12-28-11: manuscript in philmont, the price of bad governance

I'm in the paper.  I blogged the story yesterday.

Copying the bible by hand in Philmont.

Bad water in Stockport.

Darrow School in New Lebanon showed up in Google Alert.

This piece got me thinking, that post and the Stuyvesant Town meeting last night.

At the town meeting, various people praised the departing supervisor. I don't begrudge someone a good bye ceremony I guess...

But the town of Stuyvesant is totally mismanaged. We have tribal elections that lead to tribal government. There are more Kikuyu than Luo, so every president of Kenya has been Kikuyu and none Luo.

But we don't have tribes? How about factions? That's what James Madison wrote about in the 10th Federalist paper. One small town, but the dynamics are not that dissimilar nationally in some ways.

The result? The government can't actually respond to real problems and change. Then, when you add in endemic corruption, I don't think the future looks good for America.

Why do we fund our public schools with local property taxes and have school districts with elected school boards with no oversight beyond the local beauty contest? And no other school choice? Is this working?

No. American public education is largely not working. Are we changing it? No.

Look at health care. We spend tons on health care but our people are not healthy. We spend on education but our people are not well educated.

Compare the US to Sweden. Now, Sweden is a small country, but we can also compare Sweden to some state in America or a city if we wanted to. In Sweden, they have socialized medicine and free market education. They addressed these issues. When Sweden had a banking crisis, the government took control of the banks, then sold them off. The free market is alive and well in Sweden.

Sweden is a leftist country? Even as they have put into effect the Republican think-tank education solution?

Sweden is a well run country. You can actually talk about changing things and actually make it happen.

Not that Sweden is paradise: the principle holds even with the imperfections in Sweden and occasional good idea in America, a good idea that actually made it into law, which almost never happens.