My Beauty Best Teacher

A a recent article that Charles Moore wrote, I think he put his finger on exactly what is going on today- the success and advance of the twin threats of fear and doubt. Moore, who is a British journalist and former editor of The Daily Telegraph, in an article about Margaret Thatcher, wrote that after the long boom and success of capitalism and free market economics that "the worm of doubt entered the system":

You borrowed all the money needed for the price of a house. This made you, in your mind, though not in full fact, an owner. Because the value of the house was rising, it also made you, again in your mind, richer. The bank, which actually owned the house, found clever ways of mixing and selling on the loans it had granted so that it, too, felt richer. Governments, happy at rising revenues, thought it was their business to make sure that when the symptoms of high risk began to present themselves, they were suppressed.... (then) the roof fell in... (and now) when people now hear words like globalization or capitalism... they feel slightly sick.

Free market economics and capitalism did not lead our nation to failure- rather, during its wild success at making millions around the world more prosperous over the past centuries, communism and socialism and fascism latched on to it, sucking from its prosperity to feed its sick aims like parasites, and over time, many smart people began to become confused and unable to see the parasites from the concepts that they latched on.

Where free markets and capitalism created wealth and encouraged personal responsibility, governments and elites put in place rules and regulations which weakened the foundations of the system, subsidized risky behavior such as sub-prime mortgages and leveraging investments, and gave out handouts to favored industries and distorted the market by doing so. When banks, businesses, and corporations operated in a free market of capitalism, they could succeed or fail based on their own efforts and innovation; but in the new markets, which were no longer capitalistic or free, government subsidies and spending and lobbying and regulation and rules determined whether or not a business, corporation, or bank was successful or failed. And although this was no longer capitalism or free markets, but rather markets once free now twisted to the aims of elites and socialists and communists and fascists, many smart people became critical of the markets or capitalism because of the failures of the government bureaucrats who were twisting and corrupting the system.

And then the parasites of leftism began to weaken and kill the free market and capitalism, and the people cried out 'capitalism and free markets are failing us'- when it wasn't the free markets and capitalism that failed, but rather the people who failed the system.

They were led to this failure by fear and doubt- they did not believe in the hand of the God and the freedom of individuals and life, liberty, and the protection of private property.

The people (or The People, as leftists call them) feared that although they were becoming prosperous and their lives were rapidly improving, they were somehow falling behind others who were advancing more rapidly. Rather than looking at why they were successful in the free market capitalism- because of their hard work, innovation, and yes, luck- they instead demanded government policies to hold back others and help out themselves, corrupting the very system that had brought them so far. They doubted that if people were free and made free decisions, they would make 'the right decisions'- that is, the decisions that they would make if they controlled the other people and had power over them (their definition of 'right decisions').

Rather than just letting go and trusting that the unseen hand of God, trusting to the thousands and millions of individual decisions, and working to ensure that private property rights are strengthened and respected, they doubted that this giant experiment of capitalism and a free market would work, and feared that they would somehow fall behind others in material wealth if they didn't vote for and support people who promised to corrupt the system and abuse the system and circumvent the system. Many people trusted and believed in the power of men to control other men and redistribute property to other men, and in so doing rejected free markets and capitalism.

Fear and doubt came to the people's mind every time there was a recession, or even during periods when great wealth was created but wasn't immediately distributed evenly. The people reacted to the Great Depression by doubting that the free market would correct (as it had done in the 1920's and dozens of times before in the 1800's) and feared that he return to prosperity wouldn't come fast enough- and so they worked to destroy the system, corrupt the system, and make the market less free- and the results were a slight recession during into a decade long destruction of wealth.

And today, government policies and regulations and taxes and laws which corrupted the free market and corroded private property rights have let the worm of doubt creep once more into the people's minds, and in their fear that maybe they won't get to loot the dying Republic of its wealth they vote for Democrats who promise to manage the downfall and distribute the ever-decreasing wealth in the system to their supporters and voters and friends.

To return to success and advance again as a nation in wealth and happiness, we must reject doubt of the free market system and capitalism and trust the people- we need to trust and believe again that the thousands of decisions of free people will create more wealth and make more people happy, and reject those who suggest that having a smaller number of elites make those decisions for us is better. We need to let go of our fear that if we don't control the market and the system that you'll lose out, and instead work hard, innovate, save your money, and invest wisely.

UPDATE 12/7/11: President Obama delivered a major speech today on the economy, in which he expressed his doubt that the capitalist system could continue to provide wealth and prosperity for many and work to make society more equal, and from this place of fear he instead wants to trust himself and his fellow men to run a better system that will somehow do a better job of creating wealth and distributing it than having free people make free decisions.

Via memeorandum, in his Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas, we read the following fear and doubt from US President Barack Obama, one-term Democrat. These are selections from the speech- (you can read the whole thing yourself here if you want):

My grandparents served during World War II. He was a soldier in Patton’s Army; she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. And together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and over fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried -- no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out.

And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known. It was here in America that the most productive workers, the most innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth. And you know what? Every American shared in that pride and in that success -- from those in the executive suites to those in middle management to those on the factory floor.

In this passage, Obama communicates to us that his parents believed in capitalism and free markets and personal responsibility and liberty and protection of property. And furthermore, Obama knows that this system worked. But yet, he has this nagging doubt and fear...

But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments -- wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t -- and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.

He doesn't BELIEVE in capitalism. He has no faith in people, freedom, liberty, and rights. It's clear he doesn't have any hope that people will make the 'right decisions' (the decisions he would make) and he wants to therefore control other people. He continues:

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. (Applause.) He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest. And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices. And today, they still must. He fought to make sure businesses couldn’t profit by exploiting children or selling food or medicine that wasn’t safe. And today, they still can’t.

We simply cannot return to this brand of “you’re on your own” economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country.

And it is around here that we get to the heart of the matter- in the last quarter of his speech, after ripping on capitalism and freedom for 3/4's of the speech, that we finally here what he wants to do...

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy? Well, it starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages, who’s best at busting unions, who’s best at letting companies pollute as much as they want.

We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission -- a national mission. (Applause.) Government and businesses, parents and citizens. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission -- a national mission. (Applause.) Government and businesses, parents and citizens. They should be rebuilding our roads and our bridges, laying down faster railroads and broadband, modernizing our schools. Of course, those productive investments cost money. They’re not free. And so we’ve also paid for these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices.

So, in summary, here is Obama's alternative to free markets and capitalism- give him more power. Give him the power and authority to tell employers what to pay their employees, give him the power and authority to combine big government with big business and big labor (ie, fascism), give him and his cronies the power to give money to favored constituent groups to fund pet projects of vanity (palaces, statues, etc), and the power to demand that all of these decisions are paid for by someone else who does not want to pay for it- to use the power of guns to the head to make people give up cash to Obama and his people to feed their wrong ideas about the power of men to control others for their benefit.

Obama is wrong. He needs to be defeated- not just politically, but his ideas and beliefs need to be rejected by all good people and good citizens and patriots and he and his policies need to be forever rejected in decent society. We must instead look to capitalism and freedom and liberty and property protection to our future, and not look backward to the sort of tyranny that Obama is proposing.

Via Dissecting Leftism I came across this article called 'Econophysics' points way to fair salaries in free market':

A Purdue University researcher has used "econophysics" to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today.

