Goodbye, Joanne

Joanne Kloppenburg announced she would not challenge the results of the recount of her defeat in the April election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the courts.  Here is the significance her decision: none. 

The recount was an insignificant event, and she is an insignificant person - an empty vessel with a shiny surface that reflected the unionists’ hatred for Governor Scott Walker back to them.  That was the glow; there never was anything more to it.   

The Kloppenburg saga captures perfectly the essence of what so many of us find most objectionable about the state of affairs of our politics these days: insignificant people we don’t care about get in our face and stay there 24/7.  Should we be grateful to Ms. Kloppenburg that the beatings have stopped?  Sure. Thanks. Bye.

Most of us are not political crack-heads, jonesing for our daily fix of victimhood, partisan spin, overhype, and payback.  We prefer to focus on our families, homes, businesses, jobs, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, hobbies, schools, sports teams, meals, clothes, entertainment, charities, and friends.     

Here is how this is supposed to work; candidates campaign for a job and then we vote on who gets it.  Voting is the end of the job interview; you got the job or you didn’t.  Go fix a bridge if you won, and go lay by your dish if you lost.  Either way, just leave us alone until the next time we have to decide who will represent us.   

We are sick of the relentless drama.  It started in 2007 with the contest between Hillary and Barack, then their fight over Florida and Michigan delegations, which ran us right into the Presidential campaign, which flipped immediately to GM bailouts and trillion dollar stimulus, which bled right into a whole year of health care, which fired up the Tea Parties until the 2010 elections were upon us, which ran right into the lame duck session and tax showdown and…

[We interrupt this rant to thank the Green Bay Packers for their fantastic playoff run and Super Bowl victory, which gave us a one month reprieve from the self-absorbed crack-head pols and the coverage of their machinations by the pom-pom press.]

…then on to Walker’s Budget Repair Bill and six weeks of insanity and paralysis at the Capitol and then the Supreme Court election in April, which should have been a yawner but instead we endured Scylla and Charybdis bombarding us day and night, and then the mistaken count, and then the real count, and then the canvass, and then the recount, and then the wait for the decision on the court case, and then it will be the recalls and then it will be time to crank it all back up again for 2012.  The partisan bickering is not amusing anymore; it is exhausting.

The libertarians’ best argument for much less government is made every day by the incompetence and insincerity of the big-government advocates in both parties who fiddle and futz and waste money they do not have on things that do not matter.  Like, for example, a recount that never had a prayer.     

I don’t hate anyone, including Joanne Kloppenburg.  What I hate is that Ms. Kloppenburg, and people like her, force me to stay engaged in the political process day after day when I have 100 more productive things I would rather be doing. 

I hate it that I have to defend my rights from the very people I pay to protect them. And I hate it that I have to explain my rights to someone who came within a whisper of sitting on the Court that is my last line of defense in this state.  

I hate it that young people discover truths about liberty in my column that they were not taught in school. I hate it that journalists are so biased and ignorant that I have to read eight papers to get a fair idea of what is going on in this world.  I hate it that people who don’t work claim to speak for those of us who do.

I hate it that Joanne Kloppenburg made her problem our problem and indulged her appetite for a vendetta at our expense.  I hate it that she was the best the Democrat Party could come up with to sit on the Supreme Court.  And I hate it that the Republican’s best candidate could only beat her by a few thousand votes.

Goodbye, Ms. Kloppenburg.  Thank you for exiting the stage.  Please stay gone.

         

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and watch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”    

RINO

If you ask me, Ron Paul is the RINO – Republican In Name Only. 

Don’t get me wrong; that’s a good thing.  I have been a Ron Paul guy since I first heard of him in 1988 when he ran for President as a Libertarian Party candidate.  I just think it amusing that the term RINO is the pejorative used by those on the fringes of the GOP to smear the Republicans they don’t like – i.e. most of them.   

Who is under the fat hump of the GOP bell curve?  47 Republican senators signed on to a non-binding balanced budget resolution which, if enacted, would require Congress to balance the budget within five years.  But yesterday, 40 of those 47 Republicans voted against a real budget bill – Senator Rand Paul’s - that does exactly that.  

Those 85% whose gut-check bounced are not RINOs; they are R’s.  They are the mean plus one standard deviation, the center-cut, the sweet spot of the Republican Party. They talk like libertarians when they are running for office, talk like conservatives after they win, and then vote like schmucks.  Heartbreakers.

