Peril_final
When I was younger (pre-retirement) I had great confidence in our country but recent events have shaken that confidence. My concern is that we have, or will soon, lose our competitiveness in the world and that is what makes us great. I am saddened by the results of the election(2020). I am disappointed because the republicans lost but much more than that I am saddened that our country lost. I am not talking about Biden or Trump. Our country can withstand either. I am 82 and for 42 of those years we have had a democrat president and 40 years a republican. No, I am saddened for my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. They will not have the great country that I enjoyed for most of my life. A country that was the envy of the world and which people from all over the world dreamed of and clamored to join. A country that offered opportunity for anyone who worked hard and made good choices to significantly enhance their livelihood; really go from rags to riches. I did that and it saddens me to see it passing away. There are a number of signs and I will address but five of these that I believe were key to our countries success and which have significantly eroded: education, access to objective information, freedom to compete, respect for the rights of others and respect for the property of others. I will drill down some on these causes of decline; but drilling very deep becomes speculative.
Far too many of us have lost what I call love of country. Not just patriotism, which is part of love of country, but cherishing the principles our country has been built upon: law and order, respect for authority, respect for one another, justice and fair play, free markets, controlled borders and legal immigration, the ends do not justify all means, and individual freedom. Most of my life up until about the last twenty years, I have been an optimist. I thought our country could withstand just about anything and rebound. After all, I lived in the times of WWII, the cold war, the civil rights protests of the 50’s and 60’s, the protests against the Vietnam war, and the scandal of Watergate. But I see something different now, an abandoning of principles that allowed us to rebound. I ponder often if this is just me changing as I get older or is the landscape changing. I have found some who are still optimistic. I will present my case and you decide.
EDUCATION Our education system is in shambles, the standing among nations of the world has fallen from near the top to 27th overall and 38th in math. If you take in consideration the amount of money spent the value is surely the worst. I see two causes of this: loss of discipline and lack of focus on the true objective of educating our children.
One of the side effects of the civil rights movement was making obvious the discrepancy in quality of schools. That was surely true of black schools vs white schools in the South but also of poor neighborhood schools in the North vs affluent neighborhoods. At that time, school financing was primarily from local property taxes. From a career politician’s viewpoint, the solution was obvious; fund schools from Federal taxes. Many people with a more Jeffersonian view warned against this but it fell on deaf and power-hungry ears. Once government becomes the financier, they insist on being the boss! So, we got disastrous programs like “school busing” and “No child left behind”. “No child left behind” is one of those insidious programs with a nice sounding name but disastrous consequences. We wouldn’t want children left behind, would we? But the essence of the program is that children shown to be behind get special help and the special help comes with a stipend from the financier, someone in Washington, D.C. who doesn’t have a clue what is going on in Western Oregon. Soon the goal of education is not teaching the children but is getting stipends. So, we invent all sorts of disabilities that were unheard of in the 50’s when I went to school. Things like ADD (now ADHD) and LDs for reading, writing and math all of a sudden are endemic in our children. These are endemic either because the more students who have them the more money the school gets from the Feds or the “Boomer” generation of druggies produced inferior children. You can choose.
Another watershed event occurred in this timeframe when JFK went against all presidents before him and signed Executive Order 10988 in 1962 which allowed public unions. President Roosevelt explained in 1937 why this should not be. He wrote to the President of the Federation of Federal Employees: “All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rule in personnel matters.” In my words, the basic problem is that in the private sector, if the pay is pushed too high the company is not able to compete and will not be able to stay in business. A serious consequence for both management and employees. In the public sector, no one is accountable. If the pay gets too high, the government just increases taxes. The consequences once again fall on the private sector. The significance of this is that teacher unions, by their very charter, create tension between teachers and administrators. Teaching is one of the most rewarding jobs and teachers, pre1960’s, were paid as upper middle class with good retirement benefits and every summer off. Unions were able to compare teacher’s pay with engineers, lawyers and doctors and convince them they were underpaid, ignoring nine-month work year and thirty-year retirement. Administrators and teachers who once collaborated to teach children as well as they could were now antagonistic. The number of school days, number of students per class and pay and retirement benefits were priority over teaching children. The education of the children suffered and still does.
