Everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts.
Y2K panic–Global Warming panic–see the parallels.
If you feed a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll get really angry because you stopped giving him free fish.
In Toronto, a shopkeeper apprehended a shoplifter with a long criminal history. The crook got a deal on his sentence for testifying against the shopkeeper who is on trial for forcible confinement, among other charges. Is it difficult to write satire because the world writes it better than anyone?
More inadvertent satire appears in The Beautiful Tree.
Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute.
When government workers, such as those from the U.N., review education in poor countries, they invariably come up with several recommendations, untouched by facts.
The first is an increase in funding for government schools. Imagine a government official recommending more government spending.
The second is the statement that private education is inferior even when it is not. Damn the facts, full speed ahead.
The third is that private education must be closely regulated without recognizing that regulation merely provides a lever for corruption. The more rules, the more money it costs to pretend they are complied with. The data from homeschooling, reported in an earlier post, show the opposite–regulation has no effect on results.
The fourth is that private education exploits the poor when it is the government officials who exploit the school owners by requiring bribes. Any real business is exploitation. Marx taught us this and he’s been right about everything.
The fifth is that only government schooling is accountable. So wrong the opposite is correct. Private schooling is accountable to the parents and public schooling sets up a maze impenetrable by anything.
In the end, government reports are all IS, no DOES in either relying on data or worrying about corroboration.
Cheers and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
