I have been accepted to law school. Law school is that place you go when you have an undergraduate education sufficiently expensive and esoteric to render you a liability to the private sector. It’s not about helping people, whatever they say. It’s about paying down student loans. 

I visited my law school and got to see a mock class. We talked about a case that came before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting gay sodomy. The appeal challenged the law under the equal protection clause. 

I’m not a lawyer yet, and I’m certainly not a judge. But here’s what I gathered from the mock class:

O’Connor argued that they should strike down the law. Naturally, the legislature could simply outlaw all sodomy (treating everyone equally), similar to another law that the Court had allowed to stand. O’Connor thought that this wouldn’t work because all the straight people like anal sex too much.

The teacher let this hang in the air for awhile, and we all laughed. Nervously. Then she grabbed it from the air and swung it haymaker-style, beating us across the face with it. 

All those years in academia and her insight was firmly within grasp of a teenage boy, and nearly as astute. As it were. 

That’ll be fifty grand, thanks.

I found this on Ace Of Spades, here.

I find this graph terrifying. I’m not a professional, but things do seem to be getting better despite, rather than because of, President Obama’s program. 

Where is that money going to come from anyhow? Those are yearly deficits - not the cumulative debt. I also like this graph.

There’s an old story about Reagan. When his car was under assault from rowdy students screaming “We are the future!,” he responded by writing a note to them and holding it up to the window:

“I’ll sell my bonds.”

I’d be interested to hear some research on what will happen when the soaring debt of the Obamastration meets the sinking fertility rates of my generation, a group of narcissists more worried about hip living than creating a new generation to leave all that debt to. When we’re spending all my kid’s money, are we keeping track of our newly inverted family trees? A lot of the folks we’re borrowing from probably won’t ever exist in the first place. 

Pretty freakin’ spooky, huh?

I’ve been reading a lot of WSJ’s lately (although my wife accuses me of saving them for fuel in case of the Obamacalypse). They subsidize the cost to students ($100/year) and deliver them at least twice as often as the Postal Service. 

Unfortunately, their web content is not free for non-subscribers. For the cheapskates out there, try out the Investor’s Business Daily. While most of the stock picking content is subscriber only, the cartoons, editorials, and columns (”on the right” and “on the way right”) are all free. I’d never heard of it until I say a high ranking Missouri Republican reading one. They also have a cheap rate for students, but since it’s the middle of the semester you may want to hold off until next year.

To expound on my lazy professor theory, I’m going to take just a little time to pick on classes that require/maintain a roster of attendance. 

I think everyone should go to class. After all, that’s why we’re here. I can read books on my own; I pay so much to hear the professor lecture and to learn from him. 

Why would a teacher maintain and require attendance? It clearly requires more work on their part to keep attendance than simply to lecture to whomever shows up. It must be because they worry no one will come to class if they don’t force them. While classes may not always and everywhere entertain, they should have some merit on their own. That’s why we pay professors. 

If I don’t go to class, I face two possibilities:

1. I miss something important to my education that I cannot gather from the assigned reading. 
2. I don’t miss anything. 

Since I have more information about my ability to catch up on missed material and on my opportunity cost than anyone else, I should have the power to choose to skip class without an additional tax that applies equally regardless of ability. If the professor wants to raise the cost of missing class, he make his lecture more interesting. I should not be punished for skipping class to do something more important if the professor can’t manage to make attending lecture worthwhile. Keeping attendance is the last refuge of the inept lecturerer, a professor so boring or useless that no one will attend his class unless he docks their grades for absence. 

Outside of Ecomp, I’ve run into this system rarely at Washu. Teachers here generally rely on the worth of the material and their skills as lecturers to draw students to class, certain that those who don’t attend will reap the punishment on the midterm and final exams. And if you can manage to get an A without going, they don’t punish your ability with classwide absence taxes. 

Other universities frequently keep attendance, require attendance, and use pop quizzes to entice students to waste valuable time sitting in classes where the professor cares so little about his vocation that students could get good grades without attending. I pity those professors who have so little talent or inclination that they cannot keep students interested in the material, and I pity those students who are bullied into classes taught by such useless numbskulls. 

