Education Vouchers

It is the poor who know that good schooling is the only way to a better life

By Pedro Schwartz

George Shultz used to say that people loved to argue with Milton Friedman, especially when he was not there. I am going to do exactly that, argue with Milton when he is not in our midst anymore. I would have loved to hear his views about the remarks I am going to make on his idea of education vouchers. My criticism does not take a whit from my admiration of him: he was my master at-a-distance through his books and articles on microeconomics, on consumption theory, on money, on inflation, on expectations—you name it. Indeed I am attracted to the idea of school vouchers and have been known to defend them, but I think they are only a "second best" remedy for the failings of school systems where the state plays a large role.

By "second best" I mean the kind of engineered solution that tries to take a way around some immoveable legal or institutional restriction that makes the best solution unattainable. In the case of education the first best is, surprising though it may sound, totally private education, supplied by for-profit schools and financed by families and charities. This would not only be better for individual liberty and public morality but also surprisingly feasible if we attend to educational history and present day experience, as we shall see. The example of developing nations, where private education has proved to be vastly superior to public education, especially for the poor, should make us think twice about any statist intervention education.

Liberty in Shambles

The slippery slope began

by Andrew P. Napolitano

When British soldiers were roaming the American countryside in the 1760s with lawful search warrants with which they had authorized themselves to enter the private homes of colonists in order to search for government-issued stamps, Thomas Paine wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls." The soul-searching became a revolution in thinking about the relationship of government to individuals. That thinking led to casting off a king and writing a Constitution.

What offended the colonists when the soldiers came legally knocking was the violation of their natural right to privacy, their right to be left alone. We all have the need and right to be left alone. We all know that we function more fully as human beings when no authority figure monitors us or compels us to ask for a permission slip. This right comes from within us, not from the government.

Thomas Jefferson made the case for natural rights in the Declaration of Independence ("endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"). The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to reduce to writing the guarantees of personal liberty. ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of ... religion ... speech ... press ... assembly..." "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.")

And, of course, to prevent the recurrence of soldier-written search warrants and the government dragnets and fishing expeditions they wrought, the Constitution mandates that only judges may issue search warrants, and they may do so only on the basis of probable cause of crime, and the warrants must "particularly describ(e) the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Last week, we discovered that the government has persuaded judges to issue search warrants not on the constitutionally mandated basis, but because it would be easier for the feds to catch terrorists if they had a record of our phone calls and our emails and texts. How did that happen?

France’s Cul-De-Sac

The public sector now accounts for almost two-thirds of all direct economic activity, and more if indirect activity is counted

by David Howden and Jacques Briam

Over a year ago, in the midst of an ongoing economic crisis, François Hollande celebrated his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy in France’s presidential elections. Hollande became the leader of a country in economic turmoil. In the past year, he has had relatively free rein to carry out his economic agenda, since the Socialist Party he leads has a majority in the French Parliament.

France has a history of grandiose government spending, even among European countries. Public spending accounts for 57 percent of national output, and public debt accounts for over 90 percent of GDP. While austerity has been the buzz word in the rest of Europe since 2009 resulting in a modest decline in government spending as a percentage of GDP, France is not part of that trend.

The public sector now accounts for almost two-thirds of all direct economic activity, and more if indirect activity is counted. This large and growing dependence on government is disastrous because it is funded by ever higher taxes. These high taxes drain the private sector (while simultaneously giving the public sector an aura of impotence) and deficit spending obliges future generations of French citizens to pay off the largesse of today’s government.

Deep within the French psyche is the idea that cuts to the gargantuan public sector would cause undue harm to everyone. This inability to envision a French economy where the private sector picks up the slack when fewer public services are provided has reinforced the reluctance of politicians, and in particular, François Hollande, to use austerity measures to overcome the crisis. Instead, the current solution is to increase government spending and create more jobs in the public sector. For this reason, Hollande’s administration has pledged to increase the minimum wage for all employees, public and private, and create 60,000 new public teaching jobs.

The absence of freedom is tyranny. The absence of freedom is also poverty.

Why Things Will Get Worse - Much Worse

By Monty Pelerin

It is easy to be upset about what is happening all around. The economy is being destroyed, deliberately, by insane economic policies. Incentives to work are being eliminated by punishing work. At the same time rewards are increasing for not working. Not surprisingly we get less of what we penalize (work) and more of what we subsidize (non-work).

As an economist I get sick over what I see happening to what was once a great engine of productivity, capital creation and improvements in standards of living.

After two centuries of progress that amazed the world, the conditions necessary for growth and productivity are steadily being removed. Their presence allowed the miracle of America. Their absence guarantees the decline. Carried to extreme, the US could become a second or third-world nation within a few decades. Virtually all changes in the last five to ten years point in this direction and these changes are accelerating.

