The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2018, 395 pages). Almost every book on education policy (and I have read a great many of them) springs from the set of assumptions that education “experts” embrace: that schooling builds our stock of knowledge and skill, that it needs to be done mainly by government, that it makes us better human beings, and that we owe our prosperity to our great “investment” in education, kindergarten through college. Among the tiny number of books that challenge the...
subsidies
TGIF: On Privilege
One of the most abused words in English is privilege. Observe how indiscriminately this word is spoken and written. For example, in some quarters, all straight white men -- without exception -- are said to be privileged, which seems absurd. Practically all we hear about these days is privilege, who has it and who doesn't. Well, not exactly -- because those who are said not to have it are often called "underprivileged." I think it was the late P. T. Bauer, the great free-market development economist, who pointed out how peculiar a word that is. Underprivileged? Wouldn't that mean...
To Attack the Root of Evil, Fix the Money
After the Consumer Price Index surged last year to its highest level since 1982, politicians are feeling pressure from constituents to do something about it. Last Monday, President Joe Biden announced $1 billion in grants, loans, and other assistance for small meat producers. Another costly government program will, supposedly, help tame rapidly rising beef and poultry costs. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has been on a tear lately, and there is a startling commonality between all these ideas: This is your brain on fiat monetary systems and central banking: price inflation is...
Biden’s Vaccine Mandate, and State Power Over Your Life
The Biden administration on Thursday announced sweeping new mandates. The new mandates require that all employers with more than one hundred workers require workers to be vaccinated or to test for the virus weekly. The mandates also require covid vaccinations for the 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid. Moreover, vaccines are mandated for all employees of the federal government’s executive branch, and for all contractors who do business with the federal government. There is no option to test out in these cases. The new mandates extend an...
News Roundup 11/2/20
US News A planned Wisconsin Foxconn factory, championed by Trump, has failed to produce the jobs it promised after receiving billions in subsidies. [Link] Trump approved the sale of F-22s to Israel. [Link] Legendary journalist Robert Fisk passed away at 74. [Link] Afghanistan A study looking at half of US spending in Afghanistan finds $19 billion in waste. [Link] The Afghan military reports killing 30 Taliban in recent battles. [Link] Nagorno-Karabakh The Azeri leader says his country will fight till the end to reclaim Nagorno-Karabakh. [Link] Africa The Navy Seals rescued a kidnapped...
8/14/20 Grant Smith on the Unscrupulous Dealings of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board
Grant Smith joins the show for another look at the Virginia Israel Advisory Board, a government entity associated with the state of Virginia that allocates taxpayer money to Israeli companies starting operations in the U.S. The projects, Smith explains, aren't viable on their own, or else they wouldn't need the massive subsidies from the public sector—but after getting the money, they can often put local competitors out of business because of their unnatural advantage. When these projects do fail, as illustrated by a recent biodiesel project, standard practice has been to forgive...
Could the Coronavirus Be Fatal for the EU?
Since the EU’s debt crisis over Greece in 2009 and the subsequent problems with Italy, Spain, and Portugal, eurozone banks have dedicated their balance sheets to financing government deficits. At a cost to the commercial banks’ own cash flows, negative deposit rates at the ECB have ensured that no material losses have arisen from holding short-term government bonds on their balance sheets. And the only other beneficiaries have been the large corporations which through bond issues have managed to lock in zero or even negative interest rates on their debt. Officially, this has not...
The Inherent Nature of Compulsory Schooling
For almost a century, all U.S. states have enforced compulsory education laws that permit the State to extort parents at gunpoint, taking their money and children away from them to fund and fill indoctrination camps for a third of the day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, and 12 to 13 years of their children’s formal development. The layperson or the pseudo-intellectual may believe that calling schools “indoctrination camps” seems quite farfetched, and it does until you realize the inherent nature of what schools are. Most schooling options look very similar to each other regardless of...
Something’s Fishy About AquaMaof’s “Project Jonah” in Virginia
If you drive just Southwest of Richlands, VA across the Clinch River, and toward the municipal wastewater treatment plant, you’ll quickly stumble into the territory of a secret Israeli project known only to a handful of Tazewell County and state government officials in Richmond. Nearly 120 acres of land on three sides of the plant have been quietly acquired by Dominion Aquaculture, LLC, the U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli fish farming company AquaMaof. The Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB)—the only state government agency that exists in the United States with the sole mission of...
Red Flags Is All They Will Ever See
With both the left and right calling for supposed “Red Flag Laws”, we have to take a step back and look at what the State is trying to accomplish here. Lindsey Graham said that “The Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.” The politicians say they are concerned with dangerous people having “easy” access to guns. That sounds good on the surface, but if you study history, you will find that psychology has been used in the past by authoritarians as a cudgeol. Politicians are no stranger to abusing psychiatry for their own ends. In the Soviet Union, it was regularly used to keep...