Money, ideology, populism,
apathy descend upon Ken Clark
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THE COLLARD Kitchen was steaming Tuesday night, and I could hardly hear above the sickly hum of the air conditioning. S.C. Rep. Ken Clark was talking his heart out to a community meeting of 11 people, not counting his wife and campaign manager.
One of the finest, smartest and hardest-working members of the Legislature is fighting for his political life against a well-funded challenger who seems to have decided to run on a mere whim.
Kit Spires, a Gaston pharmacist (below, at right), is not going to like that characterization, and I don’t blame him. He seems to be a nice man, and he’s sincere. I spoke to him for this column longer than I did to Mr. Clark, and I like him. I can see why the folks he provides with medicine like him, too.
But I’ve covered politics since the 1970s, and I can’t remember a more lopsided match. Ask both
men about any issue you choose, and it is as bright, as sharp, as clear as the edge of a diamond that Ken Clark is a better representative than Kit Spires is prepared to be.
But Mr. Spires got 45 percent of the vote June 13 to Rep. Clark’s 35 percent. The third-place finisher has thrown his support to Mr. Spires.
"Clark’s toast," says one local official.
If that’s true, its a dramatic illustration of the corrosive effects of three things that are eating the heart out of American politics:
- Money. People who see South Carolina as a guinea pig for their project to defund government across the country have sent out 13 mailings attacking him or supporting his opponent. The attacks are off-the-shelf garbage that read like a transcript of those ideological shouting matches on cable TV. "Whats that smell, you ask? Oh, that’s just Rep. Ken Clark burning through your hard earned tax dollars." No specifics, because they dont exist. I am not making this up. The mailings are actually that stupid.
- Ideology. The money comes from rich people who have developed a religion around the idea that they should pay less in taxes, and they don’t give a damn what the money goes to pay for. Mr. Clark gets up every morning and sees problems in this poor state of ours, and he works obsessively to find sensible, cost-effective ways to solve them. The ideologues write checks to pay others to rid them of people like Mr. Clark. (And the money goes to more than mailings. As Mr. Clark noted, Mr. Spires was able to afford signs twice as large as his — see below — and more of them.)
- Populist apathy. (Or should it be populism and apathy?) This world is rapidly becoming one in which far too few care about anything that happens beyond the ends of their own driveways. Such attitudes have an alarming imperviousness to Mr. Clark’s 32 years in the U.S. Navy, or his intense service since then on school board and in the House.
Why "populist"? Mr. Clark is a highly intelligent man who does not hide his light. He came up in a system in which capable men made decisions and saw that things got done. Mr. Spires is unassuming, and seems to have rubbed far fewer people the wrong way. Nowadays, that plays better than competence.
Mr. Spires burns less brightly. He says he’ll take an interest in whatever he hears people talking about in the local diner, and what he hears them talking about most is property taxes.
He sees no reason why his mother, who hasn’t had children in the public schools for 30 years, should have to support them.
Mr. Spires is an unusual ally of the kind of people who are underwriting his campaign. He praises the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest Big Government spending boondoggle since Lyndon Johnson. But he’s flexible on the outsiders’ plan to divert public funds to tax credits for anyone who will send their kids to private schools. "I’m not against public schools," he says. He just believes "in compromise."
Mr. Clark does not compromise on anything of such critical importance. That’s why he works so hard to improve schools, rather than abandon them.
"My name is on every piece of education (reform legislation) that has gone to the governor," Mr. Clark truthfully tells every soul who will listen. That includes encouraging charter schools, and granting the right to transfer from "failing" schools to any public school a parent chooses. He sponsored a law likely to do more than any other idea I’ve heard to counter our state’s abysmal dropout rate, by engaging kids in careers early, and preparing them for those careers.
And taxing and spending? Thanks to legislation he helped pass, "You will see a decrease in your property tax bill of about 40 percent or 50 percent next year."
Mr. Spires is utterly unimpressed that the Legislature just abolished all residential property taxes for school operations. He rejects the idea that his one motivating issue is now moot. People are still talking about how they don’t like their property taxes, so how can the issue be dead?
And maybe he’s right. He’s counting on the people who think he’ll come up with a way of lowering their taxes (he’s still vague on details) outnumbering the ones who understand that Ken Clark and his fellow lawmakers have just cut their property taxes so dramatically that I don’t think it’s entirely sunk in with most of us.