The bottom line: students should be able to avoid classes whose lectures are not useful or interesting and should be willing and able to accept the consequences come exam time. Requiring attendance hurts able students who can score well without attending class and allows worthless professors to waste students’ time without putting forth effort or skill.

Conservatives often (ad nauseum) complain about liberal bias in the press. This irks me. Of course the press is biased. The news isn’t math; we can’t express what happens in terms of symbols whose definitions are understood and undisputed. We have been blessed and cursed with a beautiful and vibrant language full of connotation and nuance.

Imagine a great fountain up in Newsland. Pristine news shoots out of the fountain twenty-four hours a day. We’re all busy, though, and we can’t go get our own news out of the fountain. We send other people to do it. We’d like them to keep their buckets perfectly clean, but they’re busy too. Their buckets have got some leftover news in them, some stuff that happened yesterday and last week and three months ago. 

Not only that, but it’s a long walk from the fountain in Newsland to where we are. The people we send spill some news along the way, replacing it so that we don’t notice. Maybe they don’t even realize they’ve done it. 

The point is not that the reporters are bad people, but that they are people just as we are. There is no magical conveyor belt from Newsland, and we can’t go ourselves. We send our people and hope for the best, knowing in advance that their buckets just aren’t that clean. 

This cultural desire for fairness is a fairly recent invention. When anybody could start a paper, we didn’t care so much about objectivity. Newspapers were partisan, and that was just fine. We knew what to expect and simply didn’t read the papers we didn’t agree with. (To some extent, that happens now. I certainly avoid CNN if at all possible, and watch MSNBC only under threat of dismemberment. It’s not because the anchors are cuter elsewhere.) 

But changes in technology brought on economies of scale in newspapers. Bigger newspapers could save on overhead and price below the cost of smaller papers, and we ended up with a single paper in every major market. Without competition, journalists began to create an air of objectivity and separation from the editorial staff. They failed then as now, but the promise of fairness made the paper appealing to the wider audience it now served.

Regulation of the airways gave us a similar situation in television and radio.

Lucky for us, the internet has once again created competition in news. We now have the option to avoid the print media altogether, or to buy news papers whose opinions with which we concur. Cable news broke the backs of the networks, and the internet has brought down the New York Times. 

We’re really back to where we started, except that we have a legacy of reporters claiming to separate their feelings from the news. Let them throw down their affectation and come out of the tank. They should be free to voice their opinions so long as they truthfully report on the facts, and we know in advance their positions.* Let the market decide who shall provide the news, and let us quit whining when people behave as people will. 

*Of course, NPR is the exception. NPR should be abolished, since it will never fall under the jurisdiction of the market and so will continue to provide taxpayer subsidized advertising for the ideological left. They should hate it anyway; it’s incredibly regressive.

My next assignment in argumentation will be a peer-reviewed paper. I hate doing peer-reviewed papers. 

First of all, I don’t pay fifty grand a year to listen to what other students think of my writing. Even if I were average, I’d be better than half of those people. But even the best writer in the group is still twenty-two with a brain full of mush and nonsense. They spend all their time writing about feedlots. And global warming. And how the world will be unjust until we’ve rid it of both. 

But the second problem is perhaps more annoying. After all, my classmates are in the same boat I am. It’s not their fault that we’re all young and stupid. The real fault lies with the professor. This peer review will fill up four lectures. Tack on another four lectures for presentations at the end of the semester, and that’s eight out of twenty-seven classes that my professor will not have to prepare a lecture. The average student pays $185 per class to go here; the tab comes to nearly $1500 a person for the eight classes that we miss. That class has sixteen students, so the total bill comes to $23,680. $23,680 stolen from students by a professor. Will she declare that on her tax return?

And they say we need more money for education.

In the past few weeks, we had a lecture about emotional appeal in rhetoric, which I will summarize as “all the appeals that don’t meet the standards of logic” or “how to get the peasants to storm the Bastille.”

This has always been a problem for me. I don’t like emotional appeals. They feel manipulative and fleeting, like the feeling of opening a new Diet Dew or just almost getting a speeding ticket. Whoosh! And the magic is over. 

But emotional appeals make sense to lots of people. Many people are drawn to charisma and flourish. They don’t feel the need to ask for “proof” or “evidence.” They don’t even want to look at the “regression output.” They simply want to feel fuzzy. 

