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    Will George Bush listen to Africans?

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    Dismissed by some as a unilateralist gunslinger, President George Bush of the United States of America portrayed a different self, through an emotional speech on Gore Island Senegal. He remarked, “At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises, and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.” In East Africa, Bagamoyo stands out as a spot where slaves who trekked from the interior lost hope when they were packed in ships to the infamous Zanzibar slave market.

    Mr. Bush’s five-day, five-nation visit to Africa has been marked by a series of demands to alleviate Africa’s plight. Bush has been asked to address issues on war, poverty and preventable epidemics. He has been asked to press the U.S.A congress to release more funds for Africa. Jeffrey Sachs of Earth Institute, Columbia University, argues that 400 super rich Americans had an average income of nearly $ 174 million each, or a combined income of $69 billion, in 2000; this is more than a combined income of the 166 million people living in the four countries that the president is visiting in Africa. Said Jeffrey, “Our world is dangerously out of kilter when a few hundred people in the U.S.A command more income than 166 million people in Africa — with millions of the poor dying each year as a result of their impoverishment.”

    Since the liberation from European colonizers, most African countries opted to avoid capitalism and embrace central planning as a way to identify with their population. Friedrich A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics, wrote in his book, “The Road to Serfdom,” that central planning systems are the surest way of enslaving people. Asked Hayek, “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?” Mr. Bush ought to be careful not to fall in a trap of assuming he knows best what is good for Africa, only Africans can solve their problems.

    With over 50 million Africans living on less than $1 a day, African policy makers have focused on policies that encourage external donor funding to their governments. According to the World Bank, aid inflows to sub-Saharan Africa rose from 3.4 percent of GNP in 1980 to 16.3 percent in 1995. These official inflows typically funded basic government programs, together with all or most of government development expenditures. Dependence on aid has led to African governments virtually ceding the shaping of their economic and social policies to external agencies. Wealthy nations and international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have become the central economic planners for Africa. The end result is sporadic project implementation, corruption, and poor economic performance attributable to inept policies, political tensions as each ethnic community jostles to partake of the “national cake” and disaster unpreparedness due donor anesthesia.

    Nowhere in the commentaries are people urging Bush to listen to Africans, they urge the president of the most powerful nation in the world to “speak to African leaders to take steps” to improve the situation in Africa. True Africa is poor, but it is not keen to demand that America robs her wealthy people in order to feed her; Africa recognizes the handicaps of free handouts, its evident even within the United States of America that communities that are hooked on welfare rarely advance in creativity and entrepreneurship. Africa needs to wean itself off international welfare.

    For over 40 years that Sub Sahara continent has been groaning under the weight of welfare, and each time they ask for more. Sub Sahara Africa alone received total aid of some $83 billion between 1980 and 1988. Yet all those funds failed to spur economic growth and arrest Africa’s economic atrophy. The standard of living fell by 1.2 percent a year during this period. During the 1965 – 1984 period, 18 black African countries had growth rates of less than 1 percent per annum. The worst performers were Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ghana, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Zaire [Congo]. Between 1995/96 Sub Sahara accounted for 36 percent of the Official Development Assistance, its external debt stood at an estimated $200 billion in the year 2000. Focus on aid as an industry has simply disoriented the original mission of African freedom fighters.

    As a powerful country, the temptation to overreach to other people’s private business is high. However it is important to realize that the Africans are not keen to take another trip to serfdom. It will be strategic to weigh each step with its long-term implications. Yes Africa needs commerce, but not one ended, they want to exchange goods and travel freely. Yes Africans need charity, but not from the government, they would rather have individuals extend a hand of charity without the coercive power of the state. Government to government charity tends to destroy individual liberties in Africa, by making systems respond only to those who offer aid as opposed to having a government of the people, by the people for the people. Bush ought to address American policies that contribute to poverty in Africa such as farm subsidies and other technical barriers to trade. Africa would rather learn how to fish, so that they eat in their lifetime than get a fish that will be consumed in a day.

    Bush would do better for Africa if he urged an end to an influx of do — gooders from rich nations who have no time to listen to Africans.

    ”’James Shikwati is the Director Inter Region Economic Network [IREN Kenya] and the SIFE Kenya Country Coordinator. He can be reached via email at”’ mailto:james@irenkenya.org ”’More of his work at:”’ https://www.irenkenya.org

    Will George Bush listen to Africans?

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    Dismissed by some as a unilateralist gunslinger, President George Bush of the United States of America portrayed a different self, through an emotional speech on Gore Island Senegal. He remarked, “At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises, and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.” In East Africa, Bagamoyo stands out as a spot where slaves who trekked from the interior lost hope when they were packed in ships to the infamous Zanzibar slave market.

    Mr. Bush’s five-day, five-nation visit to Africa has been marked by a series of demands to alleviate Africa’s plight. Bush has been asked to address issues on war, poverty and preventable epidemics. He has been asked to press the U.S.A congress to release more funds for Africa. Jeffrey Sachs of Earth Institute, Columbia University, argues that 400 super rich Americans had an average income of nearly $ 174 million each, or a combined income of $69 billion, in 2000; this is more than a combined income of the 166 million people living in the four countries that the president is visiting in Africa. Said Jeffrey, “Our world is dangerously out of kilter when a few hundred people in the U.S.A command more income than 166 million people in Africa — with millions of the poor dying each year as a result of their impoverishment.”

    Since the liberation from European colonizers, most African countries opted to avoid capitalism and embrace central planning as a way to identify with their population. Friedrich A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics, wrote in his book, “The Road to Serfdom,” that central planning systems are the surest way of enslaving people. Asked Hayek, “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?” Mr. Bush ought to be careful not to fall in a trap of assuming he knows best what is good for Africa, only Africans can solve their problems.

    With over 50 million Africans living on less than $1 a day, African policy makers have focused on policies that encourage external donor funding to their governments. According to the World Bank, aid inflows to sub-Saharan Africa rose from 3.4 percent of GNP in 1980 to 16.3 percent in 1995. These official inflows typically funded basic government programs, together with all or most of government development expenditures. Dependence on aid has led to African governments virtually ceding the shaping of their economic and social policies to external agencies. Wealthy nations and international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have become the central economic planners for Africa. The end result is sporadic project implementation, corruption, and poor economic performance attributable to inept policies, political tensions as each ethnic community jostles to partake of the “national cake” and disaster unpreparedness due donor anesthesia.

    Nowhere in the commentaries are people urging Bush to listen to Africans, they urge the president of the most powerful nation in the world to “speak to African leaders to take steps” to improve the situation in Africa. True Africa is poor, but it is not keen to demand that America robs her wealthy people in order to feed her; Africa recognizes the handicaps of free handouts, its evident even within the United States of America that communities that are hooked on welfare rarely advance in creativity and entrepreneurship. Africa needs to wean itself off international welfare.

    For over 40 years that Sub Sahara continent has been groaning under the weight of welfare, and each time they ask for more. Sub Sahara Africa alone received total aid of some $83 billion between 1980 and 1988. Yet all those funds failed to spur economic growth and arrest Africa’s economic atrophy. The standard of living fell by 1.2 percent a year during this period. During the 1965 – 1984 period, 18 black African countries had growth rates of less than 1 percent per annum. The worst performers were Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ghana, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Zaire [Congo]. Between 1995/96 Sub Sahara accounted for 36 percent of the Official Development Assistance, its external debt stood at an estimated $200 billion in the year 2000. Focus on aid as an industry has simply disoriented the original mission of African freedom fighters.

    As a powerful country, the temptation to overreach to other people’s private business is high. However it is important to realize that the Africans are not keen to take another trip to serfdom. It will be strategic to weigh each step with its long-term implications. Yes Africa needs commerce, but not one ended, they want to exchange goods and travel freely. Yes Africans need charity, but not from the government, they would rather have individuals extend a hand of charity without the coercive power of the state. Government to government charity tends to destroy individual liberties in Africa, by making systems respond only to those who offer aid as opposed to having a government of the people, by the people for the people. Bush ought to address American policies that contribute to poverty in Africa such as farm subsidies and other technical barriers to trade. Africa would rather learn how to fish, so that they eat in their lifetime than get a fish that will be consumed in a day.

    Bush would do better for Africa if he urged an end to an influx of do — gooders from rich nations who have no time to listen to Africans.

    ”’James Shikwati is the Director Inter Region Economic Network [IREN Kenya] and the SIFE Kenya Country Coordinator. He can be reached via email at”’ mailto:james@irenkenya.org ”’More of his work at:”’ https://www.irenkenya.org

    Grassroot Perspective – July 14, 2003-Excerpt from Crossfire; How Would Jesus Tax?; Was Horace Really the Mann?

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Dick Rowland Image”

    ”Shoots (News, Views and Quotes)”

    – Excerpt from Crossfire. Bill Moyers and Fred Smith, Jr. of The
    Competitive Enterprise Institute discussing “Obesity, public health and the fat tax” on 6/13/03

    MOYERS: You should be feeling very good. Your side has won. I mean, the President. you have the ear of the President and every level of the government. Your arguments are being heard. Corporate executives,
    lawyers, lobbyists as we saw in the first piece are really throughout
    the government, they’re running the show now. But you must be a very
    happy man.

    SMITH: My expectations are much, much higher than that, Bill. I feel a little like the preacher who got people to recognize there is sin. But
    there’s still an awful lot of it in Washington, DC. We have taken…
    we’ve got a long way to go yet on government regulations, government
    expenditures are still dramatically out of scale. And the ability of the
    Republican administration and Congress to explain, to give a vision of
    what they’re trying to achieve still deserves a lot more work than it
    has today.

    – How Would Jesus Tax?

    By Edward Hudgins

    mailto:ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org

    One Republican is finally making moral arguments to support his tax
    policies. Unfortunately they’re the wrong arguments and wrong policies.
    Alabama’s Governor Bob Riley has just shepherded through the state
    legislature the largest tax hike in the state’s history, justifying a
    greater tax burden on the prosperous on the religious grounds summed up
    in the slogan, “What would Jesus do?”

    Alabama’s tax code — like most other state codes — is complex and needs
    changes. But approaching reform from the wrong moral premises guarantees
    immoral results. For example, Adam Cohen in a “New York Times” editorial
    supporting the tax hike notes that, “Christians are prohibited from
    oppressing the poor.” So it’s “oppression” if an individual creates
    wealth and fails to hand enough of it over to others? Of course, without
    the creators, for example, of logging companies in Alabama, there would
    be no timber industry jobs for Alabama citizens or for employees of
    stores and other enterprises that serve them.