As pained as the economic retrogression is, the loss of freedom is even more disturbing. It was free markets and free men that made America the dominant economic power and the beacon of freedom. Without freedom, no economic policy can succeed. Yet, just as economic policies seem designed to destroy rather than create, so too does the role of government as steadily destroys freedom with its expanded oppression and power. The absence of freedom is tyranny. The absence of freedom is also poverty.

Economic decline is difficult to convey, although data are useful.

Chinese Dissident Ai Weiwei: “The U.S. is Behaving Like China”

To limit power is to protect society

By Michael Krieger

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and political dissident.  Although he collaborated on the construction of Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics, his criticism of the government later led to his arrest without charges and imprisonment for several months.  I believe there are two main takeaways from the following article he wrote for The Guardian. First, he knows what it is like to live in an authoritarian regime with very little freedom or civil liberties. Thus it would be wise to take his warning to heart. Second, he illustrates a key point I have been trying to make for years. All citizens of the world must refuse to allow their respective governments to drag us into a war started by various oligarchs located in distinct geographic locations.  99.9% of the population must come together and understand that oligarchs within the U.S. and oligarchs within China are united against us all.  We must never forget this.  These guys don’t fight wars.  Rather, they rape, steal and pillage and then send you to do their dirty work.  Don’t fall for it.  From The Guardian:

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

The Economics of Bitcoin

We need to let the decentralized market test tell us what is the best money, or monies

by Robert P. Murphy

Bitcoin is an ingenious peer-to-peer "virtual" or "digital currency" that challenges the way economists have traditionally thought about money. Its inbuilt scarcity provides an assurance of purchasing power arguably safer than any other system yet conceived.

But to understand these claims, one must first understand the basics of Bitcoin. My conclusion is that, in principle, nothing stands in the way of the whole world embracing Bitcoin or some other digital currency. Yet I predict that, even with the alternative of Bitcoin, people would resort to gold if only governments got out of the way.

The Basic Structure of Bitcoin

According to its official website: "Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network."(1.)  Anyone who wants to participate can download the Bitcoin software to his or her own computer and become part of the network, engaging in "mining" operations and helping to verify the history of transactions.

Welcome to the future, where the NSA black hole lords over all as the ultimate Panopticon

Digital Blackwater rules

By Pepe Escobar 
The judgment of Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg is definitive; "There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material". And that includes the release of the Pentagon Papers themselves. Here is the 12-minute video by The Guardian where Snowden details his motives.

By now, everything swirling around the US National Security Agency (NSA) points to a black box in a black hole. The black box is the NSA headquarters itself in Fort Meade, Maryland. The black hole is an area that would include the suburbs of Virginia's Fairfax County near the CIA but mostly the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32. 

There one finds a business park a mile away from the NSA which Michael Hayden, a former NSA director (1999-2005) told Salon's Tim Shorrock is "the largest concentration of cyber power on the planet". [1] Hayden coined it "Digital Blackwater". 

Egypt’s Perils and Paradoxes

A proud civilization confronts the twin challenges of Gulf-state extremism and American pop culture

By ANDREW DORAN

“The country that was the beacon of tranquility, the society that was an example of peacefulness and tolerance — one that had never witnessed a civil war in over seven thousand years — has turned into … a breeding ground of aggression.” These words from the foreword of Tarek Osman’s 2010 book, Egypt on the Brink, which anticipated the Arab revolution in Egypt by mere months, capture a trend toward extremism in recent decades. This extremism adds a dimension to Egypt’s already numerous complexities and contradictions.

Egypt’s move toward radicalism may be principally attributed to two encounters.

Criminals in the White House - Victims in Jail

Only One Big Telecom CEO Refused To Cave To The NSA ... And He's Been In Jail For 4 Years

Joseph Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest Communications International Inc. from 1997 to 2002, arrives at the Denver Federal Courthouse with his wife, Anne, for sentencing on 19 counts of illegal stock sales in Denver, Colorado July 27, 2007.

By MICHAEL KELLEY

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio is currently serving a six-year sentence after being convicted of insider trading in April 2007 for selling $52 million of stock in the spring of 2001 as the telecommunications carrier appeared to be deteriorating.

During the trial his defense team argued that Nacchio, 63, believed Qwest was about to win secret government contracts that would keep it in the black.

Nacchio alleged that the government stopped offering the company lucrative contracts after Qwest refused to cooperate with a National Security Agency surveillance program in February 2001.

That claim gains new relevance these days, amid leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden that allege widespread domestic surveillance by the NSA.

Back in 2006 Leslie Cauley of USA Today, citing multiple people with direct knowledge of the arrangement, reported that shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks America's three largest telecoms signed contracts to provide the NSA with detailed call records from hundreds of millions of people across the country.

Cauley noted that Qwest's refusal to participate "left the NSA with a hole in its database" since the company served local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states.

