Five Points

The Cost of Compulsion, the Value of Volunteers

This past weekend I had the privilege of addressing over two thousand homeschoolers in one place, at the 22nd Annual North Carolinians for Home Education Conference in Winston-Salem. As many as that is, and it is impressive to see, it is only a fraction of the groundswell that home education is in this state. If all the parents and children in the 34 thousand homeschooling families across North Carolina were gathered together, they would populate a city the size of Fayetteville. That is significant.

At the same time as that conference was opening, the General Assembly -- to be specific, the North Carolina House -- was filing a bill to raise the compulsory attendance age from 16 to 18 years old. The long session last year already passed a change to upgrade truancy from a Class 3 to a Class 1 misdemeanor, meaning penalties could reach six months imprisonment or could even be raised to the level of a felony. Playing hooky isn't what it once was.

There are careers based on the debates which these two philosophies represent, but I find it interesting that the proposed change in compulsory attendance -- wisely avoiding the phrase "compulsory education", by the way -- carries a price tag of $41 million for the 2006-2007 school year. I seriously doubt that a student who has thrown in the towel on his own education by age 16 is going to gain much more from sitting in school another two years.

On the other hand, parents who have volunteered to fund their own children's education, whether by homeschooling or enrolling them in private or religious academies, are saving taxpayers over $980 million per year, according to the state's Department of Administration, which oversees "non-public education" here. Those options are not only for the well-to-do, either; last year I spoke with the headmistress of a Christian school which charges less than $1800 per year for their students, and even less for members of the sponsoring church.

As I concluded an op-ed in Carolina Journal once, perhaps the state should be looking at ways to encourage more of these parents who are making the choice to direct their children's education and cover their own expenses. In a $7 billion education budget, $41 million just disappears; but in a state budget of $17 billion, a non-expenditure of nearly a billion simply because citizens exercise their freedom is an idea worth promoting.

posted by Hal @ 3:12 PM 0 comments

A nice idea that leaves out the critical part

I read this morning where a private individual in Arizona has gathered enough petitions to place an initiative on the November ballot.  His idea is to take unclaimed lottery prizes and award $1 million to someone who actually casts a ballot in a subsequent election.

I'm appalled that fewer than ten percent of registered voters turned out for this month's primaries in North Carolina, but while I'm eager to encourage greater interest and participation in the democratic process, I am leery of offering a cash incentive for voting.  I am reminded of the story of a new junior college which was established several years ago; incoming students were polled for their preference of school colors and a mascot.

They were uninterested.  Just pick them and let us know, they told the administration.

Oh, no, said the school's leaders.  That's not how we're going to go about it.  You, the students, need to decide.  So they did.

On the opening day of football season, the school's team appeared in pink and white uniforms.  Their mascot was an artichoke.  Officials later admitted it was absolute murder trying to find a supplier for pink football jerseys.

Come to think of it, the school was in Arizona.

So in one sense, if voters aren't interested in exercising their franchise, there may be undesirable consequences to focusing on the mechanics of casting a vote without any expectation that the voters even know what's on the ballot.  There is much more at stake than picking a series of lottery numbers, and while we need more citizens to act the part and make the effort to participate, efforts to recruit that participation have to include the critical need for informed voters -- not just those who want a chance at a million-buck payoff.

posted by Hal @ 4:56 AM 1 comments

Losing traction on immigration

Peter Drucker related a conversation he had with General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan at the start of Drucker's first big consulting assignment. The executive called him into the office and said,

I shall not tell you what to study, what to write, or what conclusions to come to. That is your task. My only instruction to you is to put down what you think is right as you see it. Don't you worry about our reaction. Don't you worry about whether we will like this or dislike that. And don't you, above all, concern yourself with the compromises that might be needed to make your conclusions acceptable. There is not one executive in this company who does not know how to make every conceivable compromise without any help from you. But he can't make the right compromise unless you first tell him what right is.*

This is where the debate on illegal immigration is spinning its wheels. There is no question that we have millions of uninvited residents who entered the country illegally. It is obvious that many businesses benefit from their labor, particularly in unskilled work and service industries, and that consumers likewise benefit. Ultimately, it is difficult to fault a person for wanting to live in our country and seek a better and more prosperous life for himself and his family. Yet it is undeniable as well that by definition, these millions are here in violation of our law, and the failure to control our borders and points of entry is a critical weak link in our national security. This is an era when the next attack on our people and institutions will not involve waves of missiles, bombers, and uniformed armies, but will come at the hands of individuals and irregular units smaller than a platoon. A sophisticated radar net and surveillance satellites are no more effective for preventing that sort of attack than France's Maginot Line was against Hitler's Panzers.

Before we talk about economic impact, cultural issues, and the history of immigration cycles, we need to focus our debate first and foremost on the true problem -- unauthorized and uncontrolled passage of our borders -- and settle on the desired state at that point of breakdown. Until we determine what "right" looks like, the necessary political judgments -- i.e., compromises -- will be impossible to nail down with any accuracy.

Charles Krauthammer recently said that the solution to the larger problem will be both some sort of program to assimilate these workers, however that program is organized, but first, we have to stop the ingress of new illegal residents. Placing more agents and more effective barriers along the boundary is a necessary step, and having the means and will to return those caught in the newly placed nets is part and parcel of it. For those who are already here, returning to their homeland now should be a doorway which latches behind them.

