ext_306469 ([identity profile] paft.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] talkpolitics2011-07-16 10:14 am
Entry tags:

They Could Always Go Work in Factories

Teri Adams, Head of Independence Hall Tea Party and School Voucher Activist:

Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.



In other words, Adams would like education to be, along with medical care, available only to those who can pony up the cash for it.

The article I’ve linked to includes a few quotes from people speculating about what drives the American right’s hostility towards public education. The ban on teacher-led prayer is invoked, along with the mercenary desire to funnel the money now paid into public schools into private hands.

I suspect it’s much more simple than that. Without universal education, the far right wouldn’t have to contend with so many pesky arguments about the facts of history, math, science, etc.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

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Re: I see.

[identity profile] usekh.livejournal.com 2011-07-16 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)
So move to place with no taxes. As long as you live in the US you are giving your permission to the governments to tax you.

Re: I see.

[identity profile] montecristo.livejournal.com 2011-07-17 11:23 am (UTC)(link)
False. No such permission is given. (http://mises.org/daily/5343/Consent-of-the-Governedu) Furthermore, the idea that anyone has the authority to order someone off of land he does not personally own or whose owner's interests he does not personally represent is ludicrous. It is the kind of delusion to which one is susceptible through participation in the collectivist mystical tribalism fostered by government.

Re: I see.

[identity profile] usekh.livejournal.com 2011-07-18 08:31 am (UTC)(link)
So an article on the internet says so. Well it must be true.

How about an immigrant to the USA. They have come there knowing they will be taxed and are willing to do so. How do they figure into your idea?

Re: I see.

[identity profile] montecristo.livejournal.com 2011-07-19 01:29 pm (UTC)(link)
The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Re: I see.

[identity profile] usekh.livejournal.com 2011-07-20 07:52 am (UTC)(link)
People line up to immigrate to the US, people who come from places with real, genuine oppression. And you with your comfortable, white, middle class glibertarian values call it evil?

Re: I see.

[identity profile] montecristo.livejournal.com 2011-07-21 09:42 am (UTC)(link)
Let's set asside the people who immigrate to the United States simply because there may be relatively more opportunities for economic advancement here than in their home countries. Let's focus on those people that you yourself have specifically brought into this discussion: those people who face Real, Genuine Oppression. I look around me an I see the sick, lying collectivist bullshit which is choking our civilization to death and which, in the meantime, is also vastly responsible for perpetrating and perpetuating this so called Real, Genuine Oppression, around the world and I realize that it uses money confiscated from me to do it, that it relies on my blind trust and obedience to a government created and sustained by liars and con-artists. YES. Evil. Don't you throw that cheap argument-stopping smear word "glibertarianism" at me, as if I am the one who does not understand evil, [livejournal.com profile] usekh. As far as I am concerned, it is the collectivists both Left and Right, who do not understand the evil that their system pepetrates both domestically and abroad, many, because they have been bribed with their own money and think that they owe their "middle class" lifestyle to an enlightened elite who act only for their benefit.

Re: I see.

[identity profile] usekh.livejournal.com 2011-07-21 10:07 am (UTC)(link)
A lot of words to say pretty much nothing. Considering that society is what allows art, science and all those other good things to flourish. Technology is not advanced by some Randian Ubermensch living in a cave. Science requires society, art requires society. To say otherwise is profoundly ignorant.

Re: I see.

[identity profile] debergerac.livejournal.com 2011-07-22 04:48 pm (UTC)(link)
you've just described hitler's germany to a tee.

Re: I see.

[identity profile] usekh.livejournal.com 2011-07-23 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
Explain how what I said suits Hitler's Germany more than any other society in history?

Re: I see.

[identity profile] montecristo.livejournal.com 2011-07-23 06:33 am (UTC)(link)
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
Thomas Paine (http://mises.org/daily/2897)

You are conflating the Social Sphere with the Political Sphere. This is a false dichotomy. Read Franz Oppenheimer. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Oppenheimer)
Edited 2011-07-23 06:34 (UTC)

Re: I see.

[identity profile] usekh.livejournal.com 2011-07-23 07:58 am (UTC)(link)
I thought y'all believed there was no such thing as society?

Re: I see.

[identity profile] montecristo.livejournal.com 2011-07-23 02:39 pm (UTC)(link)
An abstract entity, a collection of identifiable phenomena does exist, which can be identified as being part of the concept "society," but the belief that society is the plaything of "leaders" who can "socially engineer" it into shapes pleasing to everyone's sense of values, or even a lasting majority's "sense of values" is delusional. Society exists, but it is not one monolithic thing, like Hobbes's Leviathan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book)) Hobbes's Leviathan is an invented secular god, a bit of sociological idolatry grounded in collectivist fantasy. It is the kind of "entity" to which is alluded in all sorts of places, such as the lyrics of the song by Primitive Radio Gods: "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand":

We sit outside and argue all night long,
About a god we've never seen,
But never fails to side with me.

Everybody thinks they know exactly what "The Social Contract" means, and we attempt to enforce its terms upon each other based upon that hubris. It isn't true, except in very very limited and carefully delimited cases, that "our" will is "united" by "common purpose". We delude ourselves with the attempt to control the Social Sphere through collective violence in the Political Sphere. The attempt produces perverse, unintended consequences and empowers the unscrupulous. It shrinks the Social Sphere of cooperation and enlarges the Political Sphere of conflict. This is because power, unlike wealth and economic production, is a zero-sum game. For A to have more power, some other human being(s) must have less.
What is actually the case when we often speak of the Social Contract, is that even among those who believe in it religiously as a real explicit understanding, no two people can agree upon what that explicit understanding actually is, in its details, and a contract whose terms are such that no two parties can explicitly agree to them is no contract at all, whatever else we may say about or think of the feelings of mutual amity which bind groups of human beings together into cooperative efforts to divide labor and trade.
Edited 2011-07-23 14:44 (UTC)