    Collectivism — from the Left or the Right — maintains that individuals
    who create wealth can only retain it with the permission of those who
    did not create it. Individualism maintains that if you earn it, it’s
    yours and you need answer to no one save yourself.

    For those like Gov. Riley who believe in the Biblical decree that
    Christians “take care of the least among us,” private charity at least
    does not punish the productive. A tax collector with a government gun
    does.

    Above article is quoted from The Objectivist Center
    https://www.ObjectivistCenter.org

    ”Roots (Food for Thought)”

    – Was Horace Really the Mann? The Many Schools of “Public” Education

    By Matthew J. Brouillette

    Across the nation, the debate over school choice is over. While the old
    argument used to center around whether parents should be able to choose
    their children ‘s school, today much of the debate revolves around “how
    much” and “how” choice should be expanded. And last summer, the U.S.
    Supreme Court dispelled one more of the many obsolete myths promulgated
    by those opposed to parental choice in education.

    The reality is that choice is here to stay and the days of the
    restrictive “assignment system,” forcing children into a particular
    school simply because of where they live are finally over. Empirical and
    anecdotal evidence from over 2,300 charter schools, 60,000 low-income
    children reaping the intellectual benefits from privately funded
    scholarships to attend private and parochial schools, and another 12,000
    students utilizing publicly funded vouchers, make the positive effects
    of school choice impossible to deny.

    Revisiting Public Education

    Yet despite the overwhelming success and increasing public demand for
    more school choice, many Americans remain skeptical. I’m not talking
    about the ardent opponents of school choice-moral arguments and
    empirical evidence will never convince them. I’m talking about the
    average citizen who fears that choice will somehow hurt rather than
    improve public education.

    So, in order to better understand why school choice should be embraced
    instead of feared, we should consider both the history and purpose of
    public education.

    First, however, let’s define the concept of public education. Today,
    this concept has been completely turned on its head. What used to mean
    “the education of the public through diverse means” has become
    synonymous with the direct sponsorship, operation, and control of
    schooling by the government.

    But, it hasn’t always been this way. For the first 150 years of
    America’s settlement and the first 50 to 75 years of our
    nation’s existence, public education was achieved through independent,
    church-related, philanthropic, and community-sponsored schools. These
    schools were in essence what we call private schools today.

    Yet despite this extremely decentralized system of schools, the early
    American public was exceptionally literate and relatively well educated.
    Nearly every child — including the poor — had access to some level of
    schooling. (Of course, an important exception was those persons kept in
    the government-sanctioned and government — protected system of chattel
    slavery from the 1600s through the mid-1860s.)

    Then — beginning in New England in the mid-1800s — a wave of change swept
    across the country. States began to abandon the original American model
    in favor of greater government involvement in schooling. It wasn’t a
    hostile takeover, but a persistent push for creating a government
    supported educational “safety net.”

    In 1841, Horace Mann, the leader of the government school movement in
    Massachusetts, made a bold promise. He said: “Let the common school be
    expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of
    which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code
    would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills will be
    abridged.”

    As we continue to wait for government to usher in Horace Mann’s Utopia,
    an honest look at the current school system should conclude that we have
    established a government institution that clashes with the political,
    economic, social, and cultural traditions of the United States to an
    extent unparalleled by any other in American history.

    This fact once prompted the late Albert Shanker, former president of the
    American Federation of Teachers, to say: “It’s time to admit that public
    education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in
    which every body’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few
    incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our
    school system doesn’t improve: it more resembles the communist economy
    than our own market economy.”

    Despite these stark contradictions, most Americans cling to the
    misconception that government must be involved in educating our
    children. Many more would argue further that without government
    involvement in schooling, democracy itself would be threatened.

    However, what few people realize is how sixteenth- and
    seventeenth-century Americans-without the help of government
    schooling-came to tame an unsettled continent and eventually establish
    the freest nation in history.

    One School Does Not Fit All

    The Founding Fathers were clearly educated men, and they certainly
    believed that to remain free, America must always have an educated
    citizenry. But the educated citizenry they envisioned, and what largely
    came to pass during their lifetimes, did not depend upon nor require
    that governments provide or operate schools.

    Yet today, nearly 90 percent of American children attend government-run
    schools. In the majority of states, parents who desire a religious or
    nongovernment education for their children are financially penalized.
    They must pay taxes for schools they don’t use and pay again for tuition
    at schools that are actually educating their children.

    It is clear that the goal of an educated public has given way to the
    establishment and protection of a monolithic system of government
    schools. This is not to say that some or many public schools are not
    doing a fine job of teaching children to read, write, and figure.

    But the facts are that children are falling through the cracks in even
    the best public schools. Despite our best intentions, no school can be
    all things to all people. It’s simply impossible.

    Just as one-size-fits-all shoes do not properly fit all children’s feet,
    neither do one-size-fits-all schools properly fit all children’s
    learning needs. This is why we must return to the original concept of
    public education-the education of the public through diverse means.

    Every child must have the option to choose a school that will best meet
    his or her needs-whether it is a traditional government school, or a
    charter, private, religious, or even a home school. The promise of
    public education will only be fulfilled when parents are once again
    empowered with the right, freedom, and flexibility to choose the school
    that best meets their children’s academic, emotional, spiritual, and
    physical needs.

    Once again, this is not just my opinion; my conclusion is based on
    experience and the historical record.

    A Historical Recipe For Success

    Researcher and author Andrew Coulson did us a great service a few years
    ago when he published Market Education: An Unknown History. What Coulson
    did for those of us who had a rather myopic view of government-sponsored
    education is to demonstrate that “schooling” is not a new invention. In
    fact, through his exhaustive research, he uncovered a vast wealth of
    experience with schooling that goes back as far as 2,500 years.

    Coulson says that we cannot just pick and choose one or a few historical
    school systems that seemed to work and claim that they would necessarily
    work for us today. Instead, he suggests that we look for trends in the
    kinds of systems that worked well or poorly across many different
    cultural settings.

    By doing this, it is possible to compare educational outcomes between
    similar and contemporary societies that adopted different education
    systems. As a result, we can also correlate what happened to educational
    outcomes when a given society abandoned one system in favor of another.

    What’s the best education system in world history? Remarkably, Coulson
    discovered that free markets in education — in which parents choose their
    children’s schools and schools freely compete to attract and serve those
    children — consistently out-perform all other approaches to school
    governance.

    Time and again throughout history, individuals and groups created school
    in response to public demand without the need for government
    intervention.

    Coulson also found that effective education obviously doesn’t just
    happen; nor can it be achieved through political means. He found that
    school systems that have consistently performed well under widely
    varying social conditions have consisted of five essential elements.

    Coulson warns, however, that, “Far from being a policy smorgasbord from
    which individual elements can be casually selected or rejected based on
    personal taste or political expediency, education markets behave much
    more like fragile ecosystems. If any essential element is eliminated,
    the entire system begins to decline.”

    The five elements Coulson uncovered are: 1) Parental choice; 2) Direct
    parental financial responsibility; 3) Freedom for educators; 4)
    Competition among schools; and 5) The profit motive for schools.

    These five factors, taken together, create the incentives that are
    missing in the current system.

    Are they controversial? Absolutely. No doubt that the appeal of an
    education marketplace would be broadened if we could eliminate or find
    substitutes for two elements in particular: direct Parental financial
    responsibility and the profit motive.

    Unfortunately, there are no such substitutes. Coulson found that having
    parents pay directly for their own children’s education has historically
    proven to be an indispensable component of effective education markets.

    It makes perfect sense though: what people pay for, they pay attention
    to, and what they get for free they become complacent about. Education
    is hardly exempt from this economic axiom. Nevertheless, it does pose a
    problem.

    One Educational Marketplace for All

    So how can American citizens and policy makers ensure that all
    children —regardless of family income — have access to good
    schools, particularly if good schools are dependent on parents “footing”
    some or all of the bill?

    This is actually a fairly low hurdle to get over. We offer needs-based
    financial assistance to low-income citizens for many products and
    services. Obviously this could be done so that all parents could become
    full participants in the educational marketplace. Those who could afford
    to pay for their own children’s education would do so, while those
    needing varying degrees of financial help would receive it.

    Thus preserving the benefits of direct tuition payment by parents for
    the vast majority of the population, since only a fraction of parents
    would need to have the entire cost of their children’s education paid
    for by others.

    However, the best way to provide such assistance has also been a subject
    of considerable debate among scholars in recent years.

    Some favor an education voucher similar to that used in Milwaukee,
    Cleveland, and Florida, while others seek to promote the spread of
    private scholarship organizations through the use of tax credits, as
    Arizona has done since 1997 and Pennsylvania began in 2002.

    One area that both sides do agree on is that existing programs currently
    serve far too few children.

    The other difficult hurdle is the need for the profit motive in
    education. This notion usually invites a hailstorm of criticism from the
    education community. “Children are not widgets,” they will shout.

    But once again, history proves the profit incentive is what drives
    entrepreneurs to produce better products and superior services. It is
    this very same profit motive that has provided Americans with the
    highest quality of life the world has ever known.

    It is also the absence of the profit motive that has been the chief
    reason that America’s top teachers are underpaid and the best teaching
    methods have been extremely limited in their replication and
    dissemination.

    Although many people accept the need for parents to take direct
    financial responsibility for their children ‘s education and the need
    for at least some schools to be spurred to excellence by the profit
    motive, many more people remain skeptical of market-based education
    because of the perceived negative social effects.

    Of course while we want schools to teach children to read, write, and
    figure, we also want schools to foster strong and harmonious
    communities. A more civil society most certainly won’t be achieved if we
    merely focus on academic outcomes. Therefore, we must consider the
    overall societal impact of an education marketplace.

    Fortunately, backward arguments against an education marketplace in the
    first place are nothing more than red herrings. History reveals that
    time and again, it has been free education markets that have allowed
    diverse groups to harmoniously pursue both their shared educational
    goals and their unique and varied traditions.

    It has not been diversity that has set neighbor against neighbor, but
    coercion. If parents had been allowed to choose their own schools rather
    than being forced to relocate in order to send their children elsewhere,
    much of the segregation of neighborhoods over the past several decades
    by socioeconomic level would have never taken place.

