The Department of Transportation came to us one day and said they needed to increase the fees for driver’s licenses. When we asked why, they said that the cost of relicensing wasn’t being fully recovered at the current fee levels. Then we asked why we should be doing this sort of thing at all. The transportation people clearly thought that was a very stupid question: Everybody needs a driver’s license, they said. I then pointed out that I received mine when I was fifteen and asked them: “What is it about relicensing that in any way tests driver competency?” We gave them ten days to think this over. At one point they suggested to us that the police need driver’s licenses for identification purposes. We responded that this was the purpose of an identity card, not a driver’s license. Finally they admitted that they could think of no good reason for what they were doing – so we abolished the whole process! Now a driver’s license is good until a person is 74 years old, after which he must get an annual medical test to ensure he is still competent to drive. So not only did we not need new fees, we abolished a whole department. That’s what I mean by thinking differently.

via Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand

Humphrey Carpenter describes Joseph Wright (October 31, 1855-February 27, 1930), J. R. R. Tolkien’s most influential college professor:

Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology. He had been employed in a woollen-mill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and wirsing again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a night-school in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition. When he was twenty-one he decided to use his savings to finance a term’s study at a German university, so he took a boat to Antwerp and walked stage by stage to Heidelberg, where he became interested in philology. So this former mill-hand studied Saskrit, Gothic, Old Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old English, eventually taking a doctorate. Returning to England he established himself in Oxford where he was soon appointed Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology. He could afford the lease of a small house in Norham Road, where he engaged a housekeeper. He lived with the native economy of a true Yorkshireman: he used to drink beer which he bought in a small barrel, but he thought that it went too quickly, so he arranged with Sarah the housedeeper that she should buy it and he should pay for each glass as he consumed it. He continued to work without ceasing, beginning to write a series of language primers, among which was the Gothic book that proved such a revelation to Tolkien…

Obviously, Wright was a genius (though it is not clear that anyone would have known that before he started teaching himself to read a newspaper at the age of fifteen). It is not possible to use Wright as an example of the success that everyone can have. I have no intention of doing so.

But what about an illiterate learning to read his native language as a teenager if he wants to? I don’t see why that shouldn’t be possible for a normal or even a slightly below-average individual.

Whenever I hear people talking about the importance of “education” (i.e. childhood and teen schooling) I think about Joe Wright. What are we telling people when we pump out government messages about staying in school? Are we pushing success? In some cases undoubtedly we are. But we are also saying something else: If you can’t make it in school or if you graduate without acquiring basic skills you are done for. You have no chance.

I think this is a self-fulfilling deception. The majority of forces that keep a person from succeeding are 1) his belief that what he is told is right, that he has no chance, and 2) the fact that a diploma (at whatever level) functions as a license to get a job. I don’t want to fix #2 by outlawing it. But I don’t want my tax dollars used to perpetuate the idea either. If we would get rid of minimum wage laws and other barbaric regulations that punish people for paying other people to do work, then alternative paths to productivity would not be barred. People without the piece of paper could prove themselves in other way to employers.

The entire idea of schooling and education needs to be rethought. In the nineteenth-century education was valued and people would go to school when they could… and they would stop and work to help support their families as well. Under that regime of freedom, the US as an economy and culture did not stagnate but grew tremendously.

We act like this bureaucratic, tax-fed, legally-constructed road we have created is some kind of universal path to prosperity. It isn’t. We need to kick over the fences.

Applying this idea to just one problem, I constantly hear that some zip codes are ruled by horrifying public schools where graduates are not even literate. I hear from the same sources in the same context that the drop-out rate is a scandal.

No. Willingly attending a useless dead-end skinner box ruled by bell signals for moving into the next room is the scandal. No one should put up with it.

Preaching to those “drop-outs” that their lives are now doomed is crocodile tears. Their lives don’t have to be doomed. Stop trying to doom them. Point out the value of education and encourage them to find both jobs and means of learning to better themselves.

I do worry about one potential pitfall in what I am saying. Telling a person that they can still succeed in the future can lead a people to think they don’t need to work hard “yet.” Obviously, that is a foolish attitude. That kind of attitude is addictive with the “success” always staying in the future. I don’t mean to encourage such sloth in any way.

(Cross-posted)

John Green posted an educational “rant” about health care costs in the US:

He says some interesting and true things in pointing out the difference in price between what Americans pay for healthcare and what people in other countries pay. He also did a gratifying job of knocking down some simplistic explanations for that discrepancy.

In my opinion, he does not satisfactorily address the possibility of differences in quality. If I have to wait two years for a hip replacement in one country, and can get it in a week in another country, that datum must be accounted for. But I am not arguing for that explanation for the difference in price. I’m just mentioning that I wish he had addressed it more thoroughly.

Green’s real problem is six minute in. Supposedly, other countries keep health costs down by taking bids from manufacturers and only giving the contract to the lowest bidder. According to Green, the government has more negotiating power than individual consumers and only the government can get corporations to really offer low prices because they want the government contract to provide a good or service to the everyone in the entire nation that needs that service.