And so I’ve been searching for answers. Why don’t emotional appeals work on me? I’ve thought seriously that I might simply have no emotions. After all, I am a conservative, and things are lookin’ pretty bleak right about now. As a conservative, I have a sort of chronic fear that things are going to hell, but I may simply have no fleeting emotions. Keynes might argue that in the long term we’re all dead, but it seems that in the short term we’re all irrational.

As for me, I don’t feel sorry for the poor people I hear about from Obama’s teleprompter, and I don’t worry about the uninsured. I don’t even worry about the disenfranchised. Nope, not even the poor folks who can’t find their photo ID get a tear from me. Of course, I’m something of a monarchist, and when I’m king those people won’t be allowed to vote anyway. 

I get excited about cutting the corporate tax rate, I guess, but then I also get excited about the rapture. We conservatives can hold our breath a long time. 

So I’ve gone on a crusade to find my emotions, listing things that really get me fired up. Here’s the list, in its entirety:

• Ronald Reagan
• Pujols’ homerun off of Brad Lidge on October 17, 2005
• My wife
• The Missouri River bottom on hwy 65 north of Marshall. I drove home this way a lot my freshman year at WashU - the sun always hit the fields at dusk 
• High school football - this is odd, because I was neither good at football nor enjoyed it. Go figure. 
• “Watching Airplanes” by Gary Allan
• “Photograph” by Nickelback
• Brian and Sam. Naturally. 
• Tarkio. I write about it pretty often, but there’s nothing to differentiate it from the thousands of other small towns just like it. I don’t miss the school itself, but I miss the streets and the farms and my house. I miss my parents and family. I miss the way everyone leaves their car running and the Casey’s and the combines and the attic full of my grandpa’s radios. 
• Grain elevators
• Abbie, Gabe, Lizzie, Aaron
• National Review
• The day I moved in to WashU. Not a pleasant emotion. Ditto for the time spent at Scholars’ Academy. Ew. 
• My pickup. I’ll find you someday, I promise. Odd that I don’t have the same emotional attachment to my car. Perhaps because it’s a little neurotic - every time I leave town, the car alarm runs until the battery dies. Every single time.

I think that’s all of them. That may be it forever. My emotions are worn out after all that reminiscing. Feel free to comment back with things that make you emotional. I can’t imagine anyone is still reading at this point, but if you are, you’ve earned the chance to respond. And a Diet Dew. Savor the moment.

I have a theory about college: way too many people go. 

This isn’t my theory; it’s actually Charles Murray’s theory. But I’m going to write about it anyhow, because while we’re worrying about government screwing up incentives in the financial sector and health care, we should remember how well they’ve done with education.

I recently applied for financial aid to go to law school. Federal financial aid is given on a need basis. They generally figure the student’s expected contribution at nearly one hundred percent, and the parents’ contribution at some lower figure. Since I’m married and going to graduate school, I didn’t have to report my parents’ information.

I’ve learned a little something about the federal system for allocating financial aid: if you have money, they expect you to use it to pay for school. If you don’t have money, they pay it for you. If you don’t have money, you’re likely to get your first four thousand dollars of school for free, compliments of a federal Pell grant. 

Moreover, if your savings are in cash, CDs, stocks (down 50% or more), or mutual funds, you will be expected to either sell them or borrow their value. If your savings are entirely tied up in your home, you will have the benefit of the Pell grants. 

These programs make college cheaper for people who do not save, raise the cost of tuition for everyone, and leave the folks who have saved holding the bag.  

The upshot of all of this? People who shouldn’t go to college do, because it’s a cheaper alternative than, say, becoming and adult and joining the workforce; those who save transfer wealth to universities and those who didn’t.

I’m not suggesting we should help people who save. I’m suggesting we shouldn’t help anyone go to school. If we did away with distortionary aid, the market rate for educational loans would accurately reflect the expected increase in lifetime income a degree conferred. In fact, the only people who’d go to college would be those who stood to gain from it. Isn’t that the point?

And, of course, if you think all people need a classical education, than they should go for the education, not the degree. Yale offers that for free at Open Yale. All the classes, notes, books, and none of the expense. And no debt to pay off. 