    So while public school apologists claim that public education is the
    glue that keeps communities together, it is in fact the solvent that is
    pulling them a part. Just consider the endless series of battles for
    control of public schooling. Just one example is a local school district
    near my home that has been battling over the inclusion of the creation
    theory in science class. Who really wins in these debates? Yet these are
    the inevitable and unfortunate side effects of creating an establishment
    of education.

    Our Founding Fathers wisely forbade Congress from establishing a single
    system of religion for all citizens. So, too, we must realize that any
    establishment of a single “official” system of education for all
    children invariably leads to conflict within diverse communities. It has
    repeatedly done so throughout history. Free-market education, by
    contrast, has consistently allowed heterogeneous peoples to more
    harmoniously pursue their educational needs and goals.

    Future decisions about public education-that is, the education of
    public-reach far beyond simple education policy. Ultimately they lie at
    the heart of all our freedoms-what it truly means to be an American.

    Thomas Jefferson said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in
    state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” In
    other words, we cannot long continue our ignorance and at the same time
    hope maintain and restore our liberties.

    Clearly, bringing more freedom the means by which our children and our
    children’s are educated means less government interference. Our Founding
    Fathers knew this well and it is this fundamental lesson from our
    nation’s past that taxpayers, educators and policymakers at all levels
    of govern men must heed if we ever wish to truly ensure that “no child
    is left behind” in the future.

    #######

    Matthew J. Brouillette, a former school teacher, is president of The
    Commonwealth Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit, public policy
    research and educational institute located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
    For more information, visit https://www.CommonwealthFoundation.org

    Above article is quoted from Center of the American Experiment, American
    Experiment Quarterly Spring 2003 https://www.amexp.org

    ”Evergreen (Today’s Quote)”

    “Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.” — George
    Norman Douglas, 1868-1952. British writer/diplomat

    ”’Edited by Richard O. Rowland, president of Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached at (808) 487-4959 or by email at:”’ mailto:grassroot@hawaii.rr.com ”’For more information, see its Web site at:”’ https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/

    Grassroot Perspective – July 14, 2003-Excerpt from Crossfire; How Would Jesus Tax?; Was Horace Really the Mann?

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Dick Rowland Image”

    ”Shoots (News, Views and Quotes)”

    – Excerpt from Crossfire. Bill Moyers and Fred Smith, Jr. of The
    Competitive Enterprise Institute discussing “Obesity, public health and the fat tax” on 6/13/03

    MOYERS: You should be feeling very good. Your side has won. I mean, the President. you have the ear of the President and every level of the government. Your arguments are being heard. Corporate executives,
    lawyers, lobbyists as we saw in the first piece are really throughout
    the government, they’re running the show now. But you must be a very
    happy man.

    SMITH: My expectations are much, much higher than that, Bill. I feel a little like the preacher who got people to recognize there is sin. But
    there’s still an awful lot of it in Washington, DC. We have taken…
    we’ve got a long way to go yet on government regulations, government
    expenditures are still dramatically out of scale. And the ability of the
    Republican administration and Congress to explain, to give a vision of
    what they’re trying to achieve still deserves a lot more work than it
    has today.

    – How Would Jesus Tax?

    By Edward Hudgins

    mailto:ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org

    One Republican is finally making moral arguments to support his tax
    policies. Unfortunately they’re the wrong arguments and wrong policies.
    Alabama’s Governor Bob Riley has just shepherded through the state
    legislature the largest tax hike in the state’s history, justifying a
    greater tax burden on the prosperous on the religious grounds summed up
    in the slogan, “What would Jesus do?”

    Alabama’s tax code — like most other state codes — is complex and needs
    changes. But approaching reform from the wrong moral premises guarantees
    immoral results. For example, Adam Cohen in a “New York Times” editorial
    supporting the tax hike notes that, “Christians are prohibited from
    oppressing the poor.” So it’s “oppression” if an individual creates
    wealth and fails to hand enough of it over to others? Of course, without
    the creators, for example, of logging companies in Alabama, there would
    be no timber industry jobs for Alabama citizens or for employees of
    stores and other enterprises that serve them.

    Collectivism — from the Left or the Right — maintains that individuals
    who create wealth can only retain it with the permission of those who
    did not create it. Individualism maintains that if you earn it, it’s
    yours and you need answer to no one save yourself.

    For those like Gov. Riley who believe in the Biblical decree that
    Christians “take care of the least among us,” private charity at least
    does not punish the productive. A tax collector with a government gun
    does.

    Above article is quoted from The Objectivist Center
    https://www.ObjectivistCenter.org

    ”Roots (Food for Thought)”

    – Was Horace Really the Mann? The Many Schools of “Public” Education

    By Matthew J. Brouillette

    Across the nation, the debate over school choice is over. While the old
    argument used to center around whether parents should be able to choose
    their children ‘s school, today much of the debate revolves around “how
    much” and “how” choice should be expanded. And last summer, the U.S.
    Supreme Court dispelled one more of the many obsolete myths promulgated
    by those opposed to parental choice in education.

    The reality is that choice is here to stay and the days of the
    restrictive “assignment system,” forcing children into a particular
    school simply because of where they live are finally over. Empirical and
    anecdotal evidence from over 2,300 charter schools, 60,000 low-income
    children reaping the intellectual benefits from privately funded
    scholarships to attend private and parochial schools, and another 12,000
    students utilizing publicly funded vouchers, make the positive effects
    of school choice impossible to deny.

    Revisiting Public Education

    Yet despite the overwhelming success and increasing public demand for
    more school choice, many Americans remain skeptical. I’m not talking
    about the ardent opponents of school choice-moral arguments and
    empirical evidence will never convince them. I’m talking about the
    average citizen who fears that choice will somehow hurt rather than
    improve public education.

    So, in order to better understand why school choice should be embraced
    instead of feared, we should consider both the history and purpose of
    public education.

    First, however, let’s define the concept of public education. Today,
    this concept has been completely turned on its head. What used to mean
    “the education of the public through diverse means” has become
    synonymous with the direct sponsorship, operation, and control of
    schooling by the government.

    But, it hasn’t always been this way. For the first 150 years of
    America’s settlement and the first 50 to 75 years of our
    nation’s existence, public education was achieved through independent,
    church-related, philanthropic, and community-sponsored schools. These
    schools were in essence what we call private schools today.

    Yet despite this extremely decentralized system of schools, the early
    American public was exceptionally literate and relatively well educated.
    Nearly every child — including the poor — had access to some level of
    schooling. (Of course, an important exception was those persons kept in
    the government-sanctioned and government — protected system of chattel
    slavery from the 1600s through the mid-1860s.)

    Then — beginning in New England in the mid-1800s — a wave of change swept
    across the country. States began to abandon the original American model
    in favor of greater government involvement in schooling. It wasn’t a
    hostile takeover, but a persistent push for creating a government
    supported educational “safety net.”

    In 1841, Horace Mann, the leader of the government school movement in
    Massachusetts, made a bold promise. He said: “Let the common school be
    expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of
    which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code
    would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills will be
    abridged.”

    As we continue to wait for government to usher in Horace Mann’s Utopia,
    an honest look at the current school system should conclude that we have
    established a government institution that clashes with the political,
    economic, social, and cultural traditions of the United States to an
    extent unparalleled by any other in American history.

    This fact once prompted the late Albert Shanker, former president of the
    American Federation of Teachers, to say: “It’s time to admit that public
    education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in
    which every body’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few
    incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our
    school system doesn’t improve: it more resembles the communist economy
    than our own market economy.”

    Despite these stark contradictions, most Americans cling to the
    misconception that government must be involved in educating our
    children. Many more would argue further that without government
    involvement in schooling, democracy itself would be threatened.

    However, what few people realize is how sixteenth- and
    seventeenth-century Americans-without the help of government
    schooling-came to tame an unsettled continent and eventually establish
    the freest nation in history.

    One School Does Not Fit All

    The Founding Fathers were clearly educated men, and they certainly
    believed that to remain free, America must always have an educated
    citizenry. But the educated citizenry they envisioned, and what largely
    came to pass during their lifetimes, did not depend upon nor require
    that governments provide or operate schools.

    Yet today, nearly 90 percent of American children attend government-run
    schools. In the majority of states, parents who desire a religious or
    nongovernment education for their children are financially penalized.
    They must pay taxes for schools they don’t use and pay again for tuition
    at schools that are actually educating their children.

    It is clear that the goal of an educated public has given way to the
    establishment and protection of a monolithic system of government
    schools. This is not to say that some or many public schools are not
    doing a fine job of teaching children to read, write, and figure.

    But the facts are that children are falling through the cracks in even
    the best public schools. Despite our best intentions, no school can be
    all things to all people. It’s simply impossible.

    Just as one-size-fits-all shoes do not properly fit all children’s feet,
    neither do one-size-fits-all schools properly fit all children’s
    learning needs. This is why we must return to the original concept of
    public education-the education of the public through diverse means.

    Every child must have the option to choose a school that will best meet
    his or her needs-whether it is a traditional government school, or a
    charter, private, religious, or even a home school. The promise of
    public education will only be fulfilled when parents are once again
    empowered with the right, freedom, and flexibility to choose the school
    that best meets their children’s academic, emotional, spiritual, and
    physical needs.

    Once again, this is not just my opinion; my conclusion is based on
    experience and the historical record.

    A Historical Recipe For Success

    Researcher and author Andrew Coulson did us a great service a few years
    ago when he published Market Education: An Unknown History. What Coulson
    did for those of us who had a rather myopic view of government-sponsored
    education is to demonstrate that “schooling” is not a new invention. In
    fact, through his exhaustive research, he uncovered a vast wealth of
    experience with schooling that goes back as far as 2,500 years.

    Coulson says that we cannot just pick and choose one or a few historical
    school systems that seemed to work and claim that they would necessarily
    work for us today. Instead, he suggests that we look for trends in the
    kinds of systems that worked well or poorly across many different
    cultural settings.

    By doing this, it is possible to compare educational outcomes between
    similar and contemporary societies that adopted different education
    systems. As a result, we can also correlate what happened to educational
    outcomes when a given society abandoned one system in favor of another.

    What’s the best education system in world history? Remarkably, Coulson
    discovered that free markets in education — in which parents choose their
    children’s schools and schools freely compete to attract and serve those
    children — consistently out-perform all other approaches to school
    governance.

