Freeing the future

One sometimes hears the modern welfare (nanny) state referred to in terms like "from cradle to grave." Perhaps we wouldn't have so much regulation of life and expropriation of wealth, even in death, if we didn't let the State attach itself to our children in their most formative years:

...we also long ago conceded the most critical territory of all. While strenuously wrestling over business and banking and health care and energy and a dozen other issues, we cavalierly handed over to the state a perpetual 90 percent share of the nation's educational interests. America regularly has about 50 million children enrolled in K-12 schools, and about 20 million more in colleges and universities—and while the pattern fluctuates a little, 90 percent of those 70 million young people regularly get a state-flavored view of reality.

Socialized medicine? Most of us recoil at the idea. Socialized airlines? Reminds us of Aeroflot. Socialized banks? When it happened last month, it terrified us.

But socialized schools? Nine out of ten of us patronize them regularly.

And we do so with na'ry a thought or concern about how such an arrangement affects next week's election, or the election after that, or the lifetime of elections to come.

Abraham Lincoln once said the philosophy of the schoolhouse in one generation is the philosophy of governance in the next. If so, maybe we'll see a repeal of the 22nd Amendment and The One will get to serve for life. (Don't laugh -- he's being compared to FDR... a man arrogant enough to seek election four times!)

If we want our children to live independently tomorrow, perhaps we should free them from the blender today...