"It is generally believed that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. However, my theory shows that even though companies focus primarily on making profits and individuals are only looking out for themselves, the collective self-organizing free market dynamics, under ideal conditions, leads to fairness as an emergent property," said Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a professor of chemical engineering. "In reality, the self-correcting free market mechanisms have broken down for CEOs and other top executives in the market, but they seem to be working fine for the remaining 95 percent of employees."

In the new work, the researcher has determined that fairness is integral to a normally functioning free market economy. Findings are detailed in a research paper that appeared in June in the online journal Entropy and is available at http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/6/1514/

This is pretty interesting, and provides hope that our society will finally begin making progress on psychohistory. Pshychohistory, invented by science fiction author Isaac Asimov and a key point to The Foundation Series, is a concept of mathematical sociology analogous to mathematical physics that uses the law of mass action so that it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone on a small scale. It works on the principle that the behaviour of a mass of people is predictable if the quantity of this mass is very large (equal to the population of the galaxy, which has a population of quadrillions of humans, inhabiting millions of star systems). The larger the number, the more predictable is the future. Using pshychohistory, you can predict the future.

This scientist who is working on econophysics could be an early Hari Seldon.

UPDATE: To elaborate on my thoughts on the fictional theory of pshychohistory, I do think there is a plan out there- God's plan- and I do think that some of God's plan is revealed to us through the Bible and his unseen hand (the free market). I think that the field of economics is probably the closest to guessing at some of it, and thus I find it kind of cool whenever anyone works on this.

Too many people are focusing on the 'fairness for CEO's' aspect of this guy's equation, but the more important point is that the free market is working. Probably the failures with fairness with CEO compensation are the result of government policies.

Today the Oakland County Board of Commissioners debated a resolution that would state that the County is opposed to the healthcare reform bills currently supported by the Democrats in Congress. As is my habit, I was at the meeting, and was surprised to find the meeting packed- apparently the Democrats organized a large turnout, and the Republicans responded with their own late email asking people to come in. You could tell who the the Democrats were- they all wore the same sticker (Health Care Reform Now or something).

Before the Resolution was voted on, the floor was opened up for public comment, and 30-40 people came in front of auditorium and spoke for 3 minutes each. There were maybe 100 people in the audience, so a good percentage of the people there got to comment on the issue. In the name of journalism, I'm going to record some of the comments below, but for those of you who do not regularly attend meetings and who don't follow the political scene that closely, this might be a good chance for you to hear what sorts of comments are made by both sides.

One generality that I want to point to is that almost every speaker who supports Obamacare and spoke out against the resolution began their speech with comments about how America sucks, how our healthcare system is one of the worse ones in the world, and that the reason it is so bad is because evil insurance companies are involved in a grand conspiracy to cheat people out of their wealth. Almost every single supporter of Obamacare repeated this mantra in their speech, as if by saying these things would make them true.

Another comment I enjoyed from a supporter of Obamacare was (and I quote) "Republicans need to stop taking marching orders from fat loud-mouthed drug addicts." Apparently being 'fat' is something to attack someone personally about, and so are struggles with drug addictions. This kind of sensitivity and compassion is what you can soon expect from liberal government bureaucrats who are going to be making your healthcare decisions.

Another supporter of Obamacare said "Obama won the Presidential election overwhelmingly and he campaigned for exactly the type of plan that he is pushing for now so no one in this room has the right to oppose any of his policies." For fun, count how many wrong assumptions are in that statement. Also, I have seen this guy around- a couple years ago he was loudly speaking out against President Bush and the War on Terror in Iraq. Hypocrisy, liberal is thy name.

One women plaintively expressed the following comment "How can people even think about being against free healthcare for everyone- I don't even understand how you could oppose that." This is the depth of logic and reasoning that marks the left in our nation, a group that voters let take over on multiple levels of government.

Another gentlemen expressed the following sentiment "Insurance companies are full of evil people and the government needs to go after them with the full force of the state and drive them all out of business." I'm still quoting actual comments from people who support Obamacare.

After one guy stood up and gave a speech against Obamacare, there was shouting and cries of "you lie". People sat quietly through speeches in support of Obamacare (with only an occasional quiet laugh or chuckle at the foolish statements these people uttered) but almost every single person who spoke against Obamacare was yelled at, swore at, and shouted down. Free speech for liberals is only for those who say what they want. At one point the police even came in the chamber to keep order because a liberal wanted to physically fight everyone who disagreed with him- a bully just like his hero Obama.

Logical fallacies were present in almost every liberal proponent of Obamacare- one girl said "There is nothing right now stopping the free market solving the healthcare problem- the free market had its chance and failed and now the government needs to step in." There is no free market in healthcare- there is a direct correlation between increasing government involvement in healthcare and the rising cost. Healthcare is very far from 'free market' and thus it is a problem- the more government you inject into an issue the worse it gets, and that's not an argument in favor of more government, that is an argument against government in the first place.

After someone stood up and gave a great speech about America being founded on the ideas of freedom and liberty, several speakers stood up to reject those ideas and said that "America was founded on equality and altruism, not freedom and liberty"- these people who support Obamacare obviously have little knowledge of the history of our nation. Or perhaps they are mixing up the French Revolution with ours and support the ideas that led to terror and dictatorship in France as opposed to the ideas that led to greatness and law in our nation.

Some people wondered why the Oakland County Board of Commissioners took up a resolution such as this anyway- after all, what contribution can a county board make to this debate. The problem with this very important debate on healthcare is that it is not being debated in the open- it is being done behind closed doors by elites who wish to hide their actions from the light of day. And people on both sides, for and against Obamacare, want to speak on the issue, want to exercise their rights, want to petition their government, want to gather and assemble and battle it out in the forum of ideas, and this is being denied to them by the Democrats who seek to rule us. That is why the Oakland County Board discussed this issue- to give people a forum and a voice and an outlet to their thoughts, feelings, and frustrations.

The Resolution by the Oakland County Board of Commissioners stating its opposition to the Democrats healthcare plans passed by a majority vote.

Government officials actually had a decent idea in Lansing. Instead of working on raising taxes, letting go dangerous prisoners, or outlawing behaviors they don't like, some senators actually got to work trying to improve a real problem in our state- education. Senators in Michigan introduced a plan today to allow teachers and parents to convert their local schools into independently run schools with more flexible rules.

These new 'neighborhood schools' would still have to comply with strict state standards and would have to be sponsored by a mayor, city, county or township, although they could not be affiliated with a church or religious organization in any way, because apparently that would be bad.

Neighborhood schools could hire non-state certified teachers (like lawyers, businessmen, or doctors) and could offer merit pay to their teachers (like raising MME scores or having a slew of 5's on an AP test). The schools would be funded in the same way current charter schools are funded, with an annual state grant that’s based on enrollment.

As I understand it, these schools would be governed locally and would cut out the many layers of middle-management that make schools so inefficient, and could employ any other innovative practices that they think would help their students out.

This is a good idea- but it won't go anywhere. Other Senators are working on another plan for school improvement that will involve dumping more money into the system and put in place more restrictions on the free-market and parents, and this is a bad plan, and that system is closer to being passed than the 'neighborhood schools' idea.

The good plan is sponsored by Republicans, the bad plan by Democrats. Vote appropriately in future elections.

UPDATE: Some people have emailed me and accused me of selling out to the teachers union with this one- they want to know how this squares away with my usually free-market bent. Well, these types of schools create yet more competition, and they will be run by local companies (composed of teachers and parents), so as I see it, this is a very free-market based approach to education.

