Pharyngula

Posted by: You_Monster | August 2, 2011 2:53 PM

maybe you're a shitty camera man

well played

Posted by: kinzuakid | August 2, 2011 2:53 PM

I so want to see the rest of that.

Posted by: --E | August 2, 2011 2:57 PM

I love how he channels Will Hunting from the scene in the bar when he takes down the Harvard guy who's picking on Ben Affleck's character.

(Or, more likely, when playing Will Hunting, Matt Damon was playing large portions of himself.)

There's nothing quite as tasty as seeing someone lay a smackdown with a verbal two-by-four of clear thinking.

Posted by: MadScientist | August 2, 2011 3:01 PM

I've always admired him as an actor, but he's obviously got a brain too and isn't afraid to use it. The interviewers come in with loaded questions and he calls their bullshit.

Posted by: HiHo2go | August 2, 2011 3:04 PM

Matt Damon is so full of win. When I was stuck working in the corporate world this "bottom 10 percent" phrase kept getting thrown around. There's ALWAYS a bottom 10%, and that 10% doesn't necessarily equal bad. I'm sure that idiot cameraman doesn't even know what he means by saying that other than "oogety-boogety".

Posted by: Dae | August 2, 2011 3:08 PM

Oh, that was fantastic. I want to see if I can find the rest of it, too. Very articulate, and it's damned refreshing to hear a pop celebrity soundbite that isn't a whole lot of nothing.

Posted by: Scorpy1 | August 2, 2011 3:08 PM

uggh, treats me right to get emotional and post.

"he's got their" = "he's got his"

Posted by: jenwin | August 2, 2011 3:12 PM

As a teacher, this is great to see! Thanks Matt!!

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | August 2, 2011 3:20 PM

At least in the field of teaching the bottom 10% are distinguishably worse than the other 90%.

Politicians on the other hand...

Posted by: Harry Tuttle | August 2, 2011 3:24 PM

His head is shaved for his role in the District 9 follow up; Elysium.

Certainly is a bald of awesome. Hopefully Jodie Foster is bald in it too.

Posted by: joeyess | August 2, 2011 3:29 PM

why Reason would put this up with pride is beyond me. It must be that they're totally self-unaware.

Posted by: CMT | August 2, 2011 3:31 PM

I follow Reason's blog, Hit & Run, quite a bit. They're commentariat wasn't totally impressed by the video either. But I was going to point out that they also have a love/hate relationship with PZ and Pharyngula. They have already taken notice of this post.

Posted by: CMT | August 2, 2011 3:33 PM

*their. I'm sorry about fucking that up.

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 2, 2011 3:37 PM

mike.reider,

Have you never read this blog before?

Posted by: joeyess | August 2, 2011 3:41 PM

whats with all the hate on libertarians?

What? The Fonzi of Freedom isn't cause enough to hate them?

Posted by: truthspeaker | August 2, 2011 3:44 PM

Posted by: reverend.pj Author Profile Page | August 2, 2011 3:20 PM

@5

It's the academic freedom issue that makes tenure hard to beat. And of course there's not much equivalent in most other professions.

Keep in mind that in most other professional careers you're not a probationary employee for 5 to 7 years. In a tenure system you're pretty much year to year until tenure, while in most other professions the assumption is you keep your job until there is a good reason for you to lose it.

Well that depends. In many, you can be let go to save your employer money, even if there are no problems with your performance.

Posted by: CMT | August 2, 2011 3:46 PM

Joeyess,

Is Nick Gillespie really that bad?

Posted by: christophe-thill.myopenid.com | August 2, 2011 3:46 PM

So, those people basically believe in dictatorship: Big Brother watches you, and fires you when he spots you underperforming.

Is that what being a libertarian really is about ?

Posted by: Krzysztof Sakrejda-Leavitt | August 2, 2011 3:50 PM

But the right seems to think that tenure means that you are immune to losing your job. It doesn't. All it means is that your contract is automatically renewed. Which is still nice, but it doesn't grant you immunity.

In my experience the attitude that tenure makes you immune to loosing your job comes from managers who are too lazy to build a file on a crappy worker in order to fire them.

Posted by: unaudio | August 2, 2011 3:53 PM

"But the right seems to think that tenure means that you are immune to losing your job. It doesn't. All it means is that your contract is automatically renewed. Which is still nice, but it doesn't grant you immunity."

No that is not all it means. "Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause." from Wikipedia.

Posted by: Michael Swanson | August 2, 2011 3:55 PM

I just like Damon more and more as time goes by. Side note: I took a class recently from a film production professional, and he said that rumors about Damon actually being a nice guy are true(!), that he loved working with him and was always treated respectfully.

Posted by: Elf Sternberg | August 2, 2011 3:57 PM

Bear with me on this: A few weeks ago, Washington University announced it was shutting down most of its computer science division because it had too few applicants. The University of Washington is having trouble finding interested applicants. This is happening despite a statewide blitz to tell college-qualified high school students that the sciences and engineering are where the future money lies.

The important word here is "qualified."

All of the kids who are passionate about what they want to do in the sciences and engineering are either already heading into those fields, or they didn't qualify for a science or engineering course of study. I'm sure there are thousands of kids who would love to go into science and engineering, but whose pre-college education failed them.

And you can't seduce people who don't love science and engineering to do it because "that's where the money is." Those kids, even if they stay with the program, become the button-pushers and bottle-washers. Nobody chases the Nobel because of the cash prize.

This is why I so deeply loathe the ID'rs and the climate change denialists on the right and the anti-vaccination nuts and the anti-nuke folks on the left, and all the wackiness: every kid who gets a headful of that stuff is being poisoned against what may have blossomed into a passion for knowledge.

Posted by: gex | August 2, 2011 3:58 PM

Libertarians do not understand that people do things for a myriad of reasons, being compensated and making a living being only one of those reasons. Because Libertarians love only one thing: money. They do things for no other reason.

Reminds me of when I was going to college in Augsburg's Weekend College program. Most of the adults there were going for a business degree while I went for computer science. I couldn't help but think how sad it was that these people have no interest in anything. No interest in inventing something. No interest in producing something. All they care about is squeezing a profit out of what someone else does.

And as our economy tanks while the financial sector grew to 40% of the economy, I can't help but feel like those guys are the reason why. Eventually you can't spreadsheet manage profit or productivity anymore. Then what?

Posted by: unaudio | August 2, 2011 3:58 PM

If there's one thing I always ask myself before making a decision regarding statistics, it's "What's unaudio's experience with this?"

That is some compelling evidence contrary to that experience right there.

Posted by: grudgedk | August 2, 2011 4:00 PM

I love his first bit about "You think job insecurity is why I work so hard"? In my experience it's the people motivated by "that MBA shit" that perform worst. Why? Because if your only incentive for working is "not being unemployed", then you're never going to be able to do exceptional things. You're not going to be the next Steve Jobs, Seth Godin, Ronnie James Dio or Stephen King. You're going to be the next Joe The Plumber. If you want to do exceptional things, working for a fucking paycheck is not going to cut it. You have to want to do exceptional things, you have to want to change the world. Badly. Like a heroin addict for her next fix.

Posted by: theshortearedowl | August 2, 2011 4:09 PM

Nobody chases the Nobel because of the cash prize.

Elf Sternberg wins the internet (when Matt Damon is done with it).

Posted by: lvidal | August 2, 2011 4:10 PM

Usually, at this point, a libertarian who asks such a question will try to sleaze their way in with "but we agree with you on such-and-such [civil] liberties, so how come you hate us?"

Funny, I just watched a clip of Rand Paul on CNN and he pretty much said this when asked about his position on the debt ceiling and on raising taxes.

Posted by: mike.reider | August 2, 2011 4:12 PM

@ Brownian

"they're despicable, stupid and exemplify Dunning–Kruger effect"

which is to say they suffer from this:

"the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others"

a definition which can be applied to people of virtually every political persuasion. So far I've heard nothing but vitriol and gross generalizations. I havent read this blog for very long but the comments I'm reading here resemble some cognitive groupthink.

What exactly is so irritating and irrational about libertarian policies? Is it simply a matter of different views on economics?

Posted by: Teshi | August 2, 2011 4:17 PM

My, Matt Damon is actually as well-spoken as I thought he was but was pessimistically thinking that he probably really wasn't.

Time to watch the Bourne movies again.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 4:20 PM

"Libertarians do not understand that people do things for a myriad of reasons, being compensated and making a living being only one of those reasons. Because Libertarians love only one thing: money. They do things for no other reason."

Bullshit.

I'm a libertarian. I pull

If you think libertarians only care about money, you're dead wrong. There's a lot of internal debate about social justice and charity among libertarians, but the general agreement is that if it's to be done, it shouldn't be done by the government. The most successful, hard-core libertarian CEO (John Mackey), in fact talks about the whole "purpose motive" behind his enterprise, that goes far, far beyond the "bottom line" of pulling a profit.

http://reason.com/archives/2005/10/01/rethinking-the-social-responsi

Damon has a point that teachers shouldn't be fired willy-nilly, but what people don't understand is exactly how difficult it is to fire a teacher.

http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf

And putting more money into education doesn't necessarily mean paying teachers more, nor does it mean improvement in performance. In the last 30 years, inflation-adjusted per pupil expenditures have skyrocketed, but teacher salaries have remained more or less stagnant and pupil performance hasn't improved. Ask yourself why that's the case?

Matt's arguments are essentially faith-based arugments, and for PZ to ape them mindlessly without any critical thinking is embarassing for someone who claims to be a scientist.

Posted by: MudPuddles | August 2, 2011 4:25 PM

@ Brownian:

They're despicable, stupid, and exemplify the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Nicely put! Matt Damon wins today. You get second prize.

What I hate most about libertarians is their chronic hypocrisy ("leave everyone the hell alone! unless they want control over their own bodies, sexual identity, or environmental quality...") and inability to accept that having an opinion on something of which you know few of the facts (or on which you decide to reject most of the facts) does not make you an expert, and does not make your opinion valid.

Posted by: RFW | August 2, 2011 4:29 PM

@ truthspeaker, #32 (3:44 PM):

In many [jobs], you can be let go to save your employer money, even if there are no problems with your performance.

Ah, management and managers, the bane of modern existence.

In my former job, management thought that they were golden, their shit speckled with little bits of platinum, gold, or diamonds. In point of fact, the organization would have run just as well had all the managers been fired and their replacements hired from amongst the folks waiting at the bus stop across the street.

And once you got into a management position, you never got fired, no never, not even demoted back into the working ranks, no matter how ludicrously poor your performance was. If any downsizing was deemed necessary, it was always working stiffs that got it in the neck, never the golden boys in management.

Everyone forgets that managers only manage. It's the rank-and-file that actually do the work; the managers are just there to run interference and ensure that the doers have the resources they need to do their job right.

@ Krzysztof Sakrejda-Leavitt, #38 (3:50 PM):

In my experience the attitude that tenure makes you immune to loosing your job comes from managers who are too lazy to build a file on a crappy worker in order to fire them.

Absolutely. We used to get a little monthly flier circulated that concentrated on personnel issues like firing for cause. (The flier was probably intended for management eyes but some of us got to see it anyway.)

Over and over this flier emphasized that you have to build a case if you want to fire someone and, moreover, you must not selectively build a case against only the guy you want to axe. But just as said in the quote, the managers were simply too lazy to do their job, hence the true incompetents among the workforce — people that every other worker agreed were incompetent — stayed on the job, messing things up and causing extra work for those around them.

Posted by: truthspeaker | August 2, 2011 4:30 PM

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto Author Profile Page | August 2, 2011 4:20 PM

If you think libertarians only care about money, you're dead wrong. There's a lot of internal debate about social justice and charity among libertarians, but the general agreement is that if it's to be done, it shouldn't be done by the government.

And that's why they fail.

Posted by: mike.reider | August 2, 2011 4:33 PM

Its interesting to see the utterly gross caricatures of libertarian values, to say that all libertarians value is money is ludicrous. This is aping the theistic arguments that all a-theists are 'immoral' since they dont believe in a god. These are cartoonish generalizations.

@Mudpuddles

"What I hate most about libertarians is their chronic hypocrisy ("leave everyone the hell alone! unless they want control over their own bodies, sexual identity, or environmental quality...")

most people who consider themselves 'libertarian' are not anti-abortion, are not anti-gay nor anti-environment. Where are you getting this from?

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 2, 2011 4:38 PM

most people who consider themselves 'libertarian' are not anti-abortion, are not anti-gay nor anti-environment. Where are you getting this from?

*cough* teaparty *cough*

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 2, 2011 4:39 PM

There are, however, in my experience much more bad teachers than good ones. If you think the schools are filled with enthusiastic young idealists who strive night and day to inspire the new generation you're a moron. I don't think most people go in to teaching because they love to teach either. At least I don't see how that could possibly be true. Seems to be the bottom of the barrel job, at least where I live.

Well, in my experience there are many more good teachers than bad ones. Most of the teachers I worked with were younger than 30 and plenty bright enough to have gotten private sector jobs if they didn't value the education part of their jobs more highly than the money. Our principal was relentless, it would have been very difficult for someone with a poor ethic who was not committed to the job to have stayed there very long.

Anecdote vs. anecdote...is this a draw or what?

@isaac.yonemoto:

And putting more money into education doesn't necessarily mean paying teachers more, nor does it mean improvement in performance. In the last 30 years, inflation-adjusted per pupil expenditures have skyrocketed, but teacher salaries have remained more or less stagnant and pupil performance hasn't improved. Ask yourself why that's the case?

Damon and the rest of us aren't objecting to the notion that there are problems with the US educational system -- libs have been saying it for years. The problem is with idealogues both hard right and libertarian blaming all problems with US education on the teachers themselves, who are mostly regular people doing the best they can to succeed at a difficult and undervalued job. Teachers have very little control over the system as a whole and when you blame the problems of the system on the teacher you're actually undercutting one of the few parts of the system that usually works.

Posted by: MidnightVoice | August 2, 2011 4:43 PM

If you want to see a Damon movie see "Invictus". When I saw that he was going to play Francois Pienaar (who makes a block of granite look soft)I knew he could not do it. I was wrong. He took the part seriously and was truly excellent

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 4:44 PM

Shinobi:

I'm a libertarian for pessimistic reasons - because what liberals espouse works well in an ideal world where government is essentially thoughtful and generous and considered long-term consequences and needs of communities.

I don't at all think that "everyone needs to be thoughtful and generous" for society to function - I think that maybe, 20-30% of society does (which is not a bad estimate for reality, I think), and just that power structures need to get the fuck out of the way of those virtuous people.

My libertarian viewpoint actually allowed me to predict the 2008 economic collapse. I am on record telling several people that the stock market was about to collapse and the economy was about to go in the toilet, and my insight into the situation was informed by my awareness that government intervention into the economy had inflated several bubbles that were about to collapse.

"The point of government is to make sure that someone is at least trying to act in the best interests of society"

If that's what you think, then I feel very sorry for you. Because that clearly not what's going on, and when you have a monopoly over power (versus decentralized power), you will only attract people who have the exact opposite ends to positions of responsibility.

Posted by: joeyess | August 2, 2011 4:45 PM

@isaac.yonemoto

First -- I believe that the word "libertarian" is what a conservative uses to get laid.

Second -- “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

-John Kenneth Galbraith

You said it yourself:

I pull less than 30k per year and spend a mininum of two hours a week volunteering, some of which goes to feeding low-income HIV+ individuals in my community. I also gave out of my own wallet to a not-non-profit fund (i.e. no tax break, not that I would take it anyway, for ethical reasons) to help Cory Maye get back on his feet after his unjust imprisonment. If you don't know who Cory Maye is, google him, and know it's a serious social justice issue that the Liberals largely dropped the ball on and was spearheaded primarily by libertarians.

In that one paragraph that's all you talk about. Your money. How much you make, how much you donate. Blah, blah, blah.......

Take your nonsense somewhere else. You're just bound to get verbally beat about the head and neck 'round these parts.

Posted by: mike.reider | August 2, 2011 4:48 PM

I think the issue here is one of terminology or labels. People keep grouping a very large array of political viewpoints and groups under 1 general umbrella of 'libertarians'. The "tea party" is not a libertarian movement in the classic sense of the word.

its a collection of paleo-conservatives, religious revivalists, Constitutionalists and creationists grouped into a large political movement, very much like the various Pashtun tribes fighting NATO in Afghanistan are all called 'Taliban' even though they have strong ideological differences with each other within their ranks.

so when you say 'I hate libertarians' please define exactly what you are referring to. Saying libertarians are anti-abortion or anti-gay is nonsensical.

Posted by: MudPuddles | August 2, 2011 4:49 PM

@ mike.reider: see #70 and #73. They win too.

Libertarians claim to be about small government and individual liberty, yet I have never met a libertarian, or heard one speak, who has any compunction about legislation minimising access to safe abortion services or defining what "marriage" should mean to all people. They also claim that regulating businesses on environmental issues is inherently bad, and that "free-market" approaches will root out corporations that damage human well-being through pollution or biodiversity loss - despite overwhelming evidence an experience to the contrary. Environmental, social and chemical sciences mean nothing to them - they know better than the experts in these fields.

