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RP: Religious institutions should be more important than government

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Nutty statement


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RP: I want to abolish the Dept of Education

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Amazing from someone who benefited from it!


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RP: I want to abolish the IRS

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Yeah, all infrastructure is or should be free.


That RP guy sounds like an absolute nut to me! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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Midge,

Take a moment to think about what you wrote. Why is it "amazing" to want to abolish a national agency just because it may have impacted you? Of course it may have impacted you, that's because it's a national institution which doesn't ask if you'd like to volunteer to donate or participate as part of its cause, but forcibly collects from you and then mandates educational policy (to some degree) on your local schools whether you asked for it or not. So does that mean it can never be abolished? An institution's mere existence means it is immune from debate about its continuing relevance? You really don't see the circular logic here? And of course, that's all assuming the US Dept of Ed "benefits" your local school, which is at least debatable.

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These are great. If there's any benefit, then the act must be good. No thought to opportunity costs. No thought to other alternatives.

I used to work for a very large multinational corporation. I would go to training classes that were just downright horrible. You could spend a week and learn two or three things that you could have learned in an hour of self study. But whenever I talked to other people about this, they uniformly felt that the classes were great, simply because they learned something. The fact that they flew across the country and spent a week to learn something that they could have learned in a hour at home didn't seem to bother them. They got a benefit out of the trip, so it was "worth it". As a shareholder, I was pretty disgusted.