That sounds like great advice to those looking to make a career out of this. It sounds like lousy advice for the sort of therapeutic ranting that I’m interested in. Discipline belongs to the people who get paid to write.

The problem with a dedicated theme is that I don’t always have good ideas in that theme. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say about conservatism that’s worthy of even this much exposure. But I do have things to say. And frankly, if you don’t like what you read here, I didn’t exactly rip you off. The fastest way off of the page is to click on one of the blue advertisements. Really.

After all, blogs aren’t meant to be read, at least not religiously. I read a lot, yet I have a Google Reader count that is stubburnly stuck at 1000+. The time is past when we can hope to read everything that interests us. It’s hardly possible to read enough to figure out what’s interesting.

Rather, blogs are all about the writer. And not even really about a search for improvement through public exposure. Just look at my comments; what’s there to be gained by adjusting to that nonsense? What isn’t belligerent is often incoherent.

Nope. From now on, I’m going to write whatever I darn well please. This is no longer going to be an exercise in creating a blog with a large number of readers, but rather an exercise in chasing my good ideas and expanding the avenues down which I can write well. The writing will probably improve some because I won’t be forcing the theme to conform to what I imagined to be a riveted audience of thousands of diehard conservative fans. Besides, they’re busy conspiring to organize to yell at congressmen at town hall meetings.

I visited my law school and got to see a mock class. We talked about a case that came before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting gay sodomy. The appeal challenged the law under the equal protection clause. 

I’m not a lawyer yet, and I’m certainly not a judge. But here’s what I gathered from the mock class:

O’Connor argued that they should strike down the law. Naturally, the legislature could simply outlaw all sodomy (treating everyone equally), similar to another law that the Court had allowed to stand. O’Connor thought that this wouldn’t work because all the straight people like anal sex too much.

The teacher let this hang in the air for awhile, and we all laughed. Nervously. Then she grabbed it from the air and swung it haymaker-style, beating us across the face with it. 

All those years in academia and her insight was firmly within grasp of a teenage boy, and nearly as astute. As it were. 

That’ll be fifty grand, thanks.

I find this graph terrifying. I’m not a professional, but things do seem to be getting better despite, rather than because of, President Obama’s program. 

Where is that money going to come from anyhow? Those are yearly deficits – not the cumulative debt. I also like this graph.

There’s an old story about Reagan. When his car was under assault from rowdy students screaming “We are the future!,” he responded by writing a note to them and holding it up to the window:

“I’ll sell my bonds.”

I’d be interested to hear some research on what will happen when the soaring debt of the Obamastration meets the sinking fertility rates of my generation, a group of narcissists more worried about hip living than creating a new generation to leave all that debt to. When we’re spending all my kid’s money, are we keeping track of our newly inverted family trees? A lot of the folks we’re borrowing from probably won’t ever exist in the first place. 

Pretty freakin’ spooky, huh?

Unfortunately, their web content is not free for non-subscribers. For the cheapskates out there, try out the Investor’s Business Daily. While most of the stock picking content is subscriber only, the cartoons, editorials, and columns (“on the right” and “on the way right”) are all free. I’d never heard of it until I say a high ranking Missouri Republican reading one. They also have a cheap rate for students, but since it’s the middle of the semester you may want to hold off until next year.

I think everyone should go to class. After all, that’s why we’re here. I can read books on my own; I pay so much to hear the professor lecture and to learn from him. 

Why would a teacher maintain and require attendance? It clearly requires more work on their part to keep attendance than simply to lecture to whomever shows up. It must be because they worry no one will come to class if they don’t force them. While classes may not always and everywhere entertain, they should have some merit on their own. That’s why we pay professors. 

If I don’t go to class, I face two possibilities:

1. I miss something important to my education that I cannot gather from the assigned reading. 
2. I don’t miss anything. 

Since I have more information about my ability to catch up on missed material and on my opportunity cost than anyone else, I should have the power to choose to skip class without an additional tax that applies equally regardless of ability. If the professor wants to raise the cost of missing class, he make his lecture more interesting. I should not be punished for skipping class to do something more important if the professor can’t manage to make attending lecture worthwhile. Keeping attendance is the last refuge of the inept lecturerer, a professor so boring or useless that no one will attend his class unless he docks their grades for absence. 

Outside of Ecomp, I’ve run into this system rarely at Washu. Teachers here generally rely on the worth of the material and their skills as lecturers to draw students to class, certain that those who don’t attend will reap the punishment on the midterm and final exams. And if you can manage to get an A without going, they don’t punish your ability with classwide absence taxes. 

Other universities frequently keep attendance, require attendance, and use pop quizzes to entice students to waste valuable time sitting in classes where the professor cares so little about his vocation that students could get good grades without attending. I pity those professors who have so little talent or inclination that they cannot keep students interested in the material, and I pity those students who are bullied into classes taught by such useless numbskulls. 

