Sports and Schools

Okay, two things I should have said yesterday before making my posts. Firstly, I am an idiot, and so please take anything I say with at least 5 grains of salt. Secondly, the NFL has done a wondrous job of ensuring, via the way they structure contracts, that there is huge turnover on almost every team almost every year. Even when the starters stay roughly the same, it often seems like teams are trading whole benches every year (as a few years ago, when the Broncos signed the Browns entire defensive line.) So preseason predictions are worth about as much as the electrons it takes to make them appear on your monitor. Mine are, well, no different. Just less well-informed.

But the point of this post is to direct you to this diavlog between Brink Lindsey and Josh Cohen. These two always make for a good pairing. They are cordial and respectful, but both fairly well-informed, well-spoken, and disagree on lots of things. But they know how to let the other make a point and then respond, unlike some vloggers (*cough* Eli Lake *cough*) who conduct themselves with the snarky attitude of a teenager, belying some serious lack of confidence in their own arguments.

Anyhow, Brink and Josh spend most of the vlog talking about education and raising kids. There's too much to go into in any great depth while I'm pounding out a post during lunch break, but I did want to take the time to say that Brink, while he does a great job of expounding the libertarian viewpoint, is at the same time doing a great job of driving me away from it.

I find a lot that is admirable in the libertarian model, which is basically the idea of pushing liberty above any other concept when it comes to questions of governmental power. In particular, I appreciate their live-and-let-live attitudes towards questions of sexual orientation, gender roles, abortion, and most of the social conservative wedge issues. Also, their tendency to really doubt the efficacy of the military in effecting social change in foreign lands is a lesson we all would have done well to learn prior to 2003.

However, I have absolutely no respect for the attitude of 'do whatever's best for the top 30% (or 50% or even 80%) and fuck the rest.' Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, the general attitude of libertarians in too many places.

In this case, it's in a question about schools. Josh is eviscerating the Supreme Court's take on school districts' attempts to achieve some racial balance and diversity in their schools. The court's take, basically, was 'no using race as a deciding factor in any way, shape, or form.' To which Brink's response was that, in his ideal world, there would be no public schools, and instead there would be a series of private institutions responsible for educating our young ones, and the government would help cover tuition if needed.

Pardon my French, but this is absolute fucknuttery. The only reason private schools do a better job than publics of educating kids, to whatever extent they do, is because they get to pick who goes there. They kick out kids who don't make the grade, or fall behind, or cause trouble. For a variety of reasons, some good some bad, public schools don't have nearly as much freedom in this regard. And where are these kids going to go in a world without public schools? Well, they'll either all be stuck together in some sort of serious miscreant academy, which doesn't seem like it really gives them the best chance to get their shit together, or they'll end up outside the system altogether.

To which, I suspect, Brink would say something kind-and-gentle sounding, but which lacks any actual substance.

And so, I am ready to say this. In a world in which we have created perfect human beings, I think libertarianism is the ideal social model. In the actual world in which we live, which is tragically filled with actual human beings, it's hogwash.