Posted by: Numad | August 2, 2011 4:49 PM

When a charity misuses YOUR money, you're going to be at least 150% more inclined to spend it on a different charity next time.

Even if that percentage wasn't pulled directly out of someone's butt, that would be the mildest incentive to trust charities to take on the role of social net that could possibly exist, considering the other ways in which it would represent a downgrade in reality.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 4:52 PM

First -- I believe that the word "libertarian" is what a conservative uses to get laid.

It's not working. In the social circles I frequent (lindy hop), I would have an easier time getting laid saying I'm a conservative than a libertarian. Also, I'm an asian male, so short of moving to the University of Chicago, nothing will help me out.

Second -- “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

I will concede that my "acts of altruism" make me feel better, which is a selfish act. I have no problem with this.

In that one paragraph that's all you talk about. Your money. How much you make, how much you donate.

One paragraph! Forsooth. I wrote five paragraphs. Did you know that volunteering takes TIME, too? Let me ask you: How much of your time do YOU give?

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 4:53 PM

I love Matt Damon.

On the issue of problems with allowing business to be self-regulating, there's a lovely article by a Harvard econ about the relationship between business and econ policy called "Market as Prison." The man's name is Charles Lindblom. Essentially, he argues that business, because it has been allowed to be a major factor in policy, essentially has negotiated a space in US politics where it responds to regulation by trashing the areas where the business is located/does business. It punishes the world around it by withdrawing or firing massive numbers of people.

And as a teacher, let me just respond by saying that what makes a bad teacher, frequently, is the social idea that you shouldn't have to learn to pass. Coupled with the rash of MBAs managing schools, and it's all you can do to teach anything, while being pressured into larger and larger class sizes and told your job equates to customer service.

That would be why I and most everyone I know drinks. Our jobs are impossible, and we make just enough for food stamps.

Posted by: safetycap | August 2, 2011 4:56 PM

#15 - he's working on a film in Vancouver, probably "Elysium" or, more likely, "We Bought a Zoo".

Here's more from Mr. Damon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Jh3Z52KV0

Posted by: CMT | August 2, 2011 5:00 PM

Yonemoto, are you the same guy that posts over The Agitator? Yeah, I can imagine you would give money to Cory Maye's cause. Radley Balko does a lot of great work!

Keep up the fight!

Posted by: grudgedk | August 2, 2011 5:01 PM

The most successful, hard-core libertarian CEO (John Mackey), in fact talks about the whole "purpose motive" behind his enterprise, that goes far, far beyond the "bottom line" of pulling a profit.

If you're going to call out your heroes, you probably shouldn't chose the guy who spent more than seven years posting shit about his rivals on Yahoo! Finance, so that he could buy them up relatively cheaply, as someone who has other motivation than money. You should probably chose actual philanthropists like Bill Gates or Ted Turner. Except oh wait. They don't subscribe to your laughably simplistic opinion of the world.

In the last 30 years, inflation-adjusted per pupil expenditures have skyrocketed, but teacher salaries have remained more or less stagnant and pupil performance hasn't improved. Ask yourself why that's the case?

First of all, because that's not actually true, many countries (Finland, India and South Korea in particular) have seen a tremendous return on investment in their education system, but I'll take a stab at it. Maybe it's because money isn't the only factor (I know, the shock, the horror, the PAIN!), and more importantly, if you expect that pupil performance is going to improve because you're spending money on "Of Pandas and People" and "Atlas of Creation" you're an idiot. Not just a libertarian idiot.

I pull less than 30k per year and spend a mininum of two hours a week volunteering, some of which goes to feeding low-income HIV+ individuals in my community.

Doing what? And would you switch jobs for 40K a year?

most people who consider themselves 'libertarian' are not anti-abortion, are not anti-gay nor anti-environment. Where are you getting this from?

No true Scotsman already?

Posted by: Travis | August 2, 2011 5:02 PM

These Libertarian conversations grate on me so much now. It is always the same thing. You could probably go back into the history of this blog and find a conversation that mirrors this and use it to predict the posts that will appear in the future.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 5:02 PM

considering the other ways in which it would represent a downgrade in reality.

So we've had a government-spearheaded "war on poverty" for 30 years now. How's that working out? The divide between rich and poor has been getting wider. I think it's largely because of monetary policy by a central bank, but what do I know?

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat."

-John Maynard Keynes

And I don't even like Keynes.

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 2, 2011 5:03 PM

Gah - weeks upon weeks of MRA infestation and now frigging glibertarians.

Great. Just what we need around here: more whiny, entitled, clueless white boys and their hurt fee fees.

Travis - they're identical to the MRAs and their, stale non-arguments.

Is there perhaps a lot of overlap between the two groups? Do glibertarians bristle over the thought of child support and getting called out for using hate speech for funsies too?

Re: Matt Damon. His cool is never ending.

Posted by: =8)-DX | August 2, 2011 5:08 PM

"maybe you're a shitty camera man"
OMG.. great retort. And he§s right about the teacher thing - especially young teachers. Older more experienced teacher will however mostly have a kind of life-long attachment to the process of educating the next generation.

Posted by: davric | August 2, 2011 5:11 PM

@jillian1138

I've also thought about this weird way of looking at elite athletes. When you watch downhill skiing (all the varieties), the difference between, say, the winner and the person who comes 10th is usually measured in tenths of a second - a period of time that most of us can't even discern.

And yet, if you or I tried to get down that slope, it'd take us *minutes* more, if we managed it at all!

I'm a humanities person myself, so I stopped studying maths formally at age 16, but, even so, I often wish people were a little more numerate when it comes to figures like 'the bottom 10%'.

Posted by: MrJonno | August 2, 2011 5:14 PM

Human beings will not contribute to society unless they are reasonably certain everyone else ie they everyone is paying taxes.

Once that certainty goes and knowning you might be the only one doing their part that help rapidly drops of

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 2, 2011 5:15 PM

Perhaps “libertarians” suffer from the same poser infestation from which “skeptics” suffer.

Perhaps the old Marcotte line (libertarian is what a neocon calls himself when he’s trying to get laid) is the same as our own pseudo-skeptics who claim the title for it’s “cool” factor, while failing to be even the least bit skeptical about anything that’s uncomfortable for them.

I mean, the entire libertarian philosophy is privileged bullshit from start to finish, but maybe its not quite as bad - at its core - as the Rand Paul’s of the world make it out to be.

I know I’d certainly hate being lumped into the same category as ERV the Desperately Tap Dancing Bigot, who also claims the skeptic label. Perhaps there’s a few libertarians who, though being thoroughly misguided, aren’t the Galtish freaks we’re used to seeing.

. . .

On the other hand, I’ve yet to encounter one such libertarian. So perhaps reasonable libertarians are unicorns.

Posted by: Brownian | August 2, 2011 5:21 PM

I havent read this blog for very long but the comments I'm reading here resemble some cognitive groupthink.

*Sigh*

Yes, we're a Borg collective. If you see any general agreement, it's clearly not because we've come to similar conclusions about similar lines of evidence, but because we're in communication with the Hive Mind.

Are you an atheist, Mike? If so, how do I know you came to be one through independent thought processes rather than through groupthink?

Unmasking our facade of multiple personalities earns you a bronze PS3 trophy.

Is it simply a matter of different views on economics?

For me that's pretty much it, although I've noticed a trend among libertarians to misunderstand, ignore, and even deny the sociocultural aspects of human societies, from conflating 'incentive' with 'money' to denying society itself exists.

The fact that they all play the No True Libertarian™ card adds to the annoyance. While I do understand the interest in having one's specific claims addressed rather than being lumped in with the fringe wingnuts, it's—hey, weren't we just speaking of theists' tricks? "Yeah, those other guys are looney, but my god-beliefs are perfectly reasonable. Here's why they're all crazy and my beliefs are the only true ones..."

I think the issue here is one of terminology or labels. People keep grouping a very large array of political viewpoints and groups under 1 general umbrella of 'libertarians'. The "tea party" is not a libertarian movement in the classic sense of the word.

Oh, is the lack of regulation of the term 'libertarian' a problem that at best hinders clarity and at worst prevents people from making educated choices about economic systems to espouse?

Libertarians claim to be about small government and individual liberty, yet I have never met a libertarian, or heard one speak, who has any compunction about legislation minimising access to safe abortion services or defining what "marriage" should mean to all people. They also claim that regulating businesses on environmental issues is inherently bad, and that "free-market" approaches will root out corporations that damage human well-being through pollution or biodiversity loss - despite overwhelming evidence an experience to the contrary. Environmental, social and chemical sciences mean nothing to them - they know better than the experts in these fields.

MudPuddles, mike.reider and others are right to say that the bits of yours I've highlighted aren't compatible with classically libertarian ideals. With regard to safe abortion services, I suspect a majority of atheist libertarians (at least, those who are economically libertarian as well as civilly) would say that the free market should take care of the first, and that the state should get out of the business of legislating marriage altogether.

OK, if it helps, every time you see "libertarians" on Pharyngula, replace it with "the vast majority of self-identified libertarians on the internet." Then you only have to feel bad about keeping company with idiots instead of having to consider the fact that you might be one yourself.

Maybe not the 'vast majority', but a large and vocal contingent, to be sure.

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 5:24 PM

Your choice between governments and corporations is a false one. There are nonprofits, individuals, mutual aid societies, fraternal organizations, etc. In fact the corporate form is one that wouldn't exist without government, while there is freedom of association, the corporation is freedom of association, PLUS a limited-liability licence, which comes loaded with its own set of moral hazards.

This was tried. It failed. You know this, so why pretend otherwise ?

Posted by: raven | August 2, 2011 5:25 PM

I think the issue here is one of terminology or labels. People keep grouping a very large array of political viewpoints and groups under 1 general umbrella of 'libertarians'. The "tea party" is not a libertarian movement in the classic sense of the word.

Oh right. We've just seen the No True Libertarian fallacy.

We call the Tea Party libertarians because they call themselves that.

As to why gibbertarians are laughed at, it's real simple. It's childish, simple minded, and wrong. The current champ Libertarian paradise is Somalia. No government and you can get as rich as you want. The two leading occupations are "pirate" and "warlord".

Right now in Somalia, people are literally starving to death by the thousands. And fleeing by the millions. But at least no one is forced to pay taxes for a societal safety net or food stamps.

I was a Libertarian as a teenager for a few weeks. That was how long it took me to realize how silly and stupid it was.

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 2, 2011 5:26 PM

school costs per student have increased tremendously over last 20 years but average test scores have gone down

People talk about 'test scores' like they are an objective measure. They aren't.

The state tests are surprisingly badly-written, considering the amount of weight that is put on them.

Have you read one carefully lately?

I got a lot of talk from my administrators about teaching a certain skill more effectively, since my 'test scores' for that skill were low. I looked back at the test, and discovered that the reading selection for that 7th grade test was written on an 11th grade reading level. The test score had nothing to do with that skill, and everything to do with the fact that my students hadn't understood the question.

I see things like that on every standardized test I look closely at.

I wish all the politicans who are harping on 'test scores' would show some interest in who writes the tests, and how.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 5:28 PM

mike.reider: Because I used to be a Libertarian, and that was the position a VAST majority of the people I talked to held. It was consistent enough to be ubiquitous, and anyone who disagreed was labelled something along the lines of commiefascistfreedomhatinbrainwashedlibr'l.

Posted by: raven | August 2, 2011 5:30 PM

Funny. I thought the 20th century was a lesson in how central management doesn't work.

It wasn't any better in the 19th century in the USA either. The era of Laissez Faire capitalism.

Depressions, recessions, and bank panics were common. As was corporate fraud.

Posted by: BillyJoe | August 2, 2011 5:31 PM

Reminds me of the recent Tour de France:

One commentator noted that all the crashes were occuring in the second half of the pelliton and suggested that all riders make sure they are in the first half. The other commentator had a little giggle and suggested it might just be a little difficult to for ALL the riders to be in the first half of the pelliton.

:D

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 5:32 PM

isaac.yonemoto,

If you had ever bothered to learn some social history then you would be aware that during the C19th it became increasingly clear that without government intervention it would be impossible to relive the conditions of the poor in Britain.

No matter how many good meaning people tried there were simply too many vested interests who opposed attempts to ensure workers got a fair wage, children were sent to school and not down a mine, or workers did not have to work in conditions that would kill them.

The solution to these problems required the Government to act.

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 2, 2011 5:36 PM

Libertarians vs. teachers... maybe PZ did it on purpose because he likes really long comments sections.

Next weeks: Gay people vs. men's rights people, ebooks vs. paper books, and "Who is a better person, Superman, or Batman?"

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 5:38 PM

#120

Depressions, recessions, and bank panics were common. As was corporate fraud.

So, on the net, the US got worse during the 19th century?

The way I see it, centralized economic planning (as practiced by the US 1917-today) aggregates small, brief depressions and recessions into long, drawn out periods (it has to do with socializing risk and not allowing bad business practice and obsolete technologies to clear out). Long, drawn out depression are worse for all but the rich (who can ride it out, especially since they tend to know they are coming), plus the "recovery" period is now characterized by inflation, which forces people to become fish in what is essentially a government-subsidized casino tilted for rich people (stock markets).

It's impossible to have a real argument about this, since, the data of course don't exist. But which do you prefer? Recessions and Depressions or Recessions, Depressions, and a money system that directly steals from the poor and gives to the rich?

Posted by: mike.reider | August 2, 2011 5:39 PM

"There is no slippery slope. isaac.whatever seems to be saying that if we abolished the government and let people do whatever "the market" allows that we'd all be free and happy"

what you are referring to is 'anarchy', not libertarianism. No one is calling for the abolition of government, or abolition of taxes or all government programs. These are bona fide straw-men.

What classic libertarians like Milton Friedman advocate is a limited role of government in people's lives and limited role of government in free markets. Its not some ideologically-pure 'laissez faire' idealism, but a rational approach to economics and behaviour.

Free markets create business, jobs and social welfare, not government.

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 5:41 PM

I don't know about your other examples, but you actually have this backwards. in the 19th century, factories were liable for damages caused by pollution and because of this were subject to suits and polluting factories had incentive to keep their insurance costs low and scrub their emissions. Then the supreme court ruled by fiat that Factories were a "public good" and immune to such suits, after which, predictably, pollution got worse.

What Supreme Court would this be ?

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 2, 2011 5:42 PM

The classic liberal-economic approach is to throw money at a problem, or increase the government agency that is setup to deal with this problem in hopes of a remedy.

No, that's the 20th century New Deal economic approach. "Liberalism" is bigger than that. Libertarian values are actually closer to what continental Europeans would call "liberalism."

The US government is founded on the ideas of liberalism, so both parties have always been liberal parties. The main difference is that during the depression FDR thought maybe some socialist policies could help bring the economy back in line. Those policies got assimilated into the system with the consent of both parties. I wish people would stop pretending that the Republican party played along with new deal policies and philosophy right up until Reagan.

Funny. I thought the 20th century was a lesson in how central management doesn't work. since 1917 we've had a top-down centrally managed economy, and we had two decades-long depressions, an expanding welfare state, and the divide between rich and poor has gotten worse.

This is almost pure bullshit. Justify the claim that the American economy has been centrally managed since 1917. Citations and reasoned argument, please.

We had one decade long depression followed by the longest period of economic prosperity in American history. We went from 1945-1970 without a single economic crisis, the longest period in history without a recession, panic, or similar economic fiasco.

And that scenario puts the lie to your objections. When the US government was at its MOST socialistic, most centrally planned (but still quite vital in terms of entrepreneurship and other bottom-up economic entities), the economy was in the least trouble and the gap between the richest and poorest shrunk dramatically. The gap between the rich and the middle class didn't start inflating until about the time Reagan got elected and started cutting taxes on top earners and deregulating everything in sight.

I love how you guys rewrite history to suit your warped ideology, though.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 5:43 PM

Thanks #129.

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 5:46 PM

You would be correct to say this. However, monetarily, you should look at Sweden's inflation rate. The Rieksbank is extremely tight and the Krone has inflated at rougly 1-2%/year over the last THREE DECADES. So, in fact Sweden is the least interventive country of them all.

Really ? So Sweden does not in fact have state subsidies for health care, education, child care, housing, maternity leave, paternity leave .... Well you get the picture.

Odd, because they do have all those. And what is more, the quality of the provision is high.

Yet, according to you it cannot be like that.

Posted by: Shinobi | August 2, 2011 5:47 PM

@ Isaac

I didn't realize I'd made that assumption. You seemed to assume that I cared WHY you are a libertarian, but I don't. The fact remains that you are espousing a set of policies that are not functional in the real world.

I'm so sorry that my assumption that you are a libertarian because you agreed with their policies upon thoughtful reflection was offensive to you. I should obviously assume that you chose to be a libertarian out of some rebellious and edgy irrational belief about the hopelessness of every other political party. That is the mark of a truly thoughtful individual.