Now throw into the mix the government concepts of immediate equity and no child left behind. To get immediate equity meant taking some kind of action and, if you believe two wrongs make a right, as many ignorantly do, then Affirmative Action is appealing. So, the most egregious form of racial discrimination that currently exists in our country was implemented. There was only one way to get immediate equity, lower the standards. This was quicker and easier than doing it the right way, so it appealed to our legislators.
The final blow to education was inculcating the concept that corporal punishment is bad. Excessive corporal punishment is bad; but not as bad as no punishment. The lack of discipline began with the baby boomers. The generation that fought WWII had grown up in the depression and had it tough in their lifetime. One might argue that is what made them the ‘greatest’ generation. They did not want their children to suffer as they had and they made many mistakes in overcompensating. Some hardship is necessary to build character. So, the ‘baby boomer’ generation was generally spoiled and undisciplined. This was followed by progressively less discipline in future generations until we get to the present where there is no respect for authority and no sense of responsibility. It is the ‘entitlement’ generations. In the class room there is no respect for teachers and no consideration or respect for other children. The leaders in education accommodate rather than stop this. Therefore, even the disciplined student who wants to learn is thwarted.
With no discipline at home or in schools, the students have become disrespectful ingrates. Teachers should not have to tolerate the abuse from students typical of today. And lack of discipline is not good for the students. Quote from an old marine and someone who started from nothing and made something of himself, Bob Parsons, also a golfer. “The thing is, I was actually looking for discipline. A lot of kids today who end up getting in trouble and going to jail, they want discipline. You see, discipline is attention. You know what I am saying. That’s what I lacked. Attention.” So, we come up with names for it like attention deficit disorder and the Federal government pays to have special help for these students and even lower standards. Our schools are a mess and responsible parents who can afford it (including all our legislators) send their children to private schools.
There is a long-term consequence. Our country became great by being competitive and creative. By lowering standards and pushing quotas and tolerating antisocial behavior, we will not maintain our competitive edge.
Lack of access to objective information: The development of powerful cell phones and the internet has spawned an immense increase in the information we have access to. Unfortunately, most of that information is put there for the purpose of persuading and not informing. Couple that with all of our major news organizations being prostituted. Once our major papers and tv networks saw a dual role of presenting the news in a factual, objective fashion and also presenting an interpretation of that news. The former role has been aborted and all we get now is news that is always slanted and ofttimes so biased as to be totally false. We can get more information than we want but we have no way of verifying its truthfulness. Truth is not determined by desire or political polls or persuasive rhetoric; it is what it is.
One of the phenomena of the past 60 years that is having disastrous consequences is that the fields of journalism, education and social sciences have become predominantly liberal domains. Just how and why this occurred is unclear but I will proffer an opinion that may at least start you thinking. The normal curve that I discussed earlier is the distribution of many different attributes, including the overall ability to succeed; which encompasses several attributes including: intelligence, motivation, ambition, common sense and others. Eighty-eight per cent of the population falls near the middle. Half is above the median and half below. A distinction between journalism, education and social sciences and fields such as science, engineering, medicine and even law is that in the former a broad, superficial knowledge is adequate while in the latter a focused, in depth knowledge is required. Many Boomers and later generations stayed in college to avoid being drafted or going to work and got advanced degrees in education or social sciences and the only use for those degrees is teaching in universities. The result is we have people teaching who do not understand the principles this country was founded upon, how they work, why they work and why they made us so successful. Students in our universities are fed a constant barrage of how terrible this country is, how immoral it is to have so much when much of the world has far less and how imperialistic we have been. All lies. What America has done by being so successful is pulled the rest of the world up. Of course, they don’t catch up. If you are being pulled it is pretty hard to pass up, or even catch, the puller but you go much faster than without them. If we were imperialists, Japan and Germany and Italy and South Korea would not be independent, thriving countries.