Besides, thousands of fliers have gone out telling people what a big tax-and-spender Ken Clark is. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true. That’s what folks have in front of them when they go down to the diner and gripe about their taxes.
Meanwhile, in the place where they cook the collards for Gaston’s signature festival in the much- cooler month of October, there were only about a dozen people Tuesday night. That counts me, and I don’t get a vote.
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Wow, Brad, nice attack piece on Spires.
Of course, the part of this situation that you fail to consider is that people are fed up with the incumbents that accomplish nothing. So, they vote for someone else, because maybe they will do something. Our country and our state were set up for citizen representation. Just because a normal guy runs and he can’t engage you in all of the details of a wide range of legislation, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t run.
I don’t think we really need more career politicians. Maybe normal people will come up with legislation that all of us can understand.
Brad,
Although I may agree with you that Mr. Clark is a better choice than Mr. Spires, your piece obfuscates the true nature of the problems by making generalizations. For example, ideology in itself is not bad, rather, certain ideologies and combinations of ideologies are better than others. You are highly ideological (i.e., neo-conservative/neo-liberal), and by your own admission you only hire editors of your ideological bent. You label people who disagree with you as being ideologues and partisan. The truth is that both major political parties are controlled by neo-liberal/neo-conservative factions, and that those factions are funded by the wealthy investors who own and control corporations and Chambers of Commerce nationwide. When you say money is a problem that is ruining our political system, you are right, however, who has done more than you to contribute to the egregious economic inequity in the US. You want unencumbered investment, free trade, a professional middle class as separate from the rest of society, the merger of corporations and government, no political parties, and regressive taxes. You are also hostile towards labor and unions, yet considering all of the before mentioned points, ostensibly you are quite shocked and outraged that education funding is unequal. You ignore the fact that the capital investment process itself causes the inequities that are tearing the country apart, and you refuse to allow others to be heard on possible remedies. I find it interesting that when the fight broke out between middle class property owners and the Chamber of Commerce over sales taxes that you once again sided with the Chamber of Commerce, all the while implying that your position was due to some liberal altruism, rather than providing the public with your real consideration-placating the business interests that fund your newspaper. Homeowners are being burned on property taxes, yet The State never tells people the real reason why their property taxes are shooting through the roof. Ordinary people are picking up the tax tab that wealthy people and corporations used to pay. As a consequence of neo-liberal policies, America has been drastically changed for the worse in that wealth inequality has doubled over the past thirty years. Neither classic liberalism nor its derivative neo-liberal cousin can work in modernity. Social Democracy can and does work where it has been properly applied in Northern Europe. When will South Carolinians get a real choice? Must we be doomed to choose between neo-liberalism on the one hand, and reactionary populism on the other? Why can’t we choose Progressive Populism and Social Democracy instead? I suspect that denizens of South Carolina will never even get the chance to learn about the precepts of better forms of government-certainly not through the corporatized filter of The State newspaper editorial page.
I’m in Clark’s district so I must be one of those moneyed, ideological, populist and apathetic (not to mention out-of-state) people who are descending on Clark. I can’t speak for other people in this district but I can tell you why I voted against him and will do so again on Tuesday:
1. This guy hasn’t spent a single day of his adult life in the private sector. He has no idea what it’s like to meet a payroll or to comply with all the nonsensical regulations imposed by our state. He is simply unable to see that our public schools are an utter disgrace and will never be improved or reformed by yet more educratic “solutions”, i.e the educrat fad-of-the-month. That approach has been tried for at least 4 decades, with dozens or hundreds of fads coming and going. All of them failed and despite spending about 8 times as much on education (adjusted for inflation) as we did 50 years ago we are right about where we were at the beginning. For anyone in favor of meaningful education reform, and government reform generally, Ken Clark is a dead loss.
2. I’ve seen those flyers sent out by his opposition. Far from giving no details as you mendaciously allege they did provide supporting information. I even checked some of it out and, guess what? Clark is guilty as charged! Yes he did vote to override Sanford to spend “the money for beach renourishment and the football game and the arts festivals and the 10 percent increase in spending”. He also voted for all the bloated budgets passed during his tenure. Then he compounded his big government folly by voting to override most of the governor’s vetoes. Cindi’s link to the SC Club For Growth site shows that Clark supported the governor’s vetoes only 13% of the time (that’s right down there where you start finding lots of Democrats!) I simply don’t vote for spendthrift, big government Republicans like Clark.
