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The American two party political system serves the upper class period........This is so difficult for most American's to grasp, but, it's the truth. Any talk of third party politics at this late date in our country is certainly the stuff of daydreams. The political circus that passes for our "democratic elections" is constructed in such a way to make it appear that the two parties are really in a battle of wills to bring "good" to the American people. Welfare, corporate and individual, military spending, banking laws, securities trade rules, global trade, monopoly capitalism, all these are the real agenda of our two parties, and every one of these aspects of politics serve the upper class. Welfare, whether it be corporate or individual is just a way to re-distribute wealth. Same with the military, it's needs have been the foundation for many mega business success stories.
Global trade has brought us as much economic grief as any advantages it has offered. Monopoly capitalism, a system wherein the markets for any particular commodity are cornered by larger and larger enterprises every day, think electronics, food, transportation, schools, and of course the size of our government itself, growing every day in order to serve the corporate interests. Yes, we'll run out and vote once again, but like Linus, (US voters) and Lucy, (The government) the ball will be pulled away at the last second by corporate power so that once again they are the real winners in our democratic system they have hijacked. It doesn't really matter who attempts to change this system, they will fail because that's the way of winners and losers, winners build on their wins and losers begin the long walk down the road of apathy.
With your first sentence it kind of makes you think... why bother voting?
Libertarians have a penchant to be more illogical than rational. Even if something makes sense, they oppose it just because it's not aligned with their ideology. That's cultish behavior. Hence, people pay it no mind.
This is wrong on every front..... everything is logical with Libertarians, knowing human nature combined with common sense
People in todays world tend to write off things which speak the hard and sometimes unpleasent truth, like you knowledge, living in fantasy land
Republicans and Democrats these days, in addition to controlling the state media, tend to play on fantasies of their bases no matter how insane and illogical these fantasies are and no matter how much they know they will not keep their promises to their bases and blame the other side
Libertarianism is the flip side of communism. Both are political and social philosophies that when examined from a theoretical perspective seem to make sense. However, both require a utopian fantasy world in order to work as advertised. Libertarianism would never work in the real world with real people.
4. Libertarians are for private ownership of schools for the sake of private ownership of schools. Rebuttal: This fallacy emerges regularly in Chicago, where the high school graduation rate from traditional public schools is just over 50%. We've seen how a government monopoly in schooling continues to lower standards; incentives to improve are mostly absent. Schools that must serve students or face losing them (and their attendant tuition) perform better. Private incentives work to create innovative products for satisfied customers in nearly every other sector of the economy, and they work well today for the relatively few lucky students who can attend a non-government monopoly school. Libertarians seek to make consumer-driven schooling available to the most children possible.
The problem with the quoted section above is that what if customers want a private school that is not rigorous and is actually worse than its public counterparts.
This is what eventually transpired in southern states after implementation of Brown v. Board and Alexander v. Holmes. Numerous whites of means separated themselves from the public school system to maintain segregated schools. Roughly 10, 12 years later, many of these "segregation academies" were nothing more than baby-sitting ventures whose students were seriously behind academically when compared with nearby public school counterparts. See Nevin and Bills, The Schools that Fear Built.
Other problems would be that in a private system, there'd be great schools that are really expensive (because you do indeed get what you pay for) and many more schools that do the bare minimum and are affordable to most parents. The problem here is that there'd be an un-uniform system in which standards for educational achievement would be different in the same towns, perhaps even in the same neighborhood.
Now taking a national perspective, this system wouldn't work because eventually the government will need somewhat intelligent recruits to fight whatever war we find ourselves in. In that respect, the gov. needs standardization (and this controversy about standards goes back to the 1880s if not even earlier).
Some of the problems with the current public school system are not because the government arbitrarily lowers standards. It's because the public wants the standards in school to reflect their own ideologies and worldviews. To assuage controversy, well-intending school administrators and public officials find some line between competing worldviews.
Here's a case in point of what I'm talking about. Take Alabama public schools where a large number of its patrons eschew Darwinian evolution because it undermines parental authority and ostensibly Christian religion. Probably most school officials see a need for instruction in Darwinian evolution for a variety of reasons. Yet to avoid controversy, which the general public is very adept at generating and at targeting the local school, school administrators and public officials come up with a middle point between extremes. So they teach Darwinian evolution, but not very well. As a result, overall standards for science instruction are lower for all students.
