The Schools Cannot Be Reformed

In a thoughtful, erudite essay in "The Atlantic" magazine, John McWhorter explains what NYC schools should do to help more Black students enter the vaunted specialized high schools.  I like John McWhorter, a lot.  He is a smart guy who usually has something interesting to say.  Not this time.

His analysis is correct and his suggestions are eminently reasonable.  The problem, as the kids are wont to say, is:  BTDT ("been there, done that).  It has all been tried, before.  All of it.  Result:  zero, zip, nada.

American public education has been in a state of continuous reform since John Dewey published "My Pedagogic Creed" in A.D. 1897, 122 years ago.  (Wikipedia describes Dewey as a "philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.")  I mark the modern phase of education reform to 1957, when the then USSR simultaneously launched Sputnik into orbit and propelled the U.S. into the "Space Race".

With the paranoia of the Cold War, the U.S. turned on the taps and a torrent of money started flowing into an education system that, until then, could best be described as somebody's hobby.  Like an anabolic steroid, truly massive amounts of money made the schools of education consequential in a way they had never been before, and the teachers associations turned from amateur interest groups into powerful labor unions and the most effective political lobbyists in the country.

The public schools we have, today, are not the result of ignorance or inattention.  They are what the Education Mafia made them.  Professors of education dedicate their professional careers to studying education.  They hold colloquia and symposia, they publish peer reviewed papers, on the basis of which they design curricula, write textbooks, and train teachers. 

John McWhorter, intelligent man that he is, cannot tell these people anything they have not already thought of, long ago.  Which brings us back to NYC's specialized high schools and why Black students are statistically invisible in them.  There are only two possible explanations.  Either (a) there is something wrong with Black people, or (b) there is something wrong with the schools.

My money is on (b). 

With few exceptions, American public schools are educationally inert.  Let's be clear about what that means.  You are thinking, wait, Ed, we know some schools are better than others.  True, but not because of the schools, per se, but because of the students, themselves.  The students make the schools, not vice versa.  The children of wealthier, educated, professional (mainly White) parents bring more with them than the children of blue collar and welfare (mainly Black) parents.

One depressing, and unimpeachable, example is the work done by Todd Risley and Betty Hart, who demonstrated that by age 3, there is a 30 million word gap between the children of middle class professional parents and the children of welfare mothers.  Not just numbers of words, but also quality and diversity of the words (welfare children tend to hear the same words, over and over).  This is a consequential gap that only increases over time.

We desperately want the schools to compensate for these disadvantages.  They cannot.  In other words, the more a child depends on the schools for his education, the worse it will be for that child. 

To put it bluntly, we have hired the wrong people for the job.

This thought came to me some years ago during a discussion on academic placement.  I pointed out that, starting in 1st grade or kindergarten, a school needs to know only the child's birth date, and they can fully determine the entire arc of that child's educational career for the next 12 yrs.

How can this possibly be right?  The schools take into account nothing about a child's interests, abilities, and achievements over time.  Who does this?  Imagine going to a physician and, as you start to describe your pain, he stops you and says all he needs is your birth date.  On that basis he will know exactly how to treat you.  You would run away from that doctor as fast as you can.

I characterized this educational (mal)practice as "the astrological theory of academic placement".  Bingo!  Think of it this way:  we need astronomers to run our schools but we hired astrologers.  Astronomers are scientists.  Astrologers are superstitious charlatans.  And no amount of "reform" will turn astrologers into astronomers.

John McWhorter is pissing into the wind.  The schools, as they are presently constituted, cannot do what he wants them to do.  If they could, they would have done it, already.

Listening to AOC

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was interviewed by Briahna Gray, of The Intercept, at the 2019 South by Southwest conference, where she made some astonishing remarks.  Two are highly revealing.  The first one tells us a lot about what she knows.  The second one tells us a lot about who she is.

What does AOC know?

At minute 58:56 in the video, AOC explains that if we handle the coming workplace automation correctly, we will enjoy boundless wealth, 

"Our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources. Because now we are approaching infinite resources...Capitalism is based on scarcity, and what happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial. And that is what has happened. We have created artificial scarcity."