UPDATE II: Okay, did a little bit more research on this idea, and I like it more and more. Turns out there is a book out on this very premise: Can Teachers Own Their Own Schools- New Strategies for Educational Excellence, By Richard K. Vedder. Here is a review of it online:

Vedder presents a bold plan in which teachers, administrators and others involved in the educational process would become the owners of schools, acquiring an attractive financial stake in the process. Such privatization reforms could empower those directly involved and affected by school performance and end interest group barriers, paving the way for new, cost-effective means of improving educational outcomes. As a result, schools in which teachers, administrators, and parents have a significant financial stake would foster vibrant school communities with increased parental involvement and the innovation and efficiency essential to produce educational excellence.

Look, there is no way teachers would ever go for any sort of privatization scheme- to them, this is code for job layoffs and lower pay. I don't agree with that mentality- I think privatization can be a useful means of protecting jobs and even increasing teachers pay- but that is the way it is. The key is to put in place free-market schemes that are teacher-friendly.

Selling teachers on competition and privatization by letting them run their own schools and have an ownership stake in them is a great idea. This is not like GM or Chrysler where we are giving unions an ownership stake in a private company to encourage them to work harder and be more efficient- this is giving unions an ownership stake in a government-run enterprise to make them work harder and be more efficient. And that is a great idea.

A couple weeks ago I read an interesting article in the Telegraph- in it, longtime journalist Janet Daley suggests that the best thing that the British government can do to improve the economy and make people more wealthy and happy and free is to work really hard and be very productive in DOING LESS. The truth of the matter is that politicians have to have real guts and strength to simply say 'no, I will not spend taxpayer money trying to control people and the market,' but that may be exactly the kind of strength and guts we need today- politicians who promise to do more of less. From her article A daring idea to fix the economy: try doing less:

...the myth of government activism – the idea that intervention by the state is the answer to every economic and social problem – had been definitively routed. Apparently not: Mr Osborne and, we must assume, his boss still seem to believe that any unacceptable national situation must require direct action from them.

Or maybe they don’t believe that at all. Perhaps they just lack the political courage to admit that, in our present crisis, the best thing that the Government can do is to get out of the business of running (or subsidising, or initiating, or incentivising) things altogether – not just in the interests of saving money, but because the effects of such interference are counter-productive. What the economy is suffering from is not an insufficiency of overweening, fussy, bureaucratic initiatives that inevitably unleash an avalanche of unintended consequences, but a lack of cash in the hands of people who might spend it in ways that would actually create wealth and stimulate (in the proper sense of the word) economic growth.

If ever there was a time for radical proposals by a governing party, this is it. Rather than the imitative, mealy-mouthed shuffling of dollops of money from one departmental scheme to another, in what will inevitably look like panic in the face of rising youth unemployment and disappointing growth figures, what we need is a display of real insight and nerve...

...There is an urgent need now to rethink the whole relationship between government and populace while there is still the possibility of discussion. In Britain, Europe and America, the questions are remarkably similar. Can a free-market economy support an infinitely growing state? We will have to choose, quite soon, between liberty and the “security” of a society in which government controls the levers of economic life. Washington politicians are getting a terrible drubbing for failing to resolve their implacable differences over the size of the state (to the extent that they are unable to agree a federal budget). The US national debate may seem rough and ready to European ears – but at least they are engaging in the real argument.

She is right- the argument has been joined, and today via memeorandum I read in the Wall Street Journal an article that echo's the very ideas of Ms. Daley. From former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's article Capitalism and the Right to Rise:

...Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise....

....We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

What Governor Bush is talking about is the same kind of thing that I personally observed during my time as a policy adviser in the state's capital. I remember distinctly one time when a young Republican 'conservative' staffer came in to work one day, upset that the car that she had recently bought turned out to have been a bad purchase. She set about writing a law that would force the state to regulate and control all sellers of automobiles in the state and then tried to convince legislators to sponsor this piece of legislation- she wanted the state to immediately do something, to step in and spend lots of money and time and effort controlling thousands of people's individual decisions just to protect several people from their own stupidity. She proposal was met with great hostility towards me, and I countered her proposal by suggesting that rather than the state doing something about used car dealers, it instead loosen regulations and fees and taxes on all car dealers, making the market more free, so that more fools like her could be separated from their money, as the hand of God in its infinite wisdom is wont to do. I wasn't joking though.

The real courage and intelligent thing to do to create a more vibrant, free market by cutting back government regulations and fees and enabling people to be people, in all their glorious faults and warts, because only by doing so can we also unleash the amazing potential for great and good things that humans contain in them. The safe, stately downward path of state control is not the path for me and is not the path that successful, free, and prosperous people- no, we choose the jagged and uneven and unpredictable path that is the path of less government regulation, taxes, fees, and supervision- that is the only true path for better protection and encouragement of life, liberty, and property.

Last week on Frank Beckman's show on WJR 760AM, Frank asked Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-11) if he thought that Obama was engaging in Cloward-Piven Strategy. This question surprised and intrigued me. I wrote about the Cloward-Piven Strategy before (see post Cloward-Piven Strategy), but for those of you who are sadly not frequent readers of my blog, I'll explain it to you now.

The strategy is called the Cloward-Piven Strategy after a pair of radical socialist professors from the 60's who came up with it. The idea is to purposefully create a series of crisis, each one of which will then be blamed on capitalism, de-regulation, low taxes, free markets, etc. After the crisis is at its peak and conservative ideals have been successfully blamed, you then advance a solution for the crisis- a solution to put in place a more socialist, state-run, liberal society. This solution will not make society better, but will instead create more crisis, which you then in turn blame on conservative ideas, and advance more solutions that are liberal. Eventually, the state will take over every aspect of our lives and run our society as a radical socialist utopia.

When I first suggested that the national Democrats were engaging in this policy back in 2008, I was drawing on my long experience watching Democrats in Michigan, particularly Detroit. In our state, Democrats put in place their liberal ideas, they backfire, and we get more liberal ideas, which backfire, leading to more liberal ideas, and eventually, you get Detroit (dominated by liberal Democrats for over 40 years) and to a lesser degree Michigan (dominated by liberal Democrats for almost 8 years). I figured that the series of crisis which followed the Democrats regaining control of Congress in 2006 were not due to bad ideas, incompetence, or just plain stupidity, but due to an organized and concentrated plot to create crisis so that that you could then advance liberal solutions.

For example, this current healthcare bill is not just an idiotic attempt to destroy our nation out of a foolish and misguided attempt to make things better, but a grand conspiracy to actually create a crisis in the healthcare system by putting in place laws and regulations that will lead to higher costs and lower coverage and benefits, and the response then will be an even bigger and stronger healthcare bill (which will then create an even worse situation, like we see in Canada, which will then lead to calls for more government, etc, until government controls everything).

In other words, the Democrats are purposefully overloading the system in an attempt to collapse it- adding more regulations and laws and taxes to our capitalist free-market system so that people will then think that the capitalist free-market system is failing, where in reality it is the very liberal policies that are creating the crisis.

In his interview, Frank Beckman suggested that the Democrats were engaging in this policy. Congressman McCotter disagreed.

McCotter thinks that it isn't an intelligent conspiracy of not letting any crisis go to waste to put in place more government, but rather just plain out liberal elitism and incompetence. He thinks that it is instead simply a selfish desire to create permanent dependent constituencies that will then vote Democrat, who will then distribute benefits to them. It isn't 1984, but rather more like the People's Republic of Haven (from the Honorverse). He makes a good argument, as most liberals that I have come across are really not evil manipulative people, but rather idiots and fools who lack an understanding of people, history, economics, and policy.

