29 August 2009

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@[Link]

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS government posts with allies and cronies, and now hoping for a
dynastical succession in 2014.
Costa Rican President Calls for
New Constitution [Cato at
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Liberty]
AUG 28, 2009 04:27P.M. Friday Links [Cato at Liberty]
AUG 28, 2009 04:09P.M.
President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica has joined the trend in Latin
America of calling for a new constitution that would expand executive • Nearly 30 European countries have agreed to end their government
powers and get rid of “unnecessary checks” on the president’s authority. mail monopolies in the next five years. The U.S. Postal Service has
Although Arias has less than 9 months left in office and can’t run for estimated losses of $7 billion this year. It’s time to privatize.
reelection, his brother and current minister of the presidency — a primer
minister of sorts — has openly said he’s interested in running for • If you are curious about how President Barack Obama’s health plan
president in 2014. A new constitution with expanded executive powers would affect your health care, look no further than Massachusetts.
would fit him just fine. You might not like what you find.

Arias’ call has been received with broad skepticism. La Nación, Costa • How the outcome of the health care debate will affect our greatest
Rica’s leading newspaper, said that trying to make the government more liberty — life.
efficient through a constitutional convention was like “killing a mouse
with cannon fire.” The newspaper also said that the idea of dismantling • Keep an eye on the troubling voting procedures in Europe.
the checks and balances on executive power sounds like an effort to
create an “imperial presidency.” Maybe we should send our colleague • Podcast: The Age of Reagan
Gene Healy to study the case.

However, the most disturbing aspect of Arias’ call was his harsh criticism
of the media. Borrowing from the script of Rafael Correa in Ecuador and FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Arias described news outlets as “corporations
interested in making a profit” that don’t necessarily pursue the “public Fresh OLC Memos [Cato at
good.” He asked the media to “tone down” its criticism of government
officials, and said that journalists “should understand their role within a Liberty]
higher framework.” He complained that news outlets claim to represent AUG 28, 2009 02:20P.M.
the public interest, without any control or accountability.
The Justice Department just released some more Office of Legal Counsel
That a politician with a thin skin complains about media criticism is memoranda. As you may already know, these legal interpretations
hardly news. However, the fact that Arias did it while calling for a new facilitated the worst of the Bush administration’s approach toward
constitution that would change the institutional and legal framework of terrorism — forget the lawful tools that we have on hand; let’s craft a
Costa Rica (including the role of the media) should be interpreted as a whole new legal regime that tosses out barriers to executive authority
threat to freedom of the press. and upends the rule of law. Posse Comitatus and the First Amendment
got you down? No problem. Non-Detention Act preventing you from
Most people outside Costa Rica see Arias as an accomplished democrat detaining American citizens as enemy combatants? Whatever. Geneva
who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring peace to Central Conventions, War Crimes Act, and Convention Against Torture barring
America during the 1980s. Most recently he attempted to mediate the coercive interrogation? Crank it to eleven.
conflict in Honduras after Manuel Zelaya was (legally) removed from
office. However, many people in Costa Rica fret about what they perceive Jack Balkin has a good summary with some highlights. On Iraq:
as an increasingly controlling style of governing by Arias and his brother,
intimidating the media, bullying the opposition, crowding key On October 21st, 2002, five days after Congress authorization