From USA Today (emphasis ours):

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard. ...

... the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.

Nacchio's legal concerns about the NSA program at the time mirror those of civil liberty groups today.

Cauley, citing sources familiar with events, reported the NSA asserted that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which oversees NSA snooping) — to provide the data.

"They told (Qwest) they didn't want to [run the proposal by the FISA court] because FISA might not agree with them," one NSA insider told USA Today.

There is a record of the NSA running afoul of FISA: In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."

Furthermore, Nacchio felt that it was unclear who would have access to Qwest customers' information and how that information might be used. Sources told Cauley that the NSA said government agencies including the FBI, CIA, and DEA might have access to its massive database.

Nacchio entered prison on April 14, 2009 and is scheduled for release on September 21, 2013  (Federal inmates are typically required to serve at least 80 percent of a sentence, which would be 3.5 years in this case.) 

Dystopian secrecy fuels clueless wars

Knowledge is not evil

By Chase Madar 

The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' source inside the US Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden's laptop. That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had Internet access like two billion other earthlings, but that Manning has "aided the enemy", a capital offense. 

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch (1.57 meters) gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in US history. 

But let's be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for US national security than SEAL Team 6. 

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats. This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general. (The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha bombing in Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden's organization, though white-shoe foreign policy magazines and think tanks routinely get this wrong, "al-Qaeda" being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.) 

Al-Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the greatest threat to the United States. In fact, if you measure national security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own clueless foreign policy. 

Putin's Self-Destruction

Russia's New Anti-Corruption Campaign Will Sink the Regime

A flyswatter with an image of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, part of an art installation by Russian artist Vasily Slonov, is on display at the Krasnoyarsk Museum Centre in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, 2012

By Ivan Krastev and Vladislav Inozemtsev

This spring has been almost eerily calm in Russia. The protest movement, which coalesced after the rigged parliamentary elections in the autumn of 2011, has all but disintegrated, and hopes for substantive political opening have faded. High-profile liberals are in retreat or retirement, a dozen opposition activists are in jail, and President Vladimir Putin’s will is unchallenged. Even the weather has been nice, perhaps lulling the Kremlin into believing that it has little to fear. In fact, it does: unwittingly, Putin’s recent anti-corruption campaign has set the stage for the system’s collapse.

The anti-corruption campaign was a choice. In April, the lower house of the Russian legislature passed a law that bans members of both houses from holding foreign bank accounts. The prohibition was extended to include all public servants, including central bank officials and functionaries of state-owned corporations. Three months after Putin signs the law, government officials will be barred from opening bank accounts abroad, even to pay for educational or medical expenses.

Putin has pledged that this is only the beginning. He and his advisers know well that attacks on corruption are popular with the public. They are counting on the campaign to shore up support after the protests and to mobilize Putin’s supporters. What the Kremlin is neglecting, however, is that the campaign could be a double-edged sword that ultimately delegitimizes the regime, as Putin’s own acolytes are swept out while the government’s house is cleaned.

Putin faces a critical moment and is at risk of losing his sway over the elites.

FROM GORBACHEV TO PUTIN

The fate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in the last years of the Soviet Union should have provided a warning. By the 1980s, alcohol had become a major cause of death, absenteeism, and low labor productivity in the country. Its cost to the Soviet economy totaled no less than 10 percent of national income. When Gorbachev launched a program to end alcoholism in 1985, he was celebrated across the country for his courage and strategic vision. The campaign did succeed in reducing alcohol consumption, but that didn't stop it from quickly becoming a political disaster. Ordinary Soviet citizens believed that drinking themselves to death was their right, and they actively resisted the state’s attempt to infringe upon it. They ridiculed the policy, disobeyed regulations, and made their own alcohol. These low-risk forms of everyday resistance were an enormous problem for Gorbachev, because they turned the people against the Communist Party. By the time the anti-alcohol campaign was abandoned at the end of 1987, it had severely damaged both the credibility of Gorbachev’s reforms and the Soviet leader’s popularity.

27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine

If you have a spine, that is ...

Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up?  He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.  Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine.

Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us.  But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.  Essentially, his previous life is now totally over.  And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere.

One man stands up against the Panopticon

God help us if we lose

by Justin Raimondo

At the end of the eighteenth century, the laissez-faire-philosopher-turned-statist Jeremy Bentham devised a scheme for the design of a prison he called the Panopticon: a circular building at the center of which is a watchtower made of glass from which it is possible to observe the inmates at all times. If we look at America as one vast prison, with ourselves as the inmates, we can get some idea of what the national security bureaucracy was envisioning when they conceived PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” and the program that records the details (minus content) of every phone call made in the US (which, as far as I know, doesn’t have a name). Derived from documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald, these revelations throw back the curtain on a modern day, hi tech Panopticon, with the high priests of the National Security State sitting at the center of it, relentlessly observing us, the prisoners—who don’t even know we’re prisoners – 24/7.