It does bear watching though if the pattern laid out in the Cloward-Piven Strategy holds true- if we get another crisis followed by more government control which leads to another crisis and more government control, etc. Keep your eyes on it- we have one more year of Democrats running the show in Congress, and they are sure to create more crisis in our society, either through an orchestrated strategy or incompetence, and keep your eyes out for the resulting 'the market failed' rhetoric and the 'more government is the solution' rhetoric that will follow.

Let's not complicate things- the election in 2012 is about choosing the vision for the future of our nation. For all of the talk on the right about Clinton being too progressive and all of the talk on the left about Bush being too conservative, the truth of the matter is that both of our last two former Presidents have been pretty moderate in reality. But in the coming election of 2012, we will have a real choice of visions this time around.

The vision of these Presidents was to add a modest amount of debt every year, grow the size of government at a steady pace by implementing programs that were called for, cut an occasional budget and talk tough about turning some government functions back to the states, keep taxes fairly the same by lowering but broadening them, keep spending the same amount on the military, invade a couple states, and not question the basic soft welfare state that our nation found itself in.

But in 2012, our nation will face a decision on which sort of vision to embrace. David Warren of the The Ottawa Citizen says this:

If what we want is a functioning, even flourishing economy, and therefore jobs, jobs, jobs, then the policies of Texas make sense. They are, as Rick Perry says, low taxes, minimal regulation, the avoidance of debt, and business-friendly attitudes. It is a political culture which at least tries to focus on the political questions (law, order, and so forth), and leave economic questions to the free market (with its inevitable bulls and bears).

If what we want instead is a dysfunctional and stagnant or shrinking economy, and therefore spreading unemployment, then California's policies are just the ticket. They are: high taxes, maximal regulation, and excruciating debt. Also, a political culture that belittles and despises business, almost as much as it belittles and despises law and order; one not merely addicted to "fine tuning" things utterly beyond anyone's comprehension, but earnestly trying to replace the free market with a "political market" for goods and services - whenever opportunity calls. ("Never waste a crisis.")

I'm not saying the generation of wealth should be the sole purpose of human existence. I am saying it is one of the purposes, and further, that by politicizing economic activity we actually mire ourselves much deeper in materialism than we would ever do by just going out and earning a living.

The Texas model works, and the California model fails. Quite apart from whether anyone in the States should vote for Rick Perry, they must choose between these models.

He's right, and it doesn't even have to be just limited to the 'Texas model', since Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman both are preaching the same kinds of policies as Rick Perry, and even a moderate Romney is talking a strong conservative game and will be pushed to the right by a Tea-Party strong Congress in 2012, much like a moderate-talking Obama was pushed to the left by a progressive-dominated Congress in 2008.

We are facing a real choice in visions in 2012- freedom or tyranny. It's not a new choice, but one that every generation must make.

Pivoting away from other issues like the environment ("Bombshell" Experiment: Global Climate Change Caused by Cloud Cover) or education (More Than 200 D.C. Teachers Fired! Progress?), let's return back to jobs and the role that the government plays in job creation.

In my post Coming To Grips With a Political Economy I wrote about a class that I took in college called 'Political Economy.' The class was an attempt to indoctrinate students with the idea that government could create jobs through its actions and could create wealth through proper regulation and control over free markets. I struggled through this class, mostly because I rejected entirely the idea that government can create wealth and jobs through its actions, and today I still believe that.

Government does not create jobs. It takes wealth from those who are productive and creating wealth, cycles it through many layers of bureaucracy and 'management', and then gives that wealth to those people who are favored by the government. Some of those who are favored by the government should be- the Constitution identified those who the government can give 'jobs' to and states further have identified those who the government should give 'jobs' to. But many others who the government gives 'jobs' today in America are simply those who benefit from the kind of crony capitalism and banana republic policies that are more common to two-bit dictatorships and tyrannies.

And the 'jobs' that are created by government are inefficiently created- much wealth and property is squandered and lost and burned by having government provide these jobs because of the many layers of 'management' and bureaucracy that mark the government. This is an acceptable price to pay for fire, police, and military jobs, but for most other 'jobs' the government creates the cost to create these jobs far exceeds the useful good that these jobs provide to society.

For example, many liberals claim that Obamacare will 'create jobs'- agencies and regulatory bodies that will hire overlords and masters who supervise a once-free and vibrant economic sector and regulate, tax, and control it. But the cost of these jobs was demonstrated graphically by the reaction that businesses had to it- after the passage of this law businesses dramatically dropped their hiring of workers. The Heritage report explained why this happened:

Businesses with fewer than 50 workers have a strong incentive to maintain this size, which allows them to avoid the mandate to provide government-approved health coverage or face a penalty; Businesses with more than 50 workers will see their costs for health coverage rise—they must purchase more expensive government-approved insurance or pay a penalty; and Employers face considerable uncertainty about what constitutes qualifying health coverage and what it will cost. They also do not know what the health care market or their health care costs will look like in four years. This makes planning for the future difficult.

Yet President Obama and the modern-day Democratic Party continues to think that regulations, spending, taxes, and control over free people can 'create jobs'. They take wealth from those who have it- either through taxes or fees or by simply sucking up savings by selling debt- and give it to those who they favor and try to pretend that they have made society better. But they haven't- they have killed legitimate jobs that millions of people through their free actions wanted and needed (the unseen hand of the market) and made society less because of their actions that took away freedom and property.

In Latest EPA Rules to Cost 1.4 Million Jobs and a 12% Increase in Utility Bills I wrote about how the Washington Post reported that the new EPA rules that were recently published will cause electric bills will jump 12 percent nationally by 2016 to comply with these new policies, with residents in areas such as Kentucky and Tennessee seeing a 24 percent increase in their utility bills. These policies are project to eliminate 1.4 million jobs- real jobs that will be destroyed by the actions of government, creating people who will no longer be paying taxes any more and will now be sucking down government benefits, all thanks to these policies pushed by Democratic bureaucrats employed by a Democratic President supervised by Democrats in the House and the Senate and supported by Democratic unions and a Democratic media.

And now Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso has put together a report that showed that the executive actions of the Democrat President have put in place in July alone an additional $9.5 billion in new regulatory costs by proposing 229 new rules and finalizing 379 rules. Among those rules that are going to add to the cost of doing business, kill jobs, and make our society less productive and wealthy are rules regarding the fake issues of global warming, healthcare reform, and financial regulatory reform rules.

IN JULY ALONE A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT PUT IN PLACE $9.5 BILLION IN NEW COSTS! I don't care how many times Obama 'pivots' to talk about jobs, the heart of the matter is that he is wrong about the government being able to create jobs and wealth through its actions- government is best that governs least because when people are free and free to live their lives and free to make their own decisions and free to do with their wealth and labor as they see fit, then jobs are created and wealth is created.

Make the choice in 2012 to turn America away from tyranny and 'government-created jobs' and to freedom and 'people-created jobs'.

For more reading, try Productivity versus OSHA and EPA regulations (Research for business decisions).

One of the cornerstones of modern-day conservatism is the belief that America's energy resources can and should be responsibly exploited. This means that the United States should allow private companies to drill for oil, mine coal, build nuclear power plants, tap into natural gas reserves, get shale oil, and utilize whatever other energy resources that these companies wish to use, provided that they respect the property rights of others.

