Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2013

The state’s constant interest in what’s in your kid’s lunchbag

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

James Delingpole on the most recent “Nanny knows best” appointee hoping to dictate what the kids are going to eat for lunch:

“Mr Dimbleby”, it seems to me, is coming perilously close to suggesting that the decision as to what children eat at school should be a matter for the State rather than parents. Can he really believe this? Is there nothing about saying this sort of thing that makes him uneasy?

I mean sure, I agree with him on the principle that a good, well-prepared hot meal at lunchtime is probably more filling and nourishing than a packet-bread sandwich and a packet of crisps. Problem is, not all school canteens offer quite the same range and quality you might find in — oh, I don’t know, let’s pluck a random example from the air, shall we? — Bekynton.

Having put children through the state system myself I know whereof I speak. A new caterer arrived at my daughter’s primary school to much fanfare and for a while the food was great and most parents gratefully abandoned packed lunches (which, let me tell you, are a real hassle for a parent to prepare because they have to be done fresh in the morning when you’re already in a rush having breakfast and getting ready for the school run) and welcomed the new regime. But then standards began slipping to the point where my daughter (who, like a lot of children whose staple diet is gastro-porn TV programmes from the Great British Bake Off to Masterchef, genuinely cares about food) couldn’t eat the stuff any more. Again: is “Mr Dimbleby” seriously suggesting that schools should force children to go on eating in the canteen regardless of how disgusting they find the food?

You hear similar arguments from well-heeled progressive types on the school system generally. “If only public schools were abolished and all those pushy middle-class strivers were forced to put their children through the state system, standards would rise across the board.” Well, possibly. What would more likely happen is that all those scrubbed, diligent, nicely spoken, polite young poshos would be dragged down to the level of the lowest common denominator. And in any case it’s not an experiment which has any right being attempted anywhere in a Western notionally free-market economy. Why not? Because it’s illiberal bordering on the totalitarian, is why.

This is hardly a new topic … last year I said:

I remember what kind of crap my middle and high school cafeterias offered … and if I’d forgotten to bring a sandwich with me that day, going hungry always seemed like the better choice. The food on offer always seemed to manage the difficult stunt of being visually unappealing (sometimes being actually disgusting to look at), nutritionally inadequate, and either utterly flavourless (the better choice) or actively nasty. No wonder the best sellers in the cafeteria were the milk cartons (especially the chocolate milk), pop cans, potato chips, chocolate bars, and Vachon cakes (all of which were pre-packaged and relatively invulnerable to further processing).

June 28, 2013

QotD: In praise of Bastiat’s “What is seen and what is not seen”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

For me, [Bastiat’s “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen“] is the pinnacle of economic profundity. You can call it obvious. But when I first started learning economics at the age of 17, none of Bastiat was obvious. I was an honors student at a well-regarded California high school. Yet as far as I can remember, I had never heard any argument against the minimum wage, Social Security, or the FDA in my entire life.

Every teacher and book I ever encountered treated naive populism like the Law of Gravitation. Evil businesses aren’t paying workers enough? Raise the minimum wage; problem solved. The elderly are poor? Increase Social Security payments; problem solved. Evil businesses are selling people bad drugs? Impose more government regulation; problem solved.

If you favor these programs, you can call these arguments straw men. But I assure you: These “straw men” were never presented by opponents of these policies. On the contrary, these “straw men” were invariably presented by people who favored these policies. How is that possible? Because during my first 17 years of life, I never encountered an opponent of any of these policies! You might assume I was grew up in a weird Berkeley-esque leftist enclave, but bland Northridge, California hardly qualifies.

What was going on? The best explanation is pretty simple: I only heard straw man arguments in favor of populist policies because virtually everyone finds these straw man arguments pleasantly convincing. Regardless of the merits of the minimum wage, Social Security, and the FDA, economic illiteracy is the reason for their popularity. If someone like Bastiat convinced people that the pleasantly convincing arguments are inane, proponents would have to fall back on arguments that are intellectually better yet rhetorically inferior.