To paraphrase the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, AOC’s description of the world we live in “is not good enough to be wrong”.  “Infinite resources”, or anything remotely like that, describes no world human beings have ever inhabited, or are likely ever to inhabit.  Infinite resources, and the idea that capitalism is based on scarcity, are such outlandish concepts, they are strong indicators of AOC’s thinking.

AOC studied economics at Boston University and may have heard this common definition in her Econ 101 class:  economics is the study of how societies allocate scarce resources with alternative uses.  Scarcity is the central organizing concept.  If there were no scarcity, there would be no need to study allocation, in the same way that if there were no diseases, there would be no need to study medicine.

In the same class, or some other class, she may have heard that capitalism is one of several ways societies organize to respond to scarcity.  It is hard to shake the notion that the poor dear failed to fully grasp both concepts, economics and capitalism.  And, in her confusion, she conflates them and concludes that capitalism is “based on scarcity”, an incoherent concept.  From that, it is but a short step to seeing “greedy capitalists” working to create artificial scarcity. 

But, infinite resources, however strange that idea may seem to us, is a natural flower in the Marxist garden.  Marxism begins by taking wealth for granted, and bends its thoughts entirely to redistributing it.  We saw this recently in New York City when our Marxist mayor, Bill de Blasio, in his State of The City address, said,

 “Here’s the truth, brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. Plenty of money in this city.  It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 Marxists, consumed with the problem of redistributing wealth, have little time and energy left for thinking about how to create wealth.  The problem with that, you see, is that people have to consume wealth to live.  Sooner than later, redistributing wealth is not enough, you have to make more of it, or you run out.  The thought that somebody in public office is formulating policy on the theory that “there is plenty more where that came from” should make your blood run cold.

One last point, here.  Around minute 58:00 in the video, AOC says we should be excited about the wealth created by robots because,

“What it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing and investigating in the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in.  Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”

     Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Karl Marx will recognize that scenario.  In his essay, “The German Ideology”, there is a passage where Marx begins, as usual, by criticizing the capitalist mode of production, specifically, the division of labor,

 “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.”

 Ah, but come the revolution,

 “while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

In other words, AOC delivers an early 21^st century update to a mid-19^th century fantasy.  Marx thought a magical socialist society will create unlimited resources that will free us from drudgery.  AOC thinks magical robots will do that for us. 

Therefore, you can be sure of two things:  AOC learned Marxism much better than she learned economics, and Marxist fantasy will work just as well today as it worked in the previous hundred years.  And if that does not make your blood run cold, nothing will.

What kind of person is AOC?

   AOC’s second comment, which actually comes a bit earlier in the video, sheds some light on her personality.

Starting around minute 52:23 AOC delivers her heartfelt conviction that 

“we are capable of so much as a country...so much more than what we’re doing right now...we are capable of all of these things.”  

To illustrate her point she talks about President Kennedy and his mission to the moon,

 “...and the position should be not let’s not do it because we haven’t figure out all the details yet.  How about the goal is let’s figure out all the details because we’ve decided we’re going to the moon and we’re going to get there before the end of the decade...”

 That is an inspiring homily, but then AOC wades into some facts,

    “When Kennedy said we are going to go to the moon by the end of ten years, people thought that he was crazy.  He didn’t have a plan.  So many of the technologies required to get there weren’t even invented yet, but it was taken seriously enough as a mission...”

Let’s unpack this little story. 

     Rocketry was a fast-developing field of science and engineering since the German “V” rockets of World War II. At war’s end, there was a mad scramble for German rocket scientists, and it can be fairly said that the Space Race was a competition between America’s German rocket scientists and Russia’s German rocket scientists.

     In the early years, Russia’s German rocket scientists were winning.  In 1957, they launched into earth orbit the first artificial satellite ever to exist (Sputnik).  In 1961, they launched the first human being (Yuri Gagarin) to ever orbit the earth.  And there were a number of important firsts in between. 