PRISM allows the National Security Agency (NSA) “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants,” according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian newspaper. The information scooped up by the NSA includes “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” according to the Power Point presentation leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The document claims the US (and British) governments collect this information “directly from the servers” of internet service providers. While at first denying even knowing about any such government program, as well as the idea that they would allow direct access to their servers, the named ISPs later conceded the truth of these accusations by acknowledging that the information is indeed being provided in a “online room,” where massive amounts of information are stored and then transferred to government snoops.

Smear Brigade Goes After Snowden

... and Greenwald. They can't refute the message – so they go after the messengers

by Justin Raimondo

When whistleblowers expose government wrongdoing and abuses, the procedure is always the same: the regime’s defenders focus on the whistleblower’s alleged personality defects and smear him within an inch of his life. They did it with Dan Ellsberg, they did it with Julian Assange, they did it with Bradley Manning, and that all too familiar modus operandi is unfolding pretty quickly in the case of Edward Snowden, the heroic libertarian who exposed Washington’s massive and unconstitutional spying operation against American citizens. The pundits who take seriously their job as the power elite’s Praetorian Guard are going after Snowdenhammer and tongs, and in these dark times their polemics provide a rich source of humor.

The funniest one – although this is admittedly a hard choice to make – has got to bethis piece by one William Foxton, a rather pathetic Tory “moderate” who claims to care about “civil liberties, Internet freedom, that sort of thing.” So you see he’s one of us – but he’s “never liked Glenn Greenwald,” the journalist who broke the story. Well, why not? Greenwald, after all, has been one of the staunchest advocates of those very causes, almost single-handedly responsible for calling foul on the foulest attack on civil liberties since the era of J. Edgar Hoover.

Foxton is coy on this point: he says maybe it’s because Greenwald’s pieces are “enormous,” not to mention “turgid” – although this doesn’t appear to deter Glenn’s numerous readers. Oh, but you see, they’re a “cult” – although he doesn’t let us in on the secret ceremonies, complete with Satanic altars and Druidic incantations, that no doubt figure prominently in the activities of the Greenwaldian sect. So then how do Greenwald’s many admirers – myself among them – qualify as cult members? Well, you see:

Let the smearing of Edward Snowden begin

The debate about this Short, Fat, Narcissist, Loner, Coward, Defector, Traitor, Cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood Communist is over.

By Elias Groll

Edward Snowden's decision to publicly reveal his identity has placed him at the center of growing controversy about the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering activities.

But by stepping forward, Snowden, the source behind reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian about highly classified U.S. intelligence programs, has also come under fire in the media. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me," Snowden told the Guardian. "I want it to be about what the U.S. government is doing." Snowden hasn't exactly gotten his wish.

While hailed as a hero in some quarters, Snowden has also been described as a coward and a traitor. Here is a thematic guide to the Snowden smear campaign.

Traitor

None other than John Boehner, the speaker of the House, took to ABC's Good Morning America to brand Snowden a traitor -- a sentiment echoed by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

This is, hands down, the scariest part of the NSA revelations

Metadata is more invasive and a bigger threat to privacy and civil liberties than the PRISM system

By Shane Harris

Forget PRISM, the National Security Agency's system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like. The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone-location information of U.S. citizens.

According to current and former intelligence agency employees who have used the huge collection of metadata obtained from the country's largest telecom carriers, the information is widely available across the intelligence community from analysts' desktop computers.

The data is used to connect known or suspected terrorists to people in the United States, and to help locate them. It has also been used in foreign criminal investigations and to assist military forces overseas. But the laws that govern the collection of this information and its use are not as clear. Nor are they as strong as those associated with PRISM, the system the NSA is using to collate information from the servers of America's tech giants.

Google chief wrote about 'terrifying' surveillance months before NSA leaks

Big Brother tyranny is probable but not inevitable

By John Hudson

Before defending the U.S. government's surveillance apparatus -- as he did last week -- Eric Schmidt wasn't so blasé about government snooping.

In an overlooked chapter of his recently released book The New Digital Age, Google's executive chairman described the battle for Internet privacy as a "long, important struggle" and depicted the emergence of Big Data surveillance tactics as a threat to a free society.

"Governments operating surveillance platforms will surely violate restrictions placed on them (by legislation or legal ruling) eventually," he wrote in a chapter on the future of terrorism. "The potential for misuse of this power is terrifyingly high, to say nothing of the dangers introduced by human error, data-driven false positives and simple curiosity."

Sounds like a familiar problem, right?

Little did Schmidt know that two months after his book's release, an intelligence contractor named Edward Snowden would carry out the biggest leak in the history of the National Security Agency, exposing its surveillance program PRISM and the cooperation of top technology firms including Google.