Bryan Caplan, “Who Loves Bastiat and Who Loves Him Not”, EconLog, 2012-08-15

June 15, 2013

Ontario’s abusive relationship with sex ed

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In Maclean’s, Emma Teitel talks about the failure of Ontario’s sex-ed classes to keep up with the times:

In the fifth grade, my friends and I had a special afternoon tradition. When school let out at 3:30, we would walk to Katherine’s house (a pseudonym), raid her fridge, go upstairs to her bedroom, lock the door and watch Internet pornography. Where were Katherine’s parents? They were at work. But it wouldn’t have mattered. When they were around, we just turned off the sound, or read erotic literature on a website called Kristen Archives. This is how we gained the indispensable knowledge that some women like to be ravished by farmhands, and others, by farm animals. The year was 1999. We had not yet sat through our first sex-ed class, but when we did, almost two years later, it was spectacularly disappointing. We had seen it all, and now we were shading in a diagram of the vas deferens.

Since our special after-school tradition came to an end over a decade ago, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Formspring, Instagram and Twitter have emerged. But against all logic, nothing has changed in the sex-ed business. Our century is literally on the cusp of puberty, and yet despite these enormous social and technological changes, we remain largely incapable of giving kids the resources they need to deal with their own puberty. I’m talking here, specifically, about the province of Ontario. As you read this, kids from Sarnia to Kingston — kids who, on average, have viewed Internet porn by age 11 — are probably shading in the exact same vas deferens diagram I did. There’s nothing wrong with the vas deferens — or so I’m told — but surely there is more to sexual education in the 21st century than anatomy and colouring. Ontario currently boasts the most out-of-date sex-ed curriculum in Canada. It was last revised in 1998, which means sex ed was out of date when I took it.

[. . .]

Kids shouldn’t watch porn, but they do. We can’t un-invent the Internet. And we can’t reverse puberty. Case in point: In 2001, one of the most determined voyeurs in our special after-school group skipped sex ed at the request of her religious father — for whom an hour of vas deferens shading was just too much to bear. He told her to go to the library instead, which was fine with her. Who, after all, could resist an afternoon with the Kristen Archives?

June 13, 2013

History without context

Filed under: Britain, Education, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:44

There’s a battle going on in Britain over the way history is taught in state schools:

Since the arrival of the national curriculum, public debate on school history has focused almost exclusively on what topics should be taught, namely whether the emphasis should be on British or world history. This debate has been fuelled by a steady stream of surveys revealing the ignorance of today’s school-leavers. One commissioned last summer by Lord Ashcroft found that while 92 per cent of 11- to 18-year-olds could identify the animated dog from the car insurance advertisements as Churchill, only 62 per cent could identify a photograph of Britain’s wartime prime minister. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Britain took place in the sky.

However, having become a history teacher at a state secondary school two years ago, I have realised that such debates miss the real problem. I was surprised to learn that since its inception the national curriculum has stipulated a sensible split of British and world history: every pupil between the ages of 11 and 14 is expected to study a chronological sweep of British history from 1066 to the present day. To understand the degradation of history teaching, one has to focus not on what history is taught, but how it is taught.

[. . .]

The main tenet of a child-centred view of history teaching is the idea that pupils should not be “passive” recipients of a teacher’s knowledge, but “active” individuals empowered to find things out for themselves. As a result, “chalk and talk” teaching from the front is heavily discouraged. After a senior member of staff observed one of my lessons, I was told that my role was to be the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”.

Instead of learning through listening to teachers or reading books, pupils are expected to do so through projects. It did not take me long to work out why pupils are so ignorant of British history, despite spending over a year studying it (as laid down by the national curriculum). To study the Norman Conquest, pupils would re-enact the Battle of Hastings in the playground, conduct a classroom survey to create their own Domesday Book, and make motte-and-bailey castles out of cereal boxes. Medieval England would be studied through acting out the death of Thomas Becket, and creating a boardgame to cover life as a medieval peasant. For the Industrial Revolution, pupils pitched inventions to Dragons’ Den and lessons on the British Empire culminated in the design of a commemorative plate showing whether it was or was not a “force for good”.