However, doors have knobs and locks have keys, and how we manage future immigration as well as the dozen millions who have already moved here and integrated themselves into our economy is a separate and subsequent question.

When the ship is taking on water, argument whether to pump to the left side of the ship or the right is premature until the leaks below the waterline have been addressed. Once the situation is stabilized, it may well be that the additional ballast is a help and not a threat. We will not be able to sort that out on the immigration issue until we take care of the primary problem.

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* Peter F. Drucker, "The Effective Decision," Harvard Business Review, January-February 1967; reprint 67105.

posted by Hal @ 2:48 AM 0 comments

The Man On The Ten-Dollar Bill

Greek dramatists believed that every protagonist has a tragic flaw, usually a fatal pride or hubris. Ron Chernow illustrates this in his biography of America’s most brilliant founder, Alexander Hamilton. Were it not for a tragic personal pride and ambition which would not allow him to back down from a useless challenge, Hamilton might have lived to provide many more years of insight and wisdom to a government still in a state of rapid change.

More than any but Franklin, Hamilton was the self-made man of the Constitutional era. He was born illegitimate on a West Indian island and never truly put it behind him; the experience of poverty and prejudice gave him a drive and the ability to educate himself on any matter of importance, whether clerking a mercantile business as a teen-ager or creating a national bank as treasury secretary. Throughout his life, Hamilton honestly did become "the smartest man in the room" — even Thomas Jefferson hesitated to engage him in debate — and he did it by close application, attention to details, and hours and hours of dedicated study.

As a member of the first administration, Hamilton was possibly the strongest force shaping the precedents that were established. Chernow quotes that if Washington was the father of his country, Hamilton was the father of its government, from his leadership in The Federalist Papers and the fight for constitutional ratification, on to his role as the first treasury secretary. His audacious, interlocking programs converted the ruined finances of the Confederation into a manageable federal debt, a customs service, and a national bank. His expansive view of "good" debt and federal authority, though, made him an easy target for political opponents as national politics began to polarize into Federalist and Republican factions.

His personal life provided more fuel for propagandists, though in fact, Hamilton was completely upright as a Cabinet official, and even in the midst of an adulterous affair and a subsequent blackmail scandal, he never lost his deep affection for his quiet, devout wife Eliza. Always jealous of his public reputation, he initiated the steps to a duel at least seven times, including a challenge to James Monroe over disclosure of the extramarital affair. Still, Hamilton began to rethink the code duello in his middle age; it is one of a train of ironies that he still allowed himself to be drawn into the final confrontation with Vice President Aaron Burr.

Hamilton was a remarkable man; gifted with a blinding intellect, eloquence, and a generous spirit, he also possessed traits that could -- and did -- drive him to achievement or destruction. Even in view of his tremendous contributions to our Republic, Alexander Hamilton could be held up as both good and bad example for succeeding generations. He was just like all of us -- just more so.

The full review of Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton appears in the May 2006 issue of Carolina Journal, online here

posted by Hal @ 9:16 AM 0 comments

Introduction

This is the introductory post of my new weblog, Five Points. Welcome aboard!

The title reflects two fundamental philosophies in my life, as a Christian first and an American as well. Coincidentally, they both break down into five succinct headings; I don't believe the number is significant beyond that one correspondance.

As servant of the living God and a follower of Jesus Christ, I am joyfully walking in the pathway trod by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, particularly the spiritual descendents of the Swiss Reformation. Obviously this refers to the so-called "Five Points of Calvinism", which I'm the first to say is a response to a particular and specific theological controversy of the 17th century. It's not a complete statement or creed at all. However, it's often referenced as shorthand for a much broader view of the relationship between man and his Maker, the interaction of that Creator and the world He subsequently redeemed, and the continuing role each play in the world today. With that, I concur, and praise the God who is Sovereign over the affairs of men.

For what it's worth, it's something of a family tradition, this Calvinistic bent. My ancestors include a Puritan clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony; French Huguenots who landed in the South Carolina low country around 1690; and Scots and Scot-Irish Presbyterians who arrived after the unpleasantness of the 1770's. (For good measure, my gggg-grandfather Henry Young was one of the early Methodists in South Carolina; I don't know if he would have sided toward Wesley or Whitefield. There are some German Lutherans and near as I can tell, Swiss Zwinglians from Zurich mixed in ... so we return to the Swiss Reformation, eventually).

To make it more interesting, I'm of a Baptist persuasion, so my view of Reformed theology follows the London Baptist Confession of 1689 rather than the Westminster Confession a few years previous ... just like John Bunyan, William Carey, and Charles Spurgeon. I'll address this in later posts, and some already exists on my other weblog, The Inundated Calvinist.

The Other Five Points, though, are not recognized nearly so often as a list -- in fact, in some ways they are nearly ignored. These points are the continuing role of the federal government as delineated in the preamble to our Constitution. When the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate for the government of our wide-flung states, even in that early time, the new structure was enacted "to form a more perfect union" with five continuing purposes for that government -- to ...

posted by Hal @ 3:06 PM 0 comments