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of the use of military force against Iraq, John Yoo explains FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
why it was legally irrelevant that Congress authorized the
Iraq War, noting that the President could have attacked Iraq Evidence-based for Thee, But
without anyone’s permission. Delightfully, Yoo cites
President Clinton’s use of force in Bosnia, which Yoo himself Not for Me [Cato at Liberty]
had questioned when the Republicans were out of power. But AUG 28, 2009 02:02P.M.
perhaps being in power gave him a different perspective.
One of the things that strikes me as curious about supporters of the No
Yoo sums up his argument this way: “There is no expression Child Left Behind Act is that they talk regularly about “evidence” and
in the Constitution of any requirement that the President having everything be “research-based,” yet they often ignore or distort
seek authorization from Congress prior to using military evidence in order to portray NCLB as a success. Case in point, an op-ed
force. There is certainly nothing in the text of the in today’s New York Times by the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless
Constitution that explicitly requires Congress to consent and the Fordham Foundation’s Michael Petrilli.
before the President may exercise his authority as Chief
Executive and Commander in Chief to command U.S. Truth be told, the piece doesn’t lionize NCLB, criticizing the law for
military forces.” I’m glad we straightened that out. encouraging schools to neglect high-performing students because its
primary goal is to improve the performance of low achievers. Fair
This should not be surprising. The same claim of unitary executive enough. The problem is, Loveless and Petrilli assert with great
authority was bandied about in the run-up to the Gulf War. Guess who confidence that the law is definitely doing the job it was intended to do.
said this: “It is clear,” they write, “that No Child Left Behind is helping low-
achieving students.”
It was my view at the time [that] we were absolutely
committed to getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait one way As you shall see in a moment, that is an utterly unsustainable assertion
or the other, no matter what we had to do. We had to have according to the best available evidence we have: results from the
the Saudis as allies in that venture, but if no-one else had National Assessment of Educational Progress, which carries no
been with us if it had just been the United States and Saudi consequences for schools or states and, hence, is subject to very little
Arabia, without the United Nations, without the gaming. Ironically, Loveless and Petrilli make their indefensible
authorisation of the Congress, we were prepared to go ahead. pronouncement while criticizing a study for failing to use NAEP in
I argued in public session before the Congress that we did not reaching its own conclusions about NCLB.
need Congressional authorisation. That in fact we had the
Truman precedent from the Korean crisis of 1950 that the So what’s wrong with stating that NCLB is clearly helping low-achieving
Senate and all ratified the United Nations charter. By this students? Let me count the ways (as I have done before):
time the UN Security Council had authorised the use of force
back in November saying that we could do it by January 15th 1. Numerous reforms, ranging from class-size reduction, to school
if he wasn’t out by then and that legally and from a choice, to new nutritional standards, have been occurring at the
constitutional stand point we had all the authority we needed. same time as NCLB. It is impossible to isolate which achievement
changes are attributable to NCLB, and which to myriad other
I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress to ask for an reforms
additional grant of authority.
2. As you will see in a moment, few NAEP score intervals start cleanly
The Founders made an inherently inefficient form of government as a at the beginning of NCLB – which is itself a difficult thing to
check against arbitrary use of the power of the state. The President pinpoint – making it impossible to definitively attribute trends to
doesn’t declare war, Congress does. When we allow the government to the law
write itself a waiver to constitutional limitations that are part and parcel
of its contract with the people, it’s time for the people to let the 3. When we look at gains on NAEP in many periods before NCLB,
government know who the boss is in this employer-employee they were greater on a per-year basis than during NCLB. That
relationship. means other things going on in education before NCLB were
working just as well or better than things since the law’s
Timothy Lee’s idea is looking better all the time. enactment.

So let’s go to the scores. Below I have reproduced score trends for both
the long-term and regular NAEP mathematics and reading exams. (The
former is supposed to be an unchanging test and the latter subject to
revision, though in practice both have been pretty consistent measures.)
I have posted the per-year score increase or decreases above the

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@[Link] 29 August 2009

segments that include NCLB (but that might also include years without
NCLB). I have also posted score increases in pre-NCLB segments that
saw greater improvements than segments including NCLB. (Note that on
8th-grade reading I didn’t highlight pre-NCLB segments with smaller
score decreases than seen under NCLB. I didn’t want to celebrate
backward movement in any era.)

For context, NCLB was signed into law in January 2002 but it took at
least a year to get all the regulations written and more than that for the
law to be fully implemented. As a result, I’ll leave it to the reader to
decide whether 2002, 2003, or even 2004 should be the law’s starting
point, noting only that this problem alone makes it impossible to say that
NCLB clearly caused anything. In addition, notice that some of the
biggest gains under NCLB are in periods that also include many non-
NCLB years, making it impossible to confidently attribute those gains to
NCLB.
4th Grade Regular Reading
Please note that I calculated per-year changes based on having data
collected in the same way from start to end. So some lines are dashed
and others solid (denoting changes in how some students were counted);
I calculated changes based on start and end points for the type of line
used for the period. I also rounded to one decimal point to save space.
Finally, I apologize if this is hard to read—I’m no computer graphics
wizard—and would direct you to NAEP’s website to check out the data
for yourself.