     The Space Race was part of the Cold War, and there was more than a little urgency about it, some might say hysteria.  Shortly after WW II, the U.S. created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and after the Sputnik shock it was re-organized into NASA.  Plans for a manned moon landing were being formulated during the Eisenhower administration.

     After Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, President Kennedy tasked his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, to organize committees of scientists, engineers, and NASA administrators.  JFK called upon politicians from both sides of the aisle.  The technical specialists formulated plans and budgets and assured JFK of the technical feasibility of getting to the moon.  The politicians assured him of total popular and political support.  Indeed, they urged him to do it.

     So, in May, 1961, one month after Gagarin orbited the earth, when President Kennedy proposed to put a man on the moon “before the end of ten years”, this much was patently clear,

• nobody thought he was crazy,
• he certainly had a plan,
• he had broad popular and political support,
• rocketry was an already existing and quickly developing field of science and engineering; and
• he had a massive technical and bureaucratic infrastructure to get the job done.

     Oh, and he also had a massive amount of money to spend.  In 2009, NASA estimated the Apollo program cost $170 Billion in 2005 dollars ($206 Billion in 2016 dollars).  And the NASA budget, in those days, could be expressed as some significant percent (4-5%) of the entire federal budget.

Certainly, there was a lot of work left to do, after the announcement, but here is one thing that absolutely, positively never happened:  JFK did not pull the idea out of his ass and then try to cajole everybody into following along.  Putting a man on the moon was a far more complex enterprise, and far better organized, than AOC closing her eyes, tapping her heels together, and wishing for a “Green New Deal”.

What about AOC’s charming fable of JFK?  To paraphrase the immortal words of Mary McCarthy in her criticism of Lillian Hellman, 

“every word of that story is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” 

So, is AOC a liar? Actually, that is a tougher question than it seems, but AOC is certainly of a type we have seen before.

     During my years as a partisan in the Math Wars (Oh, you have not heard of that war?  That’s because my side lost ignominiously, too bad for American school children), I met some wonderful people, among them University of Rochester Professor Ralph Raimi, of blessed memory.  Cultured and literary, Ralph was the real thing:  a Renaissance Man who held dual appointments in the departments of mathematics and sociology, and he was a charming essayist.  (And yes, he is related to Sam Raimi.  Quite the high achieving family, I’d say.)

Around 1995, Ralph wrote an essay about Isaac Newton's unpublished calculus book (a thing that never existed).  Do not deny yourself the pleasure of reading Ralph, but here is the gist of it.

One day, Ralph was listening, on the radio, to a man complaining that publishing companies, motivated only by profit, stifle ideas that could change the world.  He drives home his point,

 "... and publishers have been making such mistakes ever since one turned down Newton's Calculus on the grounds that nobody needed a new calculus book..."

Ralph was thunderstruck. Like AOC’s JFK fable, not a single word of that man’s story is true.  Ralph deconstructs this wondrously, but it is the moral of the story we want.  Ralph writes,

 “The Expert probably didn't worry too much about whether his story was true or not; he figured it could be true, which was good enough. The story illustrated what to him seemed an important truth: that publishers can make mistakes in judging the value of a new manuscript, and that electronic publishing will help prevent such mistakes from holding up progress. So the story contributes to real truth, as The Expert saw it, and that's the only kind of truth that counts...
 “So, in pursuit of the higher truth, our Expert conjured up a seventeenth century populated by students of "calculus," to whom a publishing industry was evidently supplying a rich choice of textbooks. Within that seventeenth century he conjured up a Calculus written in vain by a Newton whose works, like those of most geniuses, were ignored by practical men. It is hard to pack so much misinformation into a few words, but the Expert did it."

“It is hard to pack so much misinformation into a few words, but the Expert did it.”  As with the “Expert”, so with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Again I ask, is she a liar? 

It sure does look like it, but let’s be fair.  To be a liar, in the classical meaning of that word, AOC would have to be aware of the facts and intentionally choose to tell a story contrary to the facts, probably to gain some unfair advantage over somebody.  I doubt this is the case. 