Paul the Younger did himself doubly proud this week; he also filibustered the Patriot Act singlehandedly on the Senate floor this week.  How pathetic is that?  One lone defender of the 4^th, 5^th, and 2^nd amendments out of that whole Republican Party that made such a grand show of reading the Constitution to start the session.   

And while Dr. Rand Paul fought his own Republican Party to defend our 2^nd Amendment rights in Washington, D.C., Dr. Pam Galloway fought her own Republican Party to defend them here in Madison, Wisconsin with her Constitutional Carry bill that the leaders of her own Party are trying desperately to water down. 

The mind boggles; two doctors - rookies with no prior legislative experience – are our fragile grip on the Constitution.  And thank God for both of them.  What a perfect commentary on the absurdity of our times: our doctors are fixing government while our government is ruining health care.        

Here is the list of Republicans who have won their Party’s nomination for President since I have been old enough to vote: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush Dance Remix, and McCain.  Congressional leaders I remember include Bob Michaels, Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, Mitch McConnell, Denny Hastert. 

There hasn’t been a Goldwater Republican since…Goldwater.  

So quit calling big-government Republicans RINO’s; call them NADS, but not because theirs are particularly large.  It stands for Not A Democrat, which most days seems to be the only principle they have left.  If Obama is for it, they are against it and vice versa.  I would not be surprised if they reverse themselves and vote to double the subsidy for wind energy after it mussed up Michelle Obama’s hair in England.    

Is there even such a thing as a DINO?  Do the anti-war lesbian unionists reef on the foodstamp PETA greenies for not being Hispanic enough?  I don’t know that much about Democrats - just that they want to take all my money and tell me what to do.  I’ve never gotten past those two things to discover goal #3.      

And I’ve never heard a Libertarian called a LINO, either, although I did recently learn that we have been further subdivided into Cosmotarians and Paleotarians.  I think the difference is whether you base your Presidential campaign on legalizing drugs or ending the Fed.  It sounds a lot better than wing-nut A and wing-nut B.

Paleotarians, I am told, hold conservative personal values but oppose the imposition of values by the state.  Works for me.  And if we strip away all of the Party labels, I think that thumbnail sketch describes a majority of Americans.  We don’t want Democrat government or Republican government; we want less government.   

What we want most from government is to be left alone.  We don’t want someone else’s values written into law.  We don’t want someone else’s choices to be our mandates and prohibitions.  We don’t want to tell others how to live their lives and we don’t want to be told how to live ours.  We want to pay our own way and choose for ourselves the means to help others less fortunate.    

Is there a label for that?   Yes, it is called American.  The idea that government is limited and liberty is not; the belief that free people and free markets improve the human condition.  It’s not a Democrat thing, or a Republican thing, or a Libertarian thing; it is an American thing – or used to be.  This weekend we honor those who have given their lives for that American thing. 

How many of our politicians in either party vote as if they truly believe in free people and free markets?  How many of them vote as if the United States Constitution they swore an oath to protect and defend is the law of the land? 

How many are Americans In Name Only?  Too many.          

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and watch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”    

Ungovernable

The basic problem with government is that people are ungovernable.  The bigger government becomes and the more it tries to do, the stronger the resistance to its commands and mandates.  History’s tyrannies have all collapsed of their own weight.     

We gave rebellion our first test drive at age two – our tantrums drove our parents nuts and that pleased us greatly.  When it was time to go off to kindergarten, we discovered that we could refuse to move and negotiate a sugary cease-fire breakfast.  When the training wheels came off the bike, so did the boundaries of our travel and our regard for curfew.  Our first declaration of independence: “bye, Mom!”

As teenagers, we turned pro.  Hair, clothes, music, friends, recreational chemicals, dating explorations – anything our parents told us not to do was instantly our #1 obsession. Better still if parents and teachers both told us to not to AND it was illegal.  We couldn’t wait to leave home, to get out of town, to be free, to make our own rules, and to find our own way.

In college, we discovered rationalization and convinced ourselves our rebellions were important and relevant. We were not skipping class and getting loaded; we were sticking it to the man.  We weren’t sluts and hounds; that was peace and love in the Age of Aquarius.  We weren’t mooching off our parents and society, we were fighting income inequality and seeking justice.   Some of us admitted we were full of it at the time; others have made peace with themselves over the years; still others still cling to the delusion that it mattered.