Posted by: wheyghey | August 2, 2011 5:48 PM

Free markets create business, jobs and social welfare, not government.

It's comments like this that cause people to not take libertarianism seriously. The government can extract money from people and then create jobs with it. It happens all the time. Is it moral for it to do so? That's the question. The dispute shouldn't be over its efficiency in this regard. It's not a question of efficiency but morality.

If it's immoral for me as an individual to threaten my neighbors into paying for grandma's surgery or little Jimmy's education, then it's equally immoral for the majority of the neighborhood to hold a vote whether to do the same thing. For some reason, most people feel that as long as there was a vote (or some semblance of democracy), then the majority can collectively do something that would be immoral for an individual to do.

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 2, 2011 5:50 PM

How will we know when one side has won this comment thread? And what changes will happen in our lives as a result of that victory?

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 2, 2011 5:52 PM

can someone tell me what a 'fair' wage is? How much is a 'fair' wage in terms of $ per hour?

Enough to feed yourself, keep a roof over your head, and transport yourself to your job while still having enough time, energy, and money to be able to improve your lot in life.

The "to be able" part is important. People can choose not to and just watch TV all night instead, and there's no reason why such people should get a better than fair wage.

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 5:54 PM

What? The US is the most socialistic NOW, thanks to the policies of Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Obama. Clinton was fairly good.

Now you are just talking bollocks. If you the policies of Reagan, the Bushes and Obama were socialist then you simply have no idea what socialism is.

And please quit you US-centric attitude. It is tiresome.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 2, 2011 5:57 PM

isaac@141:

OK, how does the mere establishment of a central bank make the economy "centrally controlled"? As far as I understand, a central bank doesn't prevent private banks from choosing how they allocate money and it doesn't stop private citizens from starting businesses. In fact, it makes many of those things easier by reducing transaction costs and increasing the effective leverage of the private banks.

Posted by: grudgedk | August 2, 2011 5:59 PM

I thought the 20th century was a lesson in how central management doesn't work. since 1917 we've had a top-down centrally managed economy

If by 'we' you mean the Soviet Union, then yes. If on the other hand, you're suggesting that McCarthyism, Reaganomics, and whatever they're going to call the Bush pillaging and raping of the national treasury to share with his friends, where somehow a Communist plot, you're sadly mistaken. Also the US don't even have universal healthcare, and thinks capital punishment for kids is cool, hell there are even places which don't have a reliable power or telephone grid, so you don't get to call yourself a welfare state. Unless by welfare state, you mean a state where everyone is on welfare. But that's not generally how it's used.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 6:00 PM

Yahoo: No kidding. The idea that people can somehow magically withdraw from society and that any large scale efforts to cause society to function smoothly (like taxing people to provide social help networks and public maintenance) is ridiculous. As is characterizing it as 'threatening'.

I read that sucker as false attribution + false analogy.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 2, 2011 6:00 PM

the most a centralized government can do is provide conditions that would be favorable for a market to create jobs, low interest rates for example, or reducing federal taxes for certain industries like alternative energy.

I take it you've never driven on the Eisenhow interstate system? You should give it a try, it is pretty boss. In fact, since our economy is based on shipping useless craps overland in trucks, they're really the basis of the US economic engine. Pretty good for a wasteful government boondoggle.

Posted by: Robin Marie | August 2, 2011 6:03 PM

Michael Shermer is going to kick your ass.*

*Joke. I am very much not a libertarian.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 6:05 PM

I'm pretty disturbed, in general (US news and politics) with the false analogies between the actions of an individual and the actions of a governing body.

Analogy fails for discussions of the debt, fails for discussions of economic policy and REALLY fails for discussions of responsibility.

IMHO, it's a continuation of the mindset which gave rise to the 1886 decision which allowed for corporate personhood. It's a serious fail in the way US politics are discussed.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 2, 2011 6:06 PM

Then explain to me the moral framework of collective action.

Explain to me why it is moral for a large group to do something when any individual member of that group would be imprisoned for doing the same thing.

The government is not a large group. All the people WORKING in the government make up a large group, the group of voters is a large group, but neither one of those things IS the government itself.

Governments are systems unto themselves, and since they are the guarantors of civil rights, they are actually prior to any sort of right-based moral scheme. If you think of morality in terms of human right or civil rights you're relying on a government to provide a backstop for those.

And unless you think criminal justice AND war should be abolished completely, I have a hard time believing you don't think that the government doesn't need to do something that would be immoral for private individuals.

I don't believe there IS any absolute rational universal moral system. I think your reasoning about government and taxation is not even wrong.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 6:07 PM

issac.yonemoto: Citations needed from current economic policy. In my understanding, US banks are significantly deregulated (which was a contributing factor in the current financial woes.)

Posted by: Thebear, just an agent of peas | August 2, 2011 6:08 PM

How will we know when one side has won this comment thread?

We already know. It's just that the losers don't know it yet. It might be due to the fact that they are right-wing anarchist idiots.

And what changes will happen in our lives as a result of that victory?

A brief respite from SWOTI. Until the overlord calls in the troll hordes again.

Posted by: wheyghey | August 2, 2011 6:10 PM

Again with the simplistic thinking.

You've got the time to read through this crap. You've got the time to explain your position to me.

Hash out your ideas.

Posted by: Numad | August 2, 2011 6:13 PM

isaac.yonemoto,

So we've had a government-spearheaded "war on poverty" for 30 years now. How's that working out? The divide between rich and poor has been getting wider. I think it's largely because of monetary policy by a central bank, but what do I know?

Ha, ha, ha. What?

Here I am, laughing at the notion of some kind of freewill freemarket insuring a superior social net, and now I'm suddenly supposed to be defending the US' government* track record on wiping out poverty?

I'm not going on any wild goose chases on your say so. You could even say I have an incentive greater by 150% not to pursue this now.

*Because obviously the US has had the biggest, most unobstructed effort to eliminate poverty of all industrialized nations so it's totally representative. Yup, yup.

Posted by: captain.chaos.myopenid.com | August 2, 2011 6:14 PM

@ErkLR

I wonder if the cameraman would be surprised to learn that half of teachers perform below average?

Surely half of teachers perform below the mean, not the average?

(I'm sorry. I don't know why I do that...)

Posted by: mike.reider | August 2, 2011 6:18 PM

@bwweaver.math

I hope you werent serious with that ridiculous Chomsky video? Adam Smith was against capitalism?? Really Noam.. really?

why on earth do people still take Chomsky seriously

Posted by: ChasCPeterson | August 2, 2011 6:18 PM

Surely half of teachers perform below the mean, not the average? (I'm sorry. I don't know why I do that...)

Do what, get shit wrong?
The mean is exactly what most people mean (swidt?) by "average".
Exactly half of all teachers would rank below the median.

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 6:21 PM

So it's ok if I kill and steal as long as I get enough people on my side?

Nope.

Look, I think you need to come back when you have developed some morality. As things stands you seem to be devoid of any concept of what it means to be moral.

We can try to explain things to you, but only if you are sufficiently intellectually developed. It seems you are not.

This is not hard. Most humans, even some very shitty ones, can grasp it.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 6:22 PM

wheyghey: I'm on my way out to teach, but in brief, the idea that one can extrapolate correctly for understanding government or corporate policy when starting with an analogy for individuals is an OLD problem in US politics.

Individual decisions != basis for understanding the decisions of institutions.

Posted by: wheyghey | August 2, 2011 6:26 PM

>Me! Me! Me! It's all about meeeee!! Guess what little kid - this is the adults playground. None here bears the misfortune of being your parent. Your homework is not our problem.

Brownian responded to me. I responded to Brownian. What you have to offer in this discussion is beyond me.

To https://me.yahoo.com @ #162,

Amazing.

You're talking about the government as some sort of primordial god or something.

Governments are systems unto themselves, and since they are the guarantors of civil rights, they are actually prior to any sort of right-based moral scheme. If you think of morality in terms of human right or civil rights you're relying on a government to provide a backstop for those.

Absolutely not. The ultimate defender of my "rights" is me.

And the government is above and beyond any kind of moral scheme? What do you mean?

And unless you think criminal justice AND war should be abolished completely, I have a hard time believing you don't think that the government doesn't need to do something that would be immoral for private individuals.

Yes. War should be abolished completely. And what we call "justice" in this country is actually just law enforcement. There is a difference.

I don't believe there IS any absolute rational universal moral system. I think your reasoning about government and taxation is not even wrong.

Right. All morals and rights are just ideas in people's heads. In your head it's not ok for me to take your money at gunpoint unless I get together with large groups of people and vote to have it done by people in funny uniforms.

Posted by: wheyghey | August 2, 2011 6:29 PM

wheyghey: I'm on my way out to teach, but in brief, the idea that one can extrapolate correctly for understanding government or corporate policy when starting with an analogy for individuals is an OLD problem in US politics. Individual decisions != basis for understanding the decisions of institutions.

I like how you call theft and murder "decisions."

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 2, 2011 6:34 PM

Wheyghey,

Since you oppose being made to pay for anything, would you agree to not being asked to pay any taxes ? Would you still do so if you were not allowed to leave you house ? After all, if you do not want to pay taxes then you should not get to use the roads that they pay for should you ?

Of course there then comes the problem of what happens when someone bigger than you decides they want your house. You could call the police, but since you have opted out of paying taxes you do not get the services of the police. You could try the courts, but again, you refuse to pay so no joy there.

Posted by: grudgedk | August 2, 2011 6:35 PM

Then explain to me the moral framework of collective action.

The short explanation: Because it evens the playing field. Why is it moral that only people fortunate enough to be born into rich families get to have an education? You're not responsible for having rich parents. That shit was an accident of birth.

The long explanation: Some people (let's call them Libertarians) are selfish jerks. They think of themselves as kings of the world, and are completely oblivious to the benefits of collective action. They are the kind of people who only want to share, if it's someone else toys. For instance it is the moral obligation of everyone to ensure that all children get a decent education, so that they can in turn become productive members of society. This benefits society in general, among other reasons so a business will have a larger pool of skilled labor to chose from when hiring, which means they don't have to pay as high salaries to specialists, and become less dependent on key personnel. Of course we could do what we did in the old days, and let the businesses be responsible for educating their own workers, but there is little incentive to do this, unless we reintroduce indentured servitude to ensure that a worker stays with a business long enough for said business to make a tidy ROI on the education. Additionally it costs much less for the government to hire one teacher to instruct an entire class at once, that it would cost for a business to hire one teacher to teach only one student.

So unless your Libertarian ideals are in favor of indentured servitude, and higher costs for corporations to acquire skilled or specialist labor, collective action is the only moral and cost effective choice.

Posted by: mike.reider | August 2, 2011 6:38 PM

Governments are not the guarantors of civil rights. It is the people, the citizens that guarantee that these rights and hence, laws, are valid and guaranteed.

There is way too much credit given to the idea of 'government' in everything from economic policy to defense to the abolition of slavery and guarantee of civil rights.

It was not the government that abolished slavery but citizens. The abolitionists were not a government department, but a group of citizens who determined to end slavery through writings and non-violence. The fact that the government signed a law banning slavery was a direct result of the work and drive of private individuals, and not because of some government directive.

The idea that government creates jobs or can determine a 'fair' wage is utter non-sense. Free markets are the best and most efficient tools in generating wealth, improving prosperity and creating jobs that a society can have.

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 2, 2011 6:39 PM

Honestly, if I were persuaded that government does more harm than good, I would become an anarchist, not a libertarian.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 6:41 PM

For instance it is the moral obligation of everyone to ensure that all children get a decent education, so that they can in turn become productive members of society.

Then it's their moral obligation to pay out of their pocket to help create those productive members of society.

You run into trouble when someone else bandies about stuff like, It's you're moral obligation to not put your penis into another man's rectum

Well if the government can enforce the first moral obligation why can't it enforce the second? Because it's the framework that you prefer?

Posted by: It'spiningforthefyords | August 2, 2011 6:44 PM

Liberarians are, in this dark, dark age, as certain to be twisted, lying asshats as Xians or "Republicans," even if by chance they seem willing to dance along the course of reason and creativity slightly more often.

If you're a "Big-L" Libertarian, just fuck off and join the Teabaggers: you're a deluded creep who would gladly see evil done if it flattered your idiocy.

If you're a "small-l" sort, well,... vote with me as you wish, but I really have no intention of doing more than listening briefly and politely to you, and will dig my talons in when the usual bell-the-cat fantasies come up, just as I would a "nice" Catholic who thinks the Pope is "doing the best he can" or a "Republican" who supports science teaching (but somehow ALWAYS hates teachers' unions and is ambivalent about the whole idea of "public education")

Libertarianism was a lie and a cheat from the day someone who admired the business of Scientology invented the cursed word.

Also, I'd rather not have posts about these unimportant fringe kooks, since it draws the vermin to such sites as this, and they simply can't, being obsessed and stupid, find a way out, ssave by being banned.

Posted by: hotshoe | August 2, 2011 6:49 PM

What? The US is the most socialistic NOW, thanks to the policies of Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Obama. Clinton was fairly good.

isaac - This sentence only makes sense if you are using a definition of "socialistic" which is completely different from the one everyone else on the planet uses.

Try again.

Posted by: joeyess | August 2, 2011 6:50 PM

It's not the deregulation that contributes, it's the fraud.

In other words and in another argument it goes like this: "guns don't kill people, people kill people"

Template arguments designed to be plugged in during an emergency. Logic got ya by the balls? Quick, get out your talking points. No, not the ones about guns, the ones about banks. Yeah, I know, it's the same fucking argument. Just make it. Sheesh!

Posted by: wheyghey | August 2, 2011 6:51 PM

Penfold,

Since you oppose being made to pay for anything

No. If someone injures another person or damages someone else's property they should be "made" to pay restitution, or do whatever it takes to restitute the injured party.

Would you still do so if you were not allowed to leave you house ? After all, if you do not want to pay taxes then you should not get to use the roads that they pay for should you ?

No. There are such things as easement and right to travel. If you really wanted to keep me off the road in front of my house, though, I'd find a way around it or over it, don't worry. If you wanted to surround my house with troops, then I guess I'd be screwed, wouldn't I?

But how about being civilized? How about allowing me to make the choice in the first place? How about making me an offer? As the owner of the road in front of my house, how much would you charge for passage? And you'd better maintain the road, or people will stop paying and find a way to make you lose money.

Or (people can come up with all sorts of clever things) the people in the neighborhood can get together and collectively own the road. This happens in some places.

Of course there then comes the problem of what happens when someone bigger than you decides they want your house. You could call the police, but since you have opted out of paying taxes you do not get the services of the police. You could try the courts, but again, you refuse to pay so no joy there.

I wouldn't opt out of paying for police. That is, if the police were worth a shit. If they weren't, then there's no point in paying them is there? I'd find some other organization that could protect me better and pay them.

You seem to think that everything should be funded through force or not at all.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 6:55 PM

To say that Bush II was not into socializing financial risk, socializing medical benefits, socialize pointless national defense, etc, may not be what everyone on the planet thinks, but it's consistent with his rhetoric and his action.

Sure, he's not Salvador Allende, but if you're going to get "no true scotsman" on Bush, then Allende's project cybersyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn was hardly collective (but definitely socialized and centralized).

Posted by: Ragutis | August 2, 2011 6:57 PM

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 2, 2011 5:12 PM

Yahoomess @ 103: That thar is a slippery slope.

Actually, #104 is the one with the slippery slope.

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 2, 2011 7:00 PM

Apart from "Anarchists have better taste in music" what is the difference?

Anarchists seem less hypocritical. The libertarians I hear from seem to say that they aren't trying to abolish government... just keep it from doing anything. I don't understand what a libertarian is picturing when she describes a libertarian government.

Out of curiosity, what is the point of advocating libertarianism as a political strategy? Does it seem at all likely that this will become the way your country operates? Are there any libertarian countries right now? How did they get that way? How are things going? Are they likely to remain stably libertarian?

Posted by: nemo the derv | August 2, 2011 7:02 PM

I equate the libertarian party as the lawn party.
As in "get off of my lawn you punks"
I see society as being ruled by 3 major powers historically:
Religion
Politics(or ruling class)
Commerce(corporations)
Libertarians make the mistake of attacking two of these while promoting the third.
All three are dangerous if left out of control

Posted by: Thebear, just an agent of peas | August 2, 2011 7:02 PM

To say that Bush II was not into socializing financial risk, socializing medical benefits, socialize pointless national defense, etc, may not be what everyone on the planet thinks, but it's consistent with his rhetoric and his action.

I'm taking on my nice hat and I'm giving a big hint for once:
Privatization of profit, socialization of risk != socialism.

Posted by: timgueguen | August 2, 2011 7:03 PM

Feh, as is so often the case with discussions of libertarianism the idiot idea of taxes being theft comes up. No, taxes aren't theft, they're rent. Government asking you to contribute money to help operate the country is no different from a landlord asking you to pay for the priviledge of living on their property. Somehow I doubt someeone like wheyghey would be willing to let me live for free in his basement, yet he expects to live for free in whatever political jurisdiction he lives in.