Oh, I know what liberals and left-wingers will say- the horror of pollution! But the faults of energy development do not lie with the companies themselves, but rather with the government for not establishing clear and defined property rights- for example, rather than having the government act as police to safeguard public water, the water rights should be more clearly defined and if companies destroy or harm the property (the water) of others, they should be forced to pay in a court, much as if they destroyed other private property. The faults with 'pollution' then lie not in the companies for breaking ever expanding government rules and regulations over ever expanding public lands, but for the government for not putting in place limited and clear rules regarding private property rights and then divesting itself of public lands by selling these lands off to private entities that can then do a better job of protecting. Like most problems in our society, the solution is less government, not more.

With the main liberal concern out of the way, our nation would be free to exploit and use its vast resources- enough oil for 30 years, enough natural gas for 575 years, enough coal for 500 years, etc. With oil, gas, and coal be utilized to its fullest extent, our nation will have cheap and plentiful energy, enabling it to develop some of the most amazingly energy intensive industries there are- 'renewable resources'. The horse needs to go before the cart here- we  need to have cheap and plentiful energy in order to build the energy intensive operations and industries like building solar panels, developing batteries, building geothermal plants, etc. A wealthy, productive society thriving on cheap energy can afford to become environmentally friendly, as opposed to a cheap, declining society that the liberals and Democrats appear to be pushing us towards with their anti-energy policies.

In a free market, one in which the government is not subsidizing any of the industries (and this includes cutting subsidies for oil and gas and coal), the most efficient energy resources will be developed in an environment that encourages private property ownership and protection. American can be great again, if it moves away from the liberal model of public ownership of lands and public protection of the environment with restrictive regulations and rules and taxes on energy production combined with subsidies for 'favored' industries and campaign donors. It can be great again if it moves towards a more conservative model of private ownership of lands and private protection through impartial courts of the environment, with few restrictions and regulations and subsidies on energy production, encouraging the most efficient producers and users of energy in a free market.

Via Powerlineblog's post AMERICA’S VAST ENERGY RESOURCES I read this quote from the Institute for Energy Research. IER describes the problem (and the opportunity) bluntly:

Access to affordable, abundant energy is, fundamentally, a means of freedom. But for those seeking to create a crisis that provides an opportunity to direct the way we live, work and act, affordable, reliable, abundant, domestic energy is a threat. In a very real sense, the more energy we have, the less power they will have. Energy abundance ends the justification for central energy decision-making.

As it turns out, many of the problems of energy scarcity and rising costs in the United States have been caused by the government itself. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a report that outlined many of the policy and regulatory constraints that impact domestic energy production. While the report focused on natural gas specifically, many of the laws and procedures also represent roadblocks to any form of safe and responsible energy production. The list of energy barriers included the following policies, all of which can limit access to U.S. resources, increase delays related to exploration and production, and/or increase costs of development:

(John from Powerlineblog)The list of statutes and other legal impediments that follows is three pages long. Only liberal politicians stand between the American people and development of our vast energy resources.

As the father of several little kids, I love to read them stories. Too frequently though, the books I pick up to read my kids are filled with liberal ideas. The hero is always the minority, or a government worker. The bad guys is always business, or unregulation. The messages is always fairness, equality of condition, and peace. These kinds of stories have a place- after all, sometimes the hero is a government worker, sometimes businesses are bad, and peace solves many conflicts. The problem is when children are read only the liberal messages, day after day, their entire lives, and they lose sight of the other more conservative messages that our country was built on.

For example, in Horton Hears a Who, Horton must protect the Who's because he is bigger and stronger than they are. Horton fights for what he believes in. And Horton believes. Messages about strength, fighting, and believing in something are absent from many other children's stories.

Or take for example the story of the Little Red Hen. Nolan Finley must have kids himself- his article today talked about how America has lost sight of our foundational principles as expressed in children's stories. He wrote:

From the feisty Little Red Hen we learned the rewards of hard work. We also learned to savor those rewards guilt-free and to understand that what we create belongs to us. The hen would have flailed the Rainbow Fish had he come sashaying around with his share-your-crayons silliness.

The Little Read Hen planted the wheat and ground the flour and baked the bread and felt no obligation to break off a piece for the shiftless sheep or do-nothing donkey -- unless she wanted to. She was my kind of chick.

But she doesn't fit into an America that increasingly questions the fairness of one person having more than another, without weighing sweat or skill. In the hen's world, if you produced, you ate; if you were able to and didn't, you went hungry. Why is that too sinister a concept to teach tykes today?

I agree- are concepts such as hard work and freedom now not PC enough for children to read about? Personally, I've always like the story of Mike Mulligan- but when I think about it, why should I feel bad for an outdated piece of machinery that does a poor job of things? He's not the hero. The Little Engine that Could is the hero- he thinks he can, and does. He thinks he can, and makes his dreams come true. I guess Mike Mulligan should be applauded for finding work for all those years, and trying- but in the end, he resorts to charity paid for by taxpayers. Compare that to the Little Engine that Could, as written about in Nolan's article:

The Little Engine is my favorite. He huffed and puffed up that hill on his own steam, and kept stubbornly going even when he wasn't sure he could make it to the top. He didn't pull off the tracks to wait for Dora the Explorer to give him a push.

The Engine's breed of self-reliance and determination to overcome obstacles would serve us well as we enter what promises to be the most challenging economic stretch in decades. Will we turn to the government to pull us up the hill, or will we get up a good head of steam and go for it ourselves?

Yes, laugh as you might, but I think that between Sesame Street and PBS and public schools, my children are getting enough liberal ideas. On my time, I'm going to read them the Bible, Rudyard Kipling, The Squire and the Scroll, Owen's Walk, America : A Patriotic Primer, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey, or even Aesop's Fables: A Classic Illustrated Edition (Classic Illustrated). These are the stories that should fill children's heads and hearts- stories of doing the right thing, of working hard, of having pride in your work, of being wise and cautious, of accepting responsibility, of believing in the power of God, of freedom and liberty and choice, and of the power of the free market.

I agree with Nolan's conclusion:

In a couple of weeks, a large number of voters, likely even a majority, will go to the polls to choose a political Pied Piper to lead them to an America where everyone shares and hugs and plays patty cake in equal-size houses. I'd rather follow that cranky Red Hen.

Let's not forget the big picture during this primary season- defeating President Obama's attempt to hold on to political power. This is not a partisan issue- I don't suggest that Obama needs to be defeated merely because he is a Democrat or a liberal or a progressive or whatever- but rather this is an issue about putting someone in the White House who is better at getting out of my way.

I'm great a working hard, creating wealth, making my own decisions in my life, living with my own mistakes, and producing goods and services for our great nation- and so are you. All you require to be prosperous, happy, and free is a government which protects your life through national defense and police services and the like, a government which protects your liberty and freedom by making sure that enemies without and within do not gain the ability to order you around, and a government which protects your happiness by making sure that the property you do earn you keep. You are all great Americans.

And yet, President Obama does not think that you are great Americans- he thinks that you make bad decisions, that you don't understand how a baby could ruin your life, and that you are not creating the right sort of property or spending your property in the right way. And this dangerous man with these dangerous attitudes has become President of the United States of America and is now using the power of that executive office to take away your liberty and freedom and property and make your life a little less full.

You've felt it, just like I have, over the years and getting worse over the last three- that feeling like people don't matter any more, like peoples lives are inconsequential, and that feeling that our world is a little less alive. It is not surprising that you've felt this way- as government has gotten bigger and more powerful and more in control with more aspects of your lives this impersonal and vast institution has dehumanized us and treated us as numbers and taken away from our life, liberty, and property.

