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The Great Society Has Failed

And so here we are today in America, and both sayings have relevance, the former more so than the latter. Everyone is screaming, shouting, rioting, looting, and committing acts of violence in the name of combatting “systemic racism.” Truly, there are many folks, empty wagons, making a lot of noise, while so many others are whistling past the graveyard, not grasping the real issue in America.

The bottom line is simple: The Great Society – the grand endeavor of the progressive, racist President Lyndon Baines Johnson, has failed. Fifty-five years later, we are witnessing the -- shall I say it --“chickens coming home to roost.”

The Great Society, also known as the infamous War on Poverty was launched as every other government top-down solution is, with great promise and “noble” intention. It was an updated version of Roosevelt’s “chicken in every pot” solution.

What Johnson and his ilk believed was that they could manipulate the outcomes in the lives of individuals and create equality. They embraced the notion that the government could “level the playing field,” and with a plethora of government subsistence programs, all would be well.

In reflection, we should all agree, and stop whistling past the graveyard, that this was a program intended to do one thing -- create economic enslavement, dependency.

The progressive socialist left does not want the issues created by The Great Society to be fixed. They do not want to see strong, two-parent families, educational freedom, and economic empowerment. No, on this new plantation, the left needs victims, and victims provide them with electoral patronage. The real discussion about racism should be about the policies that have turned American inner cities into combat zones, literally.

Sadly, with the advent of reality TV and other mindless programming, we are becoming a nation of lemmings and useful idiots, not critical thinkers. We prefer to succumb to the irrational emotionalism of which we are bombarded by the lords of propaganda. We used to have a responsible press.

Who's More Radical: The Left or the Right?

There are crazy positions on the far left and crazy positions on the far right.

On the left, there are people who believe a man can get pregnant; that the world is going to end in a decade if we don’t cap carbon emissions; that the real purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve slavery.

On the right, there are people who deny the Holocaust happened; who believe that whites are inherently superior to other races; that no one should pay taxes.

But there’s an important difference between these two extremes: The crazies on the right have no voice—they are shunned. They live mostly on the far fringes of the internet. The crazies on the left have a loud voice—they are celebrated. They live in the halls of Congress, in state legislatures, and in governors’ mansions.

In light of this distinction, it might be interesting to ask ourselves this question: Which group, the left or the right, is more radical?

We can arrive at a commonsense answer by posing this thought experiment: What would America look like if the left got everything it wanted, and what would America look like if the right got everything it wanted?

Let’s start with the left.

Taxes would go up on individuals and corporations to pay for more social programs—everything from universal childcare to free college tuition. Many on the left call for income taxes as high as 70%. Private health insurance would be abolished; the government would provide all health care services. Everyone in the medical field—doctors, nurses, and administrators—would be government employees. Americans would pay for this government health care through much higher taxes.

Illegal immigration would be decriminalized. It would still be illegal to enter the country without proper documentation, but no one who made it into the US would be prosecuted for doing so. Illegal immigrants would also receive free health care, free education, and free housing.

The Green New Deal would be adopted. Hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for wind and solar power would be added to the federal budget. Drilling for fossil fuels, the current source of 80% of our energy, would be sharply curtailed or eliminated altogether. So would nuclear power. As a result, consumers’ electric bills would be much higher.

Reparations would be paid for the past injustice of slavery. How it would be paid—and exactly to whom—is not clear. Legally acquiring a gun would become much more difficult. College debt would be cancelled. Those who had already paid for college would get nothing.

Transgender women—biological men who identify as women—would be allowed to compete against women in sports. America’s military budget would be slashed by 25 to 50%. Speech codes would be enforced throughout American life.

And that’s just a partial list.

Now let’s ask what would happen if the right got what it wanted.

Income taxes would be cut. Capital gains taxes would be cut. Corporate taxes would be cut. And those cuts would be made permanent. All regulations that make doing business unnecessarily difficult and don’t protect public health would be repealed. The issue of abortion would be sent back to the states for each state to decide its own abortion rules for itself.

Many more charter schools would be opened, and it would become much easier to fire bad teachers. In order to vote, citizens would need to present a valid ID. The border with Mexico would be secured. The only way to enter the United States would be through designated border crossings. In order to qualify for welfare assistance, you would have to prove you could not work.

The health care system would be opened to free market reforms. For example, insurance companies could sell policies across state lines. Students in elementary school would recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day.

So what can we conclude from our experiment? It’s not hard to figure out.

If the right got everything it wanted, the government would get much smaller. The citizen would have more freedom.

If the left got everything it wanted, the government would get much bigger. The citizen would have less freedom.

You’re not radical if you want America to be what it’s always been: committed to individual liberty. You’re only radical if you want to fundamentally transform America into something it’s never been.

Which country do you want to live in?

I’m Will Witt for Prager University.

And that happened at a roundtable on protecting senior citizens during the coronavirus pandemic.

Democrats (Accidentally) Make The Case Against Teachers’ Unions

All this applies equally, if not more so, to teachers’ unions. Through the collective bargaining process, they’ve made it nearly impossible to fire a teacher, unless the school wants to spend roughly two years and $200,000 doing it, according to Stanford Professor Terry Moe.

Teachers themselves admit that this is a problem. A survey by NPR and Ipsos looked at the views of K-12 teachers across America, with roughly half members of teachers’ unions and half non-unionized. Among the findings: 62% of organized teachers and 64% of non-unionized teachers agreed that the unions make it harder to fire bad teachers.

A study by the Fordham Institute looking at what it takes to fire bad teachers found that “For the most part, state and local policies create a tortuous maze of paperwork, regulations, and directives. Teachers who receive years’ worth of ineffective ratings are given multiple chances for improvement and reevaluation, and a single procedural violation by the administration starts the process over again.”

Teachers’ unions are the biggest and most relentless obstacle to education reforms such as charter schools and education savings accounts that would put more control in the hands of parents and break the union stranglehold over public education.

But don’t expect Democrats to ever extend their reasons for hating police unions over to teachers, for the simple reason that teachers’ unions dump far more money on Democrats than police unions.

While police unions give heavily to Democrats, they also support Republican candidates.

As one House Democratic leadership aide told Axios, “Police unions are very different. They’re very conservative, a lot of them are even Republican. They don’t have the same progressive beliefs.”

But teachers’ unions? In the past 28 years, they gave 96% of their campaign contributions to Democratic candidates. And they are huge contributors. In 2016, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association gave $64 million in political donations.

The result: student test scores have stagnated while per-pupil costs continue to climb. Millions of children remain stuck in failing schools. But hey, it’s mainly a real problem only for those in poor, minority neighborhoods. Why would Democrats care about that?

Now that the public is opening its eyes to the harm done by one public-sector union, perhaps it will start to realize that being anti-teachers’ unions isn’t the same as being anti-education.

you are still unable to formulate a verifiable claim about BLM.

You said police officers were "lynched" by BLM. "Lynched" means "killed". Explain yourself.