More likely, like Ralph Raimi’s “Expert”, AOC is simply indifferent to facts.  If she happens to be aware of the facts, and they are helpful to her, she would be happy to use them.  If the facts are against her, she will ignore them.  And, if she is ignorant of the facts, well, she is much to busy to research them.  AOC is on a mission to save the world, and she inhabits a moral plane that rises above mere facts.

How should we feel about that?  To quote the Geena Davis character in the 1986 remake of “The Fly”, when it comes to people who rise above mere facts, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”  https://youtu.be/--hMJPUBwMc  Why?  The great Russian writer, Boris Pasternak explains it.

Early in the movie, “Doctor Zhivago”, based on the eponymous book, Lara is in love with Pasha Antipov, who later becomes the Trotsky figure, Strelnikov.

Komarovsky, the lover of Lara's mother, appears to be a selfish, grasping cad, but turns out to posses some redeeming personal qualities.  Komarovsky insists on meeting Pasha, and the three, Komarovsky, Lara, and Pasha, meet in a restaurant.

Komarovsky sees the radical in Pasha and does not like it.  After Pasha leaves, Komarovsky warns Lara off him, saying,

"There are two kinds of men and only two. And that young man is one kind. He is high-minded. He is pure. He's the kind of man the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises. He is the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women."

Of course, Komarovsky was right, as the rest of the movie tells.

I do not think the world despises AOC, but she is the same “kind of man” as Pasha Antipov.  She is high-minded.  She is pure.  She is deluded about the nature of the world we live in.  And she will breed a lot of unhappiness in a lot of people when her plans crash and burn---the inevitable fate of all plans that rise above facts. 

Marxism rises above facts.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rises above facts.  And, when her delusional plans crash and burn, as they must, so will our lives.  Just ask the people of Venezuela.

Good (Socialist) Intentions Will Get You Killed

I cannot get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ("AOC") out of my mind.

New York, city and state, had a deal with Amazon.  Part of the deal involved relief from state and local land use regulations (that entail a lengthy, exhausting, and expensive review process), environmental review, and various building regulations.  You should know, a lot of building regulations mean what you think they mean:  let's make sure the building doesn't fall down on people's heads.  And, a lot building regulations are a horror of extortionate giveaways to special interests.  E.g., for many years, exhibitors at the Jacob Javits Center had to pay union electricians, at their exorbitant rates, to plug their lights and computers into wall outlets.  Probably, Amazon did not want to deal with the extortionate shit, so they extorted back.

Mainly, to build their second headquarters in NYC and bring in 25,000 well-paying jobs, Amazon would get tax abatements to the tune of $3 Billion.

Upon hearing of Amazon pulling out of its deal with NYC, AOC walked up to a microphone, flashed her million dollar smile, and exuded happiness and victory.  She thinks tax abatements means there is a pot of money, sitting somewhere in the mayor's office, and that our mayor would actually give Jeff Bezos $3 Billion (in 10s and 20s).  And now the deal is off, these $3 Billion are available to hire teachers, repair the subway system, and "put a lot of people to work, if we wanted to."

Sooner or later, if it has not happened already, somebody will wonder, "Why wouldn't we want to?"  Why haven't we used this money already?  What are we waiting for?  The subways need fixing why haven't we fixed them?  The schools need teachers, why haven't we hired them?  The mayor of NYC, Bill de Blasio, a self-described socialist, why does he leave that pot of money just sitting there?  Why does he not use it for the betterment of the people he represents?

In contemplating this question, AOC can proceed in one of two ways.  One, she could think that, perhaps, she misunderstands something and proceed as a college educated woman should, to disabuse herself of some uncommonly stupid ideas (there is no pot of money in a closet of the mayor's office).  Or, she could see "enemies of the people" hiding under every bed.

Since 1917, when V.I. Lenin took power in Russia, murdered the royal family, and murdered more Russians in his first six months of power than the Tzars killed in the previous 100 years, socialists have never re-considered their world view.  With the utter certainty of religious faith, socialists Know they have the key to human happiness.  And when their plans do not work out (they NEVER do, since they are based on false ideas), the only possible explanation is sabotage by "enemies of the people".