President Barack Obama supports this dehumanizing and confiscating and controlling philosophy because he does not think that you are all great Americans.

Jay Cost on Saturday touched on these ideas in his blog post, where he spoke about just exactly what sort of person Obama was, what his vision of the world was, and why opposing him rises beyond simply a partisan or jobs or improving economy thing- it is a real battle of vision for the future for America- one in which the individual is great and free and prosperous, or another one in which the individual is a slave to the state and controlled by the state and prosperous only as much as the state lets them be.

Here is part of Jay Cost's blog post, from the Weekly Standard, called What's So Bad About Obama?

...Obama is not “radical,” at least not in the way we usually define the concept. But that actually points to the big the problem with this president and his worldview. The progressive ideology dating back to the turn of the last century, and in which Obama is comfortably situated, was never really about overturning the established order, but rather in co-opting it...

... the hallmarks of the First New Deal – were all about grand bargains between government, labor, farmers, and capital owners. The point was to draw all classes to the bargaining table, with the meeting chaired by the progressives, naturally. So it goes for modern-day progressivism. Both Clintoncare and Obamacare did not try to implement “socialized medicine,” but rather strike a grand bargain that would encompass all of the “stakeholders” to manage the nation’s health care...

...Obama has not set out to destroy capitalism. He is no socialist in the traditional sense of the word. He is not interested in controlling the means of production, as Marx put it. He’s happy to let commerce and industry remain in private hands, but that does not mean he's a free market advocate in any politically relevant sense of the phrase. He wants the free market to do its thing, so long as the government can socialize an ever-greater amount of the profit, and also take an intimate role in managing the private sector to “socially beneficial” ends....

...The principal reason for this opposition is that there has always been more than a whiff of anti-republicanism to the progressive agenda. Just consider the name "progressive," which implies a social, epistemological, or moral vanguard -- hardly the hallmark of true republicanism. And what one person views as “socially beneficial," another may rightfully call political patronage. For instance, the New Deal was full of payoffs – small and large – to Democratic constituencies....

...And so, the Democrats’ grand dreams of a “Fair Deal” always stink of unfairness to conservatives in the republican tradition... And Barack Obama, the president who promised to bring change to Washington, has been a very diligent patron to his party's extensive list of clients. On item after item, the topline claim to benefit the national interest is regularly belied by the particularism of the fine print. Klein mentions three items in particular in his column – the auto bailout, the financial reform bill, and the health care bill – that were all justified on purely nationalistic grounds, but peel off the top layer and the stench of clientelism will overwhelm you. To this list I would add the stimulus bill, the jobs bill that Obama proposed in the fall, and the cap-and-trade bill. Liberals look upon them all as fulfilling a great national purpose, but republicans (small "r") see massive payoffs to core Democratic groups.

If you want to understand the seething anger on the conservative side of the aisle, this is what you need to appreciate: It’s not just that Obama is a big government guy in the progressive tradition, which conservatives have opposed for more than a century. It’s also that he’s a client guy, meaning that his idea of big government inevitably has special payoffs hidden in it somewhere. And more than even this, he's a boundless client guy in what should be an age of restraint. Payoffs to party clients are one thing when the economy is growing at a four percent rate per year; that is a situation where the times are so prosperous that government patrons are really just drawing upon the national surplus to satisfy their partisans. But when the economy is growing at less than two percent per year, barely enough to keep up with population growth, paying off party clients is actually like robbing from Peter to pay Paul. And while Obama and congressional Democrats have put off that bill -- in the form of our trillion-plus deficit -- conservatives are not fools. They know they'll be asked to pay up sooner or later, and with a stagnant economy that means less money in their pockets, in part because the president wants to hold together his voting coalition.

That's what's so bad about Obama.

Let's get past all of our past labels- Republicans and Democrats, Romney vs Newt, establishment vs anti-establishment, Tea Party vs Occupier, right vs left, conservative vs liberal- and realize just exactly what the battle is about today: republicanism vs dictatorship. This 2012 is about returning power back to the people of our nation by empowering them as individuals to make lives, be free, and earn property. Obama opposes that desire, and that is what is so bad about him and why he must be defeated in 2012 and his vision of government rejected with extreme manliness.

Jay Cost is the author of Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic.

Some teachers are tempted to be babysitters during the holidays when, in fact, you can get some powerful teaching moments in your classroom. Take time to be creative and integrate holiday-themed teaching into your classroom. Please share what you like to do in the comments.

1 - Have a Social media activity relating to topics you're learning
Two of my most tweeted things from last week were the Facebook template and Twitter template that you can download and use in Microsoft Word. This is a great alternative for those of you who cannot use the online Fakebook template from Classtools.net.

Our AP Literature teacher has had students create a Facebook profile for their term paper author. They have to add at least 8 "friends" who are contemporaries of the author, a certain number of status updates with comments from friends. All of it must be believable. It is a lot of fun because students have to research their person, figure out the contemporaries and understand aspects of his/her life.

These spark fun conversations and can be done offline or online.

2 - Make an Interactive Story
This is a great time of year to teach students how to create interactive stories using PowerPoint. You can have them illustrate a popular story (like this Night Before Christmas PowerPoint) with their own narration or create an interactive story talking about their family. (see a review for Powerpoint 2007) The concepts you can teach with this idea:

• Clickable hotspots (where you click and make a choice - this is basic programming)
• Recording narration
• Creating a self-running PowerPoint

There are many free online presentations full of Christmas ideas that you can adapt.

3 - Make a Review Game (to promote future recall)
If you're doing reviews, and know that content you shared this semester will need to be recalled next semester, you can have the students create fun review games using PowerPoint (see the video below.) You can save them and review. If you don't have Powerpoint, use the Free flash Online Jeopardy Generator and have them save the file or embed on your wiki for review later.


4 - Play Games to Learn
For elementary teachers, TES has the 12 games of Christmas which are perfect for the whiteboard. If you want to play this on the ipad, the last three games (the santa addition game - #11 is my favorite for my 10 year old) are available for free. You can download the game from the iTunes store. (There are 3 games in the app - a sequencing game with ringing bells, and a velocity and angle game where you shoot an elf at presents to grab them and get them into Santa's sack.) There is a free downloadable teaching guide for these games, a big plus. (On another note, you can write a review and tweet it with #tesxmas to Twitter and win an ipad on Friday.)

But you could take this further if you have older students. Why not come up with your own 12 games of Christmas and embed them in a wiki by having students create their own games at classtools.net? These can be used for review next semester before testing. You could start playing eLections to understand how elections work or make your own class stock market game. (I use the one at Market Watch.)

You could also take some of the fun holiday games over at Kaboose and adapt them to your classroom or activity.

5- Play Games to Make the World a Better Place
Or how about selecting a game that can change the world like Free Rice (answer vocabulary questions and rice is donated to areas in need), Darfur is Dying (not a happy game for Christmas but one that could give perspective), or other games that bring awareness to social issues. (Like Disaster watch, citizen Ship, or the Carpet game.)

6 - Make Games
There are a lot of places to make your own video games: Sploder (for arcade games) or MIT's Scratch or Microsoft's Kodu Game Lab. All of these are free. As the K12 online conference 2011 said, "Play with a Purpose."

7 - Create your efolio
The end of a semester is a great time to update (or create) your efolio. All of my students have their own website and their parents know the links. When they graduate, they put the links on college applications and resumes. My favorite place for student efolio websites is Weebly, but you could also do this on Google sites.