So I think it's important of factor in what the public wants from its school system. To believe that a private system would be absolved of these controversies assumes that all of the public is in agreement on what they want schools to do. Fact is, many parents want schools to reinforce whatever ideology they ascribe to even at the detriment of other patrons in the system.
Another problem with school standards are the training of teachers at colleges and universities. Most students majoring in education are among the worst college students. They major in it because it's easy and they come out largely lacking the knowledge to teach most anything. Of course there are some fine, committed teachers out there. Yet the vast majority take this program of study in college because it's b.s., easy to pass, and is a glorified "m-r-s degree."
In light of what I've written here, this serves as just one example of why I think the LP is simply out of touch with reality. I could address the other points, but I'm sticking to what I'm well-versed in. Now philosophical libertarianism is something altogether different. Yet if I take the Nozickean view to be representative, it seems like philosophical libertarians propose a governmental system that is indifferent to social and public problems. And I think a system like that would be replete with turmoil, social unrest, and war.
Location: In a Galaxy far, far away called Germany
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DiogenesofJackson
The problem with the quoted section above is that what if customers want a private school that is not rigorous and is actually worse than its public counterparts.
This is what eventually transpired in southern states after implementation of Brown v. Board and Alexander v. Holmes. Numerous whites of means separated themselves from the public school system to maintain segregated schools. Roughly 10, 12 years later, many of these "segregation academies" were nothing more than baby-sitting ventures whose students were seriously behind academically when compared with nearby public school counterparts. See Nevin and Bills, The Schools that Fear Built.
Other problems would be that in a private system, there'd be great schools that are really expensive (because you do indeed get what you pay for) and many more schools that do the bare minimum and are affordable to most parents. The problem here is that there'd be an un-uniform system in which standards for educational achievement would be different in the same towns, perhaps even in the same neighborhood.
Now taking a national perspective, this system wouldn't work because eventually the government will need somewhat intelligent recruits to fight whatever war we find ourselves in. In that respect, the gov. needs standardization (and this controversy about standards goes back to the 1880s if not even earlier).
Some of the problems with the current public school system are not because the government arbitrarily lowers standards. It's because the public wants the standards in school to reflect their own ideologies and worldviews. To assuage controversy, well-intending school administrators and public officials find some line between competing worldviews.
Here's a case in point of what I'm talking about. Take Alabama public schools where a large number of its patrons eschew Darwinian evolution because it undermines parental authority and ostensibly Christian religion. Probably most school officials see a need for instruction in Darwinian evolution for a variety of reasons. Yet to avoid controversy, which the general public is very adept at generating and at targeting the local school, school administrators and public officials come up with a middle point between extremes. So they teach Darwinian evolution, but not very well. As a result, overall standards for science instruction are lower for all students.
So I think it's important of factor in what the public wants from its school system. To believe that a private system would be absolved of these controversies assumes that all of the public is in agreement on what they want schools to do. Fact is, many parents want schools to reinforce whatever ideology they ascribe to even at the detriment of other patrons in the system.
Another problem with school standards are the training of teachers at colleges and universities. Most students majoring in education are among the worst college students. They major in it because it's easy and they come out largely lacking the knowledge to teach most anything. Of course there are some fine, committed teachers out there. Yet the vast majority take this program of study in college because it's b.s., easy to pass, and is a glorified "m-r-s degree."
In light of what I've written here, this serves as just one example of why I think the LP is simply out of touch with reality. I could address the other points, but I'm sticking to what I'm well-versed in. Now philosophical libertarianism is something altogether different. Yet if I take the Nozickean view to be representative, it seems like philosophical libertarians propose a governmental system that is indifferent to social and public problems. And I think a system like that would be replete with turmoil, social unrest, and war.
Not really. Such schools exist/existed, sure. But, parents eventually don't send those kids there and they end up closing their doors. We have always had schools (as you pointed out) that couldn't care less about the quality of education, but they have the tendency of being poorly attended and still not hurting our nation to the scale you hypothetically point out.
As to your point about philosophical libertarianism - sure. There are many of us who have that. But, it is no different than the philosophical Dems or Republicans. Their practice is quite different from their philosophical constructs.
Item number 2 in your list is certainly no myth. The official Libertarian Platform, as adopted in May 2012, even states that Libertarians are anarchists.
Quote:
As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign...
The world we seek to build is one where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power.
It can hardly be construed as a "bizarre misconception" when the official Libertarian Party Platform flat-out admits that it desires to uphold the ideal of total anarchy.