3. Here’s what the CIA says about the Clark-Spires contest. Can you honestly say they are wrong?
4. I no longer have those CIA flyers but I do have one of Clark’s, postmarked the 19th. Virtually all his bullet points involve throwing lots of money at the problem, even though his “solutions” are unlikely to be successful and in fact many are just the latest flavors of the educrat fads that have failed over and over.
Kit Spires may not be polished enough for your taste but I submit to you that he understands his district far better than Clark ever would. He knows and trusts the people while Clark seems to think that he and a bunch of bureaucrats know much better how the people should live their lives than those people themselves do. In other words, just another big government elitist. That’s why he’s losing! Rightfully so!
You damn’ right I can honestly say it’s untrue. Let’s look at the most untrue part first:
“Personally voted for increased funding as the only solution to our state’s education woes.” How big can lies get? Sponsor of charter schools, open transfers, the education economic development act? We’re talking about actual school REFORM, instead of the ONLY thing CIA and SCRG want, which is school dismantlement. How could anyone swallow that with a straight face?
I have no idea what the reference to complaining about lottery money being an excuse not to spend more money. But I’ll tell you what I would say, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear Ken Clark say it — that the lottery is a clear sign of a society that has lost the will and the character to pony up and PAY for what is important. States with lotteries always end up spending less on schools, and they tend to have worse schools. The very fact that you would vote in a lottery shows you don’t care enough about education. If these people are for the lottery, then I’ll put them in the same category as Jim Hodges, as among those who have sold out on schools.
Refuses to even consider compromises…worst in the nation schools. If the “compromise” is giving up on schools the way CIA wants — which Mr. Spires is thoughtless and malleable enough to do — then you’ve got a bizarre notion of compromise. And the “worst in the nation” statement is the foulest kind of lie. It’s a classic. The jerks who don’t want to pay any taxes for schools WANT to believe that, so they say it, and that segment of the electorate believes it. They can’t back it up. For every statistic on which S.C. is last, you can come up with several where we’re middle-of-the-pack or better, in spite of the fact that we have some of the most extreme demographic predictors of educational failure in the nation. Schools as a whole in SC are doing a phenomenal job against the odds, and the creeps of CIA and SCRG base their entire strategy on convincing people of the lie that they are not.
Oh — and as for those things that Mr. Spires “believes” according to CIA must be what they keep TELLING him he believes, because such clear statements of beliefs never come out of his mouth.
Oh, and let’s go back to your big GOTCHA on the fact that Clark voted for the budget. Every member of the House is on record as voting for the budget except Bill Cotty, who went out of his way to be the lone “no” vote. So yeah, they really nailed ol’ Clark on that one.
Sheesh.
A final word: Like all revolutionaries, from communists to feminists, probably the most offensive thing about these people is the way they abuse language for the sake of their ideology. Take this outrageous RINO business. Ken Clark is a true conservative and a true Republican, one of the people who were Republicans when the spiritual and intellectual ancestors of these CIA gunsels were running the Democratic party with the main goal of keeping blacks out. (When they failed, they became Republicans, and started creeping out the real Republicans like Clark).
I know men like Ken Clark because he’s like my Dad — also a retired Navy captain, lifelong conservative, lifelong Republican. You know, one of those leeches who dedicated themselves to serving their country instead of grubbing for money for themselves.
All hail the hallowed private sector, in which folks like Kit Spires praise gigantic, unconscionably wasteful new entitlements that just happen to be spent to benefit his industry. Nothing like self-interest, huh?
You see Brad. We just don’t trust you.
You argue nuance, and point of view…but you are just a partisan, and every day fewer people trust you and your newspaper.
There are facts that can not be denied…such as Mike Campbell owns a bar that shovels booze at kids with “shaky” ID’s. That is a fact…but as a partisan, u will never print it. So when it comes to complicated issues such as school reform…issues that require people of good faith to research and report…you and yours just do not merit the trust.
