Level the playing field

Because kids feel bad when their parents have to work.

So, if you can’t bring enough parent involvement for the whole class, don’t allow any for anyone. Level the playing field by taking all the kids away from all the parents, all day long. Parents can see ‘em after homework at night and have weekend visitation, otherwise they are creatures of the State and that’s the only fair thing to do.

If you think this couldn't happen just remember that mandatory school uniforms were instituted in Jackson County Mississippi because some kids felt bad that they didn't have nice clothes like Susie and Joe. The cry to 'level the playing field' was raised by the socialist and communist in our communities. Then the STUPID school board took our freedom to dress our children in appropriate school clothing away to appease the socialist outcry to level the playing field.

HT: Cocking a Snook And what’s in the phrase “parent involvement”?

No Price Cafe

With its blood-red walls and black leather sofas, Kirkland's Terra Bite Lounge looks like any other coffee shop - until you get to the menu. There are no prices listed. Terra Bite doesn't have them.You read that right: No prices. Customers pay what and when they like, or not at all - it makes no difference to the cafe employees, who are instructed not to peek when people put money in the metal lock box.

Why Socialized Healthcare is a VERY Bad Idea

SONIA BENNETT MURRAY explains why National Health Care isn't the answer in her letter to the editor.

For those who think National Health is a panacea for our ills - it is not! When anything is "free" it goes downhill, overused and understaffed. With salaries for doctors and nurses fixed by a bureaucracy, too few young people are willing to spend long years of their lives in training to enter these intensely demanding professions. Medical care, like anything else, is rationed by availability.

Canada has National Health. Why do you think so many Canadians cross the border to get care?

She is absolutely correct. For further reading
The Problems with Socialized Healthcare
Socialized Medicine: The Canadian Experience as Pierre Lemieux points out socialized medicine isn't really "free". The first thing to realize is that free healthcare isn't really free.

What the consumer doesn't pay, the taxpayer does, and with a vengeance. Public health expenditures in Quebec amount to 29 per cent of the provincial government budget. One-fifth of the revenues come from a wage tax of 3.22 per cent charged to employers and the rest comes from general taxes at the provincial and federal levels. It costs $1,200 per year in taxes for each Quebec citizen to have access to the public health system. This means that the average two-child family pays close to $5,000 per year in public health insurance. This is much more expensive than the most comprehensive private health insurance plan.

Then there is the law of supply and demand to deal with.

When prices are zero, demand exceeds supply, and queues form. For many Canadians, hospital emergency rooms have become their primary doctor -- as is the case with Medicaid patients in the United States. Patients lie in temporary beds in emergency rooms, sometimes for days. At Sainte-Justine Hospital, a major Montreal pediatric hospital, children often wait many hours before they can see a doctor. Surgery candidates face long waiting lists -- it can take six months to have a cataract removed. Heart surgeons report patients dying on their waiting lists. But then, it's free. Or is it? The busy executive, housewife, or laborer has more productive things to do besides waiting in a hospital queue. For these people, waiting time carries a much higher cost than it does to the unemployed single person. So, if public health insurance reduces the costs of health services for some of the poor, it increases the costs for many other people. It discriminates against the productive. One clear effect of a socialized health system is to increase the cost of getting above-average care (while the average is dropping). Some poor people, in fact, may obtain better care under socialized medicine. But many in the middle class will lose. It isn't clear where justice is to be found in such a redistribution.

Please read this entire article Lemieux makes several good points. Now back to the list for further reading
THE CATO INSTITUE FIVE MYTHS OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.


A Hard Lesson About Socialized Medicine

For many years advocates of government-run health care pointed to Europe as an ideal, noting that America was the "only industrialized country without a national health care system." Now, however, the European welfare states are slashing benefits in the face of rising health care costs. A recent front-page story in the New York Times detailed the European cutbacks. According to the article, Britain, France and Germany are all being forced to limit access to care. Rationing, already extensive, is increasing.

