The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/103825
Opinion C-2 Wednesday, January 16, 2013 The Press-Dispatch Observations by Thomas Sowell The role of 'educators' Many years ago, as a young man, I read a very interesting book about the rise of the Communists to power in China. In the last chapter, the author tried to explain why and how this had happened. Among the factors he cited were the country's educators. That struck me as odd, and not very plausible, at the time. But the passing years have made that seem less and less odd, and more and more plausible. Today, I see our own educators playing a similar role in creating a mindset that undermines American society. Schools were once thought of as places where a society's knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University Rolling in regulations By Ed Feulner Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes, the saying goes. Unfortunately, the list doesn't stop there. We can add one other inescapable component: regulations. Think you can avoid them by, say, not owning a business? Sorry. If you're breathing, you're affected by regulations. And considering the fact that there are government rules for funeral homes, even the lack of a pulse won't save you. There are thousands upon thousands of individual regulations, and the annual cost runs into the billions of dollars. But, some may say, it's businesses who pay that costs. Wrong. The costs of these regulations are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and limited product choices. The price controls that bureaucrats slapped on the fees that banks may charge to process debitcard transactions? They prompted banks to cancel many rewards programs and free services. And it led to higher fees on checking accounts and credit cards. In fact, there's hardly an area of our lives that goes untouched by regulation. The rules cover many things, including refrigerators, freezers, clothes dryers, air conditioners, and energy standards for fluorescent lights, to name just a few. There are testing and labeling requirements for toys, limits on automotive emissions of "greenhouse gases," re- quirements for posting federal labor rules, and explicit warnings for cigarette packages. The list goes on. Heritage Foundation experts James Gattuso and Diane Katz recently compiled a list of the 10 worst regulations of 2012. So as we begin 2013, let's review a few of the more ridiculous rules that went into effect last year. With any luck, policymakers will adopt some commonsense reforms in the next 12 months. • In August, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized new fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks (model years 2017-2025). The average fuel economy the rules required by 2025? 54.5 miles per gallon. Sticker prices will soar by hundreds of dollars. "Regulators argue that the fuel savings will make up these costs," Gattuso and Katz write. "Whether consumers want to make such a trade-off does not matter. The government has decided for them." • In July, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its proposal for a more "consumer friendly" mortgage process. The idea was to simplify home loans. The result: 1,099 pages of rules. In August, the CFPB proposed more than 560 pages of detailed rules for mortgage servicing. Far from simplifying anything, this will reduce consumer mortgage lending options Continued on page 3 The no-spin zone—by Bill O'Reilly Freedom lost If you see Kris Kristofferson around, please tell him thanks for writing the line "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" in his song "Me and Bobby McGee." That thought is sage and very appropriate for America in the year 2013. In California, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed into law an astounding 876 new mandates. They all took effect last week. Now, in the Golden State, you cannot do the following: —Hunt a bear using trained dogs. Untrained canines are OK, I guess. And how would the authorities be able to tell? Would the dog have to take a test in the forest? —Sit in an off-road vehicle without being in a seat. You can't sit on the floor or on the roof. Do off-road vehicles even have roofs? I don't know. —Use a boat in a "freshwater body" without paying a separate fee. The purpose of the fee is to raise money to control the influx of "invasive mus- sels." I thought that was a 1950s monster movie. —Drive a party bus without a special license. Can't wait to see that test. "Do you know the words to 'Celebration' by Kool and the Gang?" The list of new laws is almost endless, and it is clear that Brown and the California legislature have been very busy thinking up ways to control every aspect of people's lives. And that is what's basically happening throughout this country. Politicians, some of them well-meaning, are trying to legislate everything. New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg doesn't want us to be chubby, so he's trying to ban soft drinks in large cups. If a child rides his bike, he often looks like a Roman gladiator with all the protective gear. Drive through a yellow light, and you may be ticketed thanks to a camera tied to a pole. Everybody's watching everything— and then sending it out to the world via technology. The more laws that governments pass the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything. The Taliban whipped people in public for dancing. Mao would execute you for saying a prayer. Hitler would send you to a concentrate camp if he thought you were gay. We Americans need to stop this nanny state stuff. Reasonable protections are fine. It should be a crime to text while driving. But in California it is now against the law to park at a broken meter for more time than you could if said meter were working. I can just see the cops standing there with a stopwatch. I consider myself a law-abiding person. But I'm exhausted. I don't know where to put the bottles, newspapers, cans and other stuff for garbage pickup outside my house. The rules are so thick you need someone from MIT to explain them. So here's my pitch to Brown and other elected officials: Relax. The bears will be fine. The mussels will invade no matter what you do. The parking meter deal isn't important. OK? Points to ponder—by Ford Bond Christianity and Self-Defense – Part I Who has not heard it said, "If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns;" or "If we only allow the government to have guns, then who will protect us from the government?" That is the state of the gun control debate in America today. Conservative columnist Pat Buchannan in a roundtable discussion on The McLaughlin Group (January 5, 2013) made the following points on gun ownership and the Second Amendment: "There are three million ArmaLite rifles—those Bushmaster types—out there right now, and peo- ple are buying them like hotcakes. Every gun show, the sales are up enormously. Forty-one percent, they were up in December—for last December—which was a record year . . . The push is going to come on three things: grandfather in the assault weapons that are here now; try to outlaw assault weapons, outlaw magazines that carry more than 11 or 12 bullets; and also background checks at gun shows." Moderator John McLaughlin remarked, "With no