So you make decisions for us. You report what you see as important and what will shape our opinions. We, the poor, uneducated masses of SC, must be protected from information…because you know best.
Well, that does not change the facts. The information on Mike Campbell’s bar will come out…police reports will become public knowledge…the Christian Right will know it was had….and in time the man your paper will endorse…Mr. Barber, will hopefully (in your view) become Lt. Gov.
So do I trust you to tell the truth on Mr. Clark….no. Do I trust you to tell the truth about school reform…no. You are as partisan as any county party chairman working an ideological cause. And we are all poorer for it.
You’re so predictable, Bread, and so wrong, in your slavish devotion to bigger government and those who bring it about. Here, let me clue you in:
“Personally voted for increased funding as the only solution to our state’s education woes.” How big can lies get? Sponsor of charter schools, open transfers, the education economic development act? We’re talking about actual school REFORM, instead of the ONLY thing CIA and SCRG want, which is school dismantlement. How could anyone swallow that with a straight face?
Have you even noticed that all those “solutions” involve increased funding, with only charter schools having any chance whatsoever at making an improvement? The only thing our Ken, and you, is against is simultaneously the only real “actual school REFORM” and also the one most likely to save a huge chunk of money. I know you have it in for CIA and SCRG but face it, Brad, a huge number of voters want the same things they want: school choice, lower taxes, lower spending etc . And they will get it sooner or later. Then you can continue to pout about how stupid those voters were not to agree with your superior wisdom, just like you do now with the lottery. So yes, guilty as charged: “Personally voted for increased funding as the only solution to our state’s education woes.”
the lottery is a clear sign of a society that has lost the will and the character to pony up and PAY for what is important. States with lotteries always end up spending less on schools, and they tend to have worse schools. The very fact that you would vote in a lottery shows you don’t care enough about education. If these people are for the lottery, then I’ll put them in the same category as Jim Hodges, as among those who have sold out on schools.
That’s just your opinion, Brad, and you’re certainly entitled to it. Here, however, are the facts: European countries, as Herb can surely verify for you, have had lotteries for all of my life, yet their educational systems are being held up as shining examples for us by the likes of you. There is absolutely no evidence that your assertion that “States with lotteries always end up spending less on schools, and they tend to have worse schools”. If there is some evidence, please produce it. Surely your factchecking process would have produced some such evidence, or else you wouldn’t have made this claim, right? It’s also been my understanding that our schools spent more at the end of Hodges’ 4 years than at the beginning. Is that incorrect?
Refuses to even consider compromises…worst in the nation schools. If the “compromise” is giving up on schools the way CIA wants — which Mr. Spires is thoughtless and malleable enough to do — then you’ve got a bizarre notion of compromise.
School choice is just the opposite of “giving up on schools”. IMO it’s the only way to finally get your beloved educracy off its duffs and give our kids the better education they deserve. Lord knows, everything else has been tried already! A flat refusal on Clark’s part to even consider school choice does qualify as a refusal to compromise, doesn’t it?
And the “worst in the nation” statement is the foulest kind of lie. It’s a classic. The jerks who don’t want to pay any taxes for schools WANT to believe that, so they say it, and that segment of the electorate believes it. They can’t back it up. For every statistic on which S.C. is last, you can come up with several where we’re middle-of-the-pack or better.
Thank you for calling me a jerk, Brad. That’s so mature and thoughtful, you know. I don’t agree with your preferred school funding level so obviously I must be a jerk. Who ever made you g-d so that your preferences are the be-all and end-all and everybody else is a jerk?
And why do you call me a jerk? Simply because I don’t agree with your opinion that we should throw more and more money at our schools!! Let me remind you that we are already spending close to 8 times as much money (inflation-adjusted) on our public schools as we did 50 years – when will enough ever be enough for you?
What exactly is so superior about your money-throwing approach when we could probably save close to half of all the money wasted on our schools simply by giving full school choice a chance? I don’t know about you but to me someone who knowingly wastes $millions and $billions is not someone whose spending opinions should carry much weight, if any.
Oh, and let’s go back to your big GOTCHA on the fact that Clark voted for the budget. Every member of the House is on record as voting for the budget except Bill Cotty, who went out of his way to be the lone “no” vote. So yeah, they really nailed ol’ Clark on that one.