4th Grade Regular Math

8th Grade Regular Reading

8th Grade Regular Math

Age 9 Long-term Math

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@[Link] 29 August 2009

Age 13 Long-term Reading

Age 13 Long-term Math

Age 17 Long-term Reading

Age 17 Long-term Math

So what does the data show us? First, that there were numerous periods
that didn’t include NCLB that saw greater or equal growth for low-
achieving students as periods with NCLB. That means much of what we
were doing before NCLB was apparently more effective than what we’ve
been doing under NCLB, though it is impossible to tell from the data
what any of those things are. In addition, it is notable that those periods
Age 9 Long-term Reading with the greatest gains that include NCLB are typically the ones that also
include non-NCLB years, such as 2000 to 2003 for 4th and 8th-grade
math. That means there is inescapable doubt about what caused the
gains in those periods most favorable to NCLB. And, let’s not forget, 4th
-grade reading saw a downward trend from 2002 to 2003, and 8th-

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@[Link] 29 August 2009

grade reading dropped from 2002-2005. That suggests that NCLB was FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
actually decreasing scores for low-achievers, and one would have to
acknowledge that if one were also inclined to give NCLB credit for all Friday’s Daily News [The Club
gains.
for Growth]
And so, the evidence is absolutely clear in one regard, but in the opposite AUG 28, 2009 11:47A.M.
direction of what Loveless and Petrilli suggest: One thing you definitely
cannot say about NCLB is that it has clearly helped low achievers. And THE DAILY NEWS Another Headache for Arlen Specter - Dan Eggen,
yet, they said it anyway! Washington Post GOP Poll: Reform Less Popular Than ‘94 - Michael
Falcone, Politico A Closer Look at Health Care in the U.K. - IBD Editorial
Still ‘Crazy’ — And Proud of It - P.J. O’Rourke, The Weekly Standard
Federal Pay Continues Rapid Ascent - Chris Edwards, Cato Institute
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Dems Stage Violence to Demonize Opponents - Washington Times
Editorial Charlie Rangel Wins the Personal Lottery - Wall Street Journal
Gotta Love Howard Dean... Editorial Thad Cochran (R-MS): Appropriators Gone Wild - J. Harper,
Washington Watch Useful Literature on School Vouchers - Washington
[Americans for Tax Reform] Post Editorial Budget Update Shows No Need for Tax Hikes - Curtis
AUG 28, 2009 01:12P.M. Dubay, Heritage Cubs 4, Nats 5 - Associated Press

Thanks go to Howard Dean for being clear on why tort reform is not
getting the attention it deserves: because congress is unwilling to take on
the trial lawyers. It should be mentioned, howe... FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

In Massachusetts, the Rule of

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Law Dies [Cato at Liberty]
AUG 28, 2009 11:46A.M.
Master Milton on Spending
Lawmakers in the Bay State are rushing to change state law to make sure
Other Peoples’ Money the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat is filled as soon as possible with a
reliable Democratic successor.
[Americans for Tax Reform]
AUG 28, 2009 01:06P.M. Never mind that as recently as 2004 the same state legislature had
changed state law to mandate that a vacant Senate seat could only be
Master Milton, at it Again… Why is it a bad idea to have government-run filled by a special election to be held within five months of the vacancy.
health care for all? As Milton Friedman explains, it is because the people
using it only care about getting the ... Before then, as in most other states, vacancies were filled by an
appointment of the governor, with the seat coming up for a vote at the
next federal election. But in 2004, the Democratic legislature changed
the law to prevent then-governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, from
naming a Republican to replace Democratic Sen. John Kerry if he were
to be elected president. Kerry lost to George W. Bush, but the law
remained on the books.

That was then; now is now. With Democrats in Washington wanting to

maintain their 60-vote caucus in the Senate, a five-month delay to let the
people of Massachusetts actually vote on who will replace Kennedy has
become an intolerable roadblock to progress. According to a report from
Bloomberg News this morning, the Democratically-dominated
legislature in Massachusetts is about to change the law back to allow the
now-Democratic governor to appoint a successor within a month.

This is a textbook example of how politicians routinely ignore The Rule

of Law in pursuit of political aims.

