Home School This

Maybe it’s too much to call it the Holy Grail of Conservative economics, but returning to a form of gold standard for world currency may indeed be the grail that is made of gold. Judy Shelv in the March 6, 2008, National Post, article which was take from the Wall Street Journal, wrote about this and Robert Mundell, the Nobel Prize winning economist who is considered the intellectual father of the Euro who is advising McCain on issues like this. Paul Volker also seems to be in favour of the idea of a global currency and a possible return to the gold standard. This may be an approach that would be an excellent global fiscal approach and the final triumph for capitalism or classical conservative economics.
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The real problem with the argument over offensiveness in allocating arts film funding to programming in Canada is not morality or decency or standards of community obscenity, it is viability. If a project is commercial, it should not get funding from the government. A simple, objective, cold standard is required to apply and this is it. No one can then seriously raise human rights objections to it. The problem is that it raises other disturbing questions about why the likes of Bombardier or large corporate farmers should get subsidies when clearly what they do is extremely lucrative and profitable. In the end, we are going to have to question a Canadian disease that exists at all levels of government and that is the practice of choosing industrial and corporate champions and giving money to them when they decidedly don’t need it. This is money from taxpayers, the very people that are getting the money. How circular.
If we could combat that and get rid of that completely, then there would be no reason for argument or complaint. After all, fostering the arts should never, in my opinion, be about fostering profits. Yes, a lot of artistic work can be very profitable, but it doesn’t need fostering funds from taxpayers by definition for it to grow. Get rid of the offensiveness standard and put in place instead a commerciality standard and do it for all industries and then we rid ourselves of yet another self-defeating silly discussion about community morals and standards. The real problem so many critics of ideas like this have, is the very concept of a free market. It comes down to a much more important discussion as to whether we really want a free economy or one that distorts and twists so that the very people we are trying to help are actually less competitive than they were, less viable than they should have been and so that many other small competitors are crushed underneath the weight of government’s favouritism.
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Can you have wrinkles in you soul? This is question raised by TheGreatCanadianOutdoors.com host of a commercial in which he says that the Great Canadian Outdoors can take the wrinkles out of your soul. Does that mean that there is a cosmic iron or metaphysical botox injection out there that can take the wrinkles out of your soul? Just how bad is it to have a rumpled soul? It is connected to my other idea of a new and improved brain?
What about a pedicure for the soul? What about knocking the stuffing out of your soul? Put the hair back on your soul? Knock the ear wax out of your soul? What the hell?
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I could not believe the bigotry of the two legal experts on CNN who were talking about home schooling. One of them openly admitted he did not get the idea and both said the courts were being reasonable in calling for the credentialling of home schooling and that there was no constitutional right to home school one’s child. However legally correct those principles may be, what was the disease of the Commonwealth, the injuriae, the terrible threat to the body politic posed by home schooling? Was there any evidence to show that as it stands now, home schooling results in poor schooling for children? I don’t think so. In fact, the evidence is the other way around. Home schooled children, for instance, have won the Spelling Bee here four times in a row. There is certainly no evidence put forward to show that home schooled children are not achieving at the level of public school children. In fact, I am sure it was the other way around. Any evidence that they did submit was anecdotal.
Does it mean that there could be irresponsible home schooled parents? Of course there could be. But overwhelmingly, this is about bigotry and about monopoly for the state and the teachers’ unions and the other educational groups at the formal governmental and public levels who suspect any effort to impinge on their turf. As we know at this point, home schooling is a thin minority of people, exactly those who should be given constitutional protection, especially when there is no reason to bring in this system. The cost of oversight to the public would far outweigh the benefits. This is simply another example of family life being impinged upon by the government. This is a sad development in the continuing effort by some elements of this country to make sure that we have control over almost nothing in our lives in the land of the free and the home of the brave.