Posted by: Gareth Price | August 2, 2011 7:05 PM

I know people in the UK who have become (high school) teachers because it is better than most of the other jobs you can get with a pass degree.

Posted by: Justin | August 2, 2011 7:06 PM

@214, also the government created the money in the first place. Go ahead, try and spend a dollar without the backing of a government.

It's the collectively agreed value of the money that gives it worth, thus taxation is a fee issued in order to preserve/forward that wealth.

Posted by: isaac.yonemoto | August 2, 2011 7:07 PM

#210 Nemo:

No some libertarians acknowledge that commerce can get out of control.

It's the means they argue about. Some of us are pessimistic about the ability of government to take care of it.

In the words of great progressive hero Woodrow Wilson, "If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture the government? They have already captured it."

Posted by: wheyghey | August 2, 2011 7:09 PM

The short explanation: Because it evens the playing field. Why is it moral that only people fortunate enough to be born into rich families get to have an education? You're not responsible for having rich parents. That shit was an accident of birth. The long explanation: Some people (let's call them Libertarians) are selfish jerks. They think of themselves as kings of the world, and are completely oblivious to the benefits of collective action.

Again, everyone equates a criticism of the use of force and threats as a criticism of collective action.

Act collectively all you want, just don't force people into it if they don't want to participate. (and please don't give me the love it or leave it argument)

For instance it is the moral obligation of everyone to ensure that all children get a decent education

Is it?

It's your and my obligation to ensure that some kid in Papua New Guinea gets a "decent" education?

So unless your Libertarian ideals are in favor of indentured servitude

Jeez.

costs for corporations to acquire skilled or specialist labor,

Damn, this little phrase could start an hours long discussion that I just don't have time for.

The short of it is: it would all balance out. The cost per pupil wouldn't be $16-18k for every public school (I'm using the word public in the old sense). But anyway, if it costs a corporation more to do something without using force, then I guess it's going to cost more.

collective action is the only moral and cost effective choice.

Again we're conflating mere collective action with the use of force through collective means. The use of initiation of force on peaceful people is what's immoral (to me) and it's no more acceptable if it's done through collective action.

Aggression is efficient. It gets shit done. But it's wrong.

Well, I've got stuff to do. Bye.

Posted by: Justin | August 2, 2011 7:10 PM

@ 220. So the way to prevent corruption is to give the offenders absolute leeway?

Isn't that like preventing theft by throwing wads of money at the thieves?

Posted by: Thebear, just an agent of peas | August 2, 2011 7:17 PM

Adios.

Yay!

Provided it's got the "stay gone" part of course (they never seem to do, but I still got hope for some perverse reason).

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 2, 2011 7:19 PM

Aw, is he gone? I still don't really understand how a good, functional libertarian society works. Drat.

Posted by: Thebear, just an agent of peas | August 2, 2011 7:23 PM

Aw, is he gone? I still don't really understand how a good, functional libertarian society works. Drat.

Somalia is the one to watch. Of course, international socialist forces are atm trying to sabotage the libertarian paradise with their evil socialist drought aid, but local forces are massing in a counter-offensive.

Posted by: hotshoe | August 2, 2011 7:25 PM

So it's ok if I kill and steal as long as I get enough people on my side?

Sometimes the stupid really burns. Could somebody a bit nicer than me pour a bucket or something over it?

No, why would I ? I've got my private fire-department subscription all paid up. They won't let my house catch on fire just because his is on fire ;)

Libertarians in action ... deserve what they get.

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 2, 2011 7:31 PM

what is it with libertarians and their insane persecution complexes?

Same thing it is with MRAs, xtians, etc. and their insane persecution complexes.

When you're entitled and clueless, you think the entire dessert cart of life is reserved exclusively for you. And, oh boy, do you throw a major wobbler when someone else gets a few crumbs off the floor.

Posted by: geoffreybrent | August 2, 2011 7:34 PM

You run into trouble when someone else bandies about stuff like, It's you're moral obligation to not put your penis into another man's rectum

Well if the government can enforce the first moral obligation why can't it enforce the second? Because it's the framework that you prefer?

Yep, government power to enforce "moral obligations" (real or imagined) can be misused, and quite often is.

Same with many other types of power: the power arising from being big and strong, the power arising from owning a sharp knife, the power arising from having a rich daddy... the list goes on. None of these threats, not even the ones posed by government, automatically trumps all the others in determining how we should live our lives.

IME, a lot of libertarianism comes from people who've moved past religion per se but still believe the universe ought to be simple. And if you're determined to pick a simplistic philosophy to live by, libertarianism is one of the less bad. (The type that actually does believe things like gay rights are as important as gun ownership, not the Tea Party version.)

But even the best of simplistic philosophies just don't get very far. The universe is a complex place.

Posted by: grudgedk | August 2, 2011 7:40 PM

The idea that government creates jobs

Is absolutely, undeniably true. According to the Bureau">http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs041.htm>Bureau of Labor Statistics the Federal Government employs 1.9 million people. Creating at least 100.000 more jobs, than Americas largest privately owned company Walmart, and more than four times as many as McDonalds. Add to this the 1.5 million people serving in the military, and 700.000'ish working for the US Postal Service the Federal Government alone (never mind local and state governments) employ nearly 2% of every single person in the entire US (not just 2% of everyone who has a job. 2% of EVERYONE), making it absolutely second to none, in terms of creating jobs. Even the largest privately owned companies are dwarfed by the amount of jobs the government creates, not just indirectly, by providing business with favorable terms, but directly by actually employing people. Hell UPS doesn't even employ nearly (they're about 250.000 short) as many people as the US Postal Service, and they're like the 5th largest employee in the US. So next time you hear "fiscal conservatives" talking about how we need to protect "job creators". Remember that the single biggest job creator in the US by a huge margin is the US Federal Government, and please don't suggest that Walmart are suddenly going to need a million more employees if we cut government employees in half or abolished the military. That's not how it works.

Free markets are the best and most efficient tools in generating wealth, improving prosperity and creating jobs that a society can have.

Which explains why the US is hopelessly indebted to communist China. Wait what?

Then it's their moral obligation to pay out of their pocket to help create those productive members of society.

And the way we do this, is through taxes.

You run into trouble when someone else bandies about stuff like, It's you're moral obligation to not put your penis into another man's rectum

Because that's only a moral obligation, if he doesn't consent to it. Some people like anal sex, and gender isn't really a factor. You have a moral obligation to not put your penis into anyone's rectum, who finds it objectionable. Which is why we have laws against rape, and the government enforces this law, and we pay taxes for the government to enforce this law. The difference between your example and mine is that enjoying anal sex in no way contributes to you being a less productive member of society. But your GED is not even as good as a MBA.

Because it's the framework that you prefer?

No because only one of those frameworks is a detriment to society. If you can find a significant amount of (sane) people who think getting killed for their wealth is a matter of personal preference, than your comparison would work.

Posted by: hotshoe | August 2, 2011 7:47 PM

No. If someone injures another person or damages someone else's property they should be "made" to pay restitution, or do whatever it takes to restitute the injured party.

You dumb fuck.

You even put "made" in scare-quotes in your very own sentence.

That's because you know, really, that there is NO way to "make" anyone pay restitution, absent a framework of government, laws, courts, and legal enforcers (police/sheriffs/marshalls).

What the fuck are you going to do - kidnap someone who injures you and "make" them pay restitution at the point of YOUR gun ?

Grow up. You're not a cowboy and you're not wearing the white hat now.

I wouldn't opt out of paying for police. That is, if the police were worth a shit. If they weren't, then there's no point in paying them is there? I'd find some other organization that could protect me better and pay them.

Dumbfuck libertarian.

What happens when your alternate "organization" comes back to you and threatens you if you don't pay them more money next month. What are you gonna do - report them to the real police ? The real police who citizens - like you, dumbfuck - have starved out of business by refusing to pay your due taxes ?

What happens when there are two (or more) of those alternate "organizations" in town, and they happen to have violently different ideas on how far to go in protecting their clients ? Who are you going to get to pay restitution when innocent children are caught in the crossfire of your "protection organizations" /

You either are too stupid or too lazy to have thought this through, or else you're an immoral monster.

Grow up. You can be a much better person than an ignorant shallow libertarian.

Posted by: Nance | August 2, 2011 7:52 PM

Only now recognizing Matt Damon as a hero? Gosh, what took you so long? Or, is that delay somehow correlated--as I suspect--with estrogen levels?

May he never trip over it. We need our progressive heroes right now and forever.

Posted by: Thebear, just an agent of peas | August 2, 2011 8:02 PM

Can you please stop confusing the Tea Party "libertarians" with the Thomas Paine "Age of Reason" "libertarians"? Plenty of us simply don't think we should have to choose which freedoms humans should have - guns, abortion, sexual reassignment, which charity to give to, religion or lack thereof. We want them all at the individual level. Thanks.

Like non-sheepfarmers usually can't be bothered to differentiate between individual sheep in a herd, we're not to fuzzy about the distinction between moronic subset "a" versus moronic subset "b". Especially since there is no clear lines of demarcation and plenty overlap.

Posted by: grudgedk | August 2, 2011 8:18 PM

Act collectively all you want, just don't force people into it if they don't want to participate. (and please don't give me the love it or leave it argument)

Do you understand the meaning of the word collectively? At all? If everybody doesn't participate it's not very collective, is it? If you seriously don't want to pay taxes there are plenty of countries where people don't pay taxes (Qatar comes to mind) and plenty of countries with no government (or at least a functioning one, Somalia was mentioned earlier). It not a matter of "Love it or leave it". It's a matter of "Why on earth are you staying, if you hate it so much", unless of course you (maybe subconsciously) understand that you're wrong, and you're simply using "Libertarianism" as a politically correct label to parasite off other peoples collective contributions.

It's your and my obligation to ensure that some kid in Papua New Guinea gets a "decent" education?

Yes it is. Why not? What is the moral grounds for denying a child education?

The short of it is: it would all balance out.

No it wouldn't. If it would, you'd see countries like Mexico, with lots of production, but a terrible school system, and Canada with an excellent school system, but little in the way of traditional industry, having roughly similar median household income. However this is not the case. In fact it's rather the case that the average Canadian household earns more than a factor 5, compared to it's Mexican equivalents. So no it doesn't all balance out. The country with the shitty school system doesn't get to attract specialized expert labor, so you have to make do with the shit kickers you can get your hands on, and let other countries like Canada lead the way.

Isn't that like preventing theft by throwing wads of money at the thieves?

Well to be completely honest that might just work. There is little reason to steal, if people voluntarily throw wads of money at you. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the thief mindset.

Now I know you probably have a lot of sophisticated arguments about how for a "job" to be called a "job" and create "real" wealth, it cannot be a product of tax redistribution.

But revenue redistribution is okay, right? Well guess what the "R" in IRS stands for? Guess what else? For a government there is only one kind of (legitimate) revenue. I bet you can guess what that is!!!

Posted by: Jack Lewis | August 2, 2011 8:29 PM

I love the way he maintains eye contact all the time with who ever he responds too as though he thinks they can be reached. He looks like he's hoping to catch some light switching on in their heads not sure it ever happened though.

Posted by: Lynna, OM | August 2, 2011 8:35 PM

This is a continuation of #245, with references to an article by Simon Head in the January, 2011 New York Review of Books.
Excerpts below:

.... the burden of academic managerialism in the US has fallen on the teaching rather than the research side ...[with] administrators achieving collectively what in the UK has been achieved by government fiat. The imposition of the industrial model on teaching, and especially the teaching of undergraduates, has been most damaging in the state universities below the elite level and in the two-year junior and community colleges that together... make up the great majority of American institutions of higher education.

At this lower level the prolonged and continued decline of funding from state and local governments had had a pervasive effect even before the present financial crisis hit, forcing university managers to behave more and more like their corporate counterparts and to treat academic departments as “cost centers and revenue production units.”

That statement can be easily extrapolated to apply to primary and secondary education in the U.S.

How many bodies can a teacher process for less than the $10,000 per child mentioned by the libertarian interviewing Matt Damon? That's the focus.

The growth of the contingent academic workforce brings the labor economics of the call center and the Wal-Mart store to higher education. With these contingent academics, few of whom have firm contracts, managers now have at their disposal a flexible, low-cost workforce that can be hired and fired at will, that can be made to work longer or shorter hours as the market dictates, and that is in a poor position to demand higher pay.

Looking at teaching as providing a "client service" or as "delivery of instruction" inevitably involves more administration, and more administrative costs, not less. We get more administration, and less education per dollar.

With the recession eating away at the budgets of universities on both sides of the Atlantic, the times are not propitious for those hoping to liberate scholarship and teaching from harmful managerial schemes. Such liberation would require a stronger and better-organized resistance on the part of the academy itself than we have seen so far.

Complete article here.

Posted by: m.groesbeck | August 2, 2011 8:39 PM

Act collectively all you want, just don't force people into it if they don't want to participate.

Let me guess -- there's an implied "unless the collective action involved is called 'private property' or 'enforced contracts' or 'capitalist-supremacy' -- we'd like to pretend that those aren't collective social practices, so we can make those compulsory."

Posted by: raven | August 2, 2011 8:58 PM

Are they gone now?

One wonders why there are no Libertarian governments given the claimed advantages of it. We humans are nothing if not pragmatic, and we all want a better life for us, our kids, and our neighbors.

The answer is that it's been tried many times.

The era of laissez faire capitalism is one such. Today in the world we have such nations as Somalia, at least as long as anyone is still alive there.

What happens.

1. You end up with monopolies controlled by oligarchies. This is why much of the third world is going nowhere fast.

2. You end up with boom and bust cycles and they are extreme. In the 19th century, bank panics and bank failures were common. You just lost your money. There was no such thing as the FDIC, federal deposit insurance.

3. Among other side effects you ended up with lots of child labor. Kids working in coal mines and spinning mills in New England.

The patent medicines were another area that needed improvement. Anyone could make up a medicine and claim it does anything. A lot of the miracle drugs were just fillers, some of the ones that actually did something were full of alcohol, opium, and cocaine. Coca Cola at one time actually did contain cocaine.

I would tend towards small government and freer markets myself. There is room to debate how much government should do and where. Libertarianism isn't even in that game. It's just too silly and stupid for most people to do more than laugh at it.

Posted by: raven | August 2, 2011 9:03 PM

Act collectively all you want, just don't force people into it if they don't want to participate.

Classic example of libertarian idiocy.

It is a free country. You can opt out anytime. Some people do exactly that, head off into the outback. Some of them end up dead in a few months like Chris McCandless.

Just don't drive on our roads and use our sidewalks. We paid for them ourselves.

Anyone who won't chip in to keep our civilization running is just a parasite.

Libertarian = parasite

Posted by: Numad | August 2, 2011 9:45 PM

isaac,

It'spiningforthefyords:

your wish.

Adios.

It's my wish 255% more.

Posted by: Anansi | August 2, 2011 10:17 PM

Explain to me why it is moral for a large group to do something when any individual member of that group would be imprisoned for doing the same thing.

You've just provided your own counter argument right there. Unless it is also your view that it is immoral for the government to imprison people for doing bad things to others. Or would you think that it is ok for me to personally imprison the person who stole something from me, or assaulted me, etc?

Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings | August 2, 2011 10:47 PM

wheyghey:

So it's ok if I kill and steal as long as I get enough people on my side?

Go ahead.

Just don't be surprised when me and my group (which is a little gang we like to call "society") get together to arrest you, try you with a jury of your peers (meaning, other folks who are also part of my gang), and throw you in prison.

See, that's one of the benefits of participating in society. You get the biggest gang.

Posted by: raven | August 2, 2011 11:08 PM

But yes, really guys, at a certain point, you are going to be forced to abide by the strictures set by the other apes within your social system. That, or leave the system and try to live off the land, pretending you're not a social ape. Or find a few other apes to try it with, a lot of people did that in the 60s and 90% of those efforts failed. But whatever, you're libertarians so fuck history, right?

Yeah, gibbertarians never walk their talk.

1. They are free to reject our society and join a libertarian one. It's a big world after all, 240 or so countries, 7 billion people, 25,000 miles in circumference. Surely such a powerful and successful sociopolitical system would exist somewhere besides Somalia? In point of fact, in much of the third world, the governments are far less developed than ours. That seems to be why they are in the third world.

2. There are still vast areas of wilderness and lightly populated areas even in the USA. They could always just head out with their copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and live any way they want. People do this occasionally. A few make it, many don't.

3. I've never heard of a libertarian commune but nothing is stopping them from starting one. The midwest is emptying out and there are lots of ghost towns and almost ghost towns.

Most likely, the reason they don't actually do anything but babble on the internet is simple. None of those alternatives are as easy as living in mom's basement with a computer connection. Most libertarians seem to have a mental age of about 10.

