Wait for it…

]]> http://blog.nicholascloud.com/2009/02/04/cato-institute-takes-names-literally-kicks-ass-literally/feed/ 2 http://blog.nicholascloud.com/2009/01/22/tyranny-comes-in-small-packages/ http://blog.nicholascloud.com/2009/01/22/tyranny-comes-in-small-packages/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:43:30 +0000 ncloud http://blog.nicholascloud.com/?p=238 Because it is not enough that your children are going to grow up in a world where government is messianic, you can now help them understand their new subjugation with the aid of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint!  I for one welcome our new plastic overlords.  Thanks to this blogger for the enlightenment.

I’m sorry for biting your head off at the drive-through.  You just happened to be the first person to ask me “Did you vote?” this morning.  And after I emphatically said “No.”, you had to ask, “Are you going to?”.  Please understand that if I have to repeat myself, my volume and eyebrows both go up, dramatically.  Even though you gave me my grande Thanksgiving blend coffee for free because you, also, aren’t voting today, I just wanted to take a moment and explain myself.

I can’t go to the voting booth and choose a candidate that represents my values.  Oh, there is such a candidate out there — and he even ran on a major party platform.  I voted for him in the primary, even though he was ignored by the media and received negligable speaking time in the two primary presedential “debates”.  He has served in Congress for 18 years, and even ran for president once before.  His voting record has been absolutely consistent.  He has written serveral books on economics, liberty, and government, and has lectured at economic think-tanks like the Mises Institute.

And yet, I can’t vote for this man.

I can’t vote for him because the ruling class has decided that the three qualifications for president found in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution are more like “guidelines” instead of law.  Instead, our rulers choose to allow or deny access to the great, sacred voting ballots in each state based on arbitrary whim and a strict, regimented dedication to party lines.  If politics could be compared to a market system, we could say that the ruling class holds a monopoly, and they erect artificial barriers to entry to prevent competition in their domain.  The difference between a market system and a government system, of course, is that one is backed by supply and demand, and the other is backed by guns and bullets.

When people line up at the voting booth this morning, they will be voting for the candidates they are allowed to vote for.  This is not a conspiracy theory; this is not paranoia; this is unadulterated fact.  And I cannot — will not — pretend that it is otherwise.  If I go to the voting booth today, I give legitimacy to a system that stands contrary to real freedom, and my conscience would not forgive me for that sin.

Thanks for listening, Starbucks girl, and thanks again for the free coffee.  It is warm comfort on a cold day.  Let’s just hope that the next person who asks me if I voted doesn’t end up wearing it.

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Sir the post office owns P.O. boxes and they won’t let us deliver to them.”

And that, my friends, is why the post office is NOT your friend. Because unlike naturally occurring monopolies, the post office can never be challenged, and if you try, they have all the force of the government behind them to say “screw you”.

First, I found a site about the world’s most worthless money.  Straight from the first page:

As Americans worry about the rate of inflation exceeding 4 percent, we should consider Zimbabwe, where the inflation rate broke the shocking 100,000 percent mark and the country released a 10 million-dollar note (now valued below $4 on the black market).

Why this pisses me of: dude, it’s a ten million dollar bill.  Released to the public.  TEN. MILLION. DOLLARS.  You would think that someone in the Zimbabwe government would be like, “You know, maybe there’s an problem here when we’re printing $10M dollar bills.  Maybe we should find out why our economy is so fucking horrible, and quit pretending like everything is fine.”  In all honesty, Zimbabwe could probably distribute toilet paper with more value.  But no, instead, men (and probably women!) who love power and oppression continue to pump out waste and pretend it’s legit currency.  Understand this: inflation is pretending that reality is something it is NOT.  And Zimbabwe’s meathead leaders pretend that reality is 100,000% what it is NOT.