Liberal principles are not aimed at solving problems but only making the liberal feel better. The most important thing is the name of the program, not what it accomplishes. For example, equity, taxing the workers and giving the money to those ‘in need’ sounds good on the surface but, if drilled down into, has some bad consequences. Many of the achievers among the black community (as opposed to the opportunists) believe that welfare has been a major factor in the huge increase in dysfunctional black families.
So, to conclude, why did I combine lack of objective information with education shortcomings? Simple, Universities early in my lifetime had as their goal to teach young people to be critical thinkers. They went out of their way to present opposing views. Now they do everything to keep opposing views out of the schools. They once taught how to think but now they teach what to think. Education is a barrage of propaganda. This makes the lack of objective information cataclysmic. People who have not been taught to think critically are easily brainwashed. They cannot understand concepts in depth, they buy into what on the surface sounds plausible. Man-made global warming is a prime example. Black lives matter (BLM) is not interested in improving the lot of blacks but in bringing down our system. It was founded and is led by Marxist. But the name sounds good so schools, corporations and government have blindly got behind it and contributed millions. The two things that would help blacks most, functional families and respect for authority, are two things that BLM is against.
Freedom to compete. The key difference between a socialist society and a capitalist society is the freedom to compete. America’s first experiment with socialism was the Jamestown settlement. They almost starved to death until the experiment was aborted and capitalism was implemented. The Soviet Union survived about 70 years of scarcity before it imploded.
The reason why a free society like ours excels is because of competition. If there is something that needs to be fixed, there is a rush to find a solution. If there is something desirable to be obtained or attained, there is a rush to provide it. When we have mice, competitors vie for providing a better mouse trap. But these days there are many who put down competition and our children are taught that it is bad. What happened? One thing is the fallacious idea that equality means that goods should be distributed equally. If we were truly educating our children, which we are not, most people would know enough about statistics to realize that almost all attributes are distributed in a gaussian (normal or bell curve) distribution. If the attributes of people are distributed normally, then their potential for contribution (ability) is normally distributed. That is, about two thirds are clustered around the average (mean) and about one sixth excel and about one sixth underperform. Their actual contribution is dependent on ability and some other factors such as work ethic, motivation, and even prejudices in the marketplace. Consequently, the contribution of individuals is not equal and since in a free-market society the rewards are a function of contribution, the rewards are not equal either. Nor should they be! The efforts to equalize rewards, redistribution by government, is counterproductive. First it stifles competition; who wants to work hard and make sacrifices just to have their earnings taxed and given to those who refused to work hard or make sacrifices. Second it violates the principles that our country was founded on: everyone is created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Redistribution infringes on both our liberty and our right to the pursuit of happiness. The conclusion from this is that equal distribution of goods in a free society is fallacious and teaching that it is something to be strived for leads to disastrous thinking and policy. Now I am a believer in the government providing a safety net, but governments role should simply be to ensure that the one sixth who are incapable of performing satisfactorily are provided a safety net; and perhaps the bulk of the funding for the safety net should come from the one sixth who are blessed with extraordinary ability. In the 60’s the unemployment was $40 a week and a choker setter in logging (entry level job) could make $100 a week so there was an incentive to work. Not the case today. Another case in point, the lunch program sounds good; we provide children healthy meals. But the result is far too many parents depend on it and have become even more derelict of their parental obligations. Not properly feeding your children should be so scandalous that no parent would dare neglect it.
Socialism is based on Marx fallacious assumption that the outcome of work should be equally distributed. This is fallacious not only because of what I said in the previous paragraph but also because it fails to take into account the extraordinary contribution of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur comes up with the idea, takes all of the risk, provides all of the capital and provides the leadership to make it happen. The socialism experiments have all been dismal failures. It is predictable. If you take away the incentive (rewards) for making the sacrifices necessary for greater achievement, you get less achievement. When you do not have enough to divide; dividing equally just spreads the pain. This was true at Jamestown and in the Soviet Union. China is still surviving but only because it is a totalitarian state and only for a time. The classic comparative example is North and South Korea. North is socialist and starving; South is capitalist and thriving. Most modern experiments in socialism have been disastrous like Cuba and Venezuela.
