1,000 Mice Do Not Make an Elephant

Charles Blow, a columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote an editorial about the dismal plight of America's children. He cited a report issued by the Center for American Progress that reveals, among other things, that over half of the post secondary students in the U.S. drop out before graduating, that more than 20% of America's children live in poverty, and that half of the children in the U.S. receive no early childhood education. Nearly a quarter live in poverty. More than a quarter have chronic health conditions. (Many of them are just plain fat). No one expects the situation to improve significantly any tome soon

Against these statistics, Blow places the impressive statistics of other nations. China, for example, is expected to have over 200 million college graduates by 2030 (the current population of the U.S. is 314 million). Many will have degrees is useful fields such as science and engineering. To rectify the deteriorating in the U.S., Blow, like many others proposes that Washington take matters into hand.

China is a centralized state. Policy is decided by the central government and imposed on the nation. If the government in Beijing decides that the nation needs more engineers, the order goes out to the education system to produce more engineers. If Beijing decides that it needs more scientists, the order goes out to produce more scientists. The U.S. is not yet a centralized state. The economy moves to its own rhythm. If there is a shortage of engineers, the demand for them rises. When the demand for engineers rises, the rewards for becoming an engineer increase. When the rewards increase, students gravitate towards becoming engineers. If there is a glut of engineering graduates, the benefits of an engineering degree decrease and students will find another field. That is how things have always worked in the U.S. It has worked well enough for the U.S. to become the premier scientific, technological, and economic power in the world. But, if statistics are any guide, we are losing our edge. Something has changed. For those like Blow, what has changed is that there is a lack of focus on the part of the U.S. that can only be rectified by action in Washington.

Like with so many other issues, the cure for what ails America is government. The trick is to make an issue a matter of national concern. Once an issue becomes a national concern, Washington can step in. But how do you make an issue like high school education a matter of national concern? Through statistics, that's how. It is through statistics that all the nation's overweight children can be put into one basket and thereby become a single, national issue warranting intervention from Washington. It is through statistics that Blow and others determine that the physical, economic, and scientific deterioration evident in the nation's educational system are a national concern.

Children in the U.S. do not belong to the nation. They belong to parents. It is the parents' responsibility to raise their children, not the nation's. Something has changed in America over the last 50 years. The well earned victories of the Civil Rights and environmental movements have imbued progressives with a sense of omnipotence. They believe that there is no problem that cannot be rectified through the proper application of federal compulsion and enticement. They believe that people are fundamentally plastic and can be shaped into desired form through the proper application of government. And, despite the rhetoric of "systems" and the nation, we are talking about people: hundreds of million of people each with their own tastes, habits, plans, and ambitions.

Like all human endeavors, at the foundation of any system is people. The fundamental flaw of Marxism was that it believed that people were products of society. It asserted that if you changed the system you can change people. Marxism failed because it was mistaken. Society is the product of people. Progressives have sought to turn Marxism on its head by trying change people. They believe that if they change how people think and behave they can change the world. In that they are correct. Where they err is that they take the same road that led the Soviet Union to ruin. They believe that to change people you have to manipulate society, but not through a frontal assault as Marx advocated. You have to tease it towards perfection with legislation carefully crafted to channel people onto the desired path. Instead of the iron gauntlet of law, the velvet glove of regulation and economic manipulation is used. Progressives seek to change the nation's children and mold them into economically useful little engines capable of driving America forward. Children are to be subordinated to the needs of the nation, whatever those needs happen to be at the moment. We console ourselves in this endeavor by contemplating to all the marvelous rewards awaiting our children when they receive the fruits of their labor.

Statistics provide only the barest of sketches of groups acting according to identifiable patterns. When a correlation is discerned it is leaped  upon and shaped into a tool to with which to manipulate society with. They are outlines superimposed on hundreds of millions of individuals. People all want more and better. People all want to avoid deprivation and hardship. But that is about all you can say about them. They cannot tell  you what they want more of except in vague and often meaningless terms like "equality","justice", and a "good life". Such terms are empty brackets to be filled by individuals themselves. They cannot measure the ability or tell you the personal motivations that drive the individual. They measure patterns, not causality. Indeed, to assert a causality as the basis of human behavior is the hallmark of ideology.

The raising of a child is a parent's responsibility. Clearly, too many parents in the U.S. are doing a poor job. Progressives, liberal and conservative alike, want to push parents aside and have the government take up the burden. They are forever tinkering with rules, penalties, incentives, regulations, and laws in an effort to remake people in a fashion suitable to their idea of what society should look like. For over forty years they have been laboring at this task and achieved little. Still they persist. Just as the New Deal has become the paradigm of government intervention, civil rights laws have become the paradigm of social and cultural manipulation. But, like the New Deal, the equation is far more complex. There is no simple cause and effect when it comes to human behavior. People can be stubborn, irrational, lazy, and riddled with vice. No government will ever change that because government is a product of society and society is a product of people.

As the U.S. slowly slouches toward Babylon and a debt ridden, impoverished, poorly educated, two tiered society, people are increasingly clamoring that the government do something about it. But the government has already done something about it. It has made things worse. As Samuel Johnson once said, a thousand mice do not make an elephant. Progressives cannot craft policy for 300 million mice. They need elephants. To that end they are continually stacking mice.