Posted at 12:24 am on July 30, 2010, by John W. Payne
There is a brief but important article in Wired on how regulations designed to protect small investors have made it impossible for them to seek out attractive investments in non-public companies, and it’s worth quoting extensively:
I get very tired of saying this, but it will never cease to be true, so I will keep at it: the government is the primary tool by which the rich and powerful preserve their riches and power, and whenever a law is passed for the purpose of helping the weakest in society, it will be manipulated to the advantage of the strongest. These problems are systemic and intractable because the powerful have the time and money to invest in keeping their stranglehold on the political system. No matter if they are monarchial, communistic, or democratic, governments all prop up some set of oligarchs. Link via Hit and Run. Filed under: Regulation, Unintended Consequences Comments: Comments Off on In Government, Every Day Is Opposite Day
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Posted at 9:20 pm on July 22, 2010, by David M. Brown
From the Times report on how many of the states, bribed, are embracing “National Standards for Schools” (maybe):
Two years in the making. The kids should learn to read and add and subtract. Also, by the ninth grade, I want them doing a précis of Chapter 11 of War and Peace. Of course, no “national standards” are necessary, no timeline. It’s okay to have the hodgepodge. It’s okay if some kids learn some things faster or slower than other kids. It’s okay if some kids and some teachers and some parents and some schools and some towns and some states do things differently from and perhaps better than other kids, teachers, parents, schools, towns and states; better with respect to some grand timeless objective scale of Means and Content of Learning and Teaching or at least better with respect to their own individual goals, abilities and situations. A country of non-slaves doesn’t need to be and perhaps would not even enjoy being subjugated to any “national standards for schools” either so generic as to be meaningless or so specific and totalitarian as to be obliterative of competition, innovation, and independent-thinking alternative ways of fostering the mental skills and moral values needed to understand that coercively imposed “national standards for schools” is a fascistic egalitarian crock. Filed under: Education, Nanny State Comments: Comments Off on The lesson designed: An example of the new national conformity educational standard
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