If voting for that bloated and wasteful budget was all there was to this issue, then I would have to give him a pass. However, he then proceeded to override the governor on 87% of all vetoes. That’s where he gets the big-spender label he so richly deserves. Sanford gave him a chance to stand with him and delete the worst excesses from the budget but nooooo! Our Ken inists on being a little piggie at the trough. After all, we all know how much he loves burning through other people’s money, don’t we. The CIA called it exactly right on that one. (BTW, your protege Cotty ended up on their hitlist the same way – by backing Sanford on only 33% of the vetoes, and that’s why he, too, deserves the big-spender label, despite your big GOTCHA that he didn’t vote for the budget)
Clark is undoubtedly a RINO, the only type of Republican you actually like because RINOs all tend to vote with you in supporting bigger and buigger government.
I was going to comment on your Demo-turned-Rep drivel, too, but since you have produced absolutely no evidence for your ridiculous assertion (straight out of feverswamp Left websites!) I will limit myself to an undeniable fact that you can chew on a little: The 1964 Civil Rights Act never would have passed if the GOP hadn’t provided more votes than the Dems did. Every southern Democrat senator voted against it and, except for Thurmond, they all stayed Demos until they retired or died. There was none of that big-switch fable the extreme Left (and you apparently) loves so much. One of those senators, former KKK Grand Kleagle Robert ‘Sheets’ Byrd, is still sitting in the Senate!
All hail the hallowed private sector
Yes indeed! If it weren’t for that private sector and businessmen who, unlike you, actually know how to make it work, you wouldn’t have a job!
LexWolf and others….
Your HATE is just overwhelmingly sad. Your LIES are sad. I am just happy that I live in a country where you have the right to do it. It is far better than living in a country where those in power can get away with these things.
I can’t think of many people I have read here in South Carolina who are more objective than Brad.
Your HATE exposes the true motivation behind your actions and words.
HATE, n. What a liberal calls her opponent when she can’t counter her opponent’s points on the merits and with facts.
Ignorance, adj. What someone who calls themselves a “conservative” but who denies the fact that we hold these rights to be self-evident that all people are created equal and are given certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This includes the poor children of the drug addict who attends a public school during the day and goes home to a house with a blow-up mattress in the center of the one room with 100 Sam’s Choice and Budweiser cans strewn about with holes in the floor and bugs running up the walls. Yes. This child (whom I have seen) deserves what LexWolf and his colleagues take so much for granted – a chance.
LexWolf – join the living world.
And….it is silly to “counter her opponent’s points on the merits and with facts” when the very points are don’t have merits or facts that back them up.
Peace.
QED.
This child (whom I have seen) deserves what LexWolf and his colleagues take so much for granted – a chance.
Yes indeed. Full school choice which might be her only chance to break out of her squalid environment.
Mr. LexWolf,
Please don’t use my name in support of anything you say, because it insinuates, even on a small point, that I somehow agree with you. Rest assured, I do not.
Yes, European countries have had lotteries for years. With the same results as elsewhere, including problems of addiction. It is another case of people with money being allowed, in the name of freedom, to exploit those who don’t.
As I have written before, your position, and that of others like you, rests on a naive assumption that human nature is good and needs no regulation. Adam Smith, et.al. This is a flawed assumption.
In reality, all of these issues are more complicated than you are making them. Yes, European education is, in general, more demanding of students, at least at certain levels. But it has also fallen greatly in the last forty years. A German “Abitur”, or upper tier high-school diploma, ain’t what it used to be, but it still matches at least an Associate of Arts degree here, when not a B.A. at many schools. Not to speak of the whole apprenticeship program, which makes sure that people are trained much better for many jobs. A hairdresser trains for three years. Back when I had hair, I dreaded going to the hairdresser in the US, as I never knew how much of my ears would be cut along with my hair! (Overstated, but you get the point.)
So what is the cure for such problems? Unbridled freedom, such as you seem to advocate? Assuming that because Americans are such wonderful people, they will always do what helps their fellow man? Demand what they should of their children and young people? I doubt that very much. Human nature needs regulation. And today, it needs even more of it, especially with unbridled freedom to exploit let loose on us.