In Tarkio, we tried to start a technical school for linemen, a (typically) union job with good benefits and high pay. It’s a job that does not require a college education. In fact, very few jobs require a college education, which is good because even if you go to college, the odds are against finding education there. But this particular job, which paid a good deal more than a WashU grad can expect to receive, drew too little interest to bother starting the school. We couldn’t get people interested in a job that would have put someone into the 90th percentile of income in Tarkio. Instead, we routinely send kids to college to get degrees that will leave them four years older, thousands of dollars in debt, and no more educated than they were at graduation from high school.

I often get frustrated with the Army because like all command and control structures, the Army cannot avoid, and often makes no effort to avoid, inefficiency. Even if everyone agrees there is a better way that makes no one worse off, inertia keeps inefficiency in place. We’re an organization that uses command and control in order to make quick decisions; unfortunately, when the residual claimant is too far removed from the situation, we usually end up with indecision by committee. 

But more often, somebody makes a decision, and often enough that decision saves lives. 

Discussions in college classes frustrate me even more than the Army does. Open-mindedness runs rogue into equivalency. Bad ideas enjoy the same respect as good; no one’s feelings get hurt. 

At times this can be useful, perhaps. It’s worthwhile to get people involved, even if they have stupid ideas. It’s useful when papers come due, because the teacher doesn’t have to worry about quality when assigning grades. 

But more often, bad ideas are simply bad. They should die, and as the adult (or at least the oldest person in the room), the professor ought to kill them. 

Too often the professor encourages, even offers up such nonsensical ideas as accusing libertarians of wishing to do away with private property rights. I attempted to convince her that libertarians do, in fact, believe in laws against theft. My opinion was duly ignored. 

We have allowed open-mindedness to trump truth; fear of offense to ruin honest debate. All arguments are not equally valid, and despite what my argumentation teacher might say, some disagreements end in resolution. Of course, having never ventured outside the academy, she wouldn’t know this. 

In business, stupid ideas die, and stupid people often get canned. It’s rough, but they learn to have better ideas or pour cement. In the Army, we may not always pick the most efficient decision, but we do eventually pick the one most likely to save someones life. In the academy, variety matters more than right. Odd ideas win notoriety (see Churchill, Ward). Hard choices involve latte or chai, and no one suffers when a professor goes off the reservation. Or was never on it to begin with, as it were.  

But I believe the University is an efficient institution. In spite of the professors (I here exempt professors of economics, business, and mathematics) students do manage to learn something. And even if they don’t, the Academy keeps professors out of the real world where they might do some damage. 

Of course, until Inauguration Day.

How fun would it be to be right if no one were ever wrong?

At least that’s how I get through my Argumentation class. I have to take it, because all Arts and Sciences students have to take a “writing intensive” course during their junior or senior years. Naturally, since everyone has to take the course, all the courses are taught to the lowest common denominator. (See “levelling, failure of”.)

Tomorrow is libertarian day. That’s great. She’s being “unbiased.” She gave us two articles from The New Republic. “Angry White Man” and “Pimp My Ride.” One article for and another against Ron Paul. Except she poisons the well by telling us that Tucker Carlson acts like he’s never met Ron Paul before, when in truth he simply must be in the tank. And then there’s the Kirchick article.

Kirchick argues that Paul is a racist, based entirely on his affiliation with the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the assorted newsletters that bear his name. Certainly, some of the newsletter quotations are pretty crude. Unfortunately, Kirchick makes little effort to verify that Paul either wrote or approved them. I’m not arguing that Paul isn’t a racist; he might be. But surely there must be a conservative or libertarian who isn’t somewhere, right?

The mischaracterization of the Mises Institute is much worse. Kirchick suggests, not terribly subtly, that because one believes in the right to secede, one must be a racist. I don’t know much, but I’m pretty sure that anti-federalism predates the association of slavery with race. But I don’t write for the New Republic, and I certainly don’t teach argumentation to students at a consistently-tied-for-top-12 university. 

We’re very progressive at this school - so much so that we almost got past the idea that all libertarians must be racists. I could keep my head down, read my copy of IBD quietly in the back of the class. But I probably won’t. I’ll probably dust off my stars and bars, whistle a little Dixie, and prepare to defend myself with a rolled-up copy of Reason. After all, this is libertarian day, and my teacher has no bias at all.