Posted by: Justin | August 2, 2011 11:52 PM

What you're missing spacecowboy55 is that your system will reward private schools who attract the best teachers, leaving the public schools with substandard teachers.

Why is this a problem? BECAUSE POOR PEOPLE CANNOT AFFORD PRIVATE SCHOOLS.

I hope that clears things up.

Posted by: spacecowboy55 | August 3, 2011 12:43 AM

If the attraction for "the best" teachers is purely monetary, wouldn't they all be attracted to either private schools or the highest paying public schools in the current system as well? In fact, isn't this at least part of the current problem?

But in a system where the government is subsidizing the poor to allow for the choice of a private school, through a voucher program or whatever else (on top of the private schools aiding subsidization through scholarships) wouldn't that move some of the poor students into private schooling? Wouldn't a voucher program increase the ability for poor people to attend private schools that they, in the current system, cannot afford? And wouldn't that migration consequently alleviate some of the overcrowding which occurs in poor public schools, increasing the education potential for public school students as well? Or is the assumption that such a migration would lead to the death of the public school system?

I'm not arguing that the government adding more money to the system would be a bad idea. I just think that, perhaps, having the government add more money to the system while also fostering increased competition from private schooling would be a better idea.

Also, if attracting the best teachers to private schools through higher salaries should lead to those who attend public schools getting a worse education (as is alluded to in your response), why does our college system work (at least in comparison to our grade school system)? Yes, it's top heavy as far as the best schools being private are concerned, but it isn't the sort of inequality where one cannot receive a very good education (or in the case of Berkley, UVA, UCLA, UNC, Michigan, etc. a great education) by going to a public school.

Are the two systems not in any way comparable? Is the grade school system too large to compare to the college system? Or do you think it's fair to look at the (relative) success of one to determine how best to foster success in the other?

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 12:53 AM

spacecowboy55: I work for a private school. They do NOT care about education, they pay me ($1100/month) and they treat their employees like shit. Private does not equal good.

And, before you say it, I'd love to go somewhere else. If anywhere else was hiring college professors in my area, I would.

Posted by: hotshoe | August 3, 2011 1:08 AM

Another problem is that there actually are a shortage of pupils in many school districts. Yes, I know, this sounds inconsistent with the news about overcrowded classrooms and districts going on year-round school (where each kid only attends 9 months but the school is open all year on different shifts) to ease crowding -- but those conditions are usually/always the fault of the community refusing to pay existing teachers' salaries and hire more teachers, much less pay the capital expenses of constructing school facilities.
I know; our family lives in one of those short-sighted communities which did double in population in the boom years without expanding school facilities one inch. Vouchers to parents for private schools would help NOT AT ALL in our town, since there is no legitimate private school, and building one would be subject to at least as many problems as building the new public school which is so badly needed.
Meanwhile, so many parents have pulled their kids out of school - to homeschool them (like us), to send them to basement church schools, or to transport them to some better town near where the parents work - that the "per-pupil-attendance-day" budget from the state has dropped terribly. The fixed costs don't go down (much) just because one hundred fewer students are attending; still need to turn on the lights, pay the janitors, keep the phones on ... since the income based on pupil numbers goes down, the only way the district can think of to cut costs is to lay off teachers, the most disposable item in their budget. It's a vicious cycle: they may end up with an empty classroom at the end of the hall but the remaining students are still crowded into classes with the remaining teachers.
If there is to be any hope of fixing our district schools in my lifetime for the kids who can't escape, the hope is NOT going to be in draining limited tax dollars to give as vouchers for parents to defray the cost of (expensive and redundant) private schools elsewhere. For the cost of vouchers to just one family, we could hire another teacher for our existing public high school, and teach a foreign language or an advanced math class to one hundred families' kids.

Posted by: spacecowboy55 | August 3, 2011 1:18 AM

Thanks for the perspective hotshoe: As a city kid my whole life, the idea of student shortages never occurred to me.

Posted by: pteryxx | August 3, 2011 1:31 AM

Aiyi, screwed up my link. retry:

Most Likely to Succeed

Posted by: joeinformatico | August 3, 2011 1:48 AM

@ #134:

No, that's the 20th century New Deal economic approach. "Liberalism" is bigger than that. Libertarian values are actually closer to what continental Europeans would call "liberalism."

The US government is founded on the ideas of liberalism, so both parties have always been liberal parties. The main difference is that during the depression FDR thought maybe some socialist policies could help bring the economy back in line. Those policies got assimilated into the system with the consent of both parties.

Thank you. I have difficulty discussing politics with most Americans since the US political culture has altered the definitions of "liberal", "conservative", "libertarian" and "socialist" from their original meanings.

Posted by: First Approximation, L'esprit de l'escalier | August 3, 2011 1:58 AM

How do you like them apples?!

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 2:00 AM

Also, I like teaching. I also like eating. These two things should not be incompatible.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 2:06 AM

pteryxx: Thank you for that article.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 2:07 AM

Sorry, that's $12k/year.

Posted by: It'spiningforthefyords | August 3, 2011 3:01 AM

Gosh! Did he leave because of li'l me?

Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say - Libertarians doing the "Gish Gallop" are just as impossible to answer (we can't even begin to talk about "respect" for a guy who would likely entertain the notion of the poor fattening up their babies for sale to cannibal millionaires, since they'd be able to finance their other children by such means and all. and the market price probably would stay high, y'know.)

Money says he turns up regularly now, but given the foreign nature of the very concept of forthrightness, he'll be posting under another name.

What a dark age America is in! I weep for those I love who are trapped there, and fear for all of us outside.

P.s. Isaac, please remained fucked-off as long as possible. And practice it at home as well.

Posted by: TheBigD | August 3, 2011 3:20 AM

"That should read "...and fail based on your own criteria.

Posted by: nemo the derv | August 3, 2011 3:34 AM

How to become Ayn Rand:
Step #1. Rip off Nietchze.
Step #2. Tell everyone how much Nietchze sucks because he spoke two sentences that you disagree with.
Step #3. Write the sloppiest, laziest novel with paper thin one-dimensional characters. Make sure that 800 out 1500 pages is non-sensical ranting. Also make sure you publish when the "red scare" is at it's peak so your ranting is popular.
Step #4 Sleep with all of your friend's husband's and admonish them for not allowing you to be "selfish".
Step #5 Die with no friends that aren't on your payroll.

Posted by: Kagehi | August 3, 2011 5:00 AM

Then it's their moral obligation to pay out of their pocket to help create those productive members of society.

And the way we do this, is through taxes.

More accurately, the way we "chose" to do this, collectively, as a society, was via taxes. The original concept was pushed for by Madison, who seriously distrusted a) businesses to do the right thing, b) people with power to not lie, and c) the ability of clueless, uneducated, voters to now get screwed by con artists. The solution, he figured, was to first, create an institution to produce the "initial" class of educated, well informed, people that we could elect from, and out of that, also form a collection of new educators, which would go on to turn the rest of us into people that had a damn bloody clue what was going on.

You might even say that, in principle, this was meant to form a set of "core" ideals, of not necessarily control, to make sure that the education that everyone had would *eventually* be the best at all possible. So.. Someone give me a hint as to what kind of bloody mess we ended up with? Seems to me that we have a) no consensus at all on what does and doesn't work, b) almost no standards, and what we do have is based on testing, and not testing if they can apply the information, but just if they remember the right answer, and c) 50 different "baselines", from which thousands, for each state, different interpretations of those baselines have formed. And, just to make things particularly stupid, and to be charitable, since I think its way higher than that, at least 50% of the resulting "graduates" from lower schools couldn't get into the college Madison created to start this process, if they bribed someone, never mind based on the merit of having a damn clue, knowing anything, or having learned jack.

So, the solution to this is what? Turn what was a, "We need everyone to be at least this smart, if we don't want to turn into a nation of complete idiots, like I fear!", into 500,000, or what ever it would end up being, "private" schools, which could end up, depending on the ideological bent of the people running them, anything from people that think space aliens are behind every advance in civilization, to Biblical literalists, to people that, in some cases, actually make the argument that boys shouldn't "taint" themselves with college, and girls probable shouldn't even need high school?

This morass of idiocy, which we almost have already, due to all the schools that cheat their way into precisely this sort of nonsense, is "better" than taxes to try to pay from "minimal" requirements? The idea is completely bloody stupid. It would be like seeing some clown argue that he should have the "right" to use a muzzle loaded 1820s rifle, as his military firearm, because what he uses, is trained with, etc., should be his "personal" right, and its unfair for taxpayers to give the government money to buy weapons that some people don't want to actually use.

Its the same stupid argument. Military: I don't think I should "have to" pay for our soldiers to be the best armed possible, they should be able to "choose" individually whether they run through the battlefield in Kevlar, or buck naked, using a wooden spear! Education: I shouldn't have to pay for something that has no money, to educate their kid, so they don't go and do something stupid, like, I don't know, believing insane bullshit told to them by crazy people, and electing the Tea Party candidates because they where gullible, ignorant, and badly enough educated, to fall for it!

We also tried the, "I shouldn't pay for roads I don't use.", idiocy at one time. It resulted in rich people paving roads from their house to their work, or from the factory to the ship yard, while everyone else had to drive through mud, land/rock slides, etc. No one wanted to pay for roads between places that only 0.00001% of the population lived, and no one in those places could afford to pay for it themselves. And, its not like the city governments, at the time, had any Federal/State money to do it either.

Some things you "want" everyone to have. If for no other reason that them not having it makes it less likely that the next thing you buy won't be complete crap, because 90% of the population was successfully convinced, by con artists, that it was worth something, and the guy selling the real thing went bankrupt because of it. Something that is **very** easily possible, if 90% of the population has the education of a 4th grader. Just look at how much completely useless stuff people already buy from "new age", or, "altie medicine", stuff, and that is in a country where, in theory, everyone might qualify as having an 8th grade education (while having supposedly graduated the 12th grade...). Imagine if 50% of the population, i.e., the poor, suddenly had to pay for every single year of education their kids got "personally". At a guess, under those conditions, probably 30% of the population would be illiterate, and not even have managed 1st grade, within two generations. And that is being "nice" about the prospects of such a thing happening.

Posted by: Teshi | August 3, 2011 5:52 AM

[quote]There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.[/quote]

As a teacher, I can say that I as a person had very little idea of how I would perform as a teacher in the classroom, even after practice teaching and experience in teaching-like environments (e.g. summer camps, volunteering in a classroom, one-on-one help, supply music teaching, and supply assissting in a classroom-- all of which I had to do in order to just get accepted into teacher's college in Ontario).

Turns out, like all teachers, I have strengths and weaknesses. My behaviour management is weaker and my lessons aren't the most fascinating or well-put together, but I'm excellent at enrichment.

I would hope that were I struggling to teach effectively some person wouldn't dock my pay but somebody would help me manage my classes better, and give me the resources to draw on to further improve my lessons.

I can't imagine anything more demoralising than being paid based on some SAT that someone has developed, because I found it quite difficult and generally boring to teach effectively in such a way that fits a test. I think that would make teaching unbearable: my livelihood depending on how well I taught all the basic skills (see above, where I am good at enrichment). It would just send the stress levels through the roof.

This is what you do to get good teachers: you do what Ontario has done by mistake. You make too many teachers, pay them well and give them good benefits. All of a sudden, people are jostling to get into Teacher's College (often with multiple degrees and careers behind them) and jostling to get jobs. At the moment the world (and the rest of Canada) is training Ontario's public teachers so when they can finally be employed in our home province we're all going to have years of experience in the private sector, in different school systems and with different nationalities and experiences.

Because of this glut of teachers I bet you Ontario will have one of the best education systems in the world in just a few years. Not because of the slightly dull, over-written curriculum, but because the teachers it employs are the ones who worked really hard all over Canada and the world to finally be a teacher at home in Ontario.

And the world is benefitting from Ontario-educated teachers with their multiple degrees and life experiences. We are not single-trick ponies by any means and I think that will result in some of the richest and most interesting school environments on the planet.

Recently, Canada was found to have one of the best "improvement" abilities in the world. That is to say, it is the best at taking children who enter at a low level and raising them up to fit the standard. To me, that is the sign of a successful system. Another sign is an educated populace, which Canada also has.

Sounds like the US is going about this all wrong. Teaching is not a relaxed, zippy job. You don't get coffee whenever you want it, you don't go to the toilet when you want it or (like so many people here, you don't check your favourite blog when you're at work, jeez!). In an office job, you might take a break from your work to chat. In teaching, you take a break from teaching a lesson to (for example), stand on a playground, or mark some work, or sit down to help a child with their work or talk to them about their behaviour, or liaise with other teachers over what you're doing next. That's the 'break'. 'Working lunch' doesn't exist as a separate thing. Every lunchtime is a working lunchtime.

Yeah, we get holidays. That's when we actually get to experience life again.

Teaching's not a job you go into because it's easy. You go into it because you actually think it's important, worth it, fun, interesting etc. You may be crap at it but most teachers at least start out wanting to be good. Punishing teachers for not magically figuring out first time, or second time, how to do their work so they fit some SAT test written to match every classroom and school and socio-economic strata in the whole state or province or country is not going to help, it's only going to hurt.

Just curious: Has anyone ever met a teacher who wants them and their collegues to be paid by their performance?

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 3, 2011 6:35 AM

but rather promoting private schools through a better funded voucher system

Let's have real competition based on a level playing field. Any private school taking vouchers must have 20% of the students assigned to them by the public schools (giving them a chance to get rid of some of their problems), regardless of their academic ability. Then they must try to educate those students for the full year, just like the public schools must. I bet after one year, no private schools would accept vouchers, as they would have the same problems the public schools have, namely students who don't/won't learn. But then, liberturds never, ever, think of truly fair play, always looking for that advantage.

Posted by: GravityIsJustATheory | August 3, 2011 6:51 AM

Oh, sod it.
I just wrote a big response, and the internet ate it.

Shorter version:

Posted by: christophe-thill.myopenid.com | August 2, 2011 3:46 PM

So, those people basically believe in dictatorship: Big Brother watches you, and fires you when he spots you underperforming.

Is that what being a libertarian really is about ?

That was something that started to dawn on me back when I was a libertarian.

Like Communism and Christianity, libertarianism has a proported goal (freedom, equality, love/forgiveness) that sounds nice, but the underlying details of the ideology work to undermine that goal.

Not counting outright hypocrits and those that are in it for ulterior motives (which can apply to all ideologies), I think the biggest problems with libertarianism are:

1) Fixation on the government as the only thing that can infringe your rights and freedoms. (Some liberals also seem to suffer from this, but to a far lesser extent).

2) Economic views that are essentially based on faith ("pure free market is always best, and will ensure everyone is fairly rewarded for their efforts"), and furthermore tend to assume that this is already the case. (Even if they were right about a pure free market being best, nowhere actually has one, so you can't make policy or judgements that assume we do).

3) A major overdose of the fallacy of excluding the middle (e.g. any amount of taxation or state-ownership of industry = socialism / communism / forced labour / slavery)

4) Global warming. I've seen various proposed libertarian solutions to other environmental problems (which may or may not work). But I've never seen anyone even attempt to present a libertarian solution to AGW. Most libertarians seem to assume that because there is no libertarian-compatible solution, the problem doesn't exist. (I used to be a skeptic as well, but unlike most skeptics/deniers, I based my skepticism on specific issues that could be and were falsified. And unlike most libertarians, I'd already concluded that if my skepticism was overturned, I would have to abandon libertarianism as well. Which I did.)

5) As with anarchists, even if libertarians were right about everything, a libertarian society would be very vulnerable to being taken over by non-libertarians. (Either externally, by an invading army, which would be difficult to repel without a sufficiently organized and funded army, which in turn requires a proper state; or internally, by unscrupulous rich or would-be aristocrats. Which seems to have happened to libertarianism before it even managed to establish its own society).

Posted by: captain.chaos.myopenid.com | August 3, 2011 7:51 AM

@ChasCPeterson Yes, that one. Shit, I hate it when I mess up a joke... But you know what I mediant!

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 8:47 AM

Fuck you. I've got mine.

The glibertarian theme song!

Of course, have we ever actually encountered a glibertarian who didn't immedately recant everything he claimed to believe the moment it becomes inconvenient to him?

So, really, the glibertarian theme song is titled: "Fuck you, I've got mine. And when I don't, you better give me yours".

Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies | August 3, 2011 9:11 AM

Googlemess:
Why, thank you for telling us how we should comment. It's super appreciated!

I'm not surprised to see all this hate directed towards libertarians; after all, we all hate children and especially poor children.

Okay, convince me otherwise. All of the libertarian arguments I've heard boil down to 1) Charity will do it for us! and 2) The parents should have worked harder.

Which boils down to I don't have to take responsibility for the most vulnerable members of our society.

Moreover, how difficult is it to actually understand the opponent's argument and criticize it fairly, instead of resorting to snark and insults and non sequiturs?

'Cos we've done this millions of times at this point. We understand the libertarian position* and some of us are sick of continually arguing with idiots.

Better?

If you can do this while staying on topic, I'd be grateful.

Uh huh. I looooooove it when some random person (who, btw, isn't quick enough to figure out the sign-in system) tells me how to comment.

*That is, until someone (or in this case, several someones) pull the "No True Libertarian" card.

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 3, 2011 10:04 AM

Audley,

Which boils down to I don't have to (and don't want to) take responsibility for the most vulnerable members of our society.

You accidentally left out that bolded part, so I fixed it for you. :-)

Posted by: mike.reider | August 3, 2011 10:15 AM

"Moreover, how difficult is it to actually understand the opponent's argument and criticize it fairly, instead of resorting to snark and insults and non sequiturs? ("Libertarians are selfish assholes who only care about big business, and I'm a progressive who supports the status quo, and that's why I'm right!", "SOMALIA!") "

I wanted to write something similar. I am in absolute awe at the childish level of snide and remarks to viewpoints outside the local groupthink. There is a way to criticize political viewpoints without resorting to terms like gradeschool children. Or is this too tough of a concept for some people?

As for some absolutely ludicrous points that some people have made,

Somalia a libertarian country?? Wtf.. Do we really need to discuss this one?

And someone mentioned that government does create jobs because they run the military and the post office. I hope they were joking with that statement.

Running a bureaucracy and creating things like Dept of Homeland Sec. ("jobs") is not the same as jobs created by the free market. This is related to the whole point of a 'fair wage' argument is that there is no 'fair wage' when its dictated by the government.

Fair wage is determined by market forces, supply and demand and what people are willing to pay for what, it can never be appropriately determined from the top down.

Someone mentioned that fair wage is the ability to afford basic living and education or something to that extent. Ok, so what is the concrete number in $ per hour or $ per year of such 'fair' wage? Does a guy with 1 child get the same 'fair wage' as a guy with 5 kids, or less because he needs less for his kids' education?

There are some really bad ideas floating around here that place way too much confidence and give way too much credit to government-sponsored solutions and programs and completely abhor free-market capitalism, the most successful and efficient engine of wealth-creation.

Posted by: mike.reider | August 3, 2011 10:25 AM

"The Libertarian position is, "I should not have to pay taxes, as the free market should be able to provide."

Taxes are always couched in terms of, "Why should you take from me to provide benefits for other people? That's coercion."
Am I wrong in this?"

Yes you are. No one is insisting on not paying any taxes. The argument is over the effectiveness of government programs that increase taxes in the name of 'social justice' and the actual results that these programs produce.

Taxes have gone up and costs have increased for every public school student in last 20 years yet performance is subpar. Many here are advocating throwing more money on the problem and increasing taxes in order to generate this money. This is the definition of insanity.

The same goes for other govt-sponsored social welfare programs, the 'war on poverty' etc, etc. Historically, most of these programs tend to produce a massive and bloated govt bureaucracy with little to show in results.

The best way to generate wealth, create upward mobility and empower people is to open a business, not start a government welfare program.

Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies | August 3, 2011 10:29 AM

Mike:

Fair wage is determined by market forces, supply and demand and what people are willing to pay for what, it can never be appropriately determined from the top down.

And this is why I kind of hate libertarians.

So, if market forces demanded that a fair wage* for occupation X is so low that the workers cannot afford rent, that's okay 'cos the market dictated it?

What is the employee's recourse? (And if you say, "herp a derp, find another job!" I'm going to tell you go fuck yourself with the pointy end of a porcupine.) Alternately, if the market depresses the wages for job X, what happens when no one is willing to perform job X?

Anyone who is against even a minimum wage is immediately suspect, in my book. They need to do some reading up on the history of the industrial revolution and how incredibly shitty working conditions and the standard of living were.

... free-market capitalism, the most successful and efficient engine of wealth-creation.

Sure, if you consider the worst wage gap in the industrialized world "successful". If you consider rampant homelessness "efficient". If all you care about is the top earners, then you might have a point.

*I prefer a living wage, but whatever.

Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies | August 3, 2011 10:32 AM

Mike:

The best way to generate wealth, create upward mobility and empower people is to open a business, not start a government welfare program.

You know what? Never mind. You're just regurgitating sound bites that have no basis in reality.

Posted by: contentedreader.com | August 3, 2011 10:35 AM

I still don't understand how the children of poor people get well educated in a libertarian system. And if, as you say, Somalia is not a libertarian country, then I still don't know what countries are using this system, so I can see how the system works in practice.

In fact, I don't have a very clear picture at all of how a libertarian system works in practice.

Posted by: Scorpy1 | August 3, 2011 10:39 AM

The best way to generate wealth, create upward mobility and empower people is to open a business, not start a government welfare program.

See, this is why people think people like you are assholes: a person who needs a welfare program is more concerned with survival than generating wealth.

In our country, we try to take care of people that are less fortunate and who knows, sometime down the road, those recipients might be able to contribute in some way.

In your fairy tale, their value is measured by their wealth generation potential and your level of charity seems to be contingent on what they do for you (which can't possibly be much).

I second KOPD, you're trying to sell your product in the free market of ideas and most everyone here can see that all you've got are rotten apples.

Deal with it.

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 10:49 AM

I am in absolute awe at the childish level of snide and remarks to viewpoints outside the local groupthink

Translation: It's groupthink to care about others! It's totally edgy and cool, though, to say "fuck you, I got mine!".

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 3, 2011 10:53 AM

Yes you are. No one is insisting on not paying any taxes. The argument is over the effectiveness of government programs that increase taxes in the name of 'social justice' and the actual results that these programs produce.

Someone of this very thread indeed said they did not see any reason why they should pay taxes.

Given you lied in only your second sentence, I think the rest of what you say should be ignored.

Posted by: PeteJohn | August 3, 2011 10:56 AM

"Ok maybe you're a shitty cameraman." Well played.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 3, 2011 11:01 AM

its its all jingoism, the idea that markets create wealth, jobs, prosperity and social mobility is a myth!

No idjit fuckwit, what we say is unregulated markets lead to cartels and oligarchies, boom and bust cycles, and oppression and misery for the poor folks. That is what history says.

Then you start your jingoism and preaching the gospel according to "I've got mine, you fuck off".

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 3, 2011 11:05 AM

Reider,

You lied earlier. Why did you do that ?

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 11:07 AM

#327 - too right.

I have a cousin going through this right now. She's just gotten her Masters (req to teach middle school math here). Just gotten married, just bought a house, etc. All the typical things people do.

She's making $25,000 a year. At a job that required a masters to even be considered for.

Perhaps, in about 10 or so years, she'll make somewhere close to $53,000. Which would be great, were it not for the school loans, mortgage, car payments, etc. needing payment in the meantime.

Her new hubs is a gym teacher/coach who makes a lot more (though still hardly a "good" salary). Interesting our priorities, huh.

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 11:12 AM

But take comfort, you've convinced me with your name-calling and snide personal remarks based on absolutely nothing. Stay classy.

OMG! You poor little thing! Someone didn’t immediately agree with you on the internet! A lot of people actually had the nerve to point out how incredibly fucking dumb your argument is! Call out the National Guard, a libertarian is pouting!

If you actually paid your own bills, you’d know how far $50K doesn’t stretch. But you keep pounding that clueless dipshit drum. It suits you.

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | August 3, 2011 11:14 AM

Anri,

Don't forget that the whole free market concept is based on there being over-production, since otherwise there can be no consumer choice. Over-production is not efficient.

Posted by: Scriabin | August 3, 2011 11:15 AM

[Removes lurking cloak]

Mike,

In theory, what you're saying can sort of make sense - using very broad generalizations.

But in reality, the way that corporate governance and the markets have evolved (mmm...evolution) has distorted the basic ideas that you espouse.

The recent/continuing recession is a good example. It was always the basis of the corporate system that shareholders' wealth needed to be maximized. However, from a securities' standpoint, the "add ons" to the basic system (in the form of derivatives and re-bundled bad debt bombs tied to important indicia like real property) that were injected into the system caused a massive loss of confidence and shareholder value (we were all flushed down the toilet).

Then, with the bailout, monies were funnelled into pockets of the stressed companies' officers through golden parachutes, bonuses, etc., despite the fact that many of their actions had actually minimized shareholder value.

As it now stands, the market model (let alone its connections to the insurance industry, banking industry, etc) is such a perversion of the ideal that it REQUIRES stronger government regulation so that the parasites are prevented from wrecking the system. Unfortunately, left to its own devices, the market would eat itself right now.

I'm a Canadian securities lawyer, so I've a bit of a background in this stuff (and our economy is doing pretty damn well with lots of regulation, thank you very much): your "government vs the free market" approach, sadly, doesn't present the pragmatic reality.

Maybe an argument can be made that "big government is sometimes bad". But until people also realize that "perverted free-market model is also bad", and fix it, you need to have a strong government to prevent economic suicide.

(Lurking cloak back on)

Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies | August 3, 2011 11:27 AM

contentedreader:

I asked how the children of poor people would get a good education in a libertarian system, because I don't understand that

Can I add to your question? I would like to know how a libertarian education system would ensure that all children are educated.

Or is this not a priority?

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 11:29 AM

You answered my questions by explaining that you are not a jingoist, and by saying that, in your opinion, public school teachers in the United States are paid adequately for their work.

Which, really, is another telling aspect of glibertarian narcissism. Its fair because he said its fair!

Did he bother to ask any teachers, or did he simply and arbitrarily decide that it must be a fair salary for all the training and work required because . . .. uh . . . he said so?

Afterall, NO ONE has medical problems, or children, and every single city, town, village, etc. has EXACTLY the same cost of living standard. If they can't make $53,000 a year work, it's their own fault!

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 3, 2011 11:49 AM

the mean salary for a US public school teacher is $53,000, which is not a 'shitty' salary by any metric.

For the amount of work they do, and the level of responsibility accorded to them, it actually is.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 3, 2011 11:51 AM

I asked how the children of poor people would get a good education in a libertarian system, because I don't understand that.

Self-directed learning, naturally.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 3, 2011 11:59 AM

Can I add to your question? I would like to know how a libertarian education system would ensure that all children are educated.

On-the-job training, of course.

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 3, 2011 12:03 PM

I think it was Brownian who recently mused that libertarianism assumes:
1. people will do what is in their best interest
2. libertarianism is in their best interest

And yet we have so few libertarians. I've probably mangled it, but still, it's almost as if one or both of those premises are flawed.

Posted by: PeteJohn | August 3, 2011 12:27 PM

@Mike RE: salaries

Here where I teach many districts average salary is ~$45,000. It's not minimum wage, clearly, but it's not a ton either. Not much wiggle room if a family member comes down with a major, life-threatening illness.

Furthermore, consider what one has to do to become a teacher. Many teachers have M.A.E. or M.A.T. degrees (Master of Arts in Ed/Teaching) and spend a great deal of time during their summers going to workshops and taking additional post-graduate classes. So, teachers are very well-educated, for the most part, and work for a salary that is only-barely enough.

In addition, during the 9 months of the school year (and around here it's slowly becoming 10 months b/c of snow days and ever-shrinking summers), teachers (I'm using my experience as a secondary teacher) are up around 5:30, at work by 7, work at school until 3, come home, plan lessons, grade, and then maybe watch an hour of TV and conk out at 10. That's not even close to the schedule of someone who also coaches or sponsors an activity or club. And for all that, with all the education most districts require teachers to have, a salary below that of a person with less education is fair? If the way to success in a libertarian fairyland is hard work, why do teachers, who work really fucking hard, not deserve better salaries?

Posted by: TheBigD | August 3, 2011 12:32 PM

contended.reader @ 339:

Check out Pakistan! Low taxes on the rich, huge income disparity, rich people with private security--pretty much everything the Libertarians/Tea Party/Trad GOP say is awesome. There is at least the appearance of government in Pakistan, which is what they say they want. Not total elimination of government, just smaller and low taxes...

Here's a great op-ed with the details:

http://tinyurl.com/3bfxslw

Of course, the very people who espouse the policies that are seen in action in Pakistan (and Somalia) always rush to claim that is not what they mean, except that it is.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 3, 2011 12:34 PM

@mike.reider

Free markets are the best and most efficient tools in generating wealth, improving prosperity and creating jobs that a society can have.

See, to me, this just sounds like a Christer saying "All morality comes from GOD stoopid athiest!" You worship economic markets instead of God, but it's no less a religious faith for that.

Posted by: mike.reider | August 3, 2011 12:38 PM

@ comments by several teachers

heres my question, considering the mean salary of public school teachers at 53k, not extravagant or good paying salary granted, but not minimum wage either (lets not even take into account health/dental/etc benefits)

what would you say is a 'fair' wage for teachers? How would you determine this? I've been asking this several times, what is a 'fair' wage? How much per hour or year is a fair wage?

How much should teachers make if not the current generalized average of 53k? And should teachers living in NYC area with higher cost of living make more or less than teachers living in Topeka KS?

I understand the argument that our teachers are underpaid, and I agree with this to some extent, but I can make the same case for a myriad of other professions that also feel rightly or wrongly that they are underpaid as well, and they are just as passionate about their jobs as teachers are.

The problem with this whole issue is that the core focus on poor student performance has been aimed primarily at teachers, teacher performance, teacher pay, etc, when its an obviously much more complex issue than that.

Posted by: Shriketastic | August 3, 2011 12:44 PM

The way things are for me currently, $45k a year, or even up to $55k, would be wonderful.. and yet, people are struggling with it? Somebody must not have told me something, because that just doesn't seem right.

You are single, living at home with your mother, with no dependants.

You don't pay rent or utilities. You don't pay for groceries beyond what you eat, maybe. Those two things *alone* can really eat into a budget, even for a person living alone.

Now, if that person has a family with one or more children, the bills become *much* higher. Higher rent to pay for a bigger home, more food bills, higher utilities, high health-insurance, more gas to drive the family arround, and so on.

Posted by: Shriketastic | August 3, 2011 12:47 PM

Hell, imagine paying all of those rents and utilities and gas and food and so on *with* the 1000odd dollars a month of student loans.

45, or 53k a year isn't the starting salary. It's the average salary. If you start as a teacher you'll be making closer to 30K than 40K a year.

For workdays that can last for 14-16 hours, not to mention weekend and holiday times which you may need to grade/create lesson plans.

Posted by: pteryxx | August 3, 2011 1:03 PM

re Shriketastic:

If you start as a teacher you'll be making closer to 30K than 40K a year.

Also, don't forget that 50% or so burn out before the five-year mark. They never make it to the good salaries, but they still have to pay off those student loans, while starting at ground level in some other career.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/O.jullMj0I2VvJaxMMVeNKSfOPf73voLSxJAe9PdlOWwi8Y-#258ec | August 3, 2011 1:28 PM

I have been trying to understand what libertarianism is and what is meant by it and am not having any luck at all. I do react to what seems to me the irrationality I hear though so maybe it is something in me that prevents me form understanding.

From what I hear generally is that it is about the freedom of the individual to seek his own wants and needs without being controlled by others.
They favor the individuals ability to make their own decisions their own agreements.
I do not understand how that idea is in conflict with government.
If individuals are allowed to join together and form public corporations and share ownership through common stock to promote their interests why is it not the same for people to join together to form a government to promote their interests as decided by them?
In the same way is not that what any society does?

Because what I hear is really more like "I can do anything I want you can't tell me what should do but I can tell you"
That you can not organize together " to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"

They want these things but do not want to pay for them. They want the benefits of a stable prosperous healthy educated society but are unwilling to be a part of one and not contribute what is required, they want a free ride and complain about oppressive government.

They would complain that if you compared this situation to the story of the grasshopper and the ants that they would more closely resemble the individual Grasshopper than the organized collective of the ants.

uncle frogy

Posted by: kjhoulihan | August 3, 2011 1:53 PM

He was a crap cameraman. Jumping into the middle of an interview like that - who does he think he is? Just point the camera asshole!

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 2:12 PM

I'm going to jump back in. I have two degrees and I'm working on two more. I have a BA and an MFA, and am working on a second MA and PhD. I am well educated and I've been teaching college for four years (composition and writing courses, with a self-assigned heavy component of critical thinking, for the obvious reasons.)

I've never made more than $16k for it, despite carrying multiple classes, because colleges do not have to hire you at full time and prefer to hire you on at a class or two: just enough employment to pay about half my bills.

The college I work for gives my home phone out. I get phone calls on the weekends, at 1 am, any time one of my students feels like contacting me. My students are semi-literate to illiterate, with maybe one student per class who is literate enough for me not to have to explain what a sentence is. I have to teach them things they should have learned in high school, including things like how to find what a word means, in addition to the regular English 101 and 102 pedagogy.

If I had to give an estimate for how much time I work, it would work out this way: I spend 12 hours a week in the classroom (long classes). I spend roughly another twenty hours a week meeting students (I am not paid for this; I feel compassion for them), looking at student drafts and doing research for them, since the school which employs me has not given them access to ANY research databases. I also routinely go to meetings at that school, and to professional meetings for enrichment. They require that I publish or perform professional enrichment every three months, so I'm often scrabbling to line up something else which counts as professional enrichment. On weeks where I'm not meeting students, I'm in some sort of professional enrichment or editing something to send out.

My students, almost uniformly, have serious personal issues, including coming to class after obviously being beaten by a partner, coming to class tweaking, coming to class and breaking down because they've been raped or assaulted or their home has been repossessed and they're now living in their car. I have a handful of soldiers with PTSD, who the VA has not given any sort of counseling. They are prone to blurting out expressions like the following: "I had to shoot kids in Iraq. It was the kid or me." That, BTW, was apropos of nothing, disrupting a lecture.

For this, I make (as of now) $12k/yr gross. I call bullshit on the idea that all teachers make the national average. I'm essentially an adjunct; I teach one class (which currently has 30 people in it.) I also call bullshit on the idea that teachers have time off. In my time off, I go to classes for the next degrees.

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 2:19 PM

Too bad mikeypoo tucked tail and ran like a coward. I'd love to hear him justify his idiotic stance after that, mouthyb.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/S8pO0dgN3vZCcp6GFuJzIu14IBqIw1hq7Kw-#24131 | August 3, 2011 3:01 PM

oofreerefilloo@355:

The way things are for me currently, $45k a year, or even up to $55k, would be wonderful.. and yet, people are struggling with it? Somebody must not have told me something, because that just doesn't seem right.

The way teacher salaries work at least in the district I worked in for a year, there's a pay schedule where your pay is decided by a) how many years you've worked for the district, b) what sort of degree you have, and c) the amount of professional development you've undergone. Professional development are unpaid workshops on various aspects of education, for example there was a required one dealing with a teacher's responsibilities concerning abused students and the Department of Social Services.

Starting salary in my district (which is just on the suburban side of the suburban/urban divide) for anyone without at least a masters was $30,000 a year. I was able to pay rent at a decent place in Boston and feed myself, but I wasn't really saving any money. If I had stayed the next year I would have gone up to $36,000.

The district capped out at something like $80,000 a year for someone who had worked there for 10 years, had a PhD, and maxed out their professional development points. A master's degree is actually required to work more than 5 years in the district IIRC, so there's no avoiding having to pay for grad school on a salary somewhere between $30,000 and $45,000.

If you do the math the median salary is probably quite close to the national -- around $50,000 a year. But that doesn't mean you automatically make that much when you become a teacher. You can count on earning the difference between the starting salary and the median. On the other hand, this is a suburb JUST outside of Boston (there's even a subway stop) and the cost of living is rather high. My mother was paying for my car insurance at the time, otherwise I probably wouldn't have been breaking even until the following year, after which the mandatory pay increase would probably just about cover it.

I can't even imagine trying to start a family and a teaching job at the same time. Cheers to all the teachers reading this, you're way tougher than I am.

Posted by: CookieCutter | August 3, 2011 3:09 PM

Can anyone believe this over-priveledged douche Matt Damon in this video?

*HE*, the multi-millionare, isn't driven by salary concerns, but by love for his job. What about the janitor that cleans the toilets at the studio where he works? Just looooves to clean the toilets? This was his dream job? And the guy flipping burgers? "Mommy, when I grow up, I want to ask people 'Do you want fries with that?'"

I worked for a time as a programmer for an energy retailer. I had to take a pager home that would usally go off at about 3 am requiring me to fix an issue before 8 am. I got paid well, nearly 6 figures, and not only did they need every bit of that to keep me, but it wasn't enough because after less than a year I was job hunting. What could possibly influence anyone, other than a large stack of money, to be perpetually put under the gun to solve technical issues in the middle of the night? And this after a workday that was usually in excess of 10 hours anyway.

Its money. Pretending it is anything else, like the love of waking at 3 to a buzzing noise is ridiculous.

People work for all kinds of reasons. To claim that it is, always and everywhere just love of the job that motivates peole is ridiculous, aristocratic priveldged bullshit. Thanks, PZ, for showing us what a jackass Matt Damon is.

Maybe, when I have millions, I too will sit around and spout off that people shouldn't or don't work for money. Hell, I would be able to afford to do it.

And are there really people on a skeptical website falling for this line of crap? No one checks statistics to see how salary affects people's job decisions, and instead just takes this clowns anecdotes as holy writ?

Does anyone want to bet with me that doubling or tripling teacher's salaries will cause any supposed "teacher shortage" to dissapear in a heartbeat? Would any cupcakes want to take me up on a bet like that? I would offer odds to anyone if such an experiment were possible. Somehow, I suspect all the drooling Damon fans here would decline, however.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 3:15 PM

CookieCutter: If you read the thread, you'd see that we talk quite a bit about money and a liveable wage. It's not a condition anyone here is disregarding. It is not, however, the only necessary condition. Considering that teachers are often chided for 'wasting' the public's money and the interviewer actually begins her interview by trying to get Damon to agree that there are many teachers who are bad or wasteful, I'm pretty comfortable with his mocking the line of thought.

That line of thought, BTW, runs: teachers are wasteful and bad/teachers are greedy and don't deserve to be paid what they are. I might have mocked the idea that teachers are paid a liveable wage slightly more than Damon did, with his scoffing about teachers being paid well for a job which the interviewer tried to paint as somewhat easy, but that's just me.

You should try reading the thread to catch up on the conversation.

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 3, 2011 3:32 PM

@376

Cool story, bro.

Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings | August 3, 2011 3:43 PM

CookieCutter:

What about the janitor that cleans the toilets at the studio where he works? Just looooves to clean the toilets? This was his dream job? And the guy flipping burgers? "Mommy, when I grow up, I want to ask people 'Do you want fries with that?'"

Hey, you know what? Why don't we work hard to get them living wages, too?

It's not just teachers. Libertarians and Teabaggers don't give a fuck about anyone not them. Minimum wage? Not on their watch. Collective bargaining? Not if they can help it. These pesky child labor laws? Gone.

A bit of help from the state when you can't afford to eat? Fuck that.

Right now, though, teachers are being essentially shat on by teabagger governors and pinheads like the two featured above. They are being told to suck it up, to give up collective bargaining and tenure (which is not a guarantee of a job -- just more of a guarantee than, "Get your resume in order once a year, because you won't know if you're hired back on until it's too late to look for work elsewhere.")

My mom worked for peanuts for years, barely making a living wage, because she had to pay for post-graduate schooling just to stay employed, all on a starting wage of less than $30k. Meanwhile, she was purchasing science journals on her own for her students, because the school couldn't afford them. She was picking up supplies out of her own pocket, and building demonstration experiments to match her personal budget.

Yeah. I support janitors too. I was one for a time, in college. The guy I worked for took pride in his job. He did it to make a living, sure. But that didn't mean he was motivated because he was fucking scared of losing his job, which is what these two fucktards in the video were suggesting. He did it because it was a job that needed done, and people were willing to pay him for it.

Everyone deserves a living wage that provides a decent quality of life, not just teachers.

But that certainly doesn't mean we should stand around while teabaggers fuck over our current teachers.

Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings | August 3, 2011 3:46 PM

mouthyb:

I bow to your skill in verse. My wife taught ESL while she was in Americorps. Your poem evokes those memories for me.

Posted by: JoeKaistoe | August 3, 2011 4:04 PM

@376

A more apt comparison than your, "Everyone does what they love" theory would be that people with the intelligence to get the degrees required to be teachers could very likely have gotten degrees for professions that pay significantly better.

Thus, teachers tend to gravitate towards that job because they want to teach, rather than a lust for money.

Do I do my job for money? Yes, sort of. Money will significantly factor into whether I take a job offer or not.

However, with my skillset, I could have taken something that required less education, and that I would be making more money now than I am.

Money isn't everything. Go figure.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 3, 2011 4:12 PM

It was not the government that abolished slavery but citizens. The abolitionists were not a government department, but a group of citizens who determined to end slavery through writings and non-violence.

And what the hell is government if not a group of citizens united together to work towards a common end?

What the hell is a government department if not a group of citizens working together towards a common set of goals?

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 3, 2011 4:21 PM

What about the janitor that cleans the toilets at the studio where he works? Just looooves to clean the toilets? This was his dream job? And the guy flipping burgers?

This has got to be among the dumbest arguments I have yet heard.

I do not believe there are university degrees in janitorial services, or majors and minors in burger flipping. I do not believe that people seeking employment as janitors or burger-flippers need to pay huge tuition fees, sacrifice years of time training, and obtain professional degrees before even being allowed to interview for those jobs.

Professional, skilled jobs are self-chosen simply because it is necessary to commit, a priori, to a long period of expensive training, before even being eligible to be hired. Only people with at least some interest in such jobs are going to be willing to voluntarily devote the time and expense needed to prepare for these jobs.

And among all the various professional jobs out there, I do not know of any that pay as poorly as teachers are, for the same amount of training and expense, or are respected less.

Posted by: No One | August 3, 2011 4:24 PM

I've taught at private colleges. They don't let go of the "bottom 10%". They let go of the most "expensive" teachers, the full time, health insurance receiving, experienced teachers. And then do a lateral dump of the workload on whoever is left. So the message is clear, don't become a dedicated, full time teacher, or try to achieve a higher pay rate. You'll be the first to be canned when the stock price of the school is down.

Posted by: strange gods before me ॐ homintern radfem | August 3, 2011 4:39 PM

I was waiting for this to dissolve into nothing but libertarianism. I see it's practically there now. So:

Looks like we have to go over Why Libertarians Are Bad People 101 again.

There have been a lot of reductions in personal freedoms in the United States. On this, libertarians, left-liberals, greens, progressives, and socialists agree. Some of the libertarians have a kind of zealotry that makes them very single-minded about getting their message out, and it is in general a simplistic message so it's easy to communicate. So there's a generation coming of age on the internet who don't have strong views on economics but who know that they don't feel free, and the libertarian message is the loudest one that resonates with this feeling.

The problem with libertarianism is that economic inequality is not conducive to freedom.

This much is recognized by the undeniably capitalist Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine, who jointly publish the Failed States Index, which counts uneven economic development along group lines as one of the indicators of dangerous instability. On this particular measure, by the way, the United States scores more than half as bad as Zimbabwe.

There's more detail from the Equality Trust on how economic equality buys us all the kind of society that is conducive to freedom.

Right-wing economic policies, though, tend to favor the consolidation of wealth, at the expense of other freedoms.

This is short-sighted. In the long run it's not even safe for the rich, because highly unequal societies eventually collapse into violence. Tim Wise gives a good description of how privilege ultimately hurts those who have it; he's talking about white privilege but you can easily see the parallels to class privilege.

Conservatives are famously short-sighted, wouldn't you agree? Isn't that one of the reasons libertarians don't want to be identified with them? Being tough on crime and tough on terror and tough on any foreign country that looks funny is short-sighted. Yet libertarian economic policies, in line with other right-wingers' economic policies, are similarly self-destructive.

Nobody is really free in the chaos and violence of a failed state. But even in a relatively stable state, the poor live under threat of violence and coercion.

And so today in the United States, even if we could get immediately rid of the PATRIOT Act and the war on drugs and the border walls and the cameras and the high-tech police cruisers and all the other obvious manifestations of the police state, and the corporate lobbying and the military-industrial complex and the military bases around the world and the constant state of undeclared war—and we should get rid of all these things immediately, but even if we did—life in the United States, for a substantial portion of the citizens, would still be more about violence and fear than freedom and opportunity.

And there is no laissez-faire policy that will address this reality.

Posted by: strange gods before me ॐ homintern radfem | August 3, 2011 4:41 PM

Libertarians were conservative and self-centered racists before the Tea Party came along.

Lew Rockwell's site, a major driver of libertarian opinion, is strongly opposed to civil rights. Libertarian Lew Rockwell lies about history to defend Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Libertarian Steven Yates calls the response to Lott's pro-Dixiecrat comments the "lynching of an uppity Southerner." Seriously. He seriously compared complaints about Lott's words to Klan terrorism. He then race-baits about "affirmative action hires" and, typical neo-Confederate that he is, whines that the Tenth Amendment "was thrown out when Lincoln forcibly prevented a group of states from seceding and forming a new republic." On and on about "the covert warfare that philosophical materialists [have] been waging against Christianity" and "basic property rights and freedom of association."

Remember the Nazi apologia by Pat Buchanan?

There's a reason it's still up at Lew Rockwell's and Justin Raimondo's websites, both libertarians long before the Tea Party.

The honest way for libertarians to argue is to admit that many libertarians fight against women's reproductive choice, and many libertarians are neo-Confederates who support segregation. Then, from that honest position, you can try to argue why they should be ostracized by the libertarian movement. (Then, from that idealistic position, you can start dealing with the reality of why they haven't been ostracized, and instead have so much influence within the movement.)

Posted by: Justin | August 3, 2011 4:44 PM

Hey Mike,

Better yet show me an example of libertarianism that works.

Go on, I'm waiting.

Posted by: strange gods before me ॐ homintern radfem | August 3, 2011 4:45 PM

Let's take a look at some of the Libertarian Party platform's most evil parts:

«1.4 Abortion

Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.»

That stance on abortion is such a cop-out. As in most cases, doing nothing is taking sides. If in large parts of the US, abortions are practically not available, are you really giving women a free choice in any meaningful way?

This is why libertarianism is such bullshit. Libertarians say they want to give people freedom to choose, but they never want to give people options.

And when they say "government should be kept out of the matter", they mean no public funding, and they mean removal of current funding for the generalized women's health clinics which currently exist.

Those clinics currently can't use public funding to perform abortions (which is a problem, a problem which libertarians refuse to help with), but the buildings can exist and their staffs can be maintained for other health services with public funding. Remove the funding, and many of them couldn't stay in operation, and would have to close.

Libertarianism would make abortion even less available than it already is, which is pretty darn unavailable, particularly in rural areas.

Our resident economist has more to say about their platform.

Posted by: strange gods before me ॐ homintern radfem | August 3, 2011 4:51 PM

The leaders of the libertarian movement oppose reproductive choice, and work hard to reduce women's rights.

Ron Paul and Rand Paul actively attempt to outlaw abortion, and these two guys are the most influential libertarians in the USA, major drivers of libertarian opinion.

Ron Paul is sometimes mistakenly assumed to oppose federal anti-choice legislation, preferring that anti-choice measures take place at the state level. But this is a falsehood. He votes to restrict choice at the federal level. He voted to outlaw the intact dilation and extraction procedure, federally, while complaining that the ban did not go far enough:

«For example, 14G in the “Findings” section of this bill states, “...such a prohibition will draw a bright line that clearly distinguishes abortion and infanticide...” The question I pose in response is this: Is not the fact that life begins at conception the main tenet advanced by the pro-life community? By stating that we draw a “bright line” between abortion and infanticide, I fear that we simply reinforce the dangerous idea underlying Roe v. Wade, which is the belief that we as human beings can determine which members of the human family are “expendable,” and which are not.»

The two Pauls are demonstrably representative of the libertarian movement's majority.

Compare Ron Paul's campaign with Bob Barr's campaign.

Paul got 11,817 votes in Iowa, Barr got 4,590. Paul 18,308 New Hampshire, Barr 2,217. Paul 54,475 Michigan, Barr 23,716. Paul got 6,084 in Nevada caucuses, for fuck's sake, Barr got 4,263 in a normal vote. Paul 16,154 in South Carolina, Barr 7,283. And so on.

The Ron Paul movement are the typical American-style right-wing libertarians.

A pro-choice libertarian is an anomaly.

Posted by: Justin | August 3, 2011 4:53 PM

Anyhow back to talking about Matt Damon, here's a nice compilation of his best political unscripted moments:

Posted by: pteryxx | August 3, 2011 4:55 PM

@mouthyb:

They require that I publish or perform professional enrichment every three months, so I'm often scrabbling to line up something else which counts as professional enrichment. On weeks where I'm not meeting students, I'm in some sort of professional enrichment or editing something to send out.

If there's any justice to be had, that poem should count as professional enrichment.

@No One: good point. In many if not most corporations and industries, high turnover's a good thing because rookie employees get paid less and don't organize. It's also profitable to maintain a large, desperate applicant pool. However, this sacrifices expertise, and thus quality of work - which isn't such a big deal in fast food, but it's rather important in conveying knowledge and competence to students trying to better themselves.

@Cookie: I haven't been a janitor, but I've been an animal tech, slinging dirty cages and racks of water bottles and garbage bags full of dead mice. I worked that job through both my degrees and turned pro. I rather enjoy it. Having a dirty job doesn't mean someone must be oppressed, desperate, uneducated scum.

In fact, where I worked, it was seen as vital to keep the animal techs' workload from getting too high, because if they were too stressed and hurried, or if the experienced veterans got frustrated and quit, mistakes were made and research could be lost, or animals suffer. But teachers handle other human beings, not mice.

Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies | August 3, 2011 4:59 PM

Mike:

When you are done figuring this out, you can get busy figuring out 'fair' wages for transit workers, construction workers, social scientists and anyone else who works really really hard but you feel doesn't make enough to meet basic needs. Let get some figures going.

Okay, first off, there's no need to insult people who work really really hard, as you put it. Every job should pay enough to live off of.

I'm sure you work way harder than someone who's working in retail (or a transit worker or a janitor or whatever). So, they don't deserve anything higher than the minimum that their company is willing to pay, yes? *eyeroll*

A quick googling turns up this handy-dandy Living Wage Calculator, which gives you the per hourly wage that someone would need to make in order to meet basic living expenses. It is broken down by county and state (I assume because *gasp!* the standard of living differs across the country.) You should consider this a base-line.

(I'm still working on the teacher question. Considering the amount of education that they need just to apply for a teaching position, they need to be paid much more than a living wage.)

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 5:04 PM

pteryxx: Sadly, they're a bit iffy on the creative stuff as professional development. For instance, reading locally is not good enough, and teaching workshops locally is iffy at best. After all, it's creative.

And we all know those aren't valuable skills. *grumble*

Posted by: Illuminata, féministes fin de jeu | August 3, 2011 5:09 PM

au revoir, dont choke on the hate froth.

Translation: I got my ass handed to me, time to flounce! Its manly to tuck tail and RUN!

Posted by: pteryxx | August 3, 2011 5:12 PM

@mouthyb: That's it, I'm sending your workplace a job application entirely in papier-mache with taxidermy accents.

Posted by: No One | August 3, 2011 5:16 PM

mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances Author

Living wage for my family size, where I am, is $60k/year.

How dare you sir? Think of the stockholders!

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 3, 2011 5:19 PM

more vitriol, name calling and straw-men.

Must be looking in the mirror. You have presented absolutely no citations to confirm you aren't another jingoist. All jingoists can do when faced with facts, is to tone troll like you are doing. It is a loser argument, as you so amply demonstrate. Being polite is irrelevant compared to the facts. Which you lack. Opinion =/= fact.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 5:22 PM

No One: Oh, I've got thoughts for the stockholders. They're making $88k/month off my class alone, but are too cheap to spring for research databases.

Oh, I've got thoughts for them.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 5:30 PM

oofreerefilloo: Why would that be shooting yourself in the foot? *confused face*

Posted by: oofreerefilloo | August 3, 2011 5:37 PM

@mouthyb, #422

If there's one thing I've learned from being on the Internet, it's that people love to disagree with you simply because they can. And they love pouring on the vitriol, again, because they can. Opinions and ideas are not sacred. The Internet is anarchy of the mind.

Not that that's a bad thing, but it does make self expression rather trying, since you will almost always be called upon to defend yourself.

This thread in particular has seen more than enough back and forth, and descent into ad hominem, so that people are mentally primed to continue in that vein; even if the individual they're 'debating' with isn't posting, they'll run on that same steam with anyone else who posts in the thread. That's why I figured I'd be shooting myself in the foot; someone might disagree with me.

Posted by: Justin | August 3, 2011 5:43 PM

Defending one's ideas is a great way to develop ideological consistency, and to shed ideas that don't coincide with your core beliefs.

Posted by: No One | August 3, 2011 5:48 PM

oofreerefilloo

Given the tension in this thread, I'm probably shooting myself in the foot by posting,

No your not.

Since we are "testifying", here is why I like teaching. If I am allowed to, I assign projects that are driven by the students themselves. I do mid course corrections so the thing doesn't veer off into chaos, and I make sure that all the course objectives are met. Mind you I can't always achieve this but it's my ideal.

The other thing is the teachers. You've got this incredible pool of knowledge hanging out in the teachers lounge. I'm constantly visiting other class rooms, and exchanging information and ideas.

Those two things, the teachers and the students.

Because I'm sure not in it for the meetings.

Posted by: mouthyb, ouvrier sur les connaissances | August 3, 2011 5:56 PM

No One: Ha! I also allow them to pick their projects and assign little projects leading up to the big one. And I do that same thing where I go talk to other teachers.

Because I, too, am not in it for the meetings.

Posted by: timgueguen | August 3, 2011 6:16 PM

I find Mr. Reider's crack about people starting their own businesses rather than taking welfare amusing given how many businesses fail in the first 5 years of their existence. One US study claims 50% of small businesses are still in operation after 5 years. The same study claims that only 39% of businesses make a profit during their lifetime, 30% percent break even, and 30% lose money. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/news/coladvice/ask/sa990930.htm

Of course these are people who in some fashion have or acquire the resources to start a business, which may be rather a hard thing to do if you don't have an income or are on welfare. Starting a business to escape welfare also has the problem that in many places any income you make results in an equal reduction in your welfare payment, meaning you may be no further ahead even if you somehow do start a business that makes money.

Posted by: pteryxx | August 3, 2011 6:26 PM

Since we are "testifying", here is why I like teaching. If I am allowed to, I assign projects that are driven by the students themselves. I do mid course corrections so the thing doesn't veer off into chaos, and I make sure that all the course objectives are met. Mind you I can't always achieve this but it's my ideal.

...Actually that sounds a lot like being a Dungeon Master. >_>

Posted by: No One | August 3, 2011 6:36 PM

pteryxx

Since we are "testifying", here is why I like teaching. If I am allowed to, I assign projects that are driven by the students themselves. I do mid course corrections so the thing doesn't veer off into chaos, and I make sure that all the course objectives are met. Mind you I can't always achieve this but it's my ideal.

...Actually that sounds a lot like being a Dungeon Master. >_>

That crossed with Dr Moreau. A couple of my students are mutant fuzzy/furries. Toss in the steampunks, gamers and anime buffs and we have a well rounded crew.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 3, 2011 6:40 PM

more vitriol, name calling and straw-men.

Mr. Reider here shows a greater degree of self-awareness than I expected him capable of.

Posted by: Athyco | August 3, 2011 7:32 PM

I taught for 33 years: two in Mississippi, one in Florida, thirty in Alabama.

In each summer after the Mississippi and Florida school years, I got a job that paid more than teaching, had far less stress than teaching, gave me primarily adults to speak to and socialize with during the day, didn't require me to take the work home after 5 p.m., put only three or four others as my "bosses" during working hours, and had positions available that allowed me to be upwardly mobile as I wished. The last employer offered a sizeable salary increase and assistance for law school if I would stay with the firm during school and for as many years afterward as schooling took.

I cannot explain to you why I felt "teacher" through and through. Before trying it, I had mimed gagging when someone told me I'd be good at it. I can tell you that one year there was a hugely dissatisfying occasion involving incentive--the year that metrics were set so that teachers could have paid substitutes then meet by subject area to hear and make presentations given by our peers. Scores of us met the requirements, sent in an outline of the presentation we'd like to make, waited for our day to be announced. Ooops, too many of us; the county can't afford the substitutes. Those of us who had personal leave days volunteered to use those, to give the extra to another teacher. Still too expensive. Then, we said, just give us places and access to the tech we'd need to make our presentations, and we'll do it during the summer! Naaaah, we're awfully busy, you know. That hurt almost as much as when a state agency chose the top five winners in a poster contest (prizes: trip to D.C.) and then "disqualified" the bottom three. They matched the posters to the identifying info and found that all five had been done by my students. We'd sent ten; they pulled out the other five before choosing the remaining three. (I can't think anything but "idiot" about the woman who told me this.)

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | August 3, 2011 8:19 PM

Sheesh sorry I missed the fun.

Big hat tips to SGBM on the fact smackdowns.

Posted by: strange gods before me ॐ homintern radfem | August 3, 2011 8:54 PM

Thanks, Rev.

And now I will grind it in.

Did you folks hear that they've recently studied the psychology of 10566 libertarians? It turns out libertarians experience less love; they even love their own families less than non-libertarians love theirs.

http://keenetrial.com/blog/2010/11/17/whosthelibertarian/

Libertarians tend to be male. And they score lowest of any group on measures of empathy.

“They are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

“…libertarians look somewhat like liberals, but assign lower importance to values related to the welfare or suffering of others.”

“…libertarian independence from others is associated with weaker loving feelings toward friends, family, romantic partners, and generic others… Libertarians were the outliers.”

“Self-Direction was the most strongly endorsed value for all three groups, but for libertarians the difference was quite large. If libertarians have indeed elevated self-direction as their foremost guiding principle, then it makes sense that they see the needs and claims of others, whether based on liberal or conservative principles, as a threat to their primary value.”

The part I've bolded is of interest because libertarians often claim that they are just as loving, just as caring, full of just as much empathy as anyone else.

It turns out that this is demonstrably, empirically false.

(This is not to say that they're deliberately lying about it. Everyone's ultimately alone in their own heads, right? And since they are lacking in empathy, they have a harder time understanding other people than the rest of us do, and so they have a harder time understanding that others really do feel more empathy, more care, more love.)

Full text free at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1665934

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | August 3, 2011 8:56 PM

wow

Not shocking, but

wow

Posted by: Kagehi | August 3, 2011 11:54 PM

Actually I had a thought on how to explain the concept of government as "business" actually works, under the current, "cut everything" model. Interestingly, its *exactly* the same as what you describe for a real business:

1. Cut products/services/choices, to save money. I.e., only sell silver iPods, because not giving the customer a choice means less cost to manufacture them.

2. Keep the "high level" managerial employees, even as you fire the ones you don't need any longer, now that there are fewer services and choices, and give them raises, besides, even though they haven't really done anything to earn them.

3. Use the decrease in employees/choices/services/products, to lower the "cost" (i.e. taxes) needed for those last three, even though the people that most benefit from doing so are ones you are giving things away to for free, as promotions, giving special "bulk" deals to, or trading products with, as a means to make both rich at the same time, and not the single citizen that is just looking for a new pair of shoes (or money to buy food for their baby). After all, you can make more from "big" sales, than you can selling a million 5 cent things, which you just eliminated from your product list.

4. Ignore the fact that the thousand, tens of thousands, or in the case of the government, potentially, hundreds of thousands, that no longer work there, do to the above three steps, won't be able to "buy" the products you still sell.

Oh, right, and 5. if you are a Libertarian, assume that the "market" will somehow fill the resulting void.

Its precisely why corporations all suck, for both their customers *and* their employees. And it is why doing the same thing to a government, whose "product" is protection, safety, health, education, and other "universals" we cannot afford to have dictated by whether or not someone "wants" us to use "their" money to distribute the "product" to other people, is completely bloody insane. I don't "need" my kid to buy someone's new iPod clone. I *do* need them to know the difference between a hamster and a dumpster, or a 401k version Warhammer 40k, never mind a dime and a dime bag, and why it bloody matters which one is which. They will get this from public "education", not by "buying" it from the lowest damn bidder, like someone trying to find a cheap pair of socks, and ending up with *literally* the cheapest, most useless "product" possible (heh, at least the new education come free, with holes, so you don't have to go through the trouble of wearing new ones in them..).

Posted by: UpAgainstTheRopes | August 4, 2011 4:32 AM

Holy sh!t! After 449 comments no ones mind was changed.

Posted by: Kagehi | August 4, 2011 5:52 AM

The US health grade may or may not have anything to do with its health insurance. Americans are obese, for one thing. Lack of exercise and eating too much food cause health problems which many Americans look to a pill to fix. It is easier to take Lipitor than to eat a proper diet.

Yeah, but you can "sell" the American public on buying more insurance to do with health issues. Try selling them the idea that they need to exercise, eat less, and stop putting vending machines in schools, and you will get:

1. Right wingers screaming about socialist controls over their rights and choices, as well as some set of idiots on the left falling for it.

2. A dozen groups of idiots "selling" pseudoscience, which claims that eating fat, and not exercising, is *not* the problem, but that obesity is caused by genetics, nothing else, cancer is also genetic, or caused by (insert toxins/estrogen/flavor of the week excuse), and diabetes is *actually* caused, unlike you know, thousand of years ago, when the term was created, not by people over eating sugar rich foods, and sitting on their asses, but by "artificial sweeteners!".

In short, what the dietician says is wrong, because it makes people feel as lazy as they are, guilty as they should be, and bad people/parents are they really are, for not eating healthy, exercising, and encouraging their kids to do the same. Its all the other crank "experts" that are right, and you just need to buy the right pills, vitamins, food suppliments, or stop eating things that contain the color blue, or something, and it will all go away. And if it doesn't, at least we have expensive, over priced, unaffordable, but better than any place else, health care, to take care of what ever problem isn't solve by the total bullshit we bought, because we didn't "like" the truth.

Every time someone says that "anything" health related should involve getting people off their asses, or eating better, never mind just about any and all other health issues, some moron is either their selling bullshit, which feels better, markets well, and sells, unlike the reality. And, more than half the time, if something is healthy for us, there is an equal number of con artists selling us lies about how we shouldn't do it, via fear, paranoia and/or lies (like the whole, "How dare someone that knows something in the government suggest masturbation isn't a bad thing?!", bullshit). After all, there are some things that some people believe we **must** be sold, for our own good, despite the fact that the whole goal of the sales campaign is to make us feel like shit (the flip side of all the, "Buy this powdered zub root, it may cure cancer!", gibberish).

Yes, our bad eating and lack of exercise, etc., is part of the problem. But that still doesn't explain all of the BS going on with costs. Probably not even half of it.

And.. as I said, there is no way you will, in the current "idea market", get by with selling people the idea that they need to stop eating, as a nation, 50 billion pounds of chocolate a year (probably the wrong number, but I know its one that sounds like its part of the Federal budget discussion, and not candy bars), and walk between buildings, instead of driving their car 15 feet to a new parking space, so they don't have to walk that horrible distance, possibly *gasp!* in some horrid 80 degree weather (though I can almost see the sanity of it if it was like here, where its 120 degrees...).

Posted by: Shriketastic | August 4, 2011 8:44 AM

And lets not forget the weird fucking stigma attached to riding a bike, or *walking* in a lot of cities in the southern US.

No sidewalks or bike lanes? Insane politicians seeing a program to increase bike usage as a UN plot to take over the country? What the fuck, guys. What. The. Fuck.

Posted by: mfd512 | August 4, 2011 9:44 AM

Lot of lecturing going on about who's a Libertarian, whats a Socialist, and so on.

why don't we read the American Socialist party platform from 1928?

http://blog.riseofreason.com/socialist-platform-of-1928/111/

Pat yourselves on the back already and take a day off. America's been changed in your image. You've won.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 4, 2011 10:22 AM

Yawn, libertuds keep showing us nothing but arrogance and ignorance in about equal portions. Still not proving they and their ideology/theology is relevant to the real world.

Posted by: pteryxx | August 4, 2011 11:55 AM

*patpats Shriketastic* Ah, but obesity MUST be the the fault of all those individual fat people, individually, in a void, not having to do with culture or poverty or agribusiness, because "calories in, calories out" makes such a good sound bite!

Posted by: Kagehi | August 4, 2011 1:02 PM

Though, actually, "pretending" to do the later, while handing all of the profit over to a small number of corrupt people, pretty much is what socialism turned into, in places that claimed to follow it, but never really did. I seem to remember that Russia's #1 problem, due to this, "profit for the corrupt and rich, while everyone else gets what ever we can manage to hand out", ended with failing infrastructure, a disintegration of science and industry, save when it served the military or the state, and a useless spending of what little money the did give to people, to promote "stars", such as athletes, who they could then trot around, to show the world how great their nation was, compared to those evil capitalists. Oddly.. One of the few things they actually did well was medicine, being, for example, one of the first places to perform corrective eye surgery.

Oh, wait, the moron meant the other sort of "socialism", where people actually share in the wealth, instead of becoming apathetic, lazy, unwilling to work, since they had no hope of ever benefiting from doing their best, slaves to the state, and a small number of rich, powerful, "leaders" and mafia types, who actually controlled everything over there, including the government, like "actually" happened in that country.

Posted by: Kagehi | August 4, 2011 10:28 PM

I know that, and most rational people do too. That this is the inevitable outcome of trying to do "everything" as a shared service, including business is also something most people would not reject as a reasonable position. The problem seems to be that we are currently in the process of proving that you can end up in the same situation, via capitalism, if you let businesses dictate what the government does, and thereby replace democracy with a merchant guild. Same totalitarianism, completely different "starting point". And, if it happens, the next generation will be whining about how "capitalism" was responsible, not the idiocy that allowed totalitarianism to take control.

Never the less, its the same trajectory. No spending on infrastructure, distracted hand waving and propaganda about us being, "the greatest ever!", especially in the face of a long serious of stupid decisions, badly planned (at minimum) wars, and letting some tiny group of people that think they know better than the other 299,999,000 or so of us, what we should learn, think, believe, do, etc.

Posted by: Nate D | August 17, 2011 6:06 AM

My mom is a teacher, and I recall many years where she worked every day of every week to support me and my brothers, and even then we could barely afford food and clothing.

So what?

I'm glad your mom was payed better than most teachers, and worked less than most teachers, and had better benefits than most teachers, but it doesn't have much to do with much.