I would submit that unbridled affluence, which you seem to be advocating, is as significant a problem as any heavy-handed social regulation and entitlements program on the other side of the spectrum.
Which is why I like the moderate position, and find myself agreeing with Brad a lot of the time.
“Yes indeed. Full school choice which might be her only chance to break out of her squalid environment.”
No, LexWolf. A much more realistic choice would be what is happening to her. I didn’t say anything about a squalid environment at school. In fact, this child is being helped by the very program that Mr. Clark has sponsored in the state house. A public school teacher and guidance counselor along with a social worker have invested greatly in her at the school where she gets an education from your tax dollars after arriving on the school bus that picks her up at the end of her driveway. (Cardinal Newman, Heathwood Hall, Calhoun Christian Academy, etc…..don’t do that) She has already picked a “major” for her high school years that she looks to start this coming year in 9th grade. Her goal is to be a pharmacist. She has shown great interest and talent in the areas of the sciences and math – having already completed Algebra I as an 8th grader.
Yet, she has absolutely NO chance of being enrolled in a private school – due to her home situation and where she lives.
LexWolf – start having some faith in those schools around you – the public servants that go there on a daily basis to help “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free.” Go visit and enlist as a mentor to a disadvantaged child who doesn’t know where his daddy is/or was. This may cure you yet!
Peace.
“As I have written before, your position, and that of others like you, rests on a naive assumption that human nature is good and needs no regulation.”
Aaah, now we’re getting to the crux of the matter. In your opinion, the poor, huddled masses are all too stupid, evil, and incompetent to live their own lives and they need the enlightened likes of you and Brad to tell them exactly how they should live their miserable, brutish lives. Thank you for making that so clear.
“A public school teacher and guidance counselor along with a social worker have invested greatly in her at the school where she gets an education from your tax dollars after arriving on the school bus that picks her up at the end of her driveway. (Cardinal Newman, Heathwood Hall, Calhoun Christian Academy, etc…..don’t do that)”
Nice strawman but absolutely incorrect. Heathwood Hall, for one, provides all these things, and the others in this area most likely do as well. In addition, these schools provide financial assistance for people who can’t afford the tuition.
HH sends a bus to pick her up at the end of her driveway in rural Lexington County?
It’s interesting to see how emotional Brad is getting in his blog posts.
Does he really believe that SCRG, CIA, et. al. really want to dismantle public schools?
Come on, Brad. What public schools have been dismantled where school choice has been tried?
Milwaukee? Cleveland? Arizona? Pennsylvania? Florida?
If the public schools are so good, why would any one want to leave? If no one leaves, how are schools dismantled or even “hurt” financially?
It would be nice if Brad actually took the time to rationally discuss these issues rather than always using invective against citizens groups.
Frances,
does Ken Clark send a bus from the Shop Road area to rural Lexington Country to pick up this girl? Or does the bus just take her to the nearest public school? If so, HH would be perfectly willing to also pick her up from less than 1 to 10 miles away. What distance are we talking about with this girl?
You gotta compare apples with apples, you know!
The thirteen states with the highest SAT scores in 2004 all have lotteries:
Iowa
South Dakota
Wisconsin
North Dakota
Illinois
Minnesota
Missouri
Kansas
Nebraska
Michigan
Oklahoma
Louisiana
Tennessee
The highest ranking state without
a lottery is Arkansas at #14.
This does not prove that lotteries = better education but it does provide evidence that Brad was just making stuff up.
Spreadsheet with full details available by request.
No Mr. LexWolf. All I am saying is that “getting government off the backs of the people” has a lot of pitfalls. A society has to take care of its weak, and give those a chance who would not otherwise have one. If we don’t, ultimately it will mean the destruction of our republic. I don’t want to see that happen. Your ideology seems to me to be only “survival of the fittest”, and if you don’t survive, well that’s just tough. Let them eat cake.
Come on, Doug, what kind of logic is that? You guys have to analyze the data, and then draw your conclusions. Not go in with your ideology, and make the data fit. Probably there are a lot of complex reasons for high SAT scores in Illinois, and I doubt that they have to do with the lottery. I don’t have time to research the whole angle, but hopefully someone will.
