The Fed Chairman Ponders, Be Afraid

From Bloomberg

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues may cut interest rates further and consider adopting less conventional policies when they meet Dec. 15-16.

Er, interest rates are already so effectively close to zero that cutting them more isn't even a useful symbolic act. As to the idea of "unconventional policies" - since it's a safe bet Bernanke would never be so unconventional as to tout free market policies - this has to strike fear in the heart of any rational investor.

And yet, Black Friday sales were up by several percentage points. It's a crazy world.

Zircons, Clue to Early Life?

I know next to nothing about geology, paleontology, planetary astrophysics, and the like. None of them are particular personal interests. But I do enjoy a well-written science article that teaches me something I didn't already know. This one in the International Herald Tribune on the early Earth by Kenneth Chang qualifies in spades.

The author discusses several scientists' attempts to tease out the history, geology, and climate of Earth over 4 billion years ago from the tiniest of clues. That effort alone would be interesting enough, if described as a well-told tale. Add to it that the author does so by sticking completely to the science and you have a highly dramatic story, told with balance and objectivity.

The story hinges on the role of zircons, crystalline bits of zirconium, oxygen, and silicon. From such small things do big theories grow. The real hook to the story is the evidence it provides for how early life might have arisen or developed in ways contrary to previous accounts.

Fascinating.

Transition to the Dark Green Ages

The first thing to notice about the Transition to Green (PDF) document I referenced Dec 1, 2008 is the cover. It's a beautiful piece of graphic arts work. The photos of nature are stunning. The colors are magnificent. The layout is professional. It's also very subtly vicious.

The cover has a tiled set of four photos, without a single image or even hint of modern human civilization anywhere in sight. No skyscrapers, not even a road through the wilderness. Indeed, no humans can be seen anywhere in any of the images. There is one simple wooden walkway gently meandering through a shady grove, but it looks as if it's never been used.

No one will ever persuade me that is accidental.

Rather, it provides not-at-all subtle clues about the worldview of the authors (or at least the editor in charge). That view is spelled out more clearly, albeit inconsistently, in the sub-title text: "Leading the way to a healthy environment, a green economy, and a sustainable future."

I've got news for whomever selected those platitudes. They're either false, impossible, or already here.

A Healthy Environment

The environment is already incredibly healthy. Anyone who has been alive for several decades, or has ever cracked a history book, knows that the air, water, and surroundings throughout much of the U.S. and elsewhere is enormously improved over what it was 100 years ago.

Water purification systems are safer. Levels of lead and other heavy metals in most urban water systems today are so low they would have been well under the most stringent standards of a few decades ago. By contrast, the water in the New York public system 100 years ago invariably contained ample concentrations of horse manure, lead, and coal particulates.

Urban streets lack the foul smell, not to mention safety and health hazard, of horse droppings common in city streets around the turn of the 20th century. Trash, while hardly non-existent, is so much less prevalent now in the bulk of urban streets that any still extant sticks out like a sore thumb. Few would even think to throw potato peelings, apple cores, and banana peels onto the pavement now, a habit no one on the East Side of Lower Manhattan would have thought odd in 1908.

Smog levels in Los Angeles, once high enough to burn your eyes on the best of days and still far from zero, have been decreasing for decades. Though we tend now to think only of photochemical smog, various forms have been around since Roman Times. The Great Smog of 1952 in London that put thousands in respiratory distress would be unthinkable today.

A Green Economy

If ever such a thing as a 'green' economy did arise, it would arrive in the form of a new Dark Ages. As Jack Wakeland has argued in Environmenatlism's Big Lie, whenever a technology arises that would actually power civilization, the viros are the first to turn against it. Dams used to be considered an 'eco-friendly' power source. Now, they're anathema to the Greens. Currently popular 'green' technology, such as wind farms and solar power are beginning to see now-familiar criticisms.

Many of the hoped-for advances advocated by Greens have little to nothing to do with being 'eco-friendly'. What producer in their right mind would not want their products to be made with a lower energy input? Energy costs money. So does designing more efficient processes, though. Who wouldn't want trash to disappear the moment it became trash? That too, costs money, and potentially cost-effective technology, such as plasma torches that would vaporize it, were — no surprise — heavily criticized by Greens when they first arrived.

Many other proposed changes to business practices are a mere sop to the conscience of a population seeking to escape the guilt inculcated by this new Puritanism. 'Green' banking is an absurdity. 'Green' Apple computers are a gruesome joke.

A Sustainable Future

This item on the wish list is the most absurd of all, given the Greens' disdain of capitalism. If we're to use them at all, the only way to sustain forests, agriculture, and thousands of other resources is to sustain freedom. That is the one thing they most definitely would like to halt. But, then, not using resources at all would be their preferred choice. The cover of Transition to Green is proof enough of that.