The bottom line: students should be able to avoid classes whose lectures are not useful or interesting and should be willing and able to accept the consequences come exam time. Requiring attendance hurts able students who can score well without attending class and allows worthless professors to waste students’ time without putting forth effort or skill.

Imagine a great fountain up in Newsland. Pristine news shoots out of the fountain twenty-four hours a day. We’re all busy, though, and we can’t go get our own news out of the fountain. We send other people to do it. We’d like them to keep their buckets perfectly clean, but they’re busy too. Their buckets have got some leftover news in them, some stuff that happened yesterday and last week and three months ago. 

Not only that, but it’s a long walk from the fountain in Newsland to where we are. The people we send spill some news along the way, replacing it so that we don’t notice. Maybe they don’t even realize they’ve done it. 

The point is not that the reporters are bad people, but that they are people just as we are. There is no magical conveyor belt from Newsland, and we can’t go ourselves. We send our people and hope for the best, knowing in advance that their buckets just aren’t that clean. 

This cultural desire for fairness is a fairly recent invention. When anybody could start a paper, we didn’t care so much about objectivity. Newspapers were partisan, and that was just fine. We knew what to expect and simply didn’t read the papers we didn’t agree with. (To some extent, that happens now. I certainly avoid CNN if at all possible, and watch MSNBC only under threat of dismemberment. It’s not because the anchors are cuter elsewhere.) 

But changes in technology brought on economies of scale in newspapers. Bigger newspapers could save on overhead and price below the cost of smaller papers, and we ended up with a single paper in every major market. Without competition, journalists began to create an air of objectivity and separation from the editorial staff. They failed then as now, but the promise of fairness made the paper appealing to the wider audience it now served.

Regulation of the airways gave us a similar situation in television and radio.

Lucky for us, the internet has once again created competition in news. We now have the option to avoid the print media altogether, or to buy news papers whose opinions with which we concur. Cable news broke the backs of the networks, and the internet has brought down the New York Times. 

We’re really back to where we started, except that we have a legacy of reporters claiming to separate their feelings from the news. Let them throw down their affectation and come out of the tank. They should be free to voice their opinions so long as they truthfully report on the facts, and we know in advance their positions.* Let the market decide who shall provide the news, and let us quit whining when people behave as people will. 

*Of course, NPR is the exception. NPR should be abolished, since it will never fall under the jurisdiction of the market and so will continue to provide taxpayer subsidized advertising for the ideological left. They should hate it anyway; it’s incredibly regressive.

First of all, I don’t pay fifty grand a year to listen to what other students think of my writing. Even if I were average, I’d be better than half of those people. But even the best writer in the group is still twenty-two with a brain full of mush and nonsense. They spend all their time writing about feedlots. And global warming. And how the world will be unjust until we’ve rid it of both. 

But the second problem is perhaps more annoying. After all, my classmates are in the same boat I am. It’s not their fault that we’re all young and stupid. The real fault lies with the professor. This peer review will fill up four lectures. Tack on another four lectures for presentations at the end of the semester, and that’s eight out of twenty-seven classes that my professor will not have to prepare a lecture. The average student pays $185 per class to go here; the tab comes to nearly $1500 a person for the eight classes that we miss. That class has sixteen students, so the total bill comes to $23,680. $23,680 stolen from students by a professor. Will she declare that on her tax return?

And they say we need more money for education.

This has always been a problem for me. I don’t like emotional appeals. They feel manipulative and fleeting, like the feeling of opening a new Diet Dew or just almost getting a speeding ticket. Whoosh! And the magic is over. 

But emotional appeals make sense to lots of people. Many people are drawn to charisma and flourish. They don’t feel the need to ask for “proof” or “evidence.” They don’t even want to look at the “regression output.” They simply want to feel fuzzy. 

And so I’ve been searching for answers. Why don’t emotional appeals work on me? I’ve thought seriously that I might simply have no emotions. After all, I am a conservative, and things are lookin’ pretty bleak right about now. As a conservative, I have a sort of chronic fear that things are going to hell, but I may simply have no fleeting emotions. Keynes might argue that in the long term we’re all dead, but it seems that in the short term we’re all irrational.

As for me, I don’t feel sorry for the poor people I hear about from Obama’s teleprompter, and I don’t worry about the uninsured. I don’t even worry about the disenfranchised. Nope, not even the poor folks who can’t find their photo ID get a tear from me. Of course, I’m something of a monarchist, and when I’m king those people won’t be allowed to vote anyway. 

I get excited about cutting the corporate tax rate, I guess, but then I also get excited about the rapture. We conservatives can hold our breath a long time. 