But why shouldn’t the government take national supply bids on everything and thus provide consumers with goods and services at a lower price then they can ever get for themselves? (Side note: don’t people hate Walmart for allegedly doing something like this? Does the government sanctify the action?) According to Green, the alleged inability of consumers to get a lower price is due to “inelastic demand.” Because the person needing the hip replacement really needs it and cannot live without it, the corporation can charge him more.

John Green’s reasoning cannot be right.

Go to any grocery store. Food is necessary. It is more continually necessary than medicine. As Megan McArdle writes:

Food and water are far more vital than health care, let alone higher education, which the human race managed to do without for a few hundred thousands of years. You can go quite a while without blood pressure medication or even insulin — much longer than most people could go without fuel for heating or cooking. Clothing and some sort of shelter would also rank higher on the list of imminent necessities than health care and education. Yet none of these goods displays health care and education’s pattern of above-inflation cost increases. It’s true that demand for education and health care is what economists call inelastic — meaning that the demand doesn’t decrease very much even when the price rises — but that doesn’t explain why the prices of these two inelastic services, and no others, has risen faster than inflation for decades.

You will notice that McArdle is responding to someone who is attempting to explain both why health care costs in the US and also why education costs so much. I’d be interested in what John Green thinks of this argument since Green gets so eloquent about how badly health care is needed. He certainly can’t claim that education rises to that level.

But that’s the point: treating the cost of health care as a single problem in the American economy is a fundamental error. Historically, we have more than one industry that is or was characterized by prices rising faster than inflation. Housing was one until the country could no longer take it. Education is another one. Perhaps energy/utility costs are another one.

The problem is not in the health care industry. The problem is the Federal Reserve and corrupt monetary policy (to be redundant). The American financial “system” produces booms and busts. Some, like housing, expanded and then contracted relatively recently. Others might have started earlier and yet not collapsed yet.

If you run ten times the allowable amount of water pressure to run through a hose, the hose will spring leaks. Each one of those leaks might be explained as a weakness in the hose, something that allowed water to flow at that point. But the weaknesses in the hose are not really an explanation of why the hose leaked. It leaked because there was too much water going through it.

Likewise, there are reasons why price inflation is hitting the health care industry and not groceries, but those reasons are not “why” we pay more. We pay more because of the Federal Reserve’s manipulations. We have a bubblicious economy. That is where people should focus their attention if they want to see prices get reasonable.

He writes:

So what to make of Putin?

He is Tolkien’s melodious and fatherly Saruman come alive.

Hanson is not wrong about Tolkien’s fictional character, but I had forgotten that aspect of Saruman–his “melodious” persuasiveness. Frankly, I don’t think Putin is charismatic enough to qualify.

When I think of Saruman, what first comes to mind is Saruman and his orcs. He used them and bred them to wage his wars.

I’ve been thinking of Saruman a great deal lately because his strategy of conquest seems so familiar to what I see, not in Putin, but in US policy. We flooded Libya with orcs and gave them air support bombed their enemies. They  murdered many sub-Saharan Africans and flew black flags over the conquered towns. Later, at a time when they escaped Saruman’s grip, they killed our ambassador and others in Benghazi.

Now we are using them to overrun Syria so they can rape Christians and burn down churches and overthrow a secular dictatorship in order to replace it with an Islamist nightmare.

As far as the “melodious” aspect of Saruman is concerned, that would be the pseudo-conservative writers and speakers who are doing all they can to prevent an anti-war, anti-establishment movement from growing and to turn it into a partisan anti-Democrat-Party, pro-GOP movement that will froth at the mouth when the next Republican President attacks another nation.

How can I be surprised by the hubristic behavior of a man who is so completely predictable?:

“This is the same president that two years ago said that Bashar Assad must leave office and so where is America’s credibility? Where is our ability to influence events in the region?” the Arizona Republican said.

And those “who say we should stay out of Syria do not understand that this is now a regional conflict” that is increasingly “getting worse,” he said. “And what is the president’s policy? What is the president’s policy?”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/john-mccain-leaks-syria-95992.html

So Obama told the ruler of a sovereign country to leave office and that proves we must remove him? People who doubt the American Empire are fooling themselves.

And if Obama has that authority over the Syrian government, he certainly has authority over the “nation” of the United States. How can the legal claims of the Constitution bind a man who can make extra-legal rulings over another nation in a different hemisphere? If Obama has the authority to remove Assad, the Republic is truly dead.

Next to that, the foolishness of McCain’s claim that turning a regional conflict into a global one represents an improvement on the situation barely rates a mention.

So, I made a point today of visiting the most popular Christian websites to see all the prophetic denunciations of the coming US-government-sponsored, anti-Christian bloodbath that is about to be, as the cliche goes, “taken to the next level.”

I can’t believe I am part of a subculture who lauds Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce and G. K. Chesterton and Corrie Ten Boom. Apparently, the point of honoring heroes of old is so that we can credit ourselves for admiring them to compensate for being nothing like them.

Decorating the tombs of the prophets.

So here. Let me help you transition your outrage.