Such tasks allow pupils to learn about history in an enjoyable and engaging way — or so the theory goes. In reality, all content and understanding of the past is sucked out, and the classroom begins to resemble the playground. An unfortunate side-effect is that pupils are frequently confused by the inevitable anachronisms involved in making history “relevant”. “Sir, how many Victorians would have had a TV?” I was asked. Imaginative tasks and projects can be excellent supplements to a history lesson, but when they become the mainstay of classroom activity, the consequences are disastrous.

Proponents of child-centred education are impervious to such criticism because progressive teachers have long denied the importance of knowledge in the first place. Instead, skills are seen as paramount. When I first visited my current school, the assistant head asked me how I intended to prepare for my new career. I responded that I was going to spend a few weeks boning up on my general historical knowledge. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “History is a skills-based curriculum. You should really be able to teach it without knowing anything at all.”

Update: Of course, the same issue with history appears in other countries too:

“Back to the hole in the boat: America is losing its historic literacy. Recently some 556 seniors surveyed at 55 of the nation’s top colleges — only 60 percent placed the American Civil War in the correct half of the 19th century. Only 34 percent identified George Washington as the American general at the Battle of Yorktown. Thirty-four percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant. At 78 percent of the institutions polled, no history whatsoever was required in the undergraduate program. Historian David McCullough said, “We are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate.”

May 9, 2013

This is water

Filed under: Education, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:51

In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.

We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested. However, we encourage everyone to seek out the full speech (because, in this case, the book is definitely better than the movie).
-The Glossary

Read the full speech here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

H/T to ESR for the link.

April 16, 2013

New study shows students of online courses learn as much as in traditional classes

Filed under: Education, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:03

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok summarizes the findings from a recent large study:

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!

Bowen et al. caution that their results on cost savings are speculative and it is true that they do not include the fixed costs of creating the course (either the online course or the traditional course) so these cost savings should be thought of as annual savings in steady-state equilibrium. The main reason these results are speculative, however, is that Bowen et al. only considered cost savings from faculty compensation. Long-run cost reductions from space savings may be even more significant, as the authors acknowledge.

The university model we’ve known for centuries is long overdue for change. However, remember that just about every new communication technology was touted as being “revolutionary” for education: the printing press, radio, movies, TV, and now online courses. The traditional university model has survived each new technological breakthrough relatively unscathed.

April 8, 2013

“‘Cash for sick days’ doesn’t have the same populist appeal”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

In the Globe and Mail, Barrie McKenna explains why there’s a widening fairness gap between public employees and everyone else:

The seven-month-long dispute [between the Ontario government and public school teachers] has exposed something much more disquieting: the widening fairness gap in the Canadian workplace. Thousands of public sector workers enjoy high salaries, guaranteed pensions and special perks that other Canadians will never get, regardless of how long or hard they work.

Public sector workers argue they’ve earned these gains through decades of tough negotiations with employers. And once promised, governments should not unilaterally revoke them. Fair enough. But it’s not an argument that’s likely to sway many Canadians, who exist in a parallel universe.

The ability to bank and monetize sick days is virtually unheard of in the private sector. Less than 3 per cent of the 1,336 private sector plans in Mercer Canada Ltd.’s client database allow employees to bank sick days, according to figures supplied to The Globe and Mail. That compares to 28 per cent of the 407 government plans tracked by the benefits consultant.

No wonder Ontario teachers chanted “respect teachers, respect collective bargaining,” while they suspended school sports, plays and other extracurricular activities for millions of students in recent months. “Cash for sick days” doesn’t have the same populist appeal.