They start by killing a few people.  As their failures continue, as their frustrations mount, as they become habituated to murder, they kill more and more and more.  That is how Stalin killed more Russians (more than 20 million) than Hitler, how Mao killed way more Chinese (about 60 million) than Tojo, how Pol Pot killed one quarter of the entire Cambodian population (about 2 million), and how Nicolas Maduro has made some three million Venezuelans run from starvation.

The socialists Know they are right, and they will kill and kill and kill until you get it right.  And that is what I see in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's million dollar smile.

Abortion Is Like A Car Accident

Working through the reproductive choices modern American women actually have (my previous essay) was a fascinating exercise, for me.  A revelation, really.  As always, every answer raises new questions.

If women have this blizzard of reproductive choices, how does an unplanned pregnancy happen, in the first place?  On a hunch, I googled “unplanned pregnancy alcohol” and “risky sex alcohol”.  I.e., I’m guessing that booze has something to do with it.

A 1984 study says, "Nah".  But, this seems impossible since the widely accepted number is that 25%---yes, 1/4---of all pregnancies are unplanned.  Note, this study is old and small.

Digging further, I found this item from the National Center for Biotechnology Information,  a division of the National Institutes of Health,

“A study of drinking habits and sexual behaviors of heterosexuals found that women and men who frequently combined alcohol use with sexual encounters were generally less likely to use condoms during sexual intercourse...
“In 1998, an estimated 400,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 had unprotected sex after drinking alcohol, and an estimated 100,000 had sex when they were so intoxicated that they were unable to consent (Hingson, et al., 2002). In a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 23% (5.6 million) of sexually active teens and young adults ages 15–24 in the USA reported as having had unprotected sex because they had been drinking or using drugs at the time.”

and so on.

Other studies come to the same conclusion.  E.g., "Binge drinking leads to unwanted pregnancies."

Clearly, alcohol and, probably, other drugs contribute to the shocking rate of unplanned pregnancies.  In other words, unplanned pregnancies are a lot like “DUI”, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Interestingly, in October, 2017, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation, reported (it’s a PDF download)
“alcohol-impaired-driving fatalities accounted for 28 percent of all motor vehicle traffic fatalities in the United States in 2016.”

So, 25% of all pregnancies are unplanned, and alcohol is involved; 28% of all driving fatalities involve alcohol...unplanned pregnancy sure does look a lot like DUI.  And, people get killed in both cases.

In real life, even if they are not killed, a lot of people do not just walk away from a car accident.  Many people suffer permanent, life-altering injuries.  Spinal cord injuries could mean partial or complete loss of the use of arms or legs.  I knew a young woman whose head went through a windshield, and she lived with permanently impaired short-term memory.  Death and disfigurement.  The horrors, of car accidents, are legion.

Now, consider the following thought experiment.  Suppose John survives a car accident, but he is seriously and permanently injured.  Given the bizarre nature of his injuries, doctors could cure him completely, but they would have to kill somebody else to do it, some innocent third party.  Should John and his doctors proceed?

Is that a bizarre or irrelevant thought experiment?  I think that is pretty much what an abortion is all about.

One of the great apologies for abortion is that a baby permanently changes a woman’s life.  For many young women, this change is deeply unwelcome.  It could mean not going to school, not getting a better job.  If the father is not involved, an unplanned child could doom the mother to a lifetime of poverty.  The consequences of an unplanned pregnancy are serious.

But, kill the baby---an innocent third party who was not even at the party---and all her disabilities are cured.  Just like John, from the thought experiment.

A Woman's Right To Choose 2

Responding to my essay, “A Woman’s Right To Choose”, a friend recommended the documentary, "Lake of Fire", which seems not to be streaming anywhere so you have to buy the DVD.  I bought the DVD.

“Lake of Fire” is a pretty good documentary on some of the issues of abortion, so it is beside the point of my first essay.  I was not exploring issues of abortion.

