It has become a common sense view that the US economy has performed poorly under Barack Obama. The assorted punditry are all trying to explain how Obama managed to win the election despite this fact. Perhaps they should stop to consider that perhaps this fact is not a fact at all? Well, if no one else is going to do it, it might as well be me.
Tag: France
Hollande, Homework, and the Death of Childhood
Recently, French President Francois Hollande has proposed a ban on homework because he thinks it disadvantages students from poorer backgrounds whose parents tend to be less involved and less supportive in their education. Hollande’s rather socialist point hits on the inequality in educational outcomes that can come from involving the home environment in the educational process. Many people point out that slowing the progress of the advantaged to create equality diminishes total societal educational output (though they don’t usually phrase it quite like that), and I would agree with them, except for one small issue–homework does not help kids learn, and is corroding the work ethic and academic passion of an entire generation of students.
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Dragging Behind the Horse: Making States Bigger
Though history, states have been getting bigger. From tribes, we expanded to city-states, from city-states to feudal states, and from feudal states to the consolidated modern states of today. This process has never been easy, however. There has always been resistance to the expanding, consolidating state. The unifications of Germany and Italy required extensive military campaigning, the United States fought the civil war over the south’s resistance to a strong federal government, the French monarchs struggled to break the back of the nobility for generations, and the British struggled with rebellions from Scots, Welsh, and Irish. Yet, in the end, all of these countries unified and centralised, because it was economically necessary–as more territories became economically interlinked, the same economic laws needed to apply to larger swathes of territory. There was no other way to keep the medieval guilds in line, to achieve coordinated economic policies in the interests of the whole of society, rather than for one region against others, to reduce the need of every town and region to be self-sufficient in every economic category. The economy is the horse driving the cart of the enlarged state, but there are always people dragging behind the cart, and they’re usually the very sort of people behind setting up the previous, smaller state. But this is not merely an historical tale–states are getting bigger right now for economic reasons, impeded by people who are, once more, dragging behind the horse.
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Misconceptions: “Medicare is Going Bust”
Lately it has become fashionable among political pundits to declare that the US Presidential election has devolved into a negative slug fest in which both Obama and Romney are equally culpable, lying and distorting and refusing to accept fundamental realities. This is a sort of professional centrism–taking it as an article of faith that both sides are equally to blame. The trouble is that this centrism doesn’t reflect reality and consequently, in order to maintain it, these “centrists” have resorted accepting blatantly false claims from the American political right. Chief among these is the claim that “Medicare is going bust” and that Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system is some kind of bold, serious solution. Today I set out to examine and refute that claim.
Republicans, The Germans, and Creditor Ethics
The republicans and the Germans have a lot in common right now. Ordinarily, comparing an American political party to the industrious Germans would be quite the positive thing, but right now the republicans and the Germans do not have industriousness in common–what they have in common is the hypocrisy of the creditor ethos.
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Benjamin Studebaker 