8- Create a DVD for the family
Use Photostory (free for PC), or iMovie or Windows Live Movie maker (free for PC) to make a simple DVD movie for the child's family. These are fun, simple programs that have built in tools to help make simple videos out of family photographs. If you do this option, my best recommendation is to have students bring the photos in already scanned on a CD or DVD or to have time outside class when students can scan photos.

9- Digital Picture Frame or Digital Jump Drive
The best picture I gave last year to my family was a digital picture frame with pictures from the year on it. My Mom keeps hers running in the kitchen all the time. You can get a nice Digital Picture Frame from Amazon for 20 something plus a memory card for a total of around $30. This would be a great gift for the principal or front office to have photographs and works of art. How about having students scan their work form the year and creating a digital portfolio for their parents using a digital picture frame? (You can also find small digital keychains for photos as well. I have seen them but don't have a specific one to recommend.)

You could even have students scan or photograph their work and take photos and put these items on a jump drive and give the jump drive for Christmas. Both of these gift ideas cost a little money but would be nice for parents or principals.

10- Make Christmas Cards or Have Fun with Photos
I have students create a movie poster using Adobe Photoshop to photoshop their face onto a movie poster. Then, we have the students assemble Christmas cards for the school board of directors to send to parents. If you teach graphic design, Christmas or Holiday cards are great things to do.

Have fun with Photos at Big Huge Labs

There are also many online websites like Blue Mountain where you can make ecards and send them to family. You could use this to introduce younger kids to email. You can also have students bring in family pictures and learn to scan them and pull them into a funny holiday site like Elf Yourself. (Or they can help you do this activity with the faces of teachers or administrators.) You could also use an app like Face in the Hole.

Speaking of fun with pictures, Big Huge Labs is a blast for anyone and can help you make fun, frameable signs like the one I made for my school's state championship football team.

11- Solve Santa's Murder
OK, this is a very different kind of activity, but I think that is why I like it. It is a writing activity but has students use clues to solve Santa's murder mystery. It is no secret that I spend quite a bit of time running around the free TES resources and this is another one I turned up there. Probably better for middle school but would spark interest.

Widad Kinard's Pinterest board with classroom activities

12 -  Share Your Ideas
Share your ideas for teaching during the holidays with others. Sometimes seeing what other teachers are doing is so helpful. For example, Widad Kinard has a lovely Pinterest board with classroom activity ideas overflowing with holiday ideas straight from her classroom.

Share on your blog (like I've done here.) Certainly there are many great ideas out there. Send them through your favorite hashtag on Twitter. (See Jerry Blumengarten's Hashtag Guide -he's @cybraryman1 on Twitter.)

Teach!
There are so many things you can do that will teach students.You don't have to watch another movie. But if you do, watch a classic movie. They will watch popular movies at home (most likely) but A Christmas Carol or "It's a Wonderful Life" will give the kids an insight into culture. There are lot of classic movies you can watch.

Recess is great but three recesses are a bit extreme in one day.

Some teachers go on autopilot this time of year and become glorified babysitters. You are too good for that. This is the week that separates the good from the great. Use every moment and find the power of teachable moments. As kids play and relax in other classes, they may just have more mental energy for your subject than you realize.

Take time and use your time! Please share your ideas in the comments.

Last week I wrote in my post Lessons from Economic Recessions- Introduction and Great Depression:

History teaches lessons- it allows those of us in the present to see how results in the past worked. Economic recessions are a great teaching tool for policy makers and average citizens, because they teach us how the recession may have happened and how to emerge from the recession and therefore inform us as to the policy actions that we must take and those that we as citizens must support.

In that post, I talked about the lessons from the Great Depression. The lessons that I drew from the Great Depression are based though not on just data from that event, but from other recessions that our nation has entered and exited. Most liberals simply say 'government spending got us out of the Great Depression', but when I ask them about all of the other recessions that the United States entered, they have a blank look, as they do not have any knowledge of other recessions or how we emerged from them as a nation.

One of my friends in the media should try this sometime- ask a liberal policy maker- President Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Carl Levin, or Debbie Stabenow, or Gary Peters- ask them what lessons they have personally learned from the Great Depression. I am sure they will roll off some long-winded answer that sounds educated and learned but basically boils down to 'spend more money.' Follow-up that question with a question on what lessons they learned from the Depression of 1920-21, or The Panic of 1907, or the Long Depression of 1873–79, and you'll be sure to get blank looks from these policy makers, as they don't have any knowledge about those recessions and have learned no lessons from them. They might even snap back some response to you about how unimportant it is to learn about other recessions- but they are wrong, because if you only draw your lessons on economic policy from one recession, the Great Depression, and your lessons are wrong at that, than you are sure to be wrong about very big and important policy decisions that have real effects on our nation.

Of course, my blog should not be the source for your education- I would advise you to spend some real time studying some real economists- but at least the knowledge that I display here and the lessons that I draw here are likely more educated than those of the above policy-makers, including our Harvard-trained President of the United States. So let's discuss today the The Forgotten Depression of 1920.

The Depression of 1920–21, which was an extremely sharp deflationary recession in the United States that lasted from January 1920 to July 1921, which at 18 months in duration is longer than any of the recessions after WWII, and which saw a GDP decrease of anywhere from 3% to 7%. The recession of 1920–21 was characterized by extreme deflation- anywhere from 13% to 18% — the largest one-year percentage decline in around 140 years of data. Unemployment jumped anywhere from 4 to 6% in one year, the AT&T Index of Industrial Productivity showed a decline of 29.4%, and stocks fell dramatically during the recession. It was a very bad recession that led many in society to question the stability and future of the American system of capitalism.

At the time, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — later President Hoover- urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover, as we all know now, was a progressive Republican who believed that active government response by government officials who were smarter than the rest of us could shorten a recession and led to economic growth. Hoover advocated the same policy responses in 1920 that he implemented in 1929- increased spending by the government, increased taxes especially on the evil rich, increased regulation of businesses, bailouts for banks and 'too big to fail' companies, continued support to labor unions, and more government agencies and boards to organize and improve our existing economic system.

As you can see, the responses that Hoover advocated in 1920 and implemented in 1929 are very nearly the same policies that President Obama implemented in 2009. The results of these policies are seen today and were seen in 1929- but not in 1920 because President Warren Harding ignored Hoover and did the exact opposite as what he recommended. Whereas Hoover pushed for more government spending, Harding decreased it; when Hoover wanted more regulation, Harding put in place less; for every board of smart elites that Hoover proposed to control human action, Harding cut boards and agencies so that the common man could be more free; and Harding ignored demands to raise taxes and instead slashed taxes.

The result of Harding's more conservative approach to the severe recession of 1920-1921? The recession ended quickly and ushered in an amazing period of robust economic activity the continued throughout the 1920's as Harding and Coolidge continued conservative policies. It is no surprise that the limited government, balanced budget, low taxes, low regulation, and unleashing of human freedom led to the Roaring Twenties, an amazing period in American history of social, artistic, and economic dynamism, while the active government, increased taxes, massive government spending, and more regulation of the progressive Hoover and liberal Roosevelt led to the Great Depression.

Thomas E. Woods (author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, and Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse) recently wrote a great post on this subject called The Forgotten Recession- I advise you to read the whole article, but here are several important pieces of it:

...It is hardly necessary to point out that Harding's counsel — delivered in the context of a speech to a political convention, no less — is the opposite of what the alleged experts urge upon us today. Inflation, increased government spending, and assaults on private savings combined with calls for consumer profligacy: such is the program for "recovery" in the 21st century.