Abortion is a major front in the Culture War we have been fighting most of my life.  There is an ancient sentiment that “Truth is the first casualty of war”.  The Left frames this battle as one of “reproductive choice”, I have long felt there is something insincere about this framing, and I wanted to think about it.  Writing is how I think about a subject, hence the essay.

“Framing” is a synonym for “spin” is a synonym for propaganda.  My only purpose was to deconstruct one element of the Left’s propaganda on abortion.  I.e., I was examining the propaganda about abortion, not the issue of abortion.  It was, for me, a very useful exercise.

Unless someone can punch holes through my argument (I welcome the effort), I was amazed to realize (it seems so obvious, now) that modern American women have a veritable blizzard of reproductive choices.  And not trivial choices, but choices that are astonishing in scope and consequence.  Choices that are personally and civilizationally consequential. 

So, whatever else the issue of abortion is about, it is not about the spectrum of women's reproductive choices.  It is about something much narrower.

This thought exercise also enabled me, for the first time, to think about abortion in its pristine nature, free from the encumbrances and obscurities of social, legal, and moral issues.  I.e., never mind all that other stuff, what, exactly, does abortion accomplish?

Abortion, per se, does one thing only:  it ends a pregnancy.  But, every pregnancy ends.  To put it more precisely, therefore, abortion shortens the term of a pregnancy.

Most women discover their pregnancy around 5 or 6 weeks into it, sometimes later.  Some obese women may not know they are pregnant until they give birth.

The CDC reports that 91.1% of abortions are performed in the first trimester.  In the second trimester, 7.6%.  And 1.3% in the third trimester.  Since 24.6% of all abortions are performed within the first eight weeks, it follows that 66.5% of all abortions are done in the third month of the pregnancy.

I think it is fair to say that a large majority of women save, at most, six months of pregnancy by getting an abortion.  Abortions in the second trimester might save a woman three months or so.  And third trimester abortions will save---days?

Six months is not a trivial amount of time to put one’s life on hold, if that is necessary.  But, the exact consequences of such a delay must vary widely, from woman to woman.  In some cases, a six month delay might be onerous, in others, hardly at all.

Some might argue that abortion is not about a six month delay in getting on with your life.  Once the baby comes, the woman is committed for some eighteen years.  But this raises the obvious question:  why is a woman more willing to kill her baby than give it up for adoption?

Thus, the objective observations end and the moral questions begin:

• Is a human life worth six months of your time?
• Why is a baby easier to kill than to give up for adoption?

 I leave these questions to the reader.

A Woman's Right To Choose

I would like to say a word about a woman’s reproductive choices.

In the U.S., an adult woman can choose to marry, or not.  If she wants to marry, she can marry whomever she wants, male or female.

An adult woman can choose to have sex or not, whether she is married or not.  If she is not married and chooses sex, she can have sex with whomever she wants, male or female.

If she is married and chooses to not have sex, she may not stay married, but that would be part of her calculation.

If a woman wants to have sex but not get pregnant, she has a cornucopia of contraceptive choices.  She can choose permanent contraception or temporary contraception.  Sterilization is a permanent form of contraception.  There are a couple of options here, too.

If she choose a temporary form of contraception, she can choose physical barriers, chemicals barriers, and hormonal barriers.  Physical barriers are the male condom, female condom, diaphragm,  IUD, cervical cap, and the cervical sponge.

Spermicidal jelly is a chemical barrier.

Hormonal barriers come as pills, implants, patches, and injections.

Contraception methods may be combined.  Eg, a spermicidal jelly may be used with a cervical sponge.  Also, some IUD’s release a hormone.  There are many possible combinations.

Finally, there is the “Morning After” pill, which exists in a gray area between contraception and abortion.

An American woman can choose to get pregnant, whether she is married or not.  And, she can get pregnant whether she has sex or not.

If the woman wants to get pregnant without sex, she has at least two choices:  artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization.

A woman can choose to have a baby, without carrying it, by hiring a surrogate for the pregnancy.