And we are still rebellious, just lame: we drive over the speed limit, fudge our taxes, call in sick when we aren’t, fill out our brackets on company time, tell the pastor that we gave in cash, keep buying jeans the size we used to be, count half the cigarettes and only the winning nights at the Casino, and light a Styrofoam cup on fire just to stick it to the planet.  Ok, that cup thing was a little over the top, but so was spamming me a video of some leaf-eater crying an apology to a tree. I thought the planet should know that Bark Girl did not speak for me.         

Punks right to the end; we will fight the move to the nursing home as hard as we did going off to kindergarten; even when the hour comes for us to join in the full glory of God, we will pitch a fit that would make our inner two-year-old proud. 

Our founding fathers recognized the concept of Natural Law; a set of universal rights and responsibilities endowed to us by our Creator that precedes any governments we might form for the purposes of protecting and enforcing them.  Numbers 5-10 of the Ten Commandments are sufficient for us to live in peace with each other, and most of us instinctively follow them, whether or not we believe in the God of the first four.  

When six is the upper limit of our tolerance of things we will be told we can’t do, 2,000 pages of “shall” and “shall not” don’t stand a chance. We are Americans; we don’t do shall.  That seems so obvious.      

Americans are the perfected DNA strand of rebelliousness.  Each of us is the descendant of the brother who left the farm in the old country when his mom and dad and wimpy brother told him not to; the sister who ran away rather than marry the guy her parents had arranged for her; the freethinker who decided his fate would be his own, not decided by a distant power he could not name.  How did you think we would turn out?

Those other brothers and sisters, the tame and the fearful, the obedient and the docile; they all stayed home.  Their timid DNA was passed down to the generations who have endured warfare and poverty and hopelessness and the dull, boring sameness that is the price of subjugation.    

They watch from the old countries with envy as their rebellious American cousins run with scissors.  They covet our prosperity and our might and our unbridled celebration of our liberty; but try as they might they have not been able to replicate our success in their own countries.   

Why? Because they are governable and we are not.  The framers of the Constitution were smart enough not to try to limit our liberty; they limited government instead.

Liberty still works.  In the late 1970’s, our government decided to achieve energy independence through the creation of the government Department of Energy.  At the same time, it decided to liberate a network of government computers from government control. 

In the thirty year aftermath of those two decisions, Liberty’s argument has made itself.  Government control has increased our dependence on foreign oil, while the ungovernable Internet has led to unimaginable prosperity, abundance, and freedom.  Who is so blind they cannot see which direction we must turn?  

Those who cling to the promise of government ignore its reality.  Which side of liberty are you on - the Department of Energy side, or the Internet side?   Which do you trust to deliver your prosperity – yourself or the government?  Who owns you? 

That is the question for our time.  A self-owned person is ungovernable; and ungovernable is our natural state.  Liberty is our birthright, and prosperity is its reward.                  

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

Big Coffee

Is $4 too much to pay for a gallon of gasoline?  Wait – before you answer, push your car for 18 miles and then tell us.    

I don’t like paying $4 for gas either, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the tremendous benefit we gain from gasoline in exchange for the price we pay.     

Gasoline is the most liberating invention of mankind since the printing press.  The abundance of affordable goods and food we take for granted is made possible by gasoline.  It is gasoline that allows us to live our lives where we choose, how we choose, with whom we choose, and when we choose.  No wonder the socialists hate it.    

And when it comes to getting mad at someone for their shameful profiteering and price gauging at the pump, I’m saving my ire for those socialists and Big Government types who pile on their costs to the capitalists’ gasoline without adding any value.   

They have forced their 10-15% ethanol filler, a boatload of state, local, and federal taxes, corporate taxes on the oil producers, refiners, transporters, wholesalers and retailers, the costs of boutique eco-blending at the refineries, and deeply-buried costs of all the government red-tape and mandates that burden each step of the supply chain, including Wisconsin’s minimum markup law. Not to mention what it costs to run those drippy oil company public service advertisements to appease the greenies, the costs lobbying Congress, and the costs of buying off tort cases.     

It probably would add up to half of that $4 we pay at the pump, maybe more.  I know, I know – we are all supposed to hate the oil companies, but I don’t.

