The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.

Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success . . . . Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to 'keep insurance companies honest' - and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.

Most problems, decisions, and performances are multidimensional, but somehow the results have to be reduced to a few key indicators which are to be institutionally rewarded or penalized... The need to reduce the indicators to a manageable few is based not only on the need to conserve the time (and sanity) of those who assign rewards and penalties, but also to provide those subject to these incentives with some objective indication of what their performance is expected to be and how it will be judged... key indicators can never tell the whole story.

The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education?