If a woman delivers a baby, she can choose to keep it or not.  I am not saying the decision is easy, but there is most definitely a choice.

There is finally, this question:  can a pregnant woman kill her baby to force an early end to her pregnancy? Do keep in mind that every pregnancy ends, in nine months at the latest, so the question is entirely one of convenience.  Opinion is divided.

Clearly, when it comes to reproduction, American women have a blizzard of choices.  Does anybody else think it is strange that a major political movement is motivated by this one need for abortions of convenience?  And, they claim to fight for “reproductive choice” as if, without abortions of convenience, none of the other choices matter.

A Working Hypothesis on Socialism

I do not understand how any 21st Century person, of sound mind and reasonable education, can be a socialist.  We have run the experiments, the data are in, we have the results, we know the answer:  socialism fails 100% of the time.  And yet, not only do we still have socialists, but socialism seems to be gaining in popularity.  It boggles the mind.

My thoughts tended to circle around two ideas:

1. How deep does the ignorance have to go, and 
2. How deep is the desire for power at any price?

I now think it is something else.  I think the question revolves around two other ideas, just as depressing, really, but less sinister:

1. The human desire to get something for nothing, and
2. A society that is too complicated for too many people.

First, the human desire to get something for nothing is very nearly irresistible.  As with sex, only the power of religion can contain it.  Not every religion.  I have in mind primarily Protestantism, and I hope a couple of my friends are right that Judaism works as well.  But, as the force of religion wanes in our society, the power of socialism waxes.  I think the waning of religion is one important explanation for the growing popularity of socialism.  And the strategy of politicians to promise something for nothing, always a danger, has become dominant.

On the second point, I am personally aware of many cases in which intelligent, educated people are shockingly ignorant of basic facts about the world we live in, but it was a conversation with my son about a year ago, on healthcare, that crystallized my thinking on this point.

Forgive me for saying that my son is a pretty smart guy who took his graduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  UPenn is a first class school, especially strong in the life sciences and business (Wharton is there), so he was surround by ideas on healthcare, and he paid attention.

One day, we were chatting about American healthcare.  I admitted to him that I---a college educated man---do not understand how the system works.  His simple and astonishing response was, "nobody does."  Friends, that is a hell of a statement and, almost instantly, all my other thoughts, about our complicated society, rallied to his comment like soldiers rallying around the flag.

Capitalism is the central organizing idea of our society, yet it is more misunderstood by more people than almost any other socially important idea.  Socialism is very easy to understand.  The analogy I like to use, in comparing capitalism to socialism, is the flat vs the round theories on the shape of the earth.

A flat earth is easy to understand:  you can see it and feel it.  Most of us live as if the earth is flat.  Frankly, it does not make any difference, to most people, which theory is correct, so they rightly ignore the whole subject.

On the other hand, 2,500 years ago, a few people knew the earth is round.  And they knew this not merely as a competing superstition, but as fact.  In a simple and lovely exercise in spherical geometry, involving shadows at the bottoms of wells, Greek mathematicians not only proved the earth is round, but they  worked out the circumference of the earth within 10% of the modern figure, I seem to recall.  Not many people, then or now, can understand the mathematical argument.

Ah, but who needs a mathematical argument, these days, when you can see the round earth in pictures taken from space?  Too true.  But recognize the fantastical scientific and engineering infrastructure required to take those pictures.  So my point still stands, very much so:  in one way or another, it is a far more difficult intellectual challenge to understand a round earth than a flat one.  And, space pictures or no, lots of modern, young Americans are still not sure.

Just the same with capitalism and socialism.  Socialism is easy to understand:  let's just get together and fix the problem.  Are there poor people?  Give them money.  Are there sick people?  Give them doctors.  There is an apocryphal conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

Fitzgerald:  The rich are different from you and me.
Hemingway:  Yes, they have more money.

suggesting that Hemingway cut through Fitzgerald's effete complexification.  Socialism just can't be more obvious.  And yet, everybody fails at implementing it.  Everybody.