Nope. I love the oil companies, the refiners, the rig leasers, the transporters, wholesalers, and retailers.  Here is your $2 and a big thank you for risking your capital to provide me with all the gasoline I want, wherever and whenever I want it. I hope your profits stay high enough that you don’t ever shut down stations, cut back hours of operation, or raise your prices back to the same fraction of my hourly wage it cost me to buy a gallon of your gas in 1975.   

You give me tremendous value for the $2 portion that I pay you for my gas.  I can drive for over an hour for less than it costs me to play one hand of blackjack at the Ho Chunk Casino in a blink.  I can snow-blow my driveway for less than a buck and I can’t find one of those save-the-planet kids to shovel it for 10 times that.  Why aren’t they hauling teenagers in front of Congressional committees for overcharging and holding back supply?      

I wouldn’t mind paying gasoline taxes into a trust fund for highway maintenance, but that’s not where they go anymore.  Government takes the gas tax money to pay for all manner of unrelated costly social programs that I disapprove of.  I get less than nothing; they are beating me with my own belt.      

Their ethanol adders have not only made me buy more crap gasoline to drive the same distance, but they have increased my food cost by diverting corn production to ethanol.  If it wasn’t for Kwik Trip still selling real gasoline, I would have torn my rotator cuff trying to start my weed-eater and leaf-blower with that watered-down swill the government makes us use.

Who is ripping me off – the oil companies that provide me with gasoline for their $2, or the government that juices the price the other $2?  I think you know.  

Every time oil prices rise and oil companies’ profits improve, the left immediately wants to take the “windfall” to spend on their flaky government programs. Because Hugo Chavez did it, I suppose.   A liberal friend sent me a link to a website that pleads the case for populist action against big oil:

“It is outrageous that our government continues to reward these oil giants with an additional $4 billion of our money in tax credits…”, says Credo Action.

Say what?  I hate to break it to you, Credo, but the oil companies’ money is not our money; it is their money.  They earned it.  If you don’t think they earned it, go work a rig in the North Sea for a month in winter and then weigh in.  And adding $4 billion to the cost of gasoline will not bring the price down.  Duh.

As far as I know, Credo Action, whoever that is, has never produced a drop of oil, and never sank a few million dollars of their own money into a dry well; and they have certainly never offered to push my car for 28 miles like the gallon of gas from those nasty capitalists does. 

There is no Credo Action gas station that sells The People’s Gas for $1.25, although there is nothing on earth stopping them from doing so.  For that matter, why charge us anything at all, if it really is our money already anyway?  Go for it!          

Government letting someone keep their own money is not spending; spending is confiscating money from some of us to give to others of us. Unless, of course, you believe that all money belongs to the government and each American is an equal shareholder in Big Government, Inc. and entitled to the same dividend check. There is a word for that belief: communism.

I don’t like communists; they ruin it for the rest of us who would simply like to live in peace and prosper.  I wish Big Government would just get out of our way so we could buy real gasoline for $2 from those money-grubbing, profiteering capitalists over at Big Oil.  

Think a gallon of gas is overpriced?  A gallon of Fair-Trade coffee at Starbucks will cost you $24, while their cost to make it is just over $4.  That is cool 83% profit - more than 10 times what any oil company clears. When the lynch mob is formed to go after Big Coffee, I’m in.         

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.    

Revolution

These are pretty good days to be a libertarian - all of a sudden, our ideas are popular again.  They are not really our ideas, of course; we learned them in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and understood them through the works of Friedman, Hayak, Mises, Rand, and Paul.  

For as long as I can remember, us libertarians have been dismissed by the political class as cranks and wing-nuts; the tin-foil hat guys on the margins who like guns, gold, gambling, pot, prostitutes, and pre-emptive surrender.

That is so unfair – I don’t even know any prostitutes.  The boring truth is that libertarians don’t advocate any specific choice; we just object to throwing people in jail for making choices we don’t like. As Milton Friedman said, the only real freedom is the freedom to choose.  Those who read Moment Of Clarity regularly have heard me say this many times:   

Liberty is the absence of government in choice.  Government is the absence of liberty in choice.  Tyranny is the absence of choice in government.

If you need help with the tyranny reference, just picture Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sitting on the couch together telling you why government should make your energy choices for you.  The staunchest Democrat ever fabricated and the most partisan Republican ever hatched cooing and purring and smiling at each other like prom dates while they fit you for the yoke.  Or RomneyCare; you pick ‘em.