Second Amendment, Congress could pass a law, as limited as this: banning assault rifles or as sweeping as prohibiting all A woman's perspective—by Mona Charen Democrat hurricanes vs. Republican hurricanes Just a few days after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the New York Times' Paul Krugman crowed triumphantly about the federal government's response to the disaster. "[A] fter Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that's no accident: the federal government's ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back." What a fairy tale. Mature adults understand that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are an unfortunate fact of life. They further know that government agencies are, by their very nature, slow and lumbering animals. Krugman was right about one thing, though. Sandy would not be Obama's Katrina because the press is on his side. President Obama parachuted into New Jersey after the storm and declared that he would not tolerate "red tape" or "bureaucracy" by the government. He then hopped back aboard Air Force One and resumed his campaign schedule. His admirers, including, alas, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and the besotted Krugman, swooned. Six days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, President Bush's presidency had been declared a failure and a disgrace. It was all FEMA's fault we were given to understand, and by extension, Bush's fault. It wasn't the incompetence of local and state officials came up with a very different conception of education—one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas. John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society's culture to the young, but as an agent of change— someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society. A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct Continued on page 3 or the levee collapse (a failure, by the way, that impartial observers lay at the feet of another government agency going back years, the Army Corps of Engineers). No, within a few days of the storm's impact, Bush was an enemy of the people. Six days after Sandy hit the East Coast, most of the press had utterly lost interest in the human toll, though thousands of people went without food, water, gasoline or electricity for the better part of two weeks. The Washington Times reported that two weeks after Sandy, "Bodies are still being recovered in Staten Island. Chaos reigns in the streets of the outer boroughs. Residents have taken up arms—baseball bats, machetes, shotguns—as crime and looting soar." When New York Senator Chuck Schumer visited Staten Island four days after the storm hit, a desperate constituent begged him, "Where is the government? We need gasoline! We're gonna die. We're gonna freeze." It took three days for the Red Cross to reach Staten Island—ditto for FEMA. For those without power or water, that's a very long time. What happened to the "lean forward" strategy FEMA had supposedly put in place? What became of the prepositioning of supplies like water and blankets? Prepackaged meals and bottled water languished in Georgia and Maryland warehouses, reported Breitbart.com. Other obstacles hampered the relief effort, as well, including the insistence by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that line- men from other states join the union before being permitted to pitch in with power restoration. Red tape apparently sidelined as many as 500 others. Some 50 power generators and 150,000 blankets were sent to Joint Base McGuireDix-Lakehurst, a FEMA staging area in central New Jersey, but had still not been deployed 9 days after the storm due to bureaucratic inertia. Perhaps most damaging were the policies of the governments of New York and New Jersey forbidding "price gouging" on gasoline. As Russ Roberts of the Hoover Institution noted drily, "There was no gouging, and there was no gas." Had stations been able to raise prices even temporarily, it would have been cost-effective to lease generators to pump the gas out of in-ground tanks, where it sat, untapped, for more than a week. Instead, people could not stir from their frozen homes even to pick up supplies at the supermarkets, far less to reach medical care or help stranded elderly relatives. Lack of gasoline significantly prolonged the suffering caused by the storm. Rather than permit prices to rise temporarily, residents of New Jersey and New York sat on lines for as much as three hours hoping to fill their tanks—sometimes only to find at the end of the ordeal that the available gas was gone. In New York, where the government decided to give gas away for free from the few working stations, there were scenes of desperation, fist fights, and worse. This is not to say that government has no proper role in disaster relief, merely that there are clear lessons from the failures of the Sandy response that are being missed as the Krugmans of this world strain themselves applauding Obama. private firearm ownership and requiring the surrender of all privately held firearms." Buchannan replied, "There would be a revolution in this country." McLaughlin replied, "Baloney! That doesn't mean you can't own one, but you have to put it in first . . ." What does one make of this exchange between these informed intellectuals? I think Buchannan is correct; there is no peaceful way our government can disarm America, and the experts know it. The mere knowledge that people could mass together and stage an uprising against the state (power) was a check against any government that persecuted its citizens. Weapons are a deterrent to evil and to crime. Historically, an unarmed public is at the mercy of the state. Just in the 20th Century alone the wickedness of human government was made evident in the killing of millions of people in Communist China and Russia after the citizens were disarmed. Study the civilization throughout history, and you'll find any nation that made it a crime to possess a weapon (such as the era of the Samurai in Japan), the populous was at the mercy of those who possessed weapons, which was the state. Almost without exception, until the late modern age, self-defense was accepted as a natural right, and people had respect to those who defended their family and property. Laws will not be observed, personal property will not be respected, and life not cherished without the possibility of an armed defense of one's rights. This fact is the basis for common law. Statistically, crime rates are lower in rural areas simply because rural people tend to be armed, and hoodlums know this. Ask your local farmers or tradesmen who works alone or in isolated areas if they carry a weapon. Even a herdsman has enough sense to carry a stick into the pig lot. In Britain today, it is against the law, I repeat, against the law to defend yourself and family against an intruder with anything other than a kitchen utensil. To do otherwise invites arrest (using a shotgun or rifle to protect your family in your own home will get you arrested). Carrying a folding-pocket knife over 3" in length will subject you to arContinued on page 3 The P Dispatch ress- MR. AND MRS. FRANK HEURING, PUBLISHERS ANDREW G. HEURING, EDITOR JOHN B. 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