April 3, 2013

Parenting classes are a waste of time and money

Filed under: Education, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Elizabeth and I took parenting classes, as neither of us had much experience of dealing with infants or small children before our son was born. Although the instructor was good at being re-assuring that we’d do fine as parents, almost none of the “skills” we were taught were actually of much use after the baby arrived. Since those early-90’s days, parenting courses have become even more common, but as Frank Furedi points out, no more relevant to the actual needs of parents and their newborns:

The parenting programmes promoted by government are based on a mixture of prejudice and the pseudoscience of so-called parenting research. Such ‘research’ is underpinned by a fundamental transformation in the meaning of parenting, which has been turned from a relationship into a skill. The core assumption in the government’s proposal for parenting classes is that childrearing consists of a set of practices that need to be learned by mothers and fathers. These practices are depicted as skills which can be taught by those who have the requisite professional qualifications.

No one could dispute that childrearing is something that is learned by mothers and fathers. Every human relationship involves a continual process of learning and gaining an understanding of the other person. Parents need to learn how to engage with the imagination of their child, how to stimulate her and when and how to restrain her from doing something harmful. Successful parents learn on the job. However, the really useful lessons we are learning have little to do with abstract skills, but rather are about understanding the relationship we have with our children.

The question is not whether parenting has to be learned, but whether it can be taught. Not everything that has to be learned can be taught. Parenting cannot be taught because it is about the forging and managing of an intimate relationship. And it is through the conduct of that relationship that people develop the insights and lessons suitable to their lives and conditions. One reason why professional intervention into family life is unlikely to have beneficial results is because each relationship contains something unique, which is only grasped by those involved in it.

[. . .]

However, the project of transforming parenting into a skill does have negative and potentially harmful consequences. When human relationships are recast as skills to be managed by professional trainers something very important happens in the way we conduct our personal affairs. As I argue in my study Paranoid Parenting such policy interventions cultivate a kind of learned helplessness among parents. Through exaggerating the complexity of child-rearing, parenting experts contribute to the eroding self-reliance of modern mums and dads. Inevitably, the principal outcome of such interventions is to distract parents from learning from their own experience. And yet learning from experience is the key to developing the confidence for making those crucial judgment calls that confronts parents on a daily basis.

March 24, 2013

Maclean’s agrees that Canada doesn’t need the UN’s flattery

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

Canada recently dropped out of the top ten in a UN beauty contest that we once “won” seven years in a row. At the time, Canadian politicians used that accolade as a regular talking point. Now, a bit to my surprise, the media hasn’t been using the “loss” as a stick to incessantly beat the government with. How unexpectedly mature of them:

Canadians with a penchant for lists will recall that in 1994 we began a record stint of seven straight years atop the United Nations Human Development Index. Meant to provide an international comparison of living standards, our dominance on this global leader board was seen as tangible proof Canada was the best country in the world. The annual report regularly garnered substantial media attention and sparked plenty of national braggadocio. Prime minister Jean Chrétien, in particular, made it a frequent talking point.

No longer. We haven’t topped the rankings since 2000. Current leader Norway now boasts more first-place finishes than we do. (Although our Nordic friends haven’t yet won seven in a row.) In fact this year marks the first time Canada has failed to place in the top 10. The most recent edition, released last week, has us at a humbling 11th — a whisker above South Korea. Ireland beat us.

[. . .]

In 1992 the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency stripped Canada’s federal foreign debt of its coveted AAA rating, thanks to an endless stream of government deficits. In January 1995 the Wall Street Journal measured Canada for a barrel suit, declaring us to be “an honorary member of the Third World” in its now-legendary “Bankrupt Canada” editorial. Our debt-to-GDP ratio hit a peak of 68 per cent that year. The loonie was worth about US$0.72, and would bottom out at US$0.62 before it was done falling.

Since then, of course, Canada’s financial turnaround has become a totem for countries around the world struggling with the after-effects of the Great Recession. Government finances are in better shape than most and our dollar at par. Canada’s reliance on natural resources, once considered a retrograde habit, has played a large role in allowing our economy to weather the storm. Our banking system is an international paragon of virtue; we’re even exporting central bankers. Plus Canada has adopted a more self-confident stance on foreign policy, replacing our old reputation as a meek and mild peacekeeper with a more authoritative voice.

March 19, 2013

QotD: “It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Free speech was alive and well at the University of Toronto last night, but in that moment I’d have welcomed its death with open arms.