It is heartwarming to see so many Americans getting in touch with their inner crank and wing-nut.  The libertarian belief that we can not just live with less government, but live better with less government has been rekindled by the grass-roots tea party movement and legitimized by the abject failure of the Obama presidency, the last great hope of socialists, Keynesians, and unionists.     

My jaw dropped when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently responded to a reporters question about his belief in evolution with, “it’s none of your business”.   Not so long ago, Republicans were laughing at us; now they are talking like us.  Or if they prefer, talking like Barry Goldwater, who was one of us before it was necessary to give ourselves a name.      

Freedom is popular, as our beloved Ron Paul says.  Who would have thought we would ever see him breaking Ben Bernanke’s stones from the Chairman’s seat in committee?  Or Congress locked in a showdown over how much to government to cut?  Or the Wisconsin legislature haggling over whether carry should be permitted or constitutional?    

Be honest - did you think the union stranglehold on government would ever be broken?  That school choice would be expanded?  That a public university endowment would buy over $1 billion in physical gold?  That ObamaCare and McCain/Feingold would be found unconstitutional by a modern-day court?  That someone would make a movie out of “Atlas Shrugged”?  And that it would be good?  

The revolution is on. 

It is thankfully not being fought with bullets and blood; rather with ballots and blogs.  Our liberty is being reclaimed, one battle at a time.  There is much territory to recapture and the privileged are not giving up ground without a fight.  But who can deny that liberty’s opponents are everywhere in retreat?  We must press on with diligence until our rights have been reclaimed, our liberty restored, our nation saved.    

Libertarians are to conservatives what socialists are to liberals.  We embody the extreme form of the principles that define a common worldview - free trade, limited government, individual liberty, private property.  If conservatives are Dagny Taggert, then libertarians are John Galt. 

And liberals will have no clue what that even means; the movie was not subtitled in drum.  

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and watch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”    

Constitutional Carry

We had such high hopes in Wisconsin for this new Governor and this legislature.  The coalition of conservatives, libertarians, and constitutionalists that turned out the liberals had a few priorities that we did not think would be difficult to achieve in short order, chief among them being removal of the unconstitutional restrictions on carrying firearms. 

We are not asking for much; only that law abiding citizens be afforded the same opportunities for self-defense that criminals have enjoyed in this state for decades. 

Criminals do not have to secure permits, endure training, buy licenses, or track ammo.  Criminals are not subject to restrictions on the caliber, magazine size, or firing mechanism of their weapons. When criminals find themselves in need of a firearm for self-defense, they do not have to dial 911 and then wait for a police officer to show up with one.  Criminals have no waiting period; no forms to fill out.

We are only asking that non-criminals be afforded equal rights. The fact that oh-by-the-way concealed carry reduces violent crime is a bonus, but we should not have to prove to anyone that there is a benefit to them in order for our rights to be secured.     

The bill to remove all restrictions on owning and carrying firearms in the state of Wisconsin should have been written on one page, debated for a minute, and passed on the first day of the legislative session.  You either believe in freedom or you don’t; you either believe in the Constitution or you don’t; you either believe in unalienable rights or you don’t.  Liberty does not accept amendments or earmarks.

Wisconsin’s Constitutional Carry Bill, LRB 11-2007-1 has finally been introduced and is co-sponsored by Dr. Pam Galloway, a citizen legislator with whom I was privileged to share a panel during the health care debates of 2009-10.  It strikes down all of the provisions of Wisconsin law that infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms.  Bravo, Senator Galloway and all who support her. 

But her more experienced colleagues have subsequently introduced competing bills which introduce new requirements for training, registration, licensing and other infringements.  The author of one of them, Rep. Donald Pridemore, argues that his added red tape is “a reasonable compromise between an individual’s second amendment rights and a modern day application of these rights”. 

Dear Rep. Pridemore: no compromise of a right is ever “reasonable”.  But thank you for helping me point out the difference between a Republican and a Libertarian.  We Libertarians are quite unreasonable when it comes to compromising on unalienable rights.  It is a heck of a word to say, so we tend to mean it.   

The Constitution of the United States does not grant rights to citizens; it limits the powers of government to infringe on the rights which have already endowed upon us by our Creator. One of those is the right to keep and bear arms, to defend our persons and property in any manner we see fit.  

In fact, guns are the only product or service mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.  While we also clearly have a right to keep and bear food, healthcare, clothing, shelter, and many other necessary things, the framers did not deem any of them important enough to warn the government against any form of infringement – only guns.  Think about that.  