TV Tax Dollars at Work

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you this odd little item from PBS. Showing this week, so TV Guide says,

"A team of experts seeks to determine what causes the deaths of mountain climbers at extreme altitudes."

Er, we need a team of experts for this? It's very, very cold. The air is very, very thin. Rocks are sharp and hard and it's a long way down when you fall.

Aren't you glad we pay for this with our tax money?

In general, I'm pretty fond of PBS programs, which in my neighborhood are predominantly well-done science documentaries, 50s TV series, and British dramas. Still, I have to hope this description is a little bit askew.

Viro Disinfecting Series Planned

I never worry about the likes of an Al Gore. He's such an obvious hypocrite that, despite his access to considerable funds and publicity, his influence will always be limited. It's the thousands of unknown viro policy wonks, little organisms burrowing quietly under the skin of the body politic, that keep me up nights.

Recent case in point: the authors of the Transition to Green. Nearly 400 pages, this tome is chock full of reasonable-sounding methods for committing economic and cultural suicide in the name of saving the planet.

There are so many howlers, contradictions, and downright absurd recommendations for the incoming administration it will take weeks to expose even a small subset. So, I've picked out 20 or so to mock mercilessly in future posts.

It might seem a counter-productive way to combat this type of disease. Some would call for a more sober approach in order to be taken more seriously by those "in the middle." There will be plenty of that provided. But when confronted with evil of this magnitude, especially when it's presented bearing such a reasonable tone, harsh laughter is decidedly called for.

It isn't just this multi-pronged document stirring up trouble, after all. Much of what's inside is the now-usual Green boilerplate calling for caps on GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, alternative energy sources, protecting planetary ice, blah, blah, blah.

The real danger, represented so clearly by these recommendations, is that Greens are taken seriously at all. Suggestions for the most radical overthrow of once taken-for-granted individual liberties is now completely mainstream. That's the fundamental problem.

To be sure, Obama and crew will chiefly nod agreement and then ignore most of the recommendations on pragmatic grounds. Here, for example, are people who want to radically reduce fossil fuel use without a viable alternative. That is evidenced, for example, by their stated opposition to nuclear power. That the usual Green groups — EDF, NRDC, EarthJustice, etc., etc. — signatory here are not regarded as the communists were in the 1950s is the clearest sign of more cultural trouble ahead. To fail to reject their views in principle and across the board is a sign of serious social decay.

But rather than cower in the corner because these germs are everywhere today — represented by everything from 'green' banking ads to exhortations for green copy machine practices — the best method is to expose their views, one at a time. Reason is one superb disinfectant. I'll be applying it liberally, so to speak, over the next few months.

Experts and the Silence on Rights

Many commentators on 'the right' complain that so-called liberals, especially several on the Supreme Court, have been guilty of printing press rights. That is, they invent rights that never existed. But a more serious problem in contemporary times may be that Leftists simply ignore the issue entirely.

Look at the viros. They don't often these days argue that animals have rights. Nor do they argue that those rights are just as important as humans'. Instead, they just ignore the issue entirely. They simply assert: "Here's something valuable that we want to protect. Therefore, the government should protect it."

That their value assertion is totally arbitrary and subjective is one thing. That would be bad enough. But the non-sequitur that anything valuable should be protected by government intervention is downright dangerous and it's the most common argument made today.

Think of all the trouble this saves them.

No need to engage in abstruse and endless debates about the nature of rights. Just slide in the idea on the sly that the purpose of government is to protect. Who could object to that? Just make sure to stay away from answering "to protect what?"

No need to study the history of the Constitution or capitalism, nor how they have contributed to creating a country of plenty. Focus instead on how much has not been accomplished that most everyone agrees would be nice to have.

Ignorance is a great tool for such people. How many, after all, can afford the time (even if they had the inclination) to become an expert in law, science, and economics? Instead, just let the 'experts' tackle all the problems. Be sure to have those experts — since, it's argued, experts in the private sphere are 'tainted' by self-interest — be in government.

That hand off of power to a cadre of so-called experts has been tried in America before. Progressives from just after the turn of the 20th century through the end of the Roosevelt administration (with a respite during the Coolidge years 1923-1929) argued for government by the elite. Naturally, their view of 'elite' was a mixed bag of statist ideology and actual expertise.

We're seeing a similar phenomenon today as Paulson-Bernanke continue to wreck the economy and Obama selects his Cabinet and advisers. The results will be similar. All ignore the issue of rights. Observe that in all the bailout mania taking place everyone talks about whether it will work, not whether the Feds have the right to try in the first place. Like FDR to Bush's Hoover, Obama will try the same New Deal policies, this time on steroids. Those policies will fail and no one will ask whose rights were violated, only whether the experts got it right or wrong.