It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts. And Dr. Fiamengo herself, was, standing at that podium, a buoy of relative reason in a sea of everything but. “Any movement can attract hysterical detraction and unsavoury allies,” she would tell me over the phone the next morning. “That is the risk one runs.” She’s right. Take this little Facebook diatribe from an active member of A Voice for Men, one of the men’s rights groups who support her.

    There has never been a great female composer. Throughout history there has been plenty of privileged woman, who have had access to pianos, and violins, yet somehow we are expected to believe that men have somehow stopped them for being composers? Woman have the big lovely eyes, big tits, but mean [I think he meant “men”] are far more beautiful, they are more beautiful where it counts. In their wonderful creative souls.

Unfortunately, though, the other side is no more intelligent. They just use bigger words.

Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific – only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.

Slogans don’t make scholarship and being self-righteous does not make you right.

Emma Teitel, “Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover”, Maclean’s, 2013-03-11

March 14, 2013

Toronto school board deploys police to intimidate bloggers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Arnie Lemaire, who blogs at Blazing Cat Fur is becoming a bother to the great and the good at the Toronto District School Board. After a recent comment on his blog, the TDSB sent police officers to his door:

Can writing a sarcastic but clearly tame blog comment really land two cops at your doorstep?

It happened to Blazingcatfur blogger Arnie Lemaire Wednesday for musing “OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective.”

He’s, quite rightfully, upset about it.

But, often critical of the Toronto District School Board and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Lemaire said he will not back down from efforts to “intimidate” him.

“Dear TDSB, You Can’t Silence Me,” was a headline on the blazingcatfur.blogspot in response.

But, what they clearly can do, is bring in the police to investigate.

In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany.

Update: As Mark Steyn puts it “Nobody Expects the Toronto District School Board Inquisition…“

It seems a wee bit over-sensitive for a school board that promotes murderous goons like Che Guevara and cop-killers like the Black Panthers as role models to its young charges to get its knickers in a twist over a blog post. But, of course, for leftie social engineers, the glamor of the revolutionary aesthetic is mostly a useful cover for inculcating a bovine, unquestioning statist compliance from which no deviation is permitted. There was barely any pretense by the cops that there was a legal justification for what happened yesterday; it was just a friendly warning: “Nice blog ya got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.“

One of the most disquieting trends in western Europe is the state’s increasingly open intimidation of those who dissent from the official ideology. Sad to see it on this side of the Atlantic.

March 4, 2013

Florida student punished for taking part in incident with a firearm

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

His participation in the incident was to wrestle the loaded revolver out of the hands of the football player who was threatening to shoot another player:

A 16-year-old Cypress Lake High School student, who wrestled a loaded revolver away from a teen threatening to shoot, is being punished.

The student grappled the gun away from the 15-year-old suspect on the bus ride home Tuesday after witnesses say he aimed the weapon point blank at another student and threatened to shoot him.

The student, who Fox 4 has agreed not to identify and distort his voice because he fears for his safety, says there’s “no doubt” he saved a life by disarming the gunman. And for that he was suspended for three days.

[. . .]

The teen we spoke to and authorities both confirm the Revolver was loaded. According to the arrest report the suspect, who Fox 4 is not naming because he is a minor, was “pointing the gun directly” at another student and “threatening to shoot him.”

That’s when the student we spoke with says he and others tackled the teen and wrestled away the gun. The next day the school slapped him with a three day suspension.

“It’s dumb,” he said. “How they going to suspend me for doing the right thing?”

According to the referral, he was suspended for being part of an “incident” where a weapon was present and given an “emergency suspension.”

“If they wouldn’t’ve did what they had to do on that bus,” the teen’s mother said, “I think there would have been a lot of fatalities.”

H/T to Charles Oliver for the link.

February 25, 2013

Worst. Student movement. Ever.

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

The FEUQ speeds into the global lead for worst student movement ever:

I’m trying to imagine a worse excuse for a student movement than the one Quebec has at the moment; and I have to say that I’m not sure I can.

