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Townhall...
Different Decisions
By Thomas Sowell
6/7/2011
Two unrelated news stories on the same day show the contrast between
government decisions and private decisions.
Under the headline “Foreclosed Homes Sell at Big Discounts,” USA Today
reported that banks were selling the homes they foreclosed on, at
discounts of 38 percent in Tennessee to 41 percent in Illinois and Ohio.
Banks in general try to get rid of the homes they acquire by
foreclosure, by selling them quickly for whatever they can get. Why?
Because banks are forced by economic realities to realize that they are
not real estate companies.
No matter how much expertise bank officials may have in financial
transactions, that is very different from knowing the best ways to
maintain and market empty houses.
Meanwhile, there was a story on the Fox News Channel about schools that
are using their time to indoctrinate kindergartners and fourth graders
with politically correct attitudes about sex.
Anyone familiar with the low standards and mushy notions in the schools
and departments of education that turn out our public school teachers
might think that these teachers would have all they can do to make
American children competent in reading, writing and math.
Anyone familiar with how our children stack up with children from other
countries in basic education would be painfully aware that American
children lag behind children in countries that spend far less per pupil
than we do.
In other words, teachers and schools that are failing to provide the
basics of education are branching out into all sorts of other areas,
where they have even less competence.
Why are teachers so bold when banks are so cautious? The banks pay a
price for being wrong. Teachers don’t.
If banks try to act like they are real estate companies and hold on to
a huge inventory of foreclosed homes, they are likely to lose money big
time, as those homes deteriorate and cannot compete with homes marketed
by real estate companies with far more experience and expertise in this
field.
But if teachers fail to educate children, they don’t lose one dime, no
matter how much those children and the country lose by their failure.
If the schools waste precious time indoctrinating children, instead of
educating them, that’s the children’s problem and the country’s
problem, but not the teachers’ problem.
Sex indoctrination is just one of innumerable “exciting” and
“innovative” self-indulgences of the schools. There is no bottom line
test of what these boondoggles cost the children or the country.
Incidentally, conservatives who think that schools should be teaching
“abstinence” miss the point completely. The schools have no expertise
to be teaching sex at all. We should be happy if they ever develop the
competence to teach math and English, so that our children can hold
their own in international tests given to children in other countries.
Schools are just one government institution that take on tasks for
which they have no expertise or even competence.
Congress is the most egregious example. In the course of any given
year, Congress votes on taxes, medical care, military spending, foreign
aid, agriculture, labor, international trade, airlines, housing,
insurance, courts, natural resources, and much more.
There are professionals who have spent their entire adult lives
specializing in just one of these fields. They idea that Congress can
be competent in all these areas simultaneously is staggering. Yet, far
from pulling back-- as banks or other private enterprises must, if they
don’t want to be ruined financially by operating beyond the range of
their competence-- Congress is constantly expanding further into more
fields.
Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference,
leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down
with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile
companies and medical care.
They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And that is not
going to happen until the voters recognize the fact that political
rhetoric is no substitute for competence.
Read it at Townhall
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