    Time and again throughout history, individuals and groups created school
    in response to public demand without the need for government
    intervention.

    Coulson also found that effective education obviously doesn’t just
    happen; nor can it be achieved through political means. He found that
    school systems that have consistently performed well under widely
    varying social conditions have consisted of five essential elements.

    Coulson warns, however, that, “Far from being a policy smorgasbord from
    which individual elements can be casually selected or rejected based on
    personal taste or political expediency, education markets behave much
    more like fragile ecosystems. If any essential element is eliminated,
    the entire system begins to decline.”

    The five elements Coulson uncovered are: 1) Parental choice; 2) Direct
    parental financial responsibility; 3) Freedom for educators; 4)
    Competition among schools; and 5) The profit motive for schools.

    These five factors, taken together, create the incentives that are
    missing in the current system.

    Are they controversial? Absolutely. No doubt that the appeal of an
    education marketplace would be broadened if we could eliminate or find
    substitutes for two elements in particular: direct Parental financial
    responsibility and the profit motive.

    Unfortunately, there are no such substitutes. Coulson found that having
    parents pay directly for their own children’s education has historically
    proven to be an indispensable component of effective education markets.

    It makes perfect sense though: what people pay for, they pay attention
    to, and what they get for free they become complacent about. Education
    is hardly exempt from this economic axiom. Nevertheless, it does pose a
    problem.

    One Educational Marketplace for All

    So how can American citizens and policy makers ensure that all
    children —regardless of family income — have access to good
    schools, particularly if good schools are dependent on parents “footing”
    some or all of the bill?

    This is actually a fairly low hurdle to get over. We offer needs-based
    financial assistance to low-income citizens for many products and
    services. Obviously this could be done so that all parents could become
    full participants in the educational marketplace. Those who could afford
    to pay for their own children’s education would do so, while those
    needing varying degrees of financial help would receive it.

    Thus preserving the benefits of direct tuition payment by parents for
    the vast majority of the population, since only a fraction of parents
    would need to have the entire cost of their children’s education paid
    for by others.

    However, the best way to provide such assistance has also been a subject
    of considerable debate among scholars in recent years.

    Some favor an education voucher similar to that used in Milwaukee,
    Cleveland, and Florida, while others seek to promote the spread of
    private scholarship organizations through the use of tax credits, as
    Arizona has done since 1997 and Pennsylvania began in 2002.

    One area that both sides do agree on is that existing programs currently
    serve far too few children.

    The other difficult hurdle is the need for the profit motive in
    education. This notion usually invites a hailstorm of criticism from the
    education community. “Children are not widgets,” they will shout.

    But once again, history proves the profit incentive is what drives
    entrepreneurs to produce better products and superior services. It is
    this very same profit motive that has provided Americans with the
    highest quality of life the world has ever known.

    It is also the absence of the profit motive that has been the chief
    reason that America’s top teachers are underpaid and the best teaching
    methods have been extremely limited in their replication and
    dissemination.

    Although many people accept the need for parents to take direct
    financial responsibility for their children ‘s education and the need
    for at least some schools to be spurred to excellence by the profit
    motive, many more people remain skeptical of market-based education
    because of the perceived negative social effects.

    Of course while we want schools to teach children to read, write, and
    figure, we also want schools to foster strong and harmonious
    communities. A more civil society most certainly won’t be achieved if we
    merely focus on academic outcomes. Therefore, we must consider the
    overall societal impact of an education marketplace.

    Fortunately, backward arguments against an education marketplace in the
    first place are nothing more than red herrings. History reveals that
    time and again, it has been free education markets that have allowed
    diverse groups to harmoniously pursue both their shared educational
    goals and their unique and varied traditions.

    It has not been diversity that has set neighbor against neighbor, but
    coercion. If parents had been allowed to choose their own schools rather
    than being forced to relocate in order to send their children elsewhere,
    much of the segregation of neighborhoods over the past several decades
    by socioeconomic level would have never taken place.

    So while public school apologists claim that public education is the
    glue that keeps communities together, it is in fact the solvent that is
    pulling them a part. Just consider the endless series of battles for
    control of public schooling. Just one example is a local school district
    near my home that has been battling over the inclusion of the creation
    theory in science class. Who really wins in these debates? Yet these are
    the inevitable and unfortunate side effects of creating an establishment
    of education.

    Our Founding Fathers wisely forbade Congress from establishing a single
    system of religion for all citizens. So, too, we must realize that any
    establishment of a single “official” system of education for all
    children invariably leads to conflict within diverse communities. It has
    repeatedly done so throughout history. Free-market education, by
    contrast, has consistently allowed heterogeneous peoples to more
    harmoniously pursue their educational needs and goals.

    Future decisions about public education-that is, the education of
    public-reach far beyond simple education policy. Ultimately they lie at
    the heart of all our freedoms-what it truly means to be an American.

    Thomas Jefferson said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in
    state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” In
    other words, we cannot long continue our ignorance and at the same time
    hope maintain and restore our liberties.

    Clearly, bringing more freedom the means by which our children and our
    children’s are educated means less government interference. Our Founding
    Fathers knew this well and it is this fundamental lesson from our
    nation’s past that taxpayers, educators and policymakers at all levels
    of govern men must heed if we ever wish to truly ensure that “no child
    is left behind” in the future.

    #######

    Matthew J. Brouillette, a former school teacher, is president of The
    Commonwealth Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit, public policy
    research and educational institute located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
    For more information, visit https://www.CommonwealthFoundation.org

    Above article is quoted from Center of the American Experiment, American
    Experiment Quarterly Spring 2003 https://www.amexp.org

    ”Evergreen (Today’s Quote)”

    “Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.” — George
    Norman Douglas, 1868-1952. British writer/diplomat

    ”’Edited by Richard O. Rowland, president of Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached at (808) 487-4959 or by email at:”’ mailto:grassroot@hawaii.rr.com ”’For more information, see its Web site at:”’ https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/

    Grassroot Perspective – July 14, 2003-Excerpt from Crossfire; How Would Jesus Tax?; Was Horace Really the Mann?

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Dick Rowland Image”

    ”Shoots (News, Views and Quotes)”

    – Excerpt from Crossfire. Bill Moyers and Fred Smith, Jr. of The
    Competitive Enterprise Institute discussing “Obesity, public health and the fat tax” on 6/13/03

    MOYERS: You should be feeling very good. Your side has won. I mean, the President. you have the ear of the President and every level of the government. Your arguments are being heard. Corporate executives,
    lawyers, lobbyists as we saw in the first piece are really throughout
    the government, they’re running the show now. But you must be a very
    happy man.

    SMITH: My expectations are much, much higher than that, Bill. I feel a little like the preacher who got people to recognize there is sin. But
    there’s still an awful lot of it in Washington, DC. We have taken…
    we’ve got a long way to go yet on government regulations, government
    expenditures are still dramatically out of scale. And the ability of the
    Republican administration and Congress to explain, to give a vision of
    what they’re trying to achieve still deserves a lot more work than it
    has today.

    – How Would Jesus Tax?

    By Edward Hudgins

    mailto:ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org

    One Republican is finally making moral arguments to support his tax
    policies. Unfortunately they’re the wrong arguments and wrong policies.
    Alabama’s Governor Bob Riley has just shepherded through the state
    legislature the largest tax hike in the state’s history, justifying a
    greater tax burden on the prosperous on the religious grounds summed up
    in the slogan, “What would Jesus do?”

    Alabama’s tax code — like most other state codes — is complex and needs
    changes. But approaching reform from the wrong moral premises guarantees
    immoral results. For example, Adam Cohen in a “New York Times” editorial
    supporting the tax hike notes that, “Christians are prohibited from
    oppressing the poor.” So it’s “oppression” if an individual creates
    wealth and fails to hand enough of it over to others? Of course, without
    the creators, for example, of logging companies in Alabama, there would
    be no timber industry jobs for Alabama citizens or for employees of
    stores and other enterprises that serve them.

    Collectivism — from the Left or the Right — maintains that individuals
    who create wealth can only retain it with the permission of those who
    did not create it. Individualism maintains that if you earn it, it’s
    yours and you need answer to no one save yourself.

    For those like Gov. Riley who believe in the Biblical decree that
    Christians “take care of the least among us,” private charity at least
    does not punish the productive. A tax collector with a government gun
    does.

    Above article is quoted from The Objectivist Center
    https://www.ObjectivistCenter.org

    ”Roots (Food for Thought)”

    – Was Horace Really the Mann? The Many Schools of “Public” Education

    By Matthew J. Brouillette

    Across the nation, the debate over school choice is over. While the old
    argument used to center around whether parents should be able to choose
    their children ‘s school, today much of the debate revolves around “how
    much” and “how” choice should be expanded. And last summer, the U.S.
    Supreme Court dispelled one more of the many obsolete myths promulgated
    by those opposed to parental choice in education.

    The reality is that choice is here to stay and the days of the
    restrictive “assignment system,” forcing children into a particular
    school simply because of where they live are finally over. Empirical and
    anecdotal evidence from over 2,300 charter schools, 60,000 low-income
    children reaping the intellectual benefits from privately funded
    scholarships to attend private and parochial schools, and another 12,000
    students utilizing publicly funded vouchers, make the positive effects
    of school choice impossible to deny.

    Revisiting Public Education

    Yet despite the overwhelming success and increasing public demand for
    more school choice, many Americans remain skeptical. I’m not talking
    about the ardent opponents of school choice-moral arguments and
    empirical evidence will never convince them. I’m talking about the
    average citizen who fears that choice will somehow hurt rather than
    improve public education.

    So, in order to better understand why school choice should be embraced
    instead of feared, we should consider both the history and purpose of
    public education.

    First, however, let’s define the concept of public education. Today,
    this concept has been completely turned on its head. What used to mean
    “the education of the public through diverse means” has become
    synonymous with the direct sponsorship, operation, and control of
    schooling by the government.

    But, it hasn’t always been this way. For the first 150 years of
    America’s settlement and the first 50 to 75 years of our
    nation’s existence, public education was achieved through independent,
    church-related, philanthropic, and community-sponsored schools. These
    schools were in essence what we call private schools today.

    Yet despite this extremely decentralized system of schools, the early
    American public was exceptionally literate and relatively well educated.
    Nearly every child — including the poor — had access to some level of
    schooling. (Of course, an important exception was those persons kept in
    the government-sanctioned and government — protected system of chattel
    slavery from the 1600s through the mid-1860s.)

