Looming Red

Turn on any TV show that has some interaction with public sector employed characters and you will get a narrative of shrinking public sector budgets leading to financially strangled public sector employees. Two episodes in a row of the SyFy show “Warehouse 13″ have characters employed in the public sector who bring up budget cutbacks. This TV show is not unusual in this depiction as it is very common to hear the narrative.

Specifically in the world of public education, media narratives of financially smitten educators abound. Congress comes back from recess for emergency funding to support the budgets of locally run districts. The president gives speech after speech with backdrops of teachers in an effort to get wide support for the plight of the starved teachers.

Many states and school districts have managed their affairs into the toilet. As a result of that and the economic environment, money for the public schools is said to be tight. You and I can, through our local school boards, attempt to fix our local problems, but we cannot effect one bit the decisions of some far off locally run education system. Yet, the argument from the president and other socialists is that we must pay for those far off districts and boards none the less.

Obama says that our kids will not get the education that they desperately need, because the sainted teachers will not have the money to come back and teach this year. Our kids will suffer without an education. In the spirit of this gushers and bailouts presidency and congress, we must give whatever our hopes are for our money to pay for the aims and designs on our money for the teachers and their unions. This is nothing but another bailout for those communities that have screwed themselves over with bad management on the backs of those who haven’t.

What is the point?

The national debt, contributed to by this bailout mentality is climbing and climbing. The deficit is rising. The private sector is shrinking. The government mentality is to consume and consume the surplus and non-surplus of the private sector and put off the payment to an undefined later date. Well who is going to pay later?

The debt and deficit will be reconciled by higher taxes and inflated-away savings values. Those are the only two ways this can be resolved. Unless there is an epidemic that kills off the current working generations, the current working generations will pay in shrunken retirements and shrunken pay before they retire. Still, they are not the only ones that will have to pay. The ones that will supposedly suffer by the lack of teachers are the ones who will pay later for debt today.

Anyone who has lived in a country with runaway inflation can tell you of the value of an education in such an environment. Yes, you may have a slightly larger edge over those who don’t have an education, but it is an edge that makes you king of the trash heap. Education in a hyper-inflation environment has very little effect on your ability to raise yourself out of poverty. There are no examples in history where people in mass could do anything but leave their country or revolt  to change their personal situations in mass when presented with such a circumstance.

So, again, what’s the point? If bailouts like the current one for local education lead to monetary collapse, one cannot raise by any means himself from such a collapse, what is the point of having an education payed for by bailouts?

Imagine that social mobility from incapable and poor to capable and well off is an old-time water wheel. As new water runs down stream past the paddles, the wheel turns. The part of the wheel that was under water is soon the part at the apex of the rotation. When there is freedom in the system, with a stable currency and manageable expenses, each part of the wheel can one day be at its own apex.

The American dream is that from even underwater means, one can rise to his or her own apex. We can be successful with that talent and hard work with which we have been blessed to possess or perform. That mobility it provided by a system with freedom in the rotation of the shaft on which our wheel turns.

When hyper-inflation kicks in, runaway taxation ensues, and the other burdens caused by the bailout mindset become evident, the rotation of our water wheel stops as though a tree branch is thrust in the spokes or the bearings have seized up. No amount of running water can push the wheel. You can work hard, you can work smart, you can educate yourself, but nothing pushes your wheel. You remain underwater. Underwater becomes your apex.

So, what is the point of bailing out education systems that will educate for a future where education does nothing to push your wheel? We might as well all be illiterate in the rice fields.