I mean, sure, the Canadian Federation of Students has talked some awful crap about how reducing net tuition for poor students is unacceptable, unless richer kids get a break too — really ludicrous stuff, which objectively favours richer students over poorer ones. But so far as I know, they’ve never actively aided and abetted a government that was intent on making universities poorer.

But that’s what FEUQ, and the rest of the Quebec student movement, seem to be doing right now.

[. . .]

FEUQ’s train of thought seems to run something like this: 1) Universities want more money; 2) the provincial government is broke; 3) therefore, new money can only come out of tuition fees; 4) therefore, we’d better oppose this. The problem is, if you concede point 2 you’re more or less screwed in terms of asking something for yourself, like a more generous student aid system (which Quebec certainly needs, at least for dependent students). And you’ve gone and hacked-off one of your most natural allies as far as higher education is concerned.

H/T to Stephen Gordon for the link.

February 2, 2013

“The welfare state we have is excellent in most ways. We only have this little problem. We can’t afford it.”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Based on this report in The Economist, we really should strive to be more like Sweden, and not for the reasons most Canadians would expect:

Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. This year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%.

Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period. This allowed a country with a small, open economy to recover quickly from the financial storm of 2007-08. Sweden has also put its pension system on a sound foundation, replacing a defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution one and making automatic adjustments for longer life expectancy.

Most daringly, it has introduced a universal system of school vouchers and invited private schools to compete with public ones. Private companies also vie with each other to provide state-funded health services and care for the elderly. Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who lives in America, hopes that Sweden is pioneering “a new conservative model”; Brian Palmer, an American anthropologist who lives in Sweden, worries that it is turning into “the United States of Swedeamerica”.

[. . .]

This is not to say that the Nordics are shredding their old model. They continue to pride themselves on the generosity of their welfare states. About 30% of their labour force works in the public sector, twice the average in the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation, a rich-country think-tank. They continue to believe in combining open economies with public investment in human capital. But the new Nordic model begins with the individual rather than the state. It begins with fiscal responsibility rather than pump-priming: all four Nordic countries have AAA ratings and debt loads significantly below the euro-zone average. It begins with choice and competition rather than paternalism and planning. The economic-freedom index of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, shows Sweden and Finland catching up with the United States (see chart). The leftward lurch has been reversed: rather than extending the state into the market, the Nordics are extending the market into the state.

Why are the Nordic countries doing this? The obvious answer is that they have reached the limits of big government. “The welfare state we have is excellent in most ways,” says Gunnar Viby Mogensen, a Danish historian. “We only have this little problem. We can’t afford it.” The economic storms that shook all the Nordic countries in the early 1990s provided a foretaste of what would happen if they failed to get their affairs in order.

January 20, 2013

Pennsylvania quashes latest terror threat

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

This story is not taken from the pages of The Onion:

The incident occurred Jan. 10 while the girl was waiting in line for a school bus, said Robin Ficker, the Maryland lawyer retained by the girl’s family. He would not identify the girl or her parents, but gave this version of events:

Talking with a friend, the girl said something to the effect “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself” in reference to the device that shoots out bubbles. The girl did not have the bubble gun with her and has never shot a real gun in her life, Ficker said.

Elementary school officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girls the next day, Fickler said. He said the girl did not have a parent present during the 30 minutes of questioning.

The result, he said, was that the student was labeled a “terrorist threat” and suspended for 10 days, Ficker said. The school also required her to be evaluated by a psychologist, Ficker said.

This designated terrorist is five.

H/T to Dan Mitchell for the link.

We also need to protect our kids from being exposed to bureaucrats who are jaw-droppingly stupid.

Actually, WordPress is telling me that “droppingly” isn’t a word. So maybe instead we should take Instapundit’s advice and reward these idiot officials with some tar and feathers.

And I hope the tattle-tale punk from the bus stop who ratted out the little girls is condemned to some sort of grade-school purgatory featuring never-ending wedgies.

On a more serious note, I hope the parents sue the you-know-what out of the school.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress