Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”
That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.
"The lockdowns destroyed tens of millions of destination jobs, destroyed or severely impaired millions of businesses, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world who were rushed into starvation, poverty or both as a consequence of nail-biting politicians in rich countries that chose to take a break from reality. Talk about elitist actions, plus the very idea of wrecking the economy as a virus-mitigation strategy will go down in history as one of the most abjectly stupid policy responses the world has ever endured.
ReplyDeleteThat’s the case because economic growth is easily the biggest enemy death and disease have ever known, while poverty is easily the biggest killer. Economic growth produces the resources necessary so that doctors and scientists can come up with answers to what needlessly sickens us or shortens our lives altogether."
(If I am bothering you by commenting on previous posts, please let me know. I'm having a hard time keeping up.)
I recently received this letter from the White House, as did virtually every other American. Dated 4/22/2021, it read,
"On March 11, 2021, I signed into law the American Rescue Plan, a law that will help vaccinate America and deliver immediate economic relief to hundreds of millions of Americans, including you.
A key part of the American Rescue Plan is direct payments of $1,400 per person for most American households. With the $600 direct payment from December, this brings the total relief payment up to $2,000. This fulfills a promise I made to you, and will help get millions of Americans through this crisis."
It goes on, but you get the point.
I see this is as boiler plate big government standard operating procedure. First they create a crisis and make it so only they can solve it. Then they solve it and take full credit for solving it, while dodging any blame for making the crisis in the first place, and handling it in such a damaging manner.
(con't)
If I was one of the unfortunates dispossessed of income by the lockdowns, I do not see how receiving this $2,000 would be sufficient to allow me to maintain a decent standard of living. It is a drop in the bucket to the vast majority of people. Say the median annual income for an individual is $25K. (I don't know what it is right now, but this guess is good enough for my purposes here.) Some people have now been out of work for more than a year. That means the federal government, to much self-trumpeting, has replaced less than %10. Maybe people can go out and buy a few extra bottles of vodka to drown out the sorrow of their ruination, but that's it.
ReplyDeleteYet they are dangling a lifeline out to people, and people drowning will reach out for it. There's literally not much else they can do. They can't, as they ordinarily would, go out and get work. They're literally not allowed to do that. They've been forbidden to do that.
Let's not even talk about this free moola the wise and wonderful Prez is handing out "to fulfill a promise I made to you, and will help millions get through this crisis" ultimately and one way or the other is moola coming from the people's pockets. Allowing the Prez to appear heroic and virtuous keeping his promises.
What worries me is this author's faith in what he calls economic growth. We had decades of economic growth if you can define this in terms of growth of what they now call the "GDP". (It used to be the GNP was what was referenced, and why this change of terminology was made has significance.) I take the other side of the argument here that this was associated with free markets and "economic freedom" because so many of the trends I witnessed during these decades (as just one, the offshoring of American manufacturing capacity) are precisely what brought us here.
I also worry about the way these processes of "economic freedom and growth" furthered the already considerable dependency of most people on processes (including productive ones) over which they had no control or influence. They have to go to work and learn to do whatever they are told-- or else. So that when they were told to not go to work--or else-- they were already ingrained with the notion there is nothing else but to be blindly obedient and hope for the best. This had nothing to do with freedom in any form, nor with economic growth in the sense this phrase has meaning to me, as a creating of the conditions for the flourishing of individuals, materially, and spiritually, which very importantly includes their freedoms.