Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2011

“epistemicfail” calls on liberals to stop the evil Koch brothers

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

“epistemicfail” is trying to rally liberal and progressive forces to recognize and combat the evil that is embodied in the Koch brothers:

The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That’s small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren’t enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:

   1. decriminalize drugs,

   2. legalize gay marriage,

   3. repeal the Patriot Act,

   4. end the police state,

   5. cut defense spending.

Who hates the police? Only the criminals using drugs, amirite? We need the Patriot Act to allow government to go through our emails and tap our phones to catch people who smoke marijuana and put them in prison. Oh, it’s also good for terrorists.

Wikipedia shows Koch Family Foundations supporting causes like:

   1. CATO Institute

   2. Reason Foundation

   3. cancer research ($150 million to M.I.T. – STOP THEM! KEEP CANCER ALIVE!)

   4. ballet (because seriously: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Family_Foundations

The Kochs basically give a TON of money (millions of dollars) to the CATO Institute. Scott Walker, $40K? HAH! These CATO people are the REAL problem. They want to end the War on Drugs. Insane, right? We know that the War on Drugs keeps us SAFE from Mexicans and keeps all that violence on their side of the fence. More than 30,000 Mexicans killed as of December! Thank God Mexican lives don’t count as human lives. Our government is doing a good, no, a great job protecting us and seriously, who cares about brown people or should I say non-people? HAHAHA! Public unions are good, government is good, and government protects us from drugs and brown people. The Kochs want to end all that. Look, as far back as 1989 CATO has been trying to decriminalize drugs. Don’t worry, nobody listens to them because they are INSANE.

Let’s hope they heed his call.

February 24, 2011

They’re called “factoids”, not “facts”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

There’s a factoid in common circulation at the moment that, measured by SAT scores, the states that ban collective bargaining for teachers rank almost dead last, while Wisconsin ranks 2nd. Neal McCluskey explains that this is not particularly true:

Now, aside from the factoid, if true, providing no real insight into whether collective bargaining is good or bad for education — there are myriad variables at work other than collective bargaining, none of which does this control for — but the factoid itself is highly dubious. Again, it is hard to find the original source for this, but I looked up 2009 ACT and SAT state rankings, and at the very least it seems highly unlikely that Virginia ranks 44th out of all states. According to the ACT ranking, for instance, Virginia places 22nd, and on the SAT (assuming the linked to list is accurate — I’m doing this fast), it ranked 33rd. It’s hard to see how those would be combined for a 44th place overall finish.

How about the Wisconsin second place-finish? Well, that is accurate for the SAT, but notably only 5 percent of Wisconsin students took the SAT — a negligible rate. On the ACT, which is the main test taken in the Badger State, Wisconsin finished 13th — not bad, but hardly great.

So what does this tell you? Not that collective bargaining is educationally good or bad — like I said, you just can’t get there from here — but that you have to be very careful about your sources of information. Unfortunately, that seems especially true when you’re dealing with education.

Wisconsin’s proposed labour laws not uncommon

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:07

To read all the huffing and puffing, you might get the impression that if the proposed labour law changes be enacted, Wisconsin public workers would be uniquely disenfranchised. As Josh Barro points out, however, that’s not very accurate:

The truth, as laid out in a GAO report from 2002, is that there are already 12 states with no public employee collective bargaining law at all. In these states, state workers have no right to collective bargaining; local employees have collective bargaining only if local elected officials choose to grant it. (And in a few states, notably Virginia and North Carolina, state law forbids localities to allow collective bargaining.) Another 12 states grant collective bargaining rights only to certain classes of employees, such as only state workers or only teachers. Only 26 states have a collective bargaining law covering nearly all public workers.

So that means that the model from which Walker proposes to break, much to the horror and outrage of public worker unions and their backers, is a model only actually followed by 25 other states. And indeed, by retaining limited bargaining rights for most workers (and fuller rights for a few classes, including police and firefighters) Walker is going less far in restricting public-sector collective bargaining than a substantial number of states already do.

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

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