It is no accident that the major advances in every field in my lifetime have occurred in capitalist countries. The communist countries of The Soviet Union and China did well by brutal dictator leaders who used punishment of poor performance to inspire contribution. This works moderately well for a time but eventually the people will rebel, as happened in the Soviet Union. Anyone capable of critical thinking can see that competition is what drives progress. That is why liberals have done everything possible to dampen critical thinking. It is also what drives the PC police to disdain individualism and competitiveness. People who are confident in their ability to compete do not need government to take care of them.
My definition of liberal and conservative is basically that liberals want government to do more and conservatives want less government. To get government to do more requires giving up some freedom. Liberals are willing, conservatives are not. The end point of liberalism is socialism, the end point of conservatism is utopia. We should be encouraging competition not thwarting it. Sports and games are important in teaching how to compete and a free system is essential for competition and hence, progress.
Respect for the rights and property of others: For most of my life our country has prided itself on being a nation of laws. Law and order were just accepted as the norm by everyone. If someone threatened harm to you or your property, you could call the police and they would come and arrest them. This is not the case anymore.
Starting with young children in grade school, respect for authority and for others is just not universally taught. The abuse that teachers of young children must tolerate is unbelievable. The root cause is that parents have taken the easy way rather than the right way. It is easier to pamper your child with things than it is to take the time to discipline them; especially when the PC police have determined that corporal punishment is a no no. Then when they get to school, it is the school’s responsibility. The reasons aren’t too complex that lead school administrations to accept more and more of the parent’s responsibilities. But it definitely aggravates the problem. In my school days, if a student could not abide by the rules that govern civil society, they would be sent home until they were taught them. Now the teachers bear the brunt. Then when they get shoved through school, they become the ‘protestors’ that ravage our cities and our citizens.
It is beyond the pale that criminals under the guise of protestors were allowed to destroy and loot public businesses, i.e., 2020 Portland and Seattle. In a civil society, as we once had, law enforcement would have descended on them and they would still be in jail. But now if you are a seditious organization, you need only come up with a noble sounding name and half the population will be sucked in without digging below the surface. For example, Black Lives Matter could care less about black lives. Helping the black community is not their goal, destroying our society is their goal. But millions support them and they are able to threaten and coerce corporations to support them and politicians are attracted to their power like iron filings to an electromagnet. Antifa is more honest but probably worse. I don’t like the word stupid because it has bad connotations; especially for handicapped people who have been unjustly and maliciously maligned with the term. But it is the only term to describe half of the population in the USA today. They are so thoroughly brainwashed that they are easy prey. If half the population had been this stupid in the 50’s and 60’s we would have had an ‘Italian Lives Matter’ mantra and law enforcement would have helped the mafia do their dirty work instead of pursuing and prosecuting them.
This lack of law and order is more serious than you might imagine. One of the key things that separate us from Third World countries and countries like Mexico and Guatemala is the security to live in peace and do business without interference. Now we allow looters to ransack businesses with no consequence and we are more likely to arrest and prosecute the homeowner who protects himself and his home than the one who attempts to rob him and do him harm.
Our values are turned upside down and no good will come of it.
Addendum 15 Nov 2022
We have just finished mid term elections. Yes, I am disappointed the republicans did not do better since I believe they are the least of the two evils. But this is not going to be about politics. The election has just added some additional concern over the country to be lived by our grandchildren and great grandchildren. My concern now is that many of the younger generation do not even want the country to become great again. I talked earlier about the danger of generalizing about a group or generation. They are not homogenous and any characterization will be unfair to many. However, each generation has a large number with a characteristic that defines the generation. America in my lifetime was great in my mind because anyone who was willing to work hard and make good decisions could create a good life for themselves; and most were willing.
My observation now is that many of the 21st century generations do not want a country like that. They would like a country where work was optional and the government would take care of those who didn’t choose to work. Politicians are more than willing to accommodate that if it keeps them in power. Consequently, we are dissipating the wealth this country built up in the 20th century following WWII. The government is handing out record amounts of money the national debt is growing at record rates. This cannot end well. It didn’t end well for Rome. Emperors were giving bread and games to the masses in Rome so they could stay in power and Rome declined until it was easy prey for the Vandals.
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