    Then — beginning in New England in the mid-1800s — a wave of change swept
    across the country. States began to abandon the original American model
    in favor of greater government involvement in schooling. It wasn’t a
    hostile takeover, but a persistent push for creating a government
    supported educational “safety net.”

    In 1841, Horace Mann, the leader of the government school movement in
    Massachusetts, made a bold promise. He said: “Let the common school be
    expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of
    which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code
    would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills will be
    abridged.”

    As we continue to wait for government to usher in Horace Mann’s Utopia,
    an honest look at the current school system should conclude that we have
    established a government institution that clashes with the political,
    economic, social, and cultural traditions of the United States to an
    extent unparalleled by any other in American history.

    This fact once prompted the late Albert Shanker, former president of the
    American Federation of Teachers, to say: “It’s time to admit that public
    education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in
    which every body’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few
    incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our
    school system doesn’t improve: it more resembles the communist economy
    than our own market economy.”

    Despite these stark contradictions, most Americans cling to the
    misconception that government must be involved in educating our
    children. Many more would argue further that without government
    involvement in schooling, democracy itself would be threatened.

    However, what few people realize is how sixteenth- and
    seventeenth-century Americans-without the help of government
    schooling-came to tame an unsettled continent and eventually establish
    the freest nation in history.

    One School Does Not Fit All

    The Founding Fathers were clearly educated men, and they certainly
    believed that to remain free, America must always have an educated
    citizenry. But the educated citizenry they envisioned, and what largely
    came to pass during their lifetimes, did not depend upon nor require
    that governments provide or operate schools.

    Yet today, nearly 90 percent of American children attend government-run
    schools. In the majority of states, parents who desire a religious or
    nongovernment education for their children are financially penalized.
    They must pay taxes for schools they don’t use and pay again for tuition
    at schools that are actually educating their children.

    It is clear that the goal of an educated public has given way to the
    establishment and protection of a monolithic system of government
    schools. This is not to say that some or many public schools are not
    doing a fine job of teaching children to read, write, and figure.

    But the facts are that children are falling through the cracks in even
    the best public schools. Despite our best intentions, no school can be
    all things to all people. It’s simply impossible.

    Just as one-size-fits-all shoes do not properly fit all children’s feet,
    neither do one-size-fits-all schools properly fit all children’s
    learning needs. This is why we must return to the original concept of
    public education-the education of the public through diverse means.

    Every child must have the option to choose a school that will best meet
    his or her needs-whether it is a traditional government school, or a
    charter, private, religious, or even a home school. The promise of
    public education will only be fulfilled when parents are once again
    empowered with the right, freedom, and flexibility to choose the school
    that best meets their children’s academic, emotional, spiritual, and
    physical needs.

    Once again, this is not just my opinion; my conclusion is based on
    experience and the historical record.

    A Historical Recipe For Success

    Researcher and author Andrew Coulson did us a great service a few years
    ago when he published Market Education: An Unknown History. What Coulson
    did for those of us who had a rather myopic view of government-sponsored
    education is to demonstrate that “schooling” is not a new invention. In
    fact, through his exhaustive research, he uncovered a vast wealth of
    experience with schooling that goes back as far as 2,500 years.

    Coulson says that we cannot just pick and choose one or a few historical
    school systems that seemed to work and claim that they would necessarily
    work for us today. Instead, he suggests that we look for trends in the
    kinds of systems that worked well or poorly across many different
    cultural settings.

    By doing this, it is possible to compare educational outcomes between
    similar and contemporary societies that adopted different education
    systems. As a result, we can also correlate what happened to educational
    outcomes when a given society abandoned one system in favor of another.

    What’s the best education system in world history? Remarkably, Coulson
    discovered that free markets in education — in which parents choose their
    children’s schools and schools freely compete to attract and serve those
    children — consistently out-perform all other approaches to school
    governance.

    Time and again throughout history, individuals and groups created school
    in response to public demand without the need for government
    intervention.

    Coulson also found that effective education obviously doesn’t just
    happen; nor can it be achieved through political means. He found that
    school systems that have consistently performed well under widely
    varying social conditions have consisted of five essential elements.

    Coulson warns, however, that, “Far from being a policy smorgasbord from
    which individual elements can be casually selected or rejected based on
    personal taste or political expediency, education markets behave much
    more like fragile ecosystems. If any essential element is eliminated,
    the entire system begins to decline.”

    The five elements Coulson uncovered are: 1) Parental choice; 2) Direct
    parental financial responsibility; 3) Freedom for educators; 4)
    Competition among schools; and 5) The profit motive for schools.

    These five factors, taken together, create the incentives that are
    missing in the current system.

    Are they controversial? Absolutely. No doubt that the appeal of an
    education marketplace would be broadened if we could eliminate or find
    substitutes for two elements in particular: direct Parental financial
    responsibility and the profit motive.

    Unfortunately, there are no such substitutes. Coulson found that having
    parents pay directly for their own children’s education has historically
    proven to be an indispensable component of effective education markets.

    It makes perfect sense though: what people pay for, they pay attention
    to, and what they get for free they become complacent about. Education
    is hardly exempt from this economic axiom. Nevertheless, it does pose a
    problem.

    One Educational Marketplace for All

    So how can American citizens and policy makers ensure that all
    children —regardless of family income — have access to good
    schools, particularly if good schools are dependent on parents “footing”
    some or all of the bill?

    This is actually a fairly low hurdle to get over. We offer needs-based
    financial assistance to low-income citizens for many products and
    services. Obviously this could be done so that all parents could become
    full participants in the educational marketplace. Those who could afford
    to pay for their own children’s education would do so, while those
    needing varying degrees of financial help would receive it.

    Thus preserving the benefits of direct tuition payment by parents for
    the vast majority of the population, since only a fraction of parents
    would need to have the entire cost of their children’s education paid
    for by others.

    However, the best way to provide such assistance has also been a subject
    of considerable debate among scholars in recent years.

    Some favor an education voucher similar to that used in Milwaukee,
    Cleveland, and Florida, while others seek to promote the spread of
    private scholarship organizations through the use of tax credits, as
    Arizona has done since 1997 and Pennsylvania began in 2002.

    One area that both sides do agree on is that existing programs currently
    serve far too few children.

    The other difficult hurdle is the need for the profit motive in
    education. This notion usually invites a hailstorm of criticism from the
    education community. “Children are not widgets,” they will shout.

    But once again, history proves the profit incentive is what drives
    entrepreneurs to produce better products and superior services. It is
    this very same profit motive that has provided Americans with the
    highest quality of life the world has ever known.

    It is also the absence of the profit motive that has been the chief
    reason that America’s top teachers are underpaid and the best teaching
    methods have been extremely limited in their replication and
    dissemination.

    Although many people accept the need for parents to take direct
    financial responsibility for their children ‘s education and the need
    for at least some schools to be spurred to excellence by the profit
    motive, many more people remain skeptical of market-based education
    because of the perceived negative social effects.

    Of course while we want schools to teach children to read, write, and
    figure, we also want schools to foster strong and harmonious
    communities. A more civil society most certainly won’t be achieved if we
    merely focus on academic outcomes. Therefore, we must consider the
    overall societal impact of an education marketplace.

    Fortunately, backward arguments against an education marketplace in the
    first place are nothing more than red herrings. History reveals that
    time and again, it has been free education markets that have allowed
    diverse groups to harmoniously pursue both their shared educational
    goals and their unique and varied traditions.

    It has not been diversity that has set neighbor against neighbor, but
    coercion. If parents had been allowed to choose their own schools rather
    than being forced to relocate in order to send their children elsewhere,
    much of the segregation of neighborhoods over the past several decades
    by socioeconomic level would have never taken place.

    So while public school apologists claim that public education is the
    glue that keeps communities together, it is in fact the solvent that is
    pulling them a part. Just consider the endless series of battles for
    control of public schooling. Just one example is a local school district
    near my home that has been battling over the inclusion of the creation
    theory in science class. Who really wins in these debates? Yet these are
    the inevitable and unfortunate side effects of creating an establishment
    of education.

    Our Founding Fathers wisely forbade Congress from establishing a single
    system of religion for all citizens. So, too, we must realize that any
    establishment of a single “official” system of education for all
    children invariably leads to conflict within diverse communities. It has
    repeatedly done so throughout history. Free-market education, by
    contrast, has consistently allowed heterogeneous peoples to more
    harmoniously pursue their educational needs and goals.

    Future decisions about public education-that is, the education of
    public-reach far beyond simple education policy. Ultimately they lie at
    the heart of all our freedoms-what it truly means to be an American.

    Thomas Jefferson said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in
    state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” In
    other words, we cannot long continue our ignorance and at the same time
    hope maintain and restore our liberties.

    Clearly, bringing more freedom the means by which our children and our
    children’s are educated means less government interference. Our Founding
    Fathers knew this well and it is this fundamental lesson from our
    nation’s past that taxpayers, educators and policymakers at all levels
    of govern men must heed if we ever wish to truly ensure that “no child
    is left behind” in the future.

    #######

    Matthew J. Brouillette, a former school teacher, is president of The
    Commonwealth Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit, public policy
    research and educational institute located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
    For more information, visit https://www.CommonwealthFoundation.org

    Above article is quoted from Center of the American Experiment, American
    Experiment Quarterly Spring 2003 https://www.amexp.org

    ”Evergreen (Today’s Quote)”

    “Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.” — George
    Norman Douglas, 1868-1952. British writer/diplomat

    ”’Edited by Richard O. Rowland, president of Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached at (808) 487-4959 or by email at:”’ mailto:grassroot@hawaii.rr.com ”’For more information, see its Web site at:”’ https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/

    From Employee Resistance to Business Negotiating

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Suzanne Gelb Image”

    ”Employee Resistance, How to Handle?”

    Dear Dr. Gelb:

    I am a supervisor in a small temp agency. Our office often seeks ways to maximize efficiency, including sending employees to trainings on the latest PC software. One employee has been resistant to how computerized our office is becoming and sometimes takes sick days when trainings are scheduled. I understand how intimidating technology can be but this knowledge is necessary for our company to stay competitive. I have spoken to this employee, who insists it is coincidental when his sick days coincide with trainings. What’s the best approach?

    Improvement-Oriented

    Dr. Gelb says . . .

