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The president thinks our future is tied to our ability to produce college graduates. Future of Capitalism Blog disagrees.
… Nothing against college graduates — I am one myself — but it seems to have escaped the president’s notice that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern America, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Jack Taylor, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Dell computer’s Michael Dell, movie and music producer David Geffen, and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson — are not college graduates.
It seems to me that president is wrong, and that the best economic policy is not one that “produces more college graduates,” but one that produces more entrepreneurs. If producing a high proportion of college graduates were the secret to economic success, Belgium would be the world’s economic powerhouse. …
Contemplating the president’s college education fetish, a blog named The View From Alexandria picks up on something Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote.
I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:
“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.
A post in Volokh Conspiracy wonders about priorities in the White House.
… I’ve previously defended President Obama’s enthusiasm for golf, but the picture of the American President going on television to announce his predictions in a college basketball tournament, while America’s interests and long-term security are in imminent peril, is disconcerting. Whatever Barack Obama’s virtues, Hillary Clinton was right: he was not ready for the 3 a.m. phone call; and it appears that he never will be.
More on that from White House Dossier.
The Middle East is afire with rebellion, Japan is imploding from an earthquake, and the battle of the budget is on in the United States, but none of this seems to be deterring President Obama from a heavy schedule of childish distractions.
The newly installed tandem of White House Chief of Staff William Daley and Senior Adviser David Plouffe were supposed to impart a new sense of discipline and purpose to the White House. Instead, they are permitting him to showcase himself as a poorly focused leader who has his priorities backward.
This morning, as Japan’s nuclear crisis enters a potentially catastrophic phase, we are told that Obama is videotaping his NCAA tournament picks and that we’ll be able to tune into ESPN Wednesday to find out who he likes.
Saturday, he made his 61st outing to the golf course as president, and got back to the White House with just enough time for a quick shower before heading out to party with Washington’s elite journalists at the annual Gridiron Dinner. …
Thomas Sowell writes on ways the GOP might appeal to black voters.
… With all the Republican politicians’ laments about how overwhelmingly blacks vote for Democrats, I have yet to hear a Republican politician publicly point out the harm to blacks from such policies of the Democrats as severe housing restrictions, resulting from catering to environmental extremists.
If the Republicans did point out such things as building restrictions that make it hard for most blacks to afford housing, even in places where they once lived, they would have the Democrats at a complete disadvantage.
It would be impossible for the Democrats to deny the facts, not only in coastal California but in similar affluent strongholds of liberal Democrats around the country. Moreover, environmental zealots are such an important part of the Democrats’ constituencies that Democratic politicians could not change their policies.
Although Republicans would have a strong case, none of that matters when they don’t make the case in the first place. The same is true of the effects of minimum wage laws on the high rate of unemployment among black youths. Again, the facts are undeniable, and the Democrats cannot change their policy, because they are beholden to labor unions that advocate higher minimum wages.
Yet another area in which Democrats are boxed in politically is their making job protection for members of teachers’ unions more important than improving education for students in the public schools. No one loses more from this policy than blacks, for many of whom education is their only chance for economic advancement.
But none of this matters so long as Republicans who want the black vote think they have to devise earmarked benefits for blacks, instead of explaining how Republicans’ general principles, applied to all Americans, can do more for blacks than the Democrats’ welfare state approach.
W. W. in The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog tells us why the GOP probably won’t follow Sowell’s ideas.
… Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard and author of the much-discussed “The Triumph of the City”, deserves much of the credit for growing awareness of the way in which restrictions on housing supply have enriched wealthy, urban property-owners while squeezing out middle-class and poor residents. Today at the New York Times’ Economix blog, Mr Glaeser urges the tea-party movement to stand up for downtown:
“Big cities are not typically Tea Party territory, but if the new Republican members of Congress apply their libertarian principles assiduously to a few key federal policies, they could do much for urban America.”
Mr Glaeser’s point is not so much that Republicans could pick up votes from traditional Democratic constituencies, but that libertarian-leaning voters ought, as a matter of principle, to oppose the regulations and subsidies that have pushed populations out of the cities and into the suburbs. He argues that
“Residents of dense downtowns should urge Tea Partiers to take up the fight against socially engineered suburbia through federal homeownership subsidies and sprawl-inducing federal highway spending….
Good libertarians might ask why the federal government has any business promoting particular lifestyle choices, like homeownership.”
Preach it, brother!
If we join Mr Glaeser’s argument to Mr Sowell’s, Republicans would appear to have at their disposal a powerful argument for pro-minority urbanism. If Republicans raised and fought under this banner, it really might precipitate substantial partisan realignment. But I don’t think it’s going to happen, and the reason is simple. The Republican Party, as it is presently constituted, is to a great extent the party of rural and suburban white people. …
Byron York looks at the Wisconsin recall debate.
… Both sides have several more weeks to gather signatures. After that, there is a period for legal challenges of the petitions and then another period before the actual recall election, which could come in mid-to-late summer. Will the intensity of union activists last until then? And just as important, will the intensity of ordinary citizens, the people who are volunteering for Hunt’s group and others like it, stay alive as well?
Unions are very good at things like gathering signatures and chartering buses to take people to the polls. But don’t rule out the team that’s fighting on principle.
And Bill McGurn has modern day rules for radicals.
… In that spirit, here’s an updated list of 10 rules for Wisconsin protesters:
1) No more Jesse Jackson . This man is a national symbol of agitation for agitation’s sake, and he suggests to people who have not yet made up their minds that the protesters may be more radical than they claim.
2) Ditto for Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon and Tony Shaloub. Outsiders like these may excite the crowds, but they’ll alienate people you need.
3) Lose the peace signs. It suggests a hankering for the anti-middle class 1960s, rather than a 21st-century struggle for a middle-class standard of living. …
Michael Barone checks polls on what Wisconsin voters think about unions.
… as Rasmussen has explained, how you ask the question can make a huge difference in responses, particularly on an issue which is unfamiliar to most voters. Now Rasmussen has gotten more specific, finding that likely Wisconsin voters oppose weakening collective bargaining in general but strongly favor specific changes.
“Weakening bargaining rights”? 39% for, 55% against.
Require that a local school district buy health insurance from a union company? 19% for, 57% against.
Should the union disclose all financial relationships between the union and the union-created insurance company WEA Trust? 76% yes, 12% no.
Debra Saunders says money for NPR is the Grey Poupon of federal subsidies.
… NPR now has to live with O’Keefe’s tapes. While trying to land a $5 million donation from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center Trust, now-former NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation to the broadcaster’s president) said NPR would be “better off in the long run without federal funding.”
He also said, “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.” I am sure he meant that, too.
Lamborn tells me that the O’Keefe videos increase the likelihood that Washington will cut the CPB cord because the videos show “the disarray at NPR.”
That may be a polite way of saying that the tapes make NPR execs look like complete frauds – the same way they looked when they very publicly fired Juan Williams. Vivian Schiller said the move had nothing to do with Williams’ regular appearances on the right-leaning Fox News. Apparently she believes the American public is stupid. Could that be because, until very recently, the American public very generously subsidized her perch?