Not really. Such schools exist/existed, sure. But, parents eventually don't send those kids there and they end up closing their doors. We have always had schools (as you pointed out) that couldn't care less about the quality of education, but they have the tendency of being poorly attended and still not hurting our nation to the scale you hypothetically point out.
As to your point about philosophical libertarianism - sure. There are many of us who have that. But, it is no different than the philosophical Dems or Republicans. Their practice is quite different from their philosophical constructs.
You assume that those schools no longer exist, but they do. In some southern counties, there are no white students in the public schools (which are actually not that bad), and there are no black students in any of the private schools (which are horrible, academically). Actually some of the most populated private schools in the South are far worse than what Nevin and Bills documented in their book.
For many of the private schools in the South, I'd argue that they're nothing more than either babysitting ventures or brainwashing centers.
Regardless, you didn't get my part about what parents want. A large number of parents want their children indoctrinated in some ideology or another and to think that private schools would be free of these controversies is fallacious thinking at best.
The free market (which is not really very "free" and never has been) doesn't work when it comes to education. Its principles are alien to what a state needs in terms of an educated population.
Here's another historical case in point. During the 1880s in North Carolina, a relatively well-connected and visionary group of educators proposed altering basic school curricula. Instead of having students memorize some facts and then regurgitating them, these educators had the novel idea of actually teaching students reasoning skills. Instead of students memorizing that 2x2=4 and all of the other parts of the multiplication tables, these educators thought it'd be best to have students figure out math by deductive reasoning, and later moving on to inductive reasoning for older, more experienced students.
Parents fought it. They hated it. They didn't want this type of curricular change (or any curricular change whatsoever). In short, parents wanted their kids to basically learn whatever necessary skills that were needed to work around the farm--basic math so they wouldn't get cheated at the market during harvest time, basic English so they could read wills and other gov. documents, and basic reading skills so they could study the Bible. This is all parents wanted from the school system. See James Leloudis, Schooling the New South.
Given this historical reality, how would the libertarian school system built on the privatized model treat these wishes by the majority of patrons? Well, under the libertarian private school system, they'd cater to it. In the long run, the schools would churn out morons who really don't have any abilities to reason and solve problems.
So in short there's no reason to believe that a private school system would automatically and necessarily have higher academic standards. I've argued that the standards would reflect the community in which they'd exist, and thus be nonstandard from community to community and it would be much like the system we have now except without centralized state control of educational standards. So the system we have now has the potential to be a better system, yet that comes with all the attendant controversies because parents of school-age children, for the most part, are usually standing in the way of better standards.
Hey, I'm glad that you shed some light on this. But libertarianism is misunderstood by libertarians as well. It IS an offshoot of the socialist movement, believe it or not.
As many liberals point out routinely, socialism is a part of our fabiric. There's a difference between being a socialist and supporting social programs.
-I'm a libertarian, but I don't support socialism.
-Most libertarians support the constitution literally.
-We believe that all drugs should be legalized and this so-called "war on drugs" is really a war on citizens which is being used to fund the corporate prison system which lines the pockets of politicians, lawyers and judges who perpetuate it. We DO NOT promote drug addiction. We realize that people will use drugs no matter what the law, and that drugs should be taxed and regulated, with drug programs being funded from the taxes.
-We believe that excessive social programs are being abused by the people on them, and by the bureaucrats managing them.
-We believe that when the government takes control of something (PES for example) it becomes inefficient and misguided. How many example of this truth do people need?
Socialists believe in central planning and massive government.
We believe that "a small government is the best government"
The ignorance seems to come from people who are so partisan they lose the truth of reality. We, on the other hand, look for rational and logical reasons to believe in things. The war on drugs is not rational. The Iraq/Afghanistan Wars are not rational. The national debt and fractional banking is not rational. The FED not being audited is not rational. The fact that no bankers have been arrested for the toxic assets repackaged as AAA investments (ILLEGAL INTERNATIONALLY,) is not rational. To think four more years of the same failed policy will be a good thing, is definitely NOT RATIONAL!
Socialists believe in central planning and massive government.
We believe that "a small government is the best government"
Hence, the libertarian conception of government is one that is so small, it's ill equipped to address most social problems.
Imagine a libertarian system of government and that government is under attack -- an invasion -- by a foreign enemy. As usual with invasion scenarios, there'd be civilian refugees. The libertarian gov. would put all of its resources in repelling the invasion rather than dealing with the social problem of displaced people as a result of war.
I think you could imagine a similar scenario in cases of natural disasters. This is the problem with a libertarian system.
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