The second thing that pissed me off this morning is a story about a baby born in India with a deformity that caused her to literally have “two faces”.  What really makes me angry is that she is being worshiped as a Hindu goddess.  Seriously.  Folks, what does it say about your belief system when you elevate physical deformity to godesshood?  When you view the destruction of the natural order as a good thing?  This is so deranged and anti-life that it makes me want to puke.  I feel sorry for this poor infant, and hope that she grows to overcome her deformity, live the best life she can, and disregard the religious nonsense that calls believers to worship physical corruption.

Rocked by a nationwide storm of criticism, the Los Angeles County court that declared homeschooling illegal in California has agreed to rehear the case in June. At issue is Justice H. Walter Croskey’s Feb. 28 decree, which ordered the parents of “Rachel L.” to send her away to a public or private school, where she can get a “legal education.”

Justice Croskey’s edict interpreted state education laws that govern all children, whatever their home situation and “whatever the quality”of their home education. Except for the rare case when parents already hold state teaching credentials, parents who find public schools intolerable and cannot locate or afford a suitable private school were branded by the decree as outlaws if they choose to instruct their child at home.

California legislators were entitled to enact this blanket prohibition, according to the judge, because they feared the supposed social disorder that would result from “allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests.”

“Allowing”? By what right does government presume to “allow” (or, in this case, forbid) you to make your own standards concerning your child’s education?

Government has no such right. Neither the state nor “society as a whole” has any interests of its own in your child’s education. A society is only a group of individuals, and the government’s only legitimate function is to protect the individual rights of its citizens, including yours and your children’s, against physical force and fraud. The state is your agent, not a separate entity with interests that can override your rights.

If Justice Croskey’s description of California law is correct, then the state’s educational policy is at odds with America’s founding principles. Parents are sovereign individuals whose right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness includes the right to control their child’s upbringing. Other citizens, however numerous or politically powerful, have no moral right to substitute their views on child-raising for those of the father and mother who created that child.

Instead, a proper legal system recognizes and protects parents’ moral right to pursue the personal rewards and joys of child-raising. At every stage, you have a right to set your own standards and act on them without government permission. This parental right to control your child’s upbringing includes the right to manage his education, by choosing an appropriate school or personally educating him at home.

Of course, there are certain situations in which government must step in to protect the rights of a child, as in cases of physical abuse or neglect. But no such concern for individual rights can account for California’s arrogant assertion of state control over the minds of all school-age children residing within its borders.

Education, like nutrition, should be recognized as the exclusive domain of a child’s parents, within legal limits objectively defining child abuse and neglect. Parents who starve their children may properly be ordered to fulfill their parental obligations, on pain of losing legal custody. But the fact that some parents may serve better food than others does not permit government to seize control of nutrition, outlaw home-cooked meals, and order all children to report for daily force-feeding at government-licensed cafeterias.

The shockwaves from Justice Croskey’s decision will likely impact not just homeschoolers but also the apologists for government education–teachers’ unions, educational bureaucrats, and politicians.

Their political and financial survival depends on a policy that treats children as, in effect, state property–but only rarely is the undiluted collectivism of that policy trumpeted so publicly.

What if, in the harsh glare of the “Rachel L.” case, parents start asking whether the state has any right at all to be running schools and dictating educational standards for children, in order to advance society’s “interests”? This calls into question the moral foundation of public education as such. In this light, one wonders if the court’s decision to rehear the case could be a first step toward muting, and muddying, the controversy.

For their part, the defenders of public schooling can be expected to stay busy papering over their system’s own failures–the very failures that helped fuel the homeschooling movement, by driving desperate parents to seek refuge at home from the irrationality, violence, and mediocrity that have come to characterize government education, in California and elsewhere.

For now, at least, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Are parents mere drudges whose social duty is to feed and house their spawn between mandatory indoctrination sessions at government-approved schools? Or are they sovereign individuals whose right to guide their children’s development the state may not infringe?

The answer could determine not only the future of homeschooling but the future of education in America.

Thomas A. Bowden is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on legal issues. Mr. Bowden is a former attorney and law school instructor who practiced for twenty years in Baltimore, Maryland. The Ayn Rand Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand–author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

Copyright (c) 2008 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved. Reprinted with Permission.