If You Can’t Save Everybody on a Sinking Ship, Don’t Try to Save Anybody

Protecting teachers’ unions over children, the US Secretary of Education rationalizes the Obama administration’s opposition to a successful school-vouchers program in our nation’s capital:

Secretary Arne Duncan said in an email through a Department of Education spokesman that while “this Administration is devoting more resources and supports more ambitious reform of our public school systems than any Administration in history,” he believes that “vouchers are not the solution to America’s educational challenges. Taking a tiny percentage of the kids out of the public school system and putting them in private schools is not the answer. We need to be more ambitious. We need to fix all of our schools.”

The disgracefully poor quality of our government-run system of primary education is the worst problem in our society. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of children from low-income families have their intellectual and productive potential stunted. Millions of other children receive crummy educations that scant basic skills while indulging politically-correct educationist fads.

Here’s an idea. Let’s take a chunk of the “stimulus” billions we’re pissing away on bailouts and make-work schemes and use it instead to buy out the teachers’ unions. Offer every teacher and union official a generous lump-sum early-retirement package, conditional on the disbandment of the unions and on a federal legislative prohibition against employee unionization in education through Grade 12. All of this would cost the taxpayers an enormous amount, but wouldn’t it be a much better use of public funds as compared to most of what we’re currently spending the money on?

Global Networking

Glenn brings us this sordid tale. Two men were recently arrested for plotting to perform terrorist attacks in Denmark.

It seems that they are still upset about that whole Muhammad cartoon flap that happened way back in 2005. Makes sense, as Muslim terrorists have a very long memory. They still cite the Crusades as a major reason for hating the West. If something done and gone for close to ten centuries still motivates them to attack people who had nothing whatsoever to do with those long ago events, then I suppose it seems logical that half a decade will seem like a mere tick of the clock. Maybe there will still be terrorists who have a yen to blow up cartoonists in the year 2300 CE or so, simply because of what those long dead scribblers dashed off in the opening years of the 21st Century.

But that is merely tangential to what I really want to discuss.

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Entrepreneurship in Decline?

Michael Malone has been writing about the technology industry, and particularly about Silicon Valley, for a couple of decades. This recent article is not very optimistic. Although Malone identifies several emerging technologies as having great potential, he fears that the basic mechanism by which new technologies are commercialized–the formation and growth of new enterprises–is badly broken.

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“Turning Japanese”

Christopher Wood puts the issue well in a WSJ op-ed piece:

With the U.S. government stepping in to keep markets from clearing, today’s U.S. economy in many ways resembles the post-bubble Japanese economy of the 1990s. Ultra-loose monetary policy and low demand for credit, combined with high unemployment and consumer deleveraging, could lead to a prolonged slump.
 
[…]
 
All of the above behavior invites legitimate comparisons with post-bubble Japan, where banks took years to be cleaned up as a result of regulatory forbearance. The same kind of forbearance is preventing America’s increasingly distressed commercial real-estate market from clearing. Similarly, as was the case with Japan, monetary-base growth has exploded in the U.S. over the past year courtesy of the Fed, while bank lending is declining. This is why there is every reason to fear that America is already in a Japanese-style liquidity trap.
 
[…]
 
This is why Wall Street should make the most of the rally in U.S. stocks while it lasts. The next bubble in asset markets will not be in the West but in emerging Asia, led by China. The irony is that the more anaemic the Western recovery proves to be, the longer it will take for Western interest rates to normalize and the bigger the resulting asset bubble in Asia. Emerging Asia, not the U.S. consumer, will be the prime beneficiary of the Fed’s easy money policy.

Japan is still in the economic doldrums. Despite recent electoral turnover, its leaders shows few signs of having the understanding or guts needed to encourage the liquidation of bad assets and freeing of mummified capital. Instead of needed tax cuts and structural reforms to improve business incentives, the government will bail out JAL. This is business as usual and predicts that the economic slowdown that first took hold in Japan in the early 1990s will continue. The USA isn’t Japan but our leaders are doing their best to copy Japan’s failed Keynesian fiscal regime. The outcome is likely to be similar.

The money manager Marc Faber had it exactly right when he was interviewed recently on CNBC: As American business de-leverages, government is levering up. If we continue down the path of increased debt, bailouts, and enormous public spending that drains the risk capital out of the productive sectors of the economy, the government bubble will eventually burst, and the resulting economic crisis will dwarf the current one.

You Really Want to Remind Us of That, John Kerry?

In an Afghanistan policy speech, [h/t Instapundit] John Kerry evokes a famous phrase from his infamous testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971.

David Sanger mentioned that in 1971 I asked the Foreign Relations Committee “how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

I think it relevant to the contemporary debate to recall what else he said in that testimony:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
 

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
 
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.[emp added]

Just to be clear, the Winter Soldier “investigation” was shortly proven to be wholly fraudulent.

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