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In his book, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek devoted an entire FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
chapter to the importance of the rule of law to a free society. “Nothing
distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a Deficits, Spending, and Taxes
country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former
of the great principles know as the Rule of Law,” Hayek wrote. He [Cato at Liberty]
defined the phrase to mean “that government in all its actions is bound AUG 28, 2009 10:55A.M.
by rules fixed and announced beforehand,” and not subject to be
changed arbitrarily depending on circumstances. The White House and the CBO announced this week that:

The Bloomberg story contained a less scholarly but equally sound The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the
critique of what is going on in Massachusetts: “It shows Democrats don’t government forecast earlier this year because the recession
care about principle,” said Massachusetts House Minority Leader turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget
Bradley Jones, a North Reading Republican. “They don’t care about offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate
debate. They don’t care about the rules. It really is disgusting.” updates on Tuesday.

The Obama administration’s Office of Management and

Budget raised its 10-year tally of deficits expected through
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS 2019 to $9.05 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than it
projected in February. That would represent 5.1 percent of
When Does The Government the economy’s estimated gross domestic product for the
decade, a higher level than is generally considered healthy.
Think Taxes Are Bad?
What is the right response to these deficits?
[Americans for Tax Reform]
AUG 28, 2009 11:19A.M. One view holds that most current expenditure is desirable — indeed, that
expenditure should ideally be much higher — so the United States should
When It Has to Pay. Via the UK’s Daily Mail comes a report that the US raise taxes to balance the budget. Taxes are a drag on economic growth,
is demanding an exemption from the 50 million pounds (about $82 however, and unpopular with many voters, so this view presents
million) in VAT taxes it would have to pay to construct a ... politicians with an unhappy tradeoff.

The alternative view holds that a substantial fraction of current

expenditure is undesirable and should be eliminated, even if the revenue
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS to pay for it could be manufactured out of thin air. To be concrete:

The Surreality of Washington • Medicare and Medicaid encourage excessive spending on health
care.
[Cato at Liberty]
AUG 28, 2009 10:57A.M. • The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan encourage hostility to the
U.S. and thereby increase the risk of terrorism.
Further to David Rittger’s post below, here is a sublime commentary on
Washington politics, the media, and some other odd phenomena: • Drug prohibition generates crime and corruption.

• Agricultural subsidies distort decisions about which crops to grow,

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture? and where.

• And much, much more.

So, under this view, the United States can have its cake and eat it too:
improve the economy and reduce the deficit without the need to raise
taxes.

This approach is not, of course, politically trivial, since existing

expenditure programs have constituencies that will fight their
elimination.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@[Link] 29 August 2009

But thinking about these two views of the deficits is nevertheless useful: before he blows up a building, then it’s a win all around. Terrorism
it shows that discussion should really be about which aspects of inherently breaks laws, and prosecuting aspiring terrorists for those
government are truly beneficial, not just about the deficits per se. crimes neutralizes them.

C/P Libertarianism, A to Z As former FBI counterterrorism agent Mike German says:

As an FBI agent my counterterrorism investigations never

resulted in anyone being charged with terrorism. The
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS terrorists I arrested were charged with specific criminal
offenses; possessing and transferring illegal firearms and
Enhanced Justification explosive devices, illegally using firearms and destructive
devices, conspiring to use illegal firearms and destructive
Techniques [Cato at Liberty] devices, and conspiring to violate civil rights. Terrorists use
AUG 28, 2009 10:40A.M. these crimes to accomplish their political goals. Once I had
evidence of their illegal activities, I could bring charges
Over the last few days the right has been trying to rehabilitate the use of against them. Certainly the motive behind their conduct came
“enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees, claiming that the into play to prove they had the requisite criminal intent, but
ends justified the means. For a sample, click here, here, here, and here. the laws I enforced had absolutely nothing to do with the
terrorists’ ideology.
Don’t be fooled by these “enhanced justification techniques.” (H/T
NonSequitur, who coined the term in response to Charles Al-Marri’s criminal prosecution should have been a success story that
Krauthammer’s justifications for torture, something I have also fisked) shows how law enforcement plays a critical role in counterterrorism.
Instead, the Bush administration used him as justification for domestic
Peter Bergen breaks down the facts and chronology of what information military detention of suspected terrorists, a practice that it claimed
we gleaned from Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) would be lawful in the case of an American citizen apprehended on the
over at Foreign Policy. streets of Anytown, U.S.A.