Down that road lies the tyranny of technocrats and unelected regulators in executive agencies with Congress aiding and abetting the crimes at every step. We're already far down that road and despite all the warning signs of an impending train wreck, there is no stop light in sight.

Getting Educated, So to See

There's a line in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, spoken by Roark at his trial in the novel's climax: "I'm an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is based." Nowhere is that idea better shown than in the field of education.

It's with that as background that it pays to think about how the current situation in public education came about, a situation in which Johnny can't think past the upcoming Friday night. The results we live with today are the direct consequence of what John Dewey advocated over 100 years ago. In 1897, he published My Pedagogic Creed with the express purpose of making radical changes in American education.

He wrote:

I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.
...
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.

It strikes many at first as innocuous. But connect the dots. What has happened in the average public school to support for individual scholastic achievement? Largely gone, replaced by teachers and administrators who follow Dewey's preference for "the welfare of the group."

But what of all the diversity of pink and blue hair, tattoos, and clothing styles? Isn't that evidence of individualism of a sort? Not really. It is merely another form of chaos, the flip side of gray-tunic collectivism.

Hayek writes in The Road to Serfdom (PDF) of the relation between increasing government control of society in every sphere and such forms of 'individualism'. He observes that the only freedom the youth of Britain were coming to have was the freedom to rebel against everything. It was the only means they had for individual expression, most others being circumscribed by the State.

Down that road lies anarchy, the mirror image of totalitarian control and an effect of the same cause. To rebel mindlessly against society is no better than to mindlessly follow its conventions. It's already an accomplished fact in Britain. It's on the rise here.

In any case, the one type of open 'diversity' we do not typically find in contemporary classrooms is a diversity of ideas. It's a rare teacher who would advocate increasing the amount of economic freedom. Very few would be so bold, even in the unlikely case they were inclined, to throw the cool water of rational suspicion on the fashionable man-made global warming hypothesis. Their students follow suit.

How could they do otherwise? Following Dewey, their teachers have taught them:

[T]he true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
...
I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is.

It's hard to envision a better recipe for a population ill-educated in science, literature, history, and geography. Cap it off with:

I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought.

It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.

Heaven forfend, we wouldn't want to use language "simply as a way of getting individual information," worse still as a "way of showing off." To acquire information and be proud of acquiring it might, well, who knows, lead to one person being better than another in some way.

At the root of that nonsense are the twin modern evils of pragmatism and egalitarianism, fancy words for "don't connect the dots" and "anybody is as good as anybody else, no matter what." Is there a public school administrator today who would say it ain't so?

What, in Dewey's view, should we use to educate, if not primarily ideas?

[T]he image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.

I believe that if nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.

No wonder that the speech of so many public school students is chiefly grunts and squeals, and that they can't form an argument. The end of that road is not hard to see. The overriding goal of Progressive education, the values it aims to achieve are...

that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.

I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

Or, as Rand put it in another brilliant line in The Fountainhead: "One neck, for one leash."

So, what's to be done?

Unlike many commentators on 'the right', I don't think reform of the public school system is feasible. So long as the government (particularly the Federal government's Department of Education or State government) sets the rules, there is slim likelihood of substantial changes. All the rigorous tests in the world are not going to change what, and more importantly how, teachers are teaching. After all, there's little point in, say, arm-twisting teachers into 'improving' history instruction if the history that's taught comes from Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States.

One can, of course, dream about eliminating the Department of Education. That would save the taxpayers $50 billion per year and only result in the unemployment of a few thousand busybodies. But not even Reagan made much headway on that campaign promise and no one in government is even talking about it these days. Even that wouldn't cure the problem, though. The same local and state busybodies, not to mention the same kind of teachers, would still be in place. Above all, it leaves the same Progressive ideas in place.

Private school can compensate for some of the damage, but homeschooling is by far the best chance right now for a better future. Happily, there is still a large gulf (though narrowing by the year) between the worldview of most academic intellectuals in the humanities and the citizenry. Most parents still want their children to receive an actual education, not just an effective indoctrination.

Encouraging that option is, for the next few years, likely to be more difficult than ever. With the near-term economy in serious straits thanks to trillions in new Federal dollar commitments, most parents will find it more urgent for both to work. Still, if one's inclined to look for even tarnished silver linings, the rising unemployment will find more parents at home.

Here, as in every aspect of American society today, only an intellectual revolution that restores respect for rationality to center stage is going to make much headway against the grotesque state of American education. Where that will come from or how to build momentum for it is, like so much of what ails us, anybody's guess at this stage. It sure as hell isn't going to come from the educators.