Voters Education History

20/20 Vision with Forethought

Just think! Little kids ready for the First Grade this year will be ready to vote in the November 2020 presidential election. Looking back, those old enough to vote on November 5, 2008 had their growing years during the Bill Clinton administrations.
There’s currently interest in education, as it pertains to civic affairs. I watch people on C-Span who, right and left, deplore the ignorance of youngsters when it comes to social science.
It almost seems as though school boards are reluctant to lay out a curriculum for fear it will offend someone. If you think I joke, consider the recent criticism over using Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” in English classes. And we don’t even have to venture into the murky territory of sex education. If the very term “Darwinism” is mentioned on a playground, children may take sides without ever having studied what the theory of evolution is. Yet on the evening news, some of their parents may be nodding in approval when their Congresspersons espouse more emphasis on Science in the Classroom.
What percentage of the population, grown or still growing, can fill in the names and capitals of the 50 states? And who can give more than the barest details about past US Presidents? George Washington couldn’t tell a lie. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. What about Andrew Jackson or Andrew Johnson? Or Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt?


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Words to live by

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes --indeed, deletes-- the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

But most of the people who use the new designation --economists, in particular-- are innocent as to the effect. They see nothing wrong with their bland, descriptive terminology. They pay no attention to the important question: Whether money "wealth" accords a special power. (It does.) Thus the term innocent fraud.


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