Most interesting tidbit: The rest of the information gained from KSM also fails to justify the
blowback from exceeding the lawful limits of interrogation:
The CIA inspector general’s report on al Qaeda detainees also
concluded that based on a review of KSM’s plots aimed at the The Parachas are a father-and-son team; the former, arrested
United States, it “did not uncover any evidence that these in Thailand in the summer of 2003, is being held at
plots were imminent,” but it did find that KSM “provided Guantánamo and has yet to face trial, while his son was
information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists convicted in 2005 of providing “material support” to al
including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, Qaeda.
businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use
to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a Majid Khan was arrested in Pakistan only four days after
sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative KSM was captured, suggesting that this lead came not from
who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to interrogations but from KSM’s computers and cell phones
research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s that were picked up when he was captured.
information also led to the investigation and prosecution of
Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.” Of the terrorists, alleged and otherwise, cited by the CIA
inspector general as being fingered by KSM during his
The man identified by the CIA inspector general as “Saleh coercive interrogations, only Ohio truck driver Iyman Faris
Almari, a sleeper operative in New York” who KSM was an actual al Qaeda foot soldier living in the United States
supposedly gave up to his interrogator appears, in fact, to be who had serious intention to wreak havoc. However, he was
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, not much of a competent terrorist: In 2002 he researched the
in Peoria, Ill., a year and a half before KSM was captured. feasibility of bringing down the Brooklyn Bridge by using a
blowtorch, an enterprise akin to demolishing the Empire
I’ve written extensively about al-Marri, an Al Qaeda sleeper agent that State Building with a firecracker.
the FBI picked up shortly after September 11, 2001. His arrest had
nothing to do with KSM’s statements. This was FBI agents doing police Bergen does a good job of putting torture in context and how little utility
work like we would hope they do. His indictment for credit card fraud it actually had. Read the whole thing.
and lying to federal agents may not be prosecution for conducting a
terrorist attack, but that’s okay — if you can bust him on something else

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@[Link] 29 August 2009

that Nixon was a difference in degree rather than a difference

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS in kind. Kennedy and Johnson had, with J. Edgar Hoover,
put in place many of the illegal policies and programs. Secret
How Cap and Tax Will Hurt documents obtained by the committee even revealed that the
sainted FDR had ordered IRS audits of his political enemies.
Indiana [Americans for Tax Republicans on the committee, then, had as much incentive
to dig up the truth as did their Democratic counterparts.
Reform]
AUG 28, 2009 10:20A.M. As historian Kathy Olmsted argues in her book Challenging
the Secret Government, Church was never quite able to part
In our continuing, daily, state by state, look at the financial impact of the with this conception of good Democrats/bad Republicans.
Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Tax Bill, we will show you the projected Confronted with misdeeds under Kennedy and Johnson, he
losses in Gross State Product, Personal Income, and... chose to view the CIA as a rogue agency, as opposed to one
executing the president’s wishes. This characterization
became the fulcrum of debate within the committee. At one
point Church referred to the CIA as a “rogue elephant,”
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS causing a media firestorm. But the final committee report
shows that to the degree the agency and other parts of the
We Need a New Church secret government were operating with limited control from
the White House, it was by design. Walter Mondale came
Committee [Cato at Liberty] around to the view that the problem wasn’t the agencies
AUG 28, 2009 10:03A.M. themselves but the accretion of secret executive power: “the
grant of powers to the CIA and to these other agencies,” he
The Church Committee was a post-Watergate congressional committee said during a committee hearing, “is, above all, a grant of
that investigated allegations of lawbreaking by the executive branch, power to the president.”
including the CIA and FBI. The committee’s report was incredibly
important in helping the public understand the depth and breadth of A contemporary Church Committee would do well to follow
Cold War lawlessness during the previous three decades. When Cato Mondale’s approach and not Church’s. It must
asked me to pen the chapter on electronic surveillance in this year’s comprehensively evaluate the secret government, its activities
edition of the Cato Handbook on Policy, I included a recommendation and its relationship to Congress stretching back through
that Congress should launch a modern-day successor to the Church several decades of Democratic and Republican
Committee. administrations. Such a broad scope would insulate the
committee from charges that it was simply pursuing a
In the last few months, I’ve been pleased to see that people smarter than partisan vendetta against a discredited Republican
me have been having the same idea. The latest is the Nation’s Chris administration, but it is also necessary to understand the
Hayes, who has a great cover story calling on Congress to launch a wide- systemic problems and necessary reforms.
ranging investigation of executive branch lawbreaking.
This is a case where political expedience and justice point in the same
We have lots of evidence that members of the Bush administration broke direction. A thorough investigation will undoubtedly uncover numerous
laws related to torture, wiretapping, and the Patriot Act. But because examples of abuses of power under the Bush administration. But Bill
these reports are based on press reports and heavily-redacted Freedom Clinton was hardly a civil libertarian himself. Thoroughly investigating
of Information Act requests, we don’t know the full nature and extent of abuses of power under Clinton (and under Reagan and Bush I) will serve
these crimes. Given that Barack Obama has fallen short of the two important purposes. First, of course, it will help to deflect spurious
transparency pledges he made during the campaign, Congress is likely charges that the investigation is a partisan witchhunt. But more
the only institution in the United States with the resources and the importantly, it will likely underscore the point that abuses of power are a
political clout to produce a complete accounting of the civil liberties bipartisan phenomenon. The problem is not just that George W. Bush
abuses of the last three decades. was too secretive or power-hungry (although of course he was). The
problem is that presidents are almost always secretive and power-
I think the most important point Chris makes is this one: hungry, and our system of government needs better checks and balances
to ensure that presidential attempts to evade accountability do not
Since the committee began in the wake of Nixon’s resignation succeed. The abuses of the Bush/Cheney years may provide the political
and revelations about his deceptions, abuses and sociopathic momentum we need to fix the problem. But the problem is bigger than
pursuit of grudges, Church and many Democrats had every any one administration.
reason to believe they would be chiefly unmasking the full
depths of Nixon’s perfidy. Quickly, however, it became clear

