Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city's public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in recent days. This is a thankful development, given the sense of racial entitlement that drives this program and other symptoms of voucher fever.
Government bureaucrats look out for their own kind. Entrepreneur John Shanahan, the man behind "Hooked on Phonics," found that out the hard way when he developed a program that taught his son how to read after the California public schools could not.
The joy erupting in Howard University's student union was palpably motivated; O.J. Simpson would walk. "As the verdict was read, the place erupted into screaming and jumping. You couldn't hear," one observer put it. To the students, a falsely accused black man was able to get justice—in racist America, no less.
We're no fans of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and now they know it. After Hurricane Opal caused substantial damage here in Auburn, Lew Rockwell wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times arguing that we'd be better off without post-disaster federal aid. Why should California taxpayers be penalized for our misfortune? he asked. He also had choice words for FEMA bureaucrats who use natural disasters to enhance federal control.
So the phone rang, and it was Morry Goodman of FEMA.
Cheers to the governors of Alabama and Virginia for sending back millions of dollars earmarked for the "Goals 2000" program slated to be imposed on their states' schools. After decades of federal attacks on local control, they have responded to voter demands that school centralization be halted.
There is no reason for taxpayers to support trips to the moon, particle physics, or any other research not directly serving defense against external or internal aggression, the core function of government. Funds for basic research can be allocated by the market.
Project Head Start is supposed to be the exception to the Great Society rule—a welfare program that actually works.
The Free Market Reader (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988) is a 400-page collection of 76 articles, most of which first appeared in the Free Market newsletter. Since 1982, the Mises Institute has used this medium to promote economic understanding to the general public (although academics like myself enjoy it too). The purpose is to educate people about the need to rid society of the impoverishment and injustice caused by the government.
Under the surface, Poland is seething with anti-government ferment. And the works of Ludwig von Mises and his students are part of the reason—testimony once again to the potency of truth.