    Dear Improvement:

    It is important for supervisors to be able to see through any rationalizations and excuses that an employee may have. And yes, some employees are resistant to learning and in this computerized age it is understandable that some may fear high-tech equipment — the fear of not being able to understand, the fear of appearing ignorant.

    In my opinion, if an employee’s performance is dependent on new techniques such as those afforded by state-of-the-art technology, then they would have no alternative but to learn these systems, or to seek other employment.

    As a wise teacher once said, “a carpenter could not do his job if he had a fear of a skill saw.”

    ”Business Negotiating, How To Succeed?”

    Dear Dr. Gelb:

    My husband and I own a clothing business and it is doing well. Why is it that when I am negotiating contracts or deals I break out in an embarrassing rash on my face and neck?

    Negotiator

    Dr. Gelb says . . .

    Dear Negotiator:

    Of course, always consult one’s trusted physician for issues involving the physical body.

    That being said, from a psychological point of view, in my opinion there can be a psychosomatic-type correlation between fear and symptoms such as skin issues. In some instances a connection has been made between symptoms such as a skin rash or blotchiness, and fear. One such instance occurred when a newly licensed Realtor was trying to negotiate a settlement on an important deal and broke out in hives, while at the same time experiencing a subconscious fear of being wrong or making a mistake.

    “I think deep down I’m afraid the sellers will think that I really don’t know what I’m talking about,” said the Realtor. “I’m sure they will find something wrong with what I say,” he added.

    There are numerous types of scenarios that could trigger a change in chemistry resulting in a symptom such as a rash. The reasons that trigger such symptoms are unique to each person. Generally speaking, however, the type of reaction described in your question is not uncommon. It is almost like stage fright and can cause a person to lose their sense of authority.

    This brings to mind a quote that someone shared with me recently. Its source was attributed to our 35th U.S. President, John F. Kennedy — “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

    ”’Suzanne J. Gelb, Ph.D., J.D. authors this daily column, Dr. Gelb Says, which answers questions about daily living and behavior issues. Dr. Gelb is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Honolulu. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Human Services. Dr. Gelb is also a published author of a book on Overcoming Addictions and a book on Relationships.”’

    ”’This column is intended for entertainment use only and is not intended for the purpose of psychological diagnosis, treatment or personalized advice. For more about the column’s purpose, see”’ “An Online Intro to Dr. Gelb Says”

    ”’Email your questions to mailto:DrGelbSays@hawaiireporter.com More information on Dr. Gelb’s services and related resources available at”’ https://www.DrGelbSays.com

    From Employee Resistance to Business Negotiating

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Suzanne Gelb Image”

    ”Employee Resistance, How to Handle?”

    Dear Dr. Gelb:

    I am a supervisor in a small temp agency. Our office often seeks ways to maximize efficiency, including sending employees to trainings on the latest PC software. One employee has been resistant to how computerized our office is becoming and sometimes takes sick days when trainings are scheduled. I understand how intimidating technology can be but this knowledge is necessary for our company to stay competitive. I have spoken to this employee, who insists it is coincidental when his sick days coincide with trainings. What’s the best approach?

    Improvement-Oriented

    Dr. Gelb says . . .

    Dear Improvement:

    It is important for supervisors to be able to see through any rationalizations and excuses that an employee may have. And yes, some employees are resistant to learning and in this computerized age it is understandable that some may fear high-tech equipment — the fear of not being able to understand, the fear of appearing ignorant.

    In my opinion, if an employee’s performance is dependent on new techniques such as those afforded by state-of-the-art technology, then they would have no alternative but to learn these systems, or to seek other employment.

    As a wise teacher once said, “a carpenter could not do his job if he had a fear of a skill saw.”

    ”Business Negotiating, How To Succeed?”

    Dear Dr. Gelb:

    My husband and I own a clothing business and it is doing well. Why is it that when I am negotiating contracts or deals I break out in an embarrassing rash on my face and neck?

    Negotiator

    Dr. Gelb says . . .

    Dear Negotiator:

    Of course, always consult one’s trusted physician for issues involving the physical body.

    That being said, from a psychological point of view, in my opinion there can be a psychosomatic-type correlation between fear and symptoms such as skin issues. In some instances a connection has been made between symptoms such as a skin rash or blotchiness, and fear. One such instance occurred when a newly licensed Realtor was trying to negotiate a settlement on an important deal and broke out in hives, while at the same time experiencing a subconscious fear of being wrong or making a mistake.

    “I think deep down I’m afraid the sellers will think that I really don’t know what I’m talking about,” said the Realtor. “I’m sure they will find something wrong with what I say,” he added.

    There are numerous types of scenarios that could trigger a change in chemistry resulting in a symptom such as a rash. The reasons that trigger such symptoms are unique to each person. Generally speaking, however, the type of reaction described in your question is not uncommon. It is almost like stage fright and can cause a person to lose their sense of authority.

    This brings to mind a quote that someone shared with me recently. Its source was attributed to our 35th U.S. President, John F. Kennedy — “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

    ”’Suzanne J. Gelb, Ph.D., J.D. authors this daily column, Dr. Gelb Says, which answers questions about daily living and behavior issues. Dr. Gelb is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Honolulu. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Human Services. Dr. Gelb is also a published author of a book on Overcoming Addictions and a book on Relationships.”’

    ”’This column is intended for entertainment use only and is not intended for the purpose of psychological diagnosis, treatment or personalized advice. For more about the column’s purpose, see”’ “An Online Intro to Dr. Gelb Says”

    ”’Email your questions to mailto:DrGelbSays@hawaiireporter.com More information on Dr. Gelb’s services and related resources available at”’ https://www.DrGelbSays.com

    From Employee Resistance to Business Negotiating

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Suzanne Gelb Image”

    ”Employee Resistance, How to Handle?”

    Dear Dr. Gelb:

    I am a supervisor in a small temp agency. Our office often seeks ways to maximize efficiency, including sending employees to trainings on the latest PC software. One employee has been resistant to how computerized our office is becoming and sometimes takes sick days when trainings are scheduled. I understand how intimidating technology can be but this knowledge is necessary for our company to stay competitive. I have spoken to this employee, who insists it is coincidental when his sick days coincide with trainings. What’s the best approach?

    Improvement-Oriented

    Dr. Gelb says . . .

    Dear Improvement:

    It is important for supervisors to be able to see through any rationalizations and excuses that an employee may have. And yes, some employees are resistant to learning and in this computerized age it is understandable that some may fear high-tech equipment — the fear of not being able to understand, the fear of appearing ignorant.

    In my opinion, if an employee’s performance is dependent on new techniques such as those afforded by state-of-the-art technology, then they would have no alternative but to learn these systems, or to seek other employment.

    As a wise teacher once said, “a carpenter could not do his job if he had a fear of a skill saw.”

    ”Business Negotiating, How To Succeed?”

    Dear Dr. Gelb:

    My husband and I own a clothing business and it is doing well. Why is it that when I am negotiating contracts or deals I break out in an embarrassing rash on my face and neck?

    Negotiator

    Dr. Gelb says . . .

    Dear Negotiator:

    Of course, always consult one’s trusted physician for issues involving the physical body.

    That being said, from a psychological point of view, in my opinion there can be a psychosomatic-type correlation between fear and symptoms such as skin issues. In some instances a connection has been made between symptoms such as a skin rash or blotchiness, and fear. One such instance occurred when a newly licensed Realtor was trying to negotiate a settlement on an important deal and broke out in hives, while at the same time experiencing a subconscious fear of being wrong or making a mistake.

    “I think deep down I’m afraid the sellers will think that I really don’t know what I’m talking about,” said the Realtor. “I’m sure they will find something wrong with what I say,” he added.

    There are numerous types of scenarios that could trigger a change in chemistry resulting in a symptom such as a rash. The reasons that trigger such symptoms are unique to each person. Generally speaking, however, the type of reaction described in your question is not uncommon. It is almost like stage fright and can cause a person to lose their sense of authority.

    This brings to mind a quote that someone shared with me recently. Its source was attributed to our 35th U.S. President, John F. Kennedy — “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

    ”’Suzanne J. Gelb, Ph.D., J.D. authors this daily column, Dr. Gelb Says, which answers questions about daily living and behavior issues. Dr. Gelb is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Honolulu. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Human Services. Dr. Gelb is also a published author of a book on Overcoming Addictions and a book on Relationships.”’

    ”’This column is intended for entertainment use only and is not intended for the purpose of psychological diagnosis, treatment or personalized advice. For more about the column’s purpose, see”’ “An Online Intro to Dr. Gelb Says”

    ”’Email your questions to mailto:DrGelbSays@hawaiireporter.com More information on Dr. Gelb’s services and related resources available at”’ https://www.DrGelbSays.com

    Political Tittle-tattle: News and Entertainment from Hawaii's Political Arena

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Malia Lt Blue top Image”

    ”Come on Democrats, Just ‘Fess Up: The Special Session was Just a Show”

    Democrats should just admit the Tuesday, July 8 special session at the Hawaii state Legislature was really a show — a pro-wrestling match between Hawaii’s two major political parties.

    They should be honest and say they wanted to flex their muscles and give the Republicans a good, old-fashioned whupping.

    Because give a whupping they did.

    They showed with 20 of 25 seats in the Senate and 36 of 51 in the House that they could put Hawaii’s new Republican governor in her place and override 6 of the 50 vetoes.

    They showed her who is boss.

    And they showed they don’t mind breaking their own code of honor and long-standing tradition of not overriding a governor’s fiscal vetoes — a tradition to which they’ve adhered without exception over the last 40 years while Democrat governors have been in power.

    There is only one problem. Democrats forgot something really important when they set up these theatrics.

    Sure they had their cheerleaders — including professional fundraisers not competent enough or just too lazy to get funds privately, even after Lingle’s cabinet offered to help them, and so sought state government grant subsidies.

    They had their Korean War Veterans in uniform who were told to show up to protest Gov. Linda Lingle’s veto of $30,000 for their 50th commemoration celebration. This despite the fact they already received a $90,000 appropriation, and the fact that the governor’s cabinet has helped raise $18,000 more and pledged to get $12,000 more so the celebration will go on.

    They also had their bread and butter public union thugs waiting in the wings.

    What a wonderful picture they made sitting together in benches above the Senate and House arenas.

    But again, Democrats forgot something important, something essential to their end victory.

    They forgot their audience.