So I’ve gone on a crusade to find my emotions, listing things that really get me fired up. Here’s the list, in its entirety:

• Ronald Reagan
• Pujols’ homerun off of Brad Lidge on October 17, 2005
• My wife
• The Missouri River bottom on hwy 65 north of Marshall. I drove home this way a lot my freshman year at WashU – the sun always hit the fields at dusk 
• High school football – this is odd, because I was neither good at football nor enjoyed it. Go figure. 
• “Watching Airplanes” by Gary Allan
• “Photograph” by Nickelback
• Brian and Sam. Naturally. 
• Tarkio. I write about it pretty often, but there’s nothing to differentiate it from the thousands of other small towns just like it. I don’t miss the school itself, but I miss the streets and the farms and my house. I miss my parents and family. I miss the way everyone leaves their car running and the Casey’s and the combines and the attic full of my grandpa’s radios. 
• Grain elevators
• Abbie, Gabe, Lizzie, Aaron
• National Review
• The day I moved in to WashU. Not a pleasant emotion. Ditto for the time spent at Scholars’ Academy. Ew. 
• My pickup. I’ll find you someday, I promise. Odd that I don’t have the same emotional attachment to my car. Perhaps because it’s a little neurotic – every time I leave town, the car alarm runs until the battery dies. Every single time.

I think that’s all of them. That may be it forever. My emotions are worn out after all that reminiscing. Feel free to comment back with things that make you emotional. I can’t imagine anyone is still reading at this point, but if you are, you’ve earned the chance to respond. And a Diet Dew. Savor the moment.

This isn’t my theory; it’s actually Charles Murray’s theory. But I’m going to write about it anyhow, because while we’re worrying about government screwing up incentives in the financial sector and health care, we should remember how well they’ve done with education.

I recently applied for financial aid to go to law school. Federal financial aid is given on a need basis. They generally figure the student’s expected contribution at nearly one hundred percent, and the parents’ contribution at some lower figure. Since I’m married and going to graduate school, I didn’t have to report my parents’ information.

I’ve learned a little something about the federal system for allocating financial aid: if you have money, they expect you to use it to pay for school. If you don’t have money, they pay it for you. If you don’t have money, you’re likely to get your first four thousand dollars of school for free, compliments of a federal Pell grant. 

Moreover, if your savings are in cash, CDs, stocks (down 50% or more), or mutual funds, you will be expected to either sell them or borrow their value. If your savings are entirely tied up in your home, you will have the benefit of the Pell grants. 

These programs make college cheaper for people who do not save, raise the cost of tuition for everyone, and leave the folks who have saved holding the bag.  

The upshot of all of this? People who shouldn’t go to college do, because it’s a cheaper alternative than, say, becoming and adult and joining the workforce; those who save transfer wealth to universities and those who didn’t.

I’m not suggesting we should help people who save. I’m suggesting we shouldn’t help anyone go to school. If we did away with distortionary aid, the market rate for educational loans would accurately reflect the expected increase in lifetime income a degree conferred. In fact, the only people who’d go to college would be those who stood to gain from it. Isn’t that the point?

And, of course, if you think all people need a classical education, than they should go for the education, not the degree. Yale offers that for free at Open Yale. All the classes, notes, books, and none of the expense. And no debt to pay off. 

In Tarkio, we tried to start a technical school for linemen, a (typically) union job with good benefits and high pay. It’s a job that does not require a college education. In fact, very few jobs require a college education, which is good because even if you go to college, the odds are against finding education there. But this particular job, which paid a good deal more than a WashU grad can expect to receive, drew too little interest to bother starting the school. We couldn’t get people interested in a job that would have put someone into the 90th percentile of income in Tarkio. Instead, we routinely send kids to college to get degrees that will leave them four years older, thousands of dollars in debt, and no more educated than they were at graduation from high school.

But more often, somebody makes a decision, and often enough that decision saves lives. 

Discussions in college classes frustrate me even more than the Army does. Open-mindedness runs rogue into equivalency. Bad ideas enjoy the same respect as good; no one’s feelings get hurt. 

At times this can be useful, perhaps. It’s worthwhile to get people involved, even if they have stupid ideas. It’s useful when papers come due, because the teacher doesn’t have to worry about quality when assigning grades. 

But more often, bad ideas are simply bad. They should die, and as the adult (or at least the oldest person in the room), the professor ought to kill them. 

Too often the professor encourages, even offers up such nonsensical ideas as accusing libertarians of wishing to do away with private property rights. I attempted to convince her that libertarians do, in fact, believe in laws against theft. My opinion was duly ignored. 

We have allowed open-mindedness to trump truth; fear of offense to ruin honest debate. All arguments are not equally valid, and despite what my argumentation teacher might say, some disagreements end in resolution. Of course, having never ventured outside the academy, she wouldn’t know this. 

In business, stupid ideas die, and stupid people often get canned. It’s rough, but they learn to have better ideas or pour cement. In the Army, we may not always pick the most efficient decision, but we do eventually pick the one most likely to save someones life. In the academy, variety matters more than right. Odd ideas win notoriety (see Churchill, Ward). Hard choices involve latte or chai, and no one suffers when a professor goes off the reservation. Or was never on it to begin with, as it were.  

But I believe the University is an efficient institution. In spite of the professors (I here exempt professors of economics, business, and mathematics) students do manage to learn something. And even if they don’t, the Academy keeps professors out of the real world where they might do some damage. 

Of course, until Inauguration Day.