Not surprisingly, many modern economists who have studied the depression of 1920–1921 have been unable to explain how the recovery could have been so swift and sweeping even though the federal government and the Federal Reserve refrained from employing any of the macroeconomic tools — public works spending, government deficits, and inflationary monetary policy — that conventional wisdom now recommends as the solution to economic slowdowns. The Keynesian economist Robert A. Gordon admitted that "government policy to moderate the depression and speed recovery was minimal. The Federal Reserve authorities were largely passive.… Despite the absence of a stimulative government policy, however, recovery was not long delayed."...

...There was nothing at all unusual about the pattern of American wealth in the 1920s. Far greater disparities have existed in countless times and places without any resulting disruption.

In fact, the Great Depression actually came in the midst of a dramatic upward trend in the share of national income devoted to wages and salaries in the United States — and a downward trend in the share going to interest, dividends, and entrepreneurial income. We do not in fact need the violent expropriation of any American in order to achieve prosperity, thank goodness...

...Harding's inchoate understanding of what was happening to the economy and why grandiose interventionist plans would only delay recovery is an extreme rarity among 20th-century American presidents. That he has been the subject of ceaseless ridicule at the hands of historians, to the point that anyone speaking a word in his favor would be dismissed out of hand, speaks volumes about our historians' capabilities outside of their own discipline.

The experience of 1920–1921 reinforces the contention of genuine free-market economists that government intervention is a hindrance to economic recovery. It is not in spite of the absence of fiscal and monetary stimulus that the economy recovered from the 1920–1921 depression. It is because those things were avoided that recovery came. The next time we are solemnly warned to recall the lessons of history lest our economy deteriorate still further, we ought to refer to this episode — and observe how hastily our interrogators try to change the subject....

Read the whole article- the logic, the understanding, the theories, and the explanation are all in there, and go into economic terms and theories that I am only beginning to gain an understanding of.

The lessons that I drew regarding the Great Depression are supported by the lessons that one can learn from the Recession of 1920-1921- that economic recessions are worsened and lengthened by a government that takes away human liberty, treats people as numbers to manage, takes wealth and property from those who have earned it, and that in every other way violates the Founding Principles of our nation (limited government, federalism, and separation of power). It is up to policy makers to learn those lessons and to vote accordingly on future legislation facing our nation.

Keep reading my blog regularly for future posts on this subject, and I continue becoming educated and drawing lessons from other past economic recessions that our nation faced and overcome.

This post is going to attempt to tie together commentary of FDR, Green Jobs, the Michigan 21st Century Investment Fund, and Jeff Daniels... I hope it makes sense.

As a teacher, I always become annoyed when students repeat the myth that FDR saved us from the Great Depression. It is now such a widely accepted myth that when I voice my doubts, the students think that I must be joking. It is like claiming the world is flat they think- after all, look at all the jobs that FDR created to fight the Great Depression. Look at all the never-done-before government actions, and the massive expansions in federal power that he shoved through during an unprecedented 4 terms in office. Surely he saved us, because after all, massive government action must be good, right?

Wrong. It is a myth that FDR saved us from the Great Depression. Excellent information this can be found in the essay Great Myths of the Great Depression. In fact, FDR's New Deal program was an economic failure that likely stretched a usual downturn in the economy (albeit a bad sharp one) into a depression that the US did not truly emerge from until after FDR was dead. Roosevelt’s formula of substituting government programs for a normal business recovery did not create the high unemployment. FDR's idea of extracting tax dollars from individuals and corporations to fund government programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a bad idea. The WPA hired workers to pick up trash, cut down trees, and build roads, bridges, and schools- but even though the government was 'creating jobs,' in reality they merely transferred jobs from the productive private sector to the inefficient public one. For more yet, see this site.

This myth does not die though. In Michigan, our government has dramatically increased the amount of money that it spends on two 'job creation programs' that are the centerpiece of Granholm's economic recovery program for Michigan. In fact, during her campaign, these two 'job creation programs' featured prominently, and obviously people bought this myth, because she won re-election over a real job creator in Michigan, Republican Dick DeVos. As michiganliberal.com put it "Granholm announced the creation of funding for new companies that will help diversify our economy and keep people and ideas in this state," buying into the myth that the government can tax productive companies and then somehow create jobs with that money.

In reality though, government can not create jobs, it can only force people from productive private sector jobs to inefficient public sector jobs. An article in the Detroit Free Press described how tax dollars in Michigan (where taxes have been steadily been raised) were used by two state programs, the Venture Michigan Fund and the Michigan 21st Century Investment Fund, to try to help bring new jobs to Michigan. These programs were created because Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm and liberal state lawmakers believed that they could create jobs using the power of the government. The result?

According to the research, Michigan's government spent 116 million dollars and to create 40 new Michigan jobs over the last two years - at the cost of almost $3 million per 'created' job! What's even worse, liberals and government has reached the wrong conclusion- they think that this is a success (the headline of the Free Press article- 'State Venture Capital Funds Start Paying Off'). Thank you to the Michigan Taxpayers Association for staying on top of this one.

So what sent me off on this long rant and prompted me to spend 30 minutes coming up with this post? Those annoying commercials I have to listen to that are narrated by Jeff Daniels! The Michigan Economic Development Corporation has a whole library of video's that they run on TV and the radio that they have put together to tout the myth of government creating jobs. The most annoying of these are the ones that claim that the MEDC is doing great things when it uses massive amounts of taxpayer money to lure environmental companies here, and by doing so somehow creates jobs. Michigan is now fully behind the myth of government job creation- even worse, it is buying in more and more into the more specific myth of green jobs.

John Stossel destroys this myth in his recent article "The Fallacy of Green Jobs." I'm going to pull from it and edit it below:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has a great twofer pitch: "green jobs." It sounds like a winner. Politicians always promise that their programs will create jobs. The fallacy is the same in every case: Even if the program creates jobs building bridges or windmills, it necessarily prevents other jobs from being created. This is because government spending merely diverts money from private projects to government projects.

Governments create no wealth. They only move it around while taking a cut for their trouble. So any jobs created over here come at the expense of jobs that would have been created over there. Pharaohs created thousands of jobs by building pyramids. Our government could create jobs by paying people to dig holes and then fill them up. Would actual wealth be created? Of course not. It would be destroyed. It's like arguing the hurricanes create jobs. After all, the destruction is followed by rebuilding. But does anyone seriously believe that replacing destroyed buildings creates wealth?

Look at Obama's plan- it wholeheartedly buys the myth. If "green jobs" make so much sense, the market will create them. They will be created by private entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are eager to profit from winning investments. The best ideas will rise to the top, and green energy will gradually replace coal and oil. If politicians were serious about creating jobs and cleaner technologies, they would step aside and let the free market go to work.

The last thing I want to leave you with is the Broken Window Fallacy, as spelled out by French economist Frederic Bastiat. He pointed out that a broken shop window will create work for a glassmaker, but that work comes only at the expense of the cook or tailor the shopkeeper would have patronized if he didn't have to replace the window. Government taxing tax money, cycling it through inefficient bureaucracies and vast overhead, and then trying to build things inefficiently that the market is not does not create jobs- it destroys jobs.

Need proof- during the Great Depression, FDR's unemployment rate hovered around 15%. And in Michigan, under liberal Democrat Granholm's administration and her government-jobs creation program, Michigan has lurched into a one-state recession and had it's unemployment rate climb from 3.7 to 7.2%.