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The great irony of this report is that it bears the name, in its frontmatter,
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS of one Arne Duncan, secretary of education. Secretary Duncan had this
to say shortly after taking office back in February: “If we accomplish one
My Favorite TV Commercial thing in the coming years, it should be to eliminate the extreme variation
in standards across America.”
[The Club for Growth]
AUG 28, 2009 09:46A.M. While the evidence presented by his own Department shows that greater
student achievement comes from more individually customized on-line
Several years ago, when eBay was still a young company, people didn’t learning, Duncan’s diametrically opposed priority is to
actually believe that an online marketplace would work. If you paid for homogenize education so that every 10 year old is being taught the same
something, would the other person actually deliver it to you? After all, things at the same time.
they could just take the money and run. But they didn’t do that. People
bought and sold things (a lot of things) on eBay, they developed their Fortunately, short of actually outlawing or invasively regulating on-line
online reputations, established trust, and goods moved from where they learning, there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop it from gradually
were least wanted to where they were most cherished. EBay is now a $30 displacing the old model, particularly for high school and older
billion company and to show their thanks, a few years ago, they released students.
this TV ad:

If you want to see a free market in action, look at eBay. There are very
few “regulations”, there’s only a nominal “sales tax” in the fee that eBay
charges you to sell something, and that’s about it. The reason why eBay
is so successful is because of their premise that “people are good.” The
free market works precisely because people want to better themselves
through trade. And they know that the best way to do that is through
voluntary exchange, not coercion or manipulation. That’s a powerful
lesson and a beautiful thing.

I’m a big fan of this eBay commercial as well.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

New DOE Study: On-Line

Learning Beats the Classroom
Kind [Cato at Liberty]
AUG 28, 2009 09:00A.M.

The Dept. of Education has just released a study finding that

(predominantly college-aged or older) students learn significantly more
if their lessons occur at least partly on-line, than if they rack up seat-time
exclusively in conventional classrooms (HT: Matt Ladner).

This makes sense. On-line learning usually allows students to progress at

their own pace, so as soon as the student’s ready to move on to the next
stage, she can. There’s no falling behind the rest of the class, or doodling
in your notebook while you wait for them to catch up. So, like
performance-based grouping and one-on-one instruction, it’s more
efficient than the status quo, which lumps together students by
age regardless of their knowledge or performance.