Herb, I don’t know what kind of logic that is but it’s the “logic” claimed above by Brad himself: “States with lotteries always end up spending less on schools, and they tend to have worse schools.” Doug has just totally disproved Brad’s claim!
Herb,
I can certainly understand that you are now trying to cover up your elitist, bien-pensant do-gooder post but the truth is clear to anyone who can read. Here are your own quotes:
“It is another case of people with money being allowed, in the name of freedom, to exploit those who don’t.”
“your position, and that of others like you, rests on a naive assumption that human nature is good and needs no regulation. Adam Smith, et.al. This is a flawed assumption.”
“So what is the cure for such problems? Unbridled freedom, such as you seem to advocate? Assuming that because Americans are such wonderful people, they will always do what helps their fellow man? Demand what they should of their children and young people? I doubt that very much. Human nature needs regulation. And today, it needs even more of it, especially with unbridled freedom to exploit let loose on us.”
Your comments above constitute one of the starkest expositions of the elitist liberal mindset I’ve ever seen:
People are all a bunch of idiots who will never do what’s right without your help and guidance. They are too stupid and slothful to ever live their lives the “right way”. Thus the Caped Liberal Crusader must ride to the rescue and “improve” these people so they will be just like you. Ooops, never mind that – it wouldn’t do to have them reach your level because then you wouldn’t have anyone to look down on anymore plus there would be no need for the likes of you to further “improve” them. Definitely can’t have that. Better just throw them some scraps and dollops of slop (paid for by other people’s money), and leave them permanently at some lower level so you can continue to “help” and “improve” them and thus feel good about yourself. In a nutshell the liberal attitude towards people is “you’re too stupid to ever make it through life without our help”.
Contrast that with the conservative mindset:
All people have the potential to rise above themselves and to “make it”, through hard work, dedication, persistence and making good choices. Liberal ‘help’ only retards whatever progress the people would make otherwise, by draining capital from the economy and wasting massive amounts of it, by placing numerous restrictions and mandates on the people. Conservatives believe in removing as many obstacles as possible and letting the people go as far as they possibly can. Liberals believe in punishing successful people, conservatives want to reward them, recognizing that their success benefits all of us. The conservative attitude is “Yes, you too can make it if you work hard and apply yourself”.
Your comments make quite clear that you fall in the elitist liberal category but has it ever occurred to you that you may not be right after all and that people have just as much of a right to live their lives as they see fit as you do? You may not like some of the choices they make — I often shake my head at those choices myself — but the people have every right to live their own lives even if they do make stupid choices.
How can you (and Brad) be so arrogant that you would deny the people’s choices? You may disagree with me but I would submit to you that my policy preferences are at least as valid as yours are. For example, every one of the very limited school choice programs so far has outperformed the public schools and those programs haven’t destroyed the public schools either as the educrats dire warnings told us. On the other hand we have an unbroken record of public school failures over the past 50 years even as we are now spending 8 times as much (inflation-adjusted) as we did 50 years ago. Yet when people like me say that it’s time to stop with business as usual and to try something new, your buddy Brad calls us jerks (see above). Simply because we have different opinions. What’s up with that? If this is the best you guys can come up with to defend your educrats then the school revolution will come swiftly indeed!
Herb,
As my post said, I don’t believe there is any correlation between lotteries and the quality of education provided. It was Brad who claimed states with lotteries had lower results.
I believe New Hampshire had the first state lottery starting in 1964. I’m fairly certain South Carolina would swap test scores and graduation rates with NH any day.
Also, as a bit of trivia, George Washington used a lottery to pay for road construction in Virginia and Ben Franklin used one to pay for cannons in the Revolutionary War.
Maybe GWB should consider a national lottery to finance the War on Terror in perpetuity. He never had the guts to ask citizens to make sacrifices to pay for the war but instead used his Platinum American Excess Card to ensure our kids and their kids will pay for an unwinnable war.
Herb, I much appreciate your sentiments about taking care of the weak and about providing opportunity for all. Social Darwinism permeates the popular culture (e.g., the television shows Survivor and The Apprentice) and has had a damaging effect on society.
Two thoughts immediately come to my mind concerning these ideas: Jesus commanded us to serve others (the moral and ethical concern), and also the pragmatic reality that serving and working together with others benefits society (and ultimately ourselves) much more effectively than working alone. The survival of the fittest mentality is a hallmark of primitive, often longer extant culture, whereas working together and effectively serving one another is characteristic of modern, sophisticated culture.
