper quoted a police official as saying the rules would improve the administration of the leasing market, safeguard public security and maintain social order.”

Hopefully this one will be less bloody. According to BBC News, French president Nicolas Sarkozy “has announced more than 22,000 job cuts in the civil service in order to reform the country’s bulging public sector. He said thousands of employees retiring next year would not be replaced….The move comes a day after Mr Sarkozy outlined plans to overhaul the pension benefits of 500,000 mainly public sector workers.”

Sarkozy was brutally frank (Franc?) about what he was trying to do:

“I want a public service that is smaller, better paid and with better career prospects… What I am proposing is a cultural revolution, a revolution for changing the way we think, for changing behaviour.”

Read more here.

Some polls show health care as the top domestic policy issue among the American electorate. It will surely be a major issue in the 2008 Presidential elections. According to Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, “Health care reform is hot this election season and Presidential hopefuls from both parties appear weekly with promises of reforms that will supposedly solve our system’s problems with universal coverage at affordable costs.”

Candidates probably won’t be looking too seriously at adopting the European single-payer model in the U.S., but they may find themselves looking a bit closer to home, namely Massachusetts. Should they? Ms. Pipes has her doubts:

“A recent overhaul in Massachusetts that expanded taxpayer-funded health insurance and requires individuals to purchase government-approved policies is proving particularly compelling to many, not the least because its architect, Mitt Romney, is a leading Republican candidate.

In reality, the Massachusetts mandate provides a poor model for the rest of the country - unless we are looking for an expensive expansion of government. It won’t achieve universal care. It has increased government spending, bureaucracy, and regulation. It most certainly will prompt increased taxes.”

Read the rest of her analysis here.

From Economist.com, an example of government inability to perform basic mathematics when budgets are involved:
“The office of Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, has released a preliminary budget of $5.6 billion for 2008—which would leave the city with a $218m funding gap. One reason for the shortfall is the slump in the property market, which has resulted in lower-than-expected tax revenues. City councillors fear this may force Mr Daley to renege on his re-election-campaign promise to stop increasing property taxes. Alternatively the city might close the gap with a combination of spending cuts, other tax increases (on cigarettes, perhaps) and layoffs of city employees.”

Merrill Matthews, Jr, Resident Scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) has created a 60 second sound byte on this topic. You can also read the text if you don’t want to use Windows Media Player or other program to play the file, but I recommend you do.

Use this link to view/hear the soundbyte.

Institute for Policy Innovation

by Dr. Matthew Ladner,While I’m more of a Robert Nozick guy, it is an interesting thought experiment to judge today’s public schools against the principles of John Rawls, an enormously influential liberal political philosopher.  

Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that we should shape public policy as if we were living behind a “veil of ignorance.” Behind the veil, no one would know their position in the forthcoming society, child of a billionaire or destitute. The veil, Rawls argues, creates an incentive to create a way out of the latter scenario. 

Pop quiz: You need to enroll your child in kindergarten. Would you choose a public elementary school in: 

A. The Roosevelt school district in South Phoenix;B. Inner-city Detroit;C. Camden, New Jersey;D. None of the above. 

Did you answer D? Rawls would say that if those schools aren’t good enough for your child in theory, then they aren’t good enough for children in practice.  

We have tried throwing money at dysfunctional schools, and now we need to try more effective reforms. Progressives that are serious about their values have plenty of moral reasons and piles of evidence to support school choice. Let’s put this debate behind us and get to work on the details.  

Matthew Ladner is vice-president for research at the Goldwater Institute.

Wal-Mart reports savings of $957 per person or $2,500 per family in 2005, up from $2,329.

Does that sound about right?  Read the whole article using the link below.

Wal-Mart Facts - American Families Now Save $2,500 a Year, Thanks to Wal-Mart

Opinion Journal’s ‘Best of the Web‘ brings us this rather horrifying tale from the dark woods of New York’s public school system:

“In April, reports New York’s Daily News, Mariya Fatima, a 14-year-old freshman at Jamaica High School in Queens, started vomiting during class. She was taken to the school’s office, where she waited for more than an hour and a half before someone called 911. It turned out she was having a stroke. She “lost use of her right hand and leg, [and] has had to relearn how to speak and walk since the stroke,” reports the News. “She’s receiving home instruction, but her reading skills have dropped to a fifth-grade level.”

Why the delay in calling 911, which, according to the paper, might “have made her paralysis worse”? Because two weeks earlier, Guy Venezia, the school’s assistant principal for security, had issued a directive: “No Deans are permitted to call 911 for any reason.”

The reason for this order is that in February Jamaica High “was placed on the city’s impact list of dangerous schools.” Venezia, who has since moved to a teaching job at another school, wanted to reduce the number of reported crimes at the school–not by cutting crime but by preventing administrators from reporting crime:

About a month after Mariya’s stroke, Venezia sent out another memo, this one announcing that deans “are sanctioned to make 911 calls.” But he also told the deans, “Do not use the word assault to describe a physical altercation.”

The apparent effort to drive down the crime stats failed, since the school was put on the state’s persistently dangerous list this summer and could face ramifications under the No Child Left Behind Act. . . .

Venezia declined to discuss the case but insisted, “I always place the welfare of the child above all other considerations.”

Well, that’s certainly reassuring.”