    They forgot all the people of Hawaii were watching to see what kind of performance they’d give. To see if they’d have good sportsmanship, play fair and be in the fight with true passion or just for show and to make them look superior.

    At the conclusion of the match, although Democrats won all six rounds, overriding six of the governor’s vetoes, they lost many of their fans.

    And though the special interest cheerleaders might help the Democrats in their electioneering, it is all the fans who really count on Election Day in 2004.

    ”Special Session Unorganized, Not Thought Out”

    It seemed as if Democrat leadership in the Legislature was just “winging it” during the special session.

    In the early minutes of the Senate session, proper procedure was not being followed. There was no “Order of the Day” for senators and members of the public to follow, so no one knew which bills were up for discussion. Then when the first version of the Order of the Day was passed out, it simply said “vetoes” and did not list the bills up for consideration.

    The House, confused by the Senate’s disorganization, simply printed all 50 of the governor’s vetoes on its Order of the Day, to ensure they would override the same bills as the Senate did.

    Also, the Senate Democrat leadership neglected to tell the Republican minority that there was a special session on Tuesday or what bills would be challenged.

    House minority leaders say they had to attend Democrat press conferences with the media in order to find out what time they were supposed to be in session and what bills might be covered.

    Minority Republicans say these were not oversights, rather intentional acts to prevent real debate and a truly good legislative agenda from moving forward.

    ”Several Mistakes Expose Democrats for False Session”

    At a July 7 press conference, Senate President Robert Bunda and House Speaker Calvin Say told Hawaii media they were calling a special session to ensure the “health, welfare and safety of the people of Hawaii.”

    They said they disagreed with the governor’s statement that she ensured no safety nets were broken for those in need and that subsidies she vetoed to specific charities were duplicative or expanded services.

    But as soon as the session started, it seems Democrat leaders forgot their pledge, and instead overturned six bills, four of which had nothing to do with what they termed “health and welfare.”

    *The first bill they tackled was to give the Korean War veterans $30,000 for their 50th anniversary celebration, a bill that had nothing to do with health or welfare. Democrats insisted their support of this bill made them “patriotic” and Republicans “not patriotic” which of course caused a huge ruckus. Republicans pointed out the governor vetoed the $30,000 because her cabinet took the initiative to help raise the money privately and already has had success, raising $18,000 and negotiating with the city to have fees waived to make up the remaining $12,000.

    *Another bill they overrode had nothing to do with health and welfare. Democrats sided with the public sector unions in overriding the governor’s veto of binding arbitration, which allows union leaders to avoid strikes and instead rely on a decision by three arbitrators on one panel as to what their salary increases should be. The governor, Republican legislators and Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Waianae, voted against binding arbitration because the arbitrator does not have to use as a criteria what the state can afford. In other words, union leaders get to charge as much as the arbitration panel of three says on the state’s credit card and the taxpayers have to find a way to pay it back. Typically unions get much higher increases under binding arbitration, usually double digit increases, with little or no effort or risk, while taxpayers are bound to foot the bill.

    *A third bill again had nothing to do with health and welfare, rather with agricultural land in Hawaii and zoning of that land. Saying they had the farmers beating down their door, Democrats voted to override the governor’s veto of SB 255, relating to agriculture. The governor originally planned to sign the bill saying it was “worthy,” but it was technically flawed according to the state attorney general, so she asked Legislators to fix the bill and send it to her in the next session. Democrats refused and overrode her veto, also turning down an amendment proposed by Republicans and approved by the governor that would have fixed the flaws. Now, as is, the governor and her staff says there will be “unintended adverse consequences.”

    *A fourth bill they overrode had nothing to do with health and welfare, rather with power and money. With the power of the highly respected state auditor behind them, Democrat legislators authorized the auditor to audit any agency in the administrative branch and charge the agency for it. The governor argued the bill invites duplication and waste of limited resources for the many departments that must budget for and schedule their own audits.

    Bills five and six can be argued as “health and welfare bills,” though Republicans argue these are duplicative subsidies or expanded services the state cannot afford.

    *Democrats voted to override the governor’s veto of SB 745 relating to emergency medical services. This bill requires the Department of Health to establish, administer and maintain an aeromedical emergency medical services system statewide, but the attorney general argued the bill opens the state to liability because it is written with the term “statewide” but only is intended to serve Maui county. The governor also said the state cannot afford the $1 million it will take to start up the service. Republicans argued the service will not save even one life anyway this year as it is not set to start until July 2004. But Democrats disagreed with the arguments by the governor, the attorney general and Republicans, saying by 2004 the state will be able to afford the $1 million and will not face additional liability issues.

    *Democrats also raided the Rainy Day Fund to give more handouts and subsidies to the charities and non-profits that support them. Specifically Democrats voted to raid the state’s emergency fund — the rainy day fund — for $3.5 million to pay for services they deemed necessary, despite the fact that the governor’s human services and health directors made sure all essential services not new, expanded or duplicative were covered. The governor was forced to choose between making cuts to SB 1305 or raiding the state’s special fund because the budget she received from the Legislature was short $152 million thanks to a revenue projection shortfall announced by the council on revenues after the session closed May 1.

    ”Nasty Attitudes, Harsh Words Fly at Legislature”

    Many House Democrats brought their nasty faces, snide voices and prewritten canned scripts to the session and took direction from a public relations flak cueing them from the sidelines.

    House Speaker Calvin Say had to act like a disciplinarian father presiding over bratty children who would not listen and kept talking back. Several times during heated discussions, Democrats got down and dirty, launching personal attacks on the governor and her Republican counterparts. In several cases, the Representatives got so out of control that the House speaker had to call a recess and a caucus with Democrats.

    Rep. Marcus Oshiro, D-Wahiawa, called the governor brainless and heartless, despite loud protests from Republicans and a good scolding from Rep. Cynthia Thielen who got in his face for the comments. This exchange led Say to call another recess and an eventual apology from Oshiro.

    Rep. Michael Kahikina, D-Waianae, called Republicans and the governor “unpatriotic” for refusing to allocate $30,000 to the Korean War veterans for their 50th celebration, even though the governor’s appointees were successfully helping organizers raise the money privately.

    Democrats in the Senate showed more restraint, but were just as aggressive and determined as their counterparts in the House to show the governor that she could not beat them at the political game.

    There were exceptions in the Senate — some freshman Senators who don’t yet know how to keep their cool as the more experienced Senators seem to do, exposed themselves to questions as to their mental stability and ability to stay on subject and speak the truth.

    Sen. Gary Hooser, D-Kauai, who tends to travel at light speed toward the Hooser twilight zone once he gets talking, attacked Republicans and said they abandoning the sick, poor, homeless, beaten and raped to fend for themselves because they would not subsidize duplicative or expanded government programs.

    Though other Senators, such as Sen. Roz Baker, D-Maui, gave similar biting speeches, Hooser leads the pack in the ability to get so carried away that he loses sight of reality and gets into fantasy.

    Political observers note that this trait is bound to get him into hot water with his constituents, and say that they believe his Senate career will be short lived — like one more year.

    ”Happy Ending for the Taxpayer?”

    If this were a happily ever after story for the majority of people in Hawaii, it would end with Democrats in the Legislature checking themselves into a shopperaholics anonymous clinic until they learned to control their raging spending habits that are based on emotion rather than logic.

    They’d have to take a lie detector test in order to determine if they truly believe the stories they spew to the people of the Hawaii. The stories such as the often repeated one about people (substitute any of the following: homeless, children, elderly, sick, beaten, raped, drug addicts) who will die, live on the street, trade sex for food, take drugs and commit crimes, should taxpayers not give even more of their hard-earned money.

    Some would pass the test, but many would not. Some legislators actually do believe the $3.5 million will create a “safety net” and want the governor to raid from the rainy day fund under SB 1305. They are caring, compassionate Democrats who have fallen for the best stories told by the non-profits directors who are better at storytelling, then working to fundraise from private and federal sources.

    Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland, D-Nuuanu, for example, bursts into tears, real tears, nearly every time she talks about people she feels are less fortunate. To her credit, she is not a callous politician, but she does need to check out if she is being duped by wise fundraisers and follow the money to see if it is going where it should.

    Sen. Colleen Hanbusa, D-Waianae, says she is a Democrat and believes people should receive handouts and subsidies. She is one of the few Democrats in leadership who votes on occasion against the other majority leaders and for what she believes. She was the only Democrat to vote against binding arbitration for the public sector unions.

    But bottom line is the state only has so much money and it is all gone and no amount of tears will bring back that money.

    Much more than is available has been spent by the previous governor and legislators and the Council on Revenues estimates an additional $150 million shortfall that will make balancing the budget even more difficult.

    ”Awakening the Sleeping Giant – the Hawaii Taxpayer”

    Though people in Hawaii are slow to anger, once they are hurt or insulted, they remember the incident and the culprit. And despite what many politicians and political operatives think, they are not stupid.

    Democrats awakened many observers with this charade, even some in their own party, who watched the special session in person or on television and were disgusted by what they saw.

    They knew the special session was not held for the benefit of the general public, even though Democrats, through a fake series of hearings with their cheerleader supporters, tried to make it appear that way.

    Unlike the special session in 2000, which at insistence of the general public led to the override of Gov. Benjamin Cayetano’s veto of a bill that raised the age of sexual consent to 16, the 2003 session was strictly for political, not moral, purposes, and at the public’s expense.

    ”’Send any tittle or tattle you might have to Malia Zimmerman at”’ mailto:Malia@HawaiiReporter.com ”’Send complaints elsewhere. Compliments and news tips accepted here.”’

    Political Tittle-tattle: News and Entertainment from Hawaii’s Political Arena

    Hawaii Reporter
    -
    0

    “Malia Lt Blue top Image”

    ”Come on Democrats, Just ‘Fess Up: The Special Session was Just a Show”

    Democrats should just admit the Tuesday, July 8 special session at the Hawaii state Legislature was really a show — a pro-wrestling match between Hawaii’s two major political parties.

    They should be honest and say they wanted to flex their muscles and give the Republicans a good, old-fashioned whupping.

    Because give a whupping they did.

    They showed with 20 of 25 seats in the Senate and 36 of 51 in the House that they could put Hawaii’s new Republican governor in her place and override 6 of the 50 vetoes.

    They showed her who is boss.

    And they showed they don’t mind breaking their own code of honor and long-standing tradition of not overriding a governor’s fiscal vetoes — a tradition to which they’ve adhered without exception over the last 40 years while Democrat governors have been in power.