Who do you imagine they had in mind that needed to be expressly warned by the 2^nd amendment?  I’m guessing the same folks who are being warned “hands off” in the other nine. Was the 4^th amendment aimed at your neighbor, requiring a warrant before he comes in to borrow a cup of sugar?  Was the 5^th amendment needed to limit the power of your priest at confession?  Was the 1^st amendment meant to keep the auctioneer from ignoring your bid? 

No.  It is government that the founders feared enough to bind by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and their worst fears of government encroachment on our liberties have come true in our lifetimes.  The purpose of the second amendment is to protect us from our government; we will not negotiate the dinner menu with cannibals.

Government officials who swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, and who are expressly prohibited from any form of infringement on the citizens’ rights to keep and bear arms, have amassed so many unconstitutional prohibitions in violation of the oath that it takes Dr. Galloway’s bill 19 pages to list all of them which will be struck moot by adhering to the Constitution in Wisconsin.  It is time for us to correct this wrong, and to do so in one fell swoop.

The thing about gun rights is not the guns part, it’s the rights part. We do not require citizens to buy a license and pay for training to vote, speak, worship, assemble, secure their homes, serve on a jury, or petition for redress. Constitutional carry is liberty’s demand, not mine; call your representatives and remind them what they were sent to do last November.   

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and watch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”    

Special Needs

In recent weeks, opponents of reform in Wisconsin have done themselves proud – going after the civil rights of small businesspeople, 14-year old girls, nuns, the entire city of Brookfield, gifted children, and opening-day fishermen.  Now add parents of special needs children to the hit list from the most misguided campaign to win over hearts and minds ever conceived.          

Governor Walker proposed to give parents of special needs children a voucher to enroll their child in the school of their choice – public, charter, or private.  Naturally, the liberal defenders of the government/union public school monopoly are outraged at the prospect; outrage is their reflexive response to any idea younger than the age of their pension eligibility.

A lawyer for Disability Rights Wisconsin went a little overboard, promising that the bill would cause parents to send their special needs children to private schools which do not “even have a single special needs teacher or therapist on staff”.  Back before it was a Class A felony to use the word “retarded”, that is exactly what we would have called such a stupid thing to say.  Get the cuffs – it is retarded.

Does anyone really believe that a parent would choose to remove their disabled child from a public school providing adequate special education and move him/her to a private school with no services whatsoever?  Then why would the advocacy industry stoop so low except to defend their market share in the highly lucrative victimhood sector of the public trough?     

And a spokesperson for the State Department of Public Instruction got her undies all in a bunch because private schools would not be accountable – to the state.  She frets that her department would receive “no tests, no attendance reporting, no graduation rates, no drop out reporting, and no other measure” to satisfy them that the children’s needs are being served.  Oh, dear.

Here is your “other measure”, dipppies: parents are sending their kids there. 

What a convenient time for DPI to suddenly discover the virtue of accountability.  Yet even in their epiphany they get it all wrong - parents are not accountable to the state; the state is accountable to parents.  Besides, in every one of those metrics she listed off, what the public schools are reporting on those precious little forms is that they suck. Recently, it was reported that the administrators in Madison high schools are no longer able to identify gifted children; that’s how bad it has gotten.  $50 says the janitors can still tell.  

If the headlines are any indication, our public schools’ specialty these days seems to be cranking out fat kids that can’t read.  Only the government could screw up feeding children.  Even the Neanderthals got the hang of it, and thankfully the wheel and fire occurred to them before they got sidetracked with liberal visions of hot lunch and hairnets and k3 and forced bussing and school administrators fixated on banning chocolate milk.  We would be the feline descendants of the saber-tooth tigers that ate them while they banged on their drums.      

My sister-in-law is a licensed behavior analyst for a school district in Florida, where McKay Scholarships have provided school choice for parents of special needs children for many years.  One private school in her district does such a great job with Autistic children that they have filled their 80 student program to capacity, each child bringing their state funding to the school along with them.

Tomorrow she will present her plan for her public school district to improve their programs in response, hoping to attract students and funding back to the district schools.  The school board will listen to her (if they are smart) and they will get better, causing the private schools to lose students and make new improvements to their programs.  Lather, Rinse, Repeat – it is not difficult to see why markets work.  

And that, my friends, is why the public education elites in Wisconsin and all across the country oppose school choice – because it works and they know it works.  When it works, it exposes their union/government monopoly model for the failure that it is.