The merger of the moral and practical is especially appealing to me. Regardless of the political economy of a society, divisions of labor in some form are necessary for the survival of everybody. Good divisions of labor far outweigh differential ability. For example, suppose you were given the choice of using graduate student labor or fifth grade labor for the task of assembling 10,000 cars consisting of 30,000 parts a piece, where the graduate students were told to assemble one car at a time per graduate student, and the fifth graders were told to develop their own assembly line. Of course, the fifth graders would put a serious whipping on the graduate students, both in terms of quantity and quality over time.
The fifth graders would win because by creating even rudimentary divisions of labor they would drastically reduce the variation of the process of building cars. Over time, the fifth graders would find that they would have to make better divisions of labor to make the cars more efficiently. They would also realize that the more that they divided the labor to make cars, the more complicated the system would become, and the harder it would become for individuals or small groups to run the system because of imperfect knowledge of the complex process. Eventually they would find that everyone had the most perfect knowledge of his own job, and that it would be best to use the knowledge and ideas of everyone to improve the overall process.
But Lo (and woe), now the fifth graders are told they have to redo their system. Now they’re told they have to base their carefully determined divisions of labor on capital investment rather than process improvement, therefore the concept of bosses and workers is introduced. What once was a democratically controlled now becomes hierarchal-what was once was designed to benefit everyone (these fifth graders can drive) now benefits only a few (the bosses keep most of the cars as a return on their investment).
Mark, thanks for writing again, but I’m not sure I understand you. But I’ll read your post again in a day or two when my head has cleared up some. I’m coming off of a flu virus that laid me pretty flat.
LexWolf, I suppose it is not really worthwhile to try and address your posts further, but just for your information, not everyone who disagrees with you is a liberal. There is such a position as moderate, that doesn’t adopt an ideology first and make everything else fit it, but tries to deal with complex problems with what often have to be complex answers.
I guess I have been around long enough to know that not everyone can just work hard and better themselves. Yes, individual initiative has to be encouraged, but at the same time, the weak have to be protected. Both things have to be done. It is complex. Take away taxation, and the rich will grow richer at everyone else’s expense. Overdo it, and private initiative suffers. The latter is a problem that Europe faces right now. America doesn’t have to go to the other extreme, though.
I trust I am not being judgmental, and I mean no attack on your character, but your name means “law of the canine,” or similar, doesn’t it? Conservative ideology is often just that, “dog eat dog,” or survival of the pit bull. It seems to me what you are advocating is exactly that.
Yet another case where you’re assuming, Herb, and badly so to boot. If my posting name did mean what you suggest it would be either LexCaniis or LexLupus, or something like that. I’m sure your son, the one who took Latin, could help you out with the correct case and declination. Wolf is a germanic word, not a romance one, and thus wouldn’t be combined like that, so you totally misread it.
Just to take you off your tenterhooks of suspense, Lex refers to Lexington.
As for moderates, to me that always means someone who doesn’t know what he/she believes and who can easily be swayed by anyone with a slick enough approach or by the last TV commercial seen before entering the voting booth.
I actually talked to Ken Clark for about 30 minutes today after voting. For my take on the conversation, go to the Runoff Predictions thread.
Herb, I hope you are feeling better soon. When you do feel up to re-reading my short piece above, please read the following corrected sentence:
“The survival of the fittest mentality is a hallmark of primitive, often no longer extant culture, whereas working together and effectively serving one another is characteristic of modern, sophisticated culture.”
A note to my liberal and conservative friends: Here is the result when people have equal opportunity within capitalism, and here is the result when opportunity is unequal among people participating in capitalism. Here is the result when the society is full of lazy bums, and here is the result when society is run by a bunch of go-getters. Capital investment, plus monetary exchanges, plus hierarchal divisions of labor equals this.
That just leaves taxes and divisions of labor as things we can reasonably control.
Thanks, Lex, I’m sure my son would have, but I obviously didn’t ask him. I had Latin too, but the American version (2 years), and obviously don’t remember anything, except for “All Gaul is divided into three parts . . . ”
I still think the name fits.
Carpe Mañana