On the other hand, capitalism, the theory that every person pursues his own self-interest, is a byword for selfishness.  How can you help your neighbor by being selfish?  Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, had to conjure an "invisible hand" for explanation,

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

What?

You can see a flat earth, it's the round earth that sounds like superstition.  You can understand people working together to solve problems, we do it all the time.  It's the "invisible hand" that sounds like superstition.  Like religion, actually.  The same religion that warns you never to possess things you did not earn by the labor of your own hands.

Capitalism requires a difficult explanation.  Just try reading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or
F.A. Hayek's remarkable work, "The Road to Serfdom".  I think most people are no more able to read Smith than to understand the Greek argument in spherical geometry.

The American nation was founded by a small intellectual elite who could read Adam Smith, and understand a geometric argument.  Benjamin Franklin met Smith twice and conducted an extensive correspondence with him.  Their respect and admiration was mutual.

So, it comes down to this.  That small intellectual elite: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin, created a society in their image.  The rest of us are more or less uncomfortable guests.  Most of us do not understand capitalism, do not understand healthcare, do not understand compound interest, or how to use a credit card responsibly.

Do not imagine, however, that lack of understanding is restricted to the "lower" classes.  E.g., there were several strange reasons for the housing crisis of 2008.  Three of them were

1. several million people bought houses they could not afford, 
2. financial institutions traded in securities they did not understand, and
3. a federal agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, that did not understand the market it was supposedly regulating.  

From high school dropouts to economics PhD's, the complexities of their personal and professional lives, in 21st century America, simply eluded their grasp.  For them, for most of us, socialism will come as a physical relief.  We will be poorer but more peaceful in spirit.

There is a passage in "The Fellowship of the Ring" that predicts our fate.  The Lady Galadriel is queen of the Sylvan Elves.  Her great powers derived from the Ring of Power in her possession, one of nine.  All nine Rings of Power were slaves to the One Ring, a ring of great evil.

Galadriel understood the One Ring had to be destroyed.  And, when the One Ring is destroyed,

"...then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."

The Border Wall

A quick word on the border wall the president wants to build.

One of the main objections Democrats have against the wall is that walls do not work.  Their arguments are preposterous, but I do not want to go down the list, point-by-point.  Rather, I want to give some context.

After the Muslim attack of 9/11/2001, it quickly got out that America had established some "Black Sites", unacknowledged locations outside the U.S. where unnamed people tortured information out of "unlawful enemy combatants".  The revelation caused immediate outcry.

One argument for the Black Sites went as follows.  Suppose Muslims planted a "dirty bomb" in a major American city.  If it exploded, at least a million people would be severely affected, with an immediate 10,000 fatalities.  In your custody is a Muslim with information that would enable you to pre-empt the bomb, if you could get the information out of him.  Would you torture one man to save one million people?

The Democrats answered "No", explaining that torture does not work.   

What?!  Everybody knows torture works.  Every spy novel you ever read, every Cold War movie you ever saw assumes torture works (that's why the hero carries a cyanide tablet in case of capture).  Every real life terrorist group, like the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, organizes in a clandestine cell system precisely because they know torture works,
"Thus, a cell member who is apprehended and interrogated (or who is a mole) will not likely know the identities of the higher-ranking individuals in the organization."

"The basic principle behind cell organization is simple: By dividing the greater organization into many multiperson groups and compartmentalizing information inside each cell as needed, the greater organization is more likely to survive if one of its components is compromised."

What does "compromised" mean, daddy?  It means you put electrodes on the guy's testicles until he talks.  (After the second jolt, you won't be able to shut him up.)

The moral of the story is this: don't waste your time listening to Democrats.  And, yes, of course walls work.

Alright, one last word:  a border wall will not cure cancer.  I mean, a wall is a tool like any tool.  It will not solve all our problems.  It will not even solve all our immigration problems.  Like any tool, it has to be used correctly and it has its limitations.  So, the issue is not whether a wall solves everything.  The question is whether it is one more effective tool in a box of effective border control tools.

And that is an discussion the Democrats will never have.