What is not to like about school choice?  More options for parents, better outcomes for students, lower costs for everyone; the private schools get better, the charter schools get better, and the public schools get better.  

Here’s the thing about school choice: you cannot be for children and against the thing that improves their education.  Pick your side.

We all know parents of special needs children.  They are the experts when it comes to their own children and the most tenacious advocates for their care.  They alone know what is best for their kids and their decisions are guided by a capacity for love that the rest of us will never fully appreciate.  

I trust them completely to do the right thing for their children; the state cannot be trusted do the right thing nor the thing right.  School choice is an easy choice.         

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and watch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”    

Good Riddance

There isn’t a lot left to say about the killing of Osama Bin Laden last Monday by U.S. Special Forces.  “Good riddance” for him; “thank you” to them.

Today, I attended the christening of the U.S.S. Michael S. Murphy, named in honor of the Navy SEAL who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism in Afghanistan.  Lt. Murphy was a warrior; he died fighting enemy soldiers in battle.  Osama Bin Laden was a coward; he died hiding after sending boys on suicide missions to kill civilians.   It is easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys; it is hard to understand why so many find it so difficult.

The media’s post-game obsessions with details of the mission this week have ranged from irrelevant to asinine.  The Obama administration has bungled the release of information on the raid as ineptly as humanly possible, but so what?  What is the difference how he died, when he died, what he was carrying, who was with him, how long it took, what caliber the bullets were, how he was buried, how the DNA was matched or where the pictures are?   

Bin Laden killed Americans for personal glory and we finally found him and killed him; the rest is noise. We should neither celebrate nor apologize for exercising our right of self-defense. Bin Laden signed his own death warrant many times over by killing innocents on five continents for over two decades. He recognized no legal authority on the planet, so justice has not been denied by delivering him to the Judge of us all.       

  

Why does the left fret over the message it might send to the world if we say this or that or do thus or such now that he is gone?  Here is your message, world: we will spend whatever it takes and do whatever it takes for as long as it takes wherever it takes to defend ourselves.  Just know that.      

And know this, too: 3 billion other unarmed humans were not killed by U.S. Special Forces on Monday.  Those of us who do not spend our time blowing up Americans have nothing to fear from SEAL Team 6 – they are not coming for me next just because I write a blog that is critical of their Commander-In-Chief.  

When we killed the Somali pirates, there was no orgy of speculation, no weeklong frenzy of hand-wringing and bed-wetting; just relief that the bad guys were taken down without casualties on our side. Piracy on the high seas and terrorism are similar threats to our security in that non-state actors prey on innocents from sanctuaries beyond the reach of sovereign legal systems and the international treaties that set the boundaries of conventional warfare. 

Our defensive capabilities must also extend beyond sovereign legal systems and wartime conventions. And yes, it is disturbing to know that small and secretive lethal forces are necessary to keep us safe.  It is far more disturbing to keep sending standing armies to occupy foreign nations as our only means of response.  Even more disturbing to be defenseless, trusting that lawyers torturing the meaning of words in court to maximize their billings might somehow deter the guys in foreign lands who are planning to blow us up.  Naïve becomes stupid when implemented.

It is not anti-libertarian to defend ourselves when we are attacked; the means by which we do so are not for others to choose.  The time to ponder the consequences of killing American civilians is before, not after, aggression is initiated.  If you don’t want us to trespass into your yard, Mr. Pakistan, then don’t hide the wolf that ate our children in your garden shed.  Get it?  Diplomacy is only complicated to diplomats. 

What is the backlash we fear from the killing of Osama Bin Laden?   Will the bombs of radical Islamists take our oil wells out of production?  Our own Department of Interior beat them to the punch.  Will Al Qaeda do something to destabilize our currency?  The FED is way ahead of them.  Could we be assaulted in airports?  TSA even has a manual for how to do it.  The greatest threat to our liberties works in cubicles, not caves.

We can honor the lives lost in 9/11 and on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq by reclaiming the liberty we have given up in the name of the war on terror, the liberty we have given up in the name of economic crisis, and the liberty we have given up in the name of “social justice”.  It is our freedom that Osama Bin Laden hated; it was our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness that he sought to take from us.     

Men like Lt. Michael S. Murphy remind us that America is still the home of the brave; let us honor their service by making it once again the land of the free.  That is victory.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and watch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”