Rape the Forest, Fleece the Taxpayer, and Ship Fuel Halfway Around the World

damaging families and denying children and young adults the opportunity for a decent education. I'd prefer we stop doing that. :-)

So how do we stop damaging families through accelerating inflation? Well, we need to recognize that our federal government cannot "help" us any more. Washington has been borrowing and printing too much money in the first place -- we have a federal government we cannot afford, and further efforts to "help" are only making problems worse.

There's no silver bullet, and it's not an easy message to deliver, but we need to recognize that prosperity results from people creating value in their communities, not the federal government providing grants, loans, and other sources of "money". You can't "print" wealth, as much as we like trying.

Here are some thoughts on the economy, and inflation. At one point I thought the FairTax would be a step in the right direction, but I'm now questioning that hypothesis in our inflationary environment. Right now, we're seeing stagnant wages and rising prices. Moving to a national sales tax would compound rising prices by adding a tax on top of them -- so the average American would be paying more tax on necessities in the face of stagnant income. Not fun.

My conclusion is that our only option is to move towards a federal government that we can actually afford. We have a road map for that journey, our United States Constitution, that sets out specific areas of responsibility for the federal government while leaving everything else to be worked out within our local communities.

Education is a good example of something where the federal government causes more harm than good. We spend over $60 billion feeding a Department of Education in Washington. North Carolina gets back about $1 billion in federal educational funding, and those federal dollars come with lots of strings attached that reduce local control and accountability.

I think we could do a better job educating our children if we relied on local ingenuity, and provided more choices for our students with different needs. Here are some good examples of programs that are making a huge difference locally (and nationally) with no federal funding or oversight whatsoever:

http://blog.lawsonforcongress.com/2007/12/13/the-finest-middle-school-in-north-carolina/

http://blog.lawsonforcongress.com/2008/01/17/celebrating-blue-ribbon-mentor-advocate/

826 Valencia/Dave Eggers <-- AMAZING VIDEO!

In other words, we can do this. Folks who expect great things to happen when we "outsource" social progress to Washington are typically disappointed. We need to take responsibility for our own community, to develop and support local solutions for our local problems.

I'm not going to pretend that New Zealand has all of the diversity and challenges that we do, but they went through a significant educational transition, with pretty good results:

New Zealand had an education system that was failing as well. It was failing about 30 percent of its children - especially those in lower socio-economic areas. We had put more and more money into education for 20 years, and achieved worse and worse results.

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration. Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.

But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools. More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment.

In other words, their success was not getting rid of government, it was making government (or governance of their schools) as local, and as accountable, as possible.

To the extent we can encourage folks to step forward and make a difference in our community, we can be successful. We need to stop blaming politicians, and start holding them accountable (at every level - federal, state, and local). We need more people outside of politics to go into politics -- to serve, instead of to be served.

No easy answers, but I believe it's a journey... not a destination.

William (B.J.) Lawson
Congressional Candidate, North Carolina's 4th District

Forgot the link.

Pictures

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(Or not so much if you're saving for college.)

William (B.J.) Lawson
Congressional Candidate, North Carolina's 4th District

edited for image size. Linda

Thanks, Linda -- much better.