Utopia, you are standing in it!

Writing about the failed government education monopoly back in 2013, I paraphrased Winston Churchill and observed that, “never has so much been spent so recklessly with such meager results.”

This more-recent data from Mark Perry shows that inflation-adjusted spending has ballooned in recent decades, driven in part by teacher expenses but even more so by the cost of bureaucrats.

Robby Soave recently wrote about the hypocrisy of one of those non-teaching bureaucrats.

In a must-read article for Reason, he notes that the lavishly compensated superintendent of government schools in a suburb of Washington, DC, has decided that one of his kids will get a better education at a private school.

Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) Superintendent Gregory Hutchings has always been proud to call himself a parent of two children who attend public school. …But now, Hutchings has pulled one of his kids from ACPS—which remains all-virtual, to…

Sarah Haider and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are discussing the topic “Is the culture war lost?” on the Letter site. (The “war” is between traditional liberals and the extremist wing of the Left known as Wokeism.)

When Sarah wrote her first email, arguing that yes, the culture war has already been lost to the Woke, I featured her thoughts in a post. Now Ayaan has responded, and is not as pessimistic. Click on the screenshot to read her response:

I won’t quote it in extenso, but I will say that Hirsi Ali mentions her own experience of being canceled for her criticisms of Islam, and argues that now Western sentiments are turning in her favor. (She compares Wokeism to Islamism as forms of religious ideology.) Here are two short quotes, and then you must read the rest for yourself:

My understanding is that you and I mistook many of…

Continuing to read Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy(1942) As I mentioned in a previous post, I was surprised to find that, in a book I thought would tell me about the currently prevailing theory of platform monopoly and competition, Schumpeter’s first few chapters are devoted entirely to a consideration of Karl Marx.

Schumpeter’s treatment of Marx is the epitome of respectful disagreement. Each chapter in his treatment, “Marx the Prophet”, “Marx the Sociologist”, “Marx the Economist”, and “Marx the Teacher”, is brimming with praise and reverence for the intellectual accomplishments of Marx. Schumpeter is particularly sensitive to the value of Marx’s contributions in their historical context: they exceeded what came before it and introduced many critical new ideas and questions.

Contextualizing it thus, Schumpeter then engages in a deep intellectual critique of Marx, pointing out many inconsistencies and omissions of the doctrine and of the contemporary Marxist or Marxian…

Like me, every once in a while Nick Cohen has to display his bona fides and assert that no, he’s no right-winger. That’s because—also like me—his interest is largely in identifying and decrying the excesses of the Left, which he considers damaging to our side. And so, in September, he wrote a piece in the Guardian asserting (and I’m with him here as well) that the far right is a much greater danger to Western societies than is the far left.  We both have to do this from time to time lest we be labeled as Nazis for criticizing our own Left. (While I’m on Cohen, I highly recommend his book on this issue, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, as well as his book on modern censorship, You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom.)

So far, so good. But I was…