    There is only one problem. Democrats forgot something really important when they set up these theatrics.

    Sure they had their cheerleaders — including professional fundraisers not competent enough or just too lazy to get funds privately, even after Lingle’s cabinet offered to help them, and so sought state government grant subsidies.

    They had their Korean War Veterans in uniform who were told to show up to protest Gov. Linda Lingle’s veto of $30,000 for their 50th commemoration celebration. This despite the fact they already received a $90,000 appropriation, and the fact that the governor’s cabinet has helped raise $18,000 more and pledged to get $12,000 more so the celebration will go on.

    They also had their bread and butter public union thugs waiting in the wings.

    What a wonderful picture they made sitting together in benches above the Senate and House arenas.

    But again, Democrats forgot something important, something essential to their end victory.

    They forgot their audience.

    They forgot all the people of Hawaii were watching to see what kind of performance they’d give. To see if they’d have good sportsmanship, play fair and be in the fight with true passion or just for show and to make them look superior.

    At the conclusion of the match, although Democrats won all six rounds, overriding six of the governor’s vetoes, they lost many of their fans.

    And though the special interest cheerleaders might help the Democrats in their electioneering, it is all the fans who really count on Election Day in 2004.

    ”Special Session Unorganized, Not Thought Out”

    It seemed as if Democrat leadership in the Legislature was just “winging it” during the special session.

    In the early minutes of the Senate session, proper procedure was not being followed. There was no “Order of the Day” for senators and members of the public to follow, so no one knew which bills were up for discussion. Then when the first version of the Order of the Day was passed out, it simply said “vetoes” and did not list the bills up for consideration.

    The House, confused by the Senate’s disorganization, simply printed all 50 of the governor’s vetoes on its Order of the Day, to ensure they would override the same bills as the Senate did.

    Also, the Senate Democrat leadership neglected to tell the Republican minority that there was a special session on Tuesday or what bills would be challenged.

    House minority leaders say they had to attend Democrat press conferences with the media in order to find out what time they were supposed to be in session and what bills might be covered.

    Minority Republicans say these were not oversights, rather intentional acts to prevent real debate and a truly good legislative agenda from moving forward.

    ”Several Mistakes Expose Democrats for False Session”

    At a July 7 press conference, Senate President Robert Bunda and House Speaker Calvin Say told Hawaii media they were calling a special session to ensure the “health, welfare and safety of the people of Hawaii.”

    They said they disagreed with the governor’s statement that she ensured no safety nets were broken for those in need and that subsidies she vetoed to specific charities were duplicative or expanded services.

    But as soon as the session started, it seems Democrat leaders forgot their pledge, and instead overturned six bills, four of which had nothing to do with what they termed “health and welfare.”

    *The first bill they tackled was to give the Korean War veterans $30,000 for their 50th anniversary celebration, a bill that had nothing to do with health or welfare. Democrats insisted their support of this bill made them “patriotic” and Republicans “not patriotic” which of course caused a huge ruckus. Republicans pointed out the governor vetoed the $30,000 because her cabinet took the initiative to help raise the money privately and already has had success, raising $18,000 and negotiating with the city to have fees waived to make up the remaining $12,000.

    *Another bill they overrode had nothing to do with health and welfare. Democrats sided with the public sector unions in overriding the governor’s veto of binding arbitration, which allows union leaders to avoid strikes and instead rely on a decision by three arbitrators on one panel as to what their salary increases should be. The governor, Republican legislators and Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Waianae, voted against binding arbitration because the arbitrator does not have to use as a criteria what the state can afford. In other words, union leaders get to charge as much as the arbitration panel of three says on the state’s credit card and the taxpayers have to find a way to pay it back. Typically unions get much higher increases under binding arbitration, usually double digit increases, with little or no effort or risk, while taxpayers are bound to foot the bill.

    *A third bill again had nothing to do with health and welfare, rather with agricultural land in Hawaii and zoning of that land. Saying they had the farmers beating down their door, Democrats voted to override the governor’s veto of SB 255, relating to agriculture. The governor originally planned to sign the bill saying it was “worthy,” but it was technically flawed according to the state attorney general, so she asked Legislators to fix the bill and send it to her in the next session. Democrats refused and overrode her veto, also turning down an amendment proposed by Republicans and approved by the governor that would have fixed the flaws. Now, as is, the governor and her staff says there will be “unintended adverse consequences.”

    *A fourth bill they overrode had nothing to do with health and welfare, rather with power and money. With the power of the highly respected state auditor behind them, Democrat legislators authorized the auditor to audit any agency in the administrative branch and charge the agency for it. The governor argued the bill invites duplication and waste of limited resources for the many departments that must budget for and schedule their own audits.

    Bills five and six can be argued as “health and welfare bills,” though Republicans argue these are duplicative subsidies or expanded services the state cannot afford.

    *Democrats voted to override the governor’s veto of SB 745 relating to emergency medical services. This bill requires the Department of Health to establish, administer and maintain an aeromedical emergency medical services system statewide, but the attorney general argued the bill opens the state to liability because it is written with the term “statewide” but only is intended to serve Maui county. The governor also said the state cannot afford the $1 million it will take to start up the service. Republicans argued the service will not save even one life anyway this year as it is not set to start until July 2004. But Democrats disagreed with the arguments by the governor, the attorney general and Republicans, saying by 2004 the state will be able to afford the $1 million and will not face additional liability issues.

    *Democrats also raided the Rainy Day Fund to give more handouts and subsidies to the charities and non-profits that support them. Specifically Democrats voted to raid the state’s emergency fund — the rainy day fund — for $3.5 million to pay for services they deemed necessary, despite the fact that the governor’s human services and health directors made sure all essential services not new, expanded or duplicative were covered. The governor was forced to choose between making cuts to SB 1305 or raiding the state’s special fund because the budget she received from the Legislature was short $152 million thanks to a revenue projection shortfall announced by the council on revenues after the session closed May 1.

    ”Nasty Attitudes, Harsh Words Fly at Legislature”

    Many House Democrats brought their nasty faces, snide voices and prewritten canned scripts to the session and took direction from a public relations flak cueing them from the sidelines.

    House Speaker Calvin Say had to act like a disciplinarian father presiding over bratty children who would not listen and kept talking back. Several times during heated discussions, Democrats got down and dirty, launching personal attacks on the governor and her Republican counterparts. In several cases, the Representatives got so out of control that the House speaker had to call a recess and a caucus with Democrats.

    Rep. Marcus Oshiro, D-Wahiawa, called the governor brainless and heartless, despite loud protests from Republicans and a good scolding from Rep. Cynthia Thielen who got in his face for the comments. This exchange led Say to call another recess and an eventual apology from Oshiro.

    Rep. Michael Kahikina, D-Waianae, called Republicans and the governor “unpatriotic” for refusing to allocate $30,000 to the Korean War veterans for their 50th celebration, even though the governor’s appointees were successfully helping organizers raise the money privately.

    Democrats in the Senate showed more restraint, but were just as aggressive and determined as their counterparts in the House to show the governor that she could not beat them at the political game.

    There were exceptions in the Senate — some freshman Senators who don’t yet know how to keep their cool as the more experienced Senators seem to do, exposed themselves to questions as to their mental stability and ability to stay on subject and speak the truth.

    Sen. Gary Hooser, D-Kauai, who tends to travel at light speed toward the Hooser twilight zone once he gets talking, attacked Republicans and said they abandoning the sick, poor, homeless, beaten and raped to fend for themselves because they would not subsidize duplicative or expanded government programs.

    Though other Senators, such as Sen. Roz Baker, D-Maui, gave similar biting speeches, Hooser leads the pack in the ability to get so carried away that he loses sight of reality and gets into fantasy.

    Political observers note that this trait is bound to get him into hot water with his constituents, and say that they believe his Senate career will be short lived — like one more year.

    ”Happy Ending for the Taxpayer?”

    If this were a happily ever after story for the majority of people in Hawaii, it would end with Democrats in the Legislature checking themselves into a shopperaholics anonymous clinic until they learned to control their raging spending habits that are based on emotion rather than logic.

    They’d have to take a lie detector test in order to determine if they truly believe the stories they spew to the people of the Hawaii. The stories such as the often repeated one about people (substitute any of the following: homeless, children, elderly, sick, beaten, raped, drug addicts) who will die, live on the street, trade sex for food, take drugs and commit crimes, should taxpayers not give even more of their hard-earned money.

    Some would pass the test, but many would not. Some legislators actually do believe the $3.5 million will create a “safety net” and want the governor to raid from the rainy day fund under SB 1305. They are caring, compassionate Democrats who have fallen for the best stories told by the non-profits directors who are better at storytelling, then working to fundraise from private and federal sources.

    Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland, D-Nuuanu, for example, bursts into tears, real tears, nearly every time she talks about people she feels are less fortunate. To her credit, she is not a callous politician, but she does need to check out if she is being duped by wise fundraisers and follow the money to see if it is going where it should.

    Sen. Colleen Hanbusa, D-Waianae, says she is a Democrat and believes people should receive handouts and subsidies. She is one of the few Democrats in leadership who votes on occasion against the other majority leaders and for what she believes. She was the only Democrat to vote against binding arbitration for the public sector unions.

    But bottom line is the state only has so much money and it is all gone and no amount of tears will bring back that money.

    Much more than is available has been spent by the previous governor and legislators and the Council on Revenues estimates an additional $150 million shortfall that will make balancing the budget even more difficult.

    ”Awakening the Sleeping Giant – the Hawaii Taxpayer”

    Though people in Hawaii are slow to anger, once they are hurt or insulted, they remember the incident and the culprit. And despite what many politicians and political operatives think, they are not stupid.

    Democrats awakened many observers with this charade, even some in their own party, who watched the special session in person or on television and were disgusted by what they saw.

    They knew the special session was not held for the benefit of the general public, even though Democrats, through a fake series of hearings with their cheerleader supporters, tried to make it appear that way.

    Unlike the special session in 2000, which at insistence of the general public led to the override of Gov. Benjamin Cayetano’s veto of a bill that raised the age of sexual consent to 16, the 2003 session was strictly for political, not moral, purposes, and at the public’s expense.

    ”’Send any tittle or tattle you might have to Malia Zimmerman at”’ mailto:Malia@HawaiiReporter.com ”’Send complaints elsewhere. Compliments and news tips accepted here.”’

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