The case against socialized health care
Written by: Beck

Furthermore, quality of health care will rapidly deteriorate. Every nation that has implemented universal health care--every single one--has seen the quality of health care provided decline. The reason for this is that with the government providing the insurance policies, it falls to the government to regulate the rates at which they will reimburse medical practitioners. Left with no choice but to lose money or cut corners, hospitals will cut corners. The problems caused by many homos skimpy coverage and draconian cost control measures will promptly infect the entire health care system from top to bottom. While I would hope that the US wouldn't make Canada's mistake of requiring patients to use the public health system, thereby preventing the wealthy "line-jumping" (an idiotic concept rooted in egalitarian notions that everyone should receive the same sub-standard quality of service regardless of what they can pay), the impact on all but the highest-end of health care providers will find itself stuck under government health care cost structuring.

Socialized healthcare and The Road To Serfdom By Nikhil Rao
So before you jump on the national healthcare bandwagon consider carefully.

• Do you really want to be taxed in order to pay for a strangers healthcare?
• Do you want the government telling you when you can see a doctor?
• Do you want long lines at the doctors office and a waiting list for surgery?
• Do you want your healthcare rationed by the government?

Public Education is Inherently Destructive

One of the big problems with the public school system is that the schools are not accountable to the parents. Parents have their children's best interest at heart; unfortunately public schools often do not.

Public education is inherently destructive. Public education involves forcing people, via taxation, to pay for public schools. This makes schools directly accountable to government bureaucracies, not to parents. Individual parents are thereby denied the right to choose which school will receive their education dollars, i.e., the right to reward schools for performance. If parents could pay schools directly, schools would have to earn those dollars by satisfying individual parents. And since parents are primarily concerned with the interests of their children, schools would have to deliver real value to children, which would require focusing on the child's educational needs.

Then of course there are the teachers who see their classrooms as an arena to brainwash their students.

Unfortunately, there is much confusion about both free speech and academic freedom. At too many schools and colleges across the country, teachers feel free to use a captive audience to vent their politics when they are supposed to be teaching geography or math or other subjects.

For example The Jay Bennish 'Diatribe as Geography'

This kind of indoctrination is by no means restricted to Overland High School. School teachers, at all grades, often use their classroom for environmental, anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-parent propaganda. Some get their students to write letters to political figures condemning public policy the teacher doesn't like. Dr. Thomas Sowell's "Inside American Education" documents numerous ways teachers attack parental authority. Teachers have asked third-graders, "How many of you ever wanted to beat up your parents?" In a high school health class, students were asked, "How many of you hate your parents?"

If you happen to have an exceptionally smart child the public schools are no place for them.

Unfortunately, the idea of treating the brighter or more serious students as a problem to be dealt with by keeping them busy is not uncommon, and is absolutely pervasive in the public schools. One fashionable solution for such "problem" students is to assign them to help the less able or less conscientious students who are having trouble keeping up. In other words, make them unpaid teacher's aides! But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators -- and some are absolutely hostile to the idea. It violates their notions of equality or "social justice" and it threatens the "self-esteem" of other students. As a result, too often a student with the potential to become a future scientist, inventor, or a discoverer of a cure for cancer will instead have his time tied up doing busy work for the teacher.

Cheri Pierson Yecke decries these social experiments with out children.

Heterogeneous grouping is a staple of cooperative learning -- one of the many educational fads that have seeped into middle-school education over the past 50 years. Cheri Pierson Yecke, former secretary of education in Virginia and commissioner of education in Minnesota, describes this movement to make all middle-school students equally mediocre in her book, “The War Against Excellence.” She decries the effort to “promote social egalitarianism by coercing students who are gifted/high ability to be like everybody else” as well as the way educators tend to use middle schools as laboratories in which to conduct their perverse social experiments.

Unfortunately bright students are often resented not only by their peers, but by their teachers too.

In regular public school classrooms, these gifted students have been too often resented by their classmates and their teachers alike. Some teachers have seemed glad to be able to catch them in occasional mistakes. Given the low academic records of most public school teachers, it is hard to imagine their being enthusiastic about kids so obviously brighter than they were -- and often brighter than they are. No small part of the gross neglect of gifted students in our public schools is the old story of the dog in the manger.

Thanks to these articles in Capitalism Magazine parents are at least aware of the pitfalls of a public education.