COST SHIFTING. The administration at Northern Illinois University has discovered that students are printing off their course documents and other stuff at the computer labs, because one of their "economy" measures has been to reduce the supplies budget for the academic departments.

Because of the increase in student enrollment and rules ignored by lab attendants, an excessive amount of paper is wasted in labs. Each year, about 10 to 15 percent more paper is used than allowed and NIU has not received any additional funding for paper. Its yearly budget only allows $150,000 for paper, said ITS supervisor Elizabeth Leake.

Let's leave aside the impracticality of defining "excessive." What's the fix?

While there is no charge for printing right now, more serious measures may be taken if the problem with the increase in paper use each year is not fixed. ITS is thinking about possibly fining students who break the rules, but nothing is set in stone, Leake said. Leake said there has been no discussion of charging at all for printouts and the readers are simply in place to track who is printing what and to keep the rules unbroken so all students are able to receive their fair share of paper. She also said almost all universities have systems similar to this and they have been proven to work as they should.

So much done, so much left to do. "Excessive" and "fair share" and "no charge." Primitives.

RUNNING EXTRA. Northern Illinois University is apparently luckier than some universities. Mike Adams has some fun with the administration at North Carolina-Wilmington, where the computer labs have run out of paper and out of funds to pay the lab staff.

At first, I considered the possibility that the shortage of paper and toner may have been the result of a few selfish students printing out personal emails and otherwise hogging the resources of the collective. But, of course, that doesn’t explain the shutdown of various computer labs over the course of the last year.

Furthermore, such a view would be incompatible with the socialist mindset that pervades this university. Various programs sponsored by the Office of Campus Diversity have taught me that individuals will act in the best interest of the collective, as long as the government sufficiently taxes them and properly oversees the redistribution of public funds.

So, that really leaves me with only one conclusion: A few individuals in the administration are mismanaging student technology fees. In other words, those who control the means of production are oppressing the masses in the student population.

It goes on in a similar vein.

FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR LOAN SHARKS! I have finished The Two Income Trap (details or compare prices) and must confess to being less than impressed with its recommendations. Apparently one of the authors did some consulting for Citibank, and recommended that Citi could reduce its bankruptcy-related losses by not lending to families who are "obviously in financial trouble." This proposal did not go over well with the senior man at the meeting, who noted that the bank made most of its profits from precisely those borrowers. (That is consistent with one nugget I learned: in the credit card business, a "deadbeat" is somebody who pays off his outstanding balance in full each month, thus exploiting the grace period and paying no interest. The problem the bank has is generating sufficient interest income from its portfolio of credit cards ... where some people pay no interest because they are using credit cards as float, and others pay no interest because they are deadbeats in the old sense of the word.)

So what's the solution? Turn to page 144.

The consumer-credit monster could be beaten back if Congress would enact a simple provision into law -- a provision that wouldn't require the creation of vast new oversight committees or contentious battles in the Supreme Court. Congress could simply revive the usury laws that served the country since the American Revolution. Federal law could be amended to close the loopholes that let one state override the lending rules of another. Alternatively, Congress could impose a uniform rate to apply across the country. Such a provision would enable the states or the federal government to reimpose meaningful limits on interest rates.

I will leave it to the legal experts to determine whether or not such a federal law would be contrary to the "full faith" provision or the commerce clause of the Constitution. Let me turn to the economics, but first let me alert new readers to the Utopian Wonk style of writing excerpted above. I have been reading this sort of stuff for years, and the "if only we would do this our troubles would go away" style leaves me cool. There is more of that sort of utopian wonkery to come, but let us turn first to the usury proposal.

Authors Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi correctly note that such an interest rate cap ought to reflect the prime lending rate or the underlying rate of inflation so as to avoid a repeat of the Regulation Q follies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But their expectation of the reaction of the banking industry is, well, utopian wonkery.

The beauty of this approach is that it would help families get out of debt without costing taxpayers a dime. How would it work? By harnessing the energy of the marketplace. Lenders themselves would transform mortgage and credit card practices just by acting in their own best interest. Since they would no longer be allowed to charge exorbitant interest rates to families with marginal credit records, it would be unprofitable for lenders to pursue [meaning to offer credit] families in financial trouble. Instead, banks would once again have a reason to screen potential buyers carefully, making loans to those who can really afford to repay.

But not repay too quickly, as the portfolio of loans might turn into an asset that paid less than a Treasury note. That policy might also bring us back to those thrilling days of the 1890s, as laid out in The Ledger, a publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's economic education unit.

Could we get along without a lot of the things we buy on credit? Yes, but our lives would be very different. There would be far fewer households with multiple TV sets and full-blown entertainment centers; fewer island cruises and trips to visit a certain cartoon mouse during school vacations. But there would also be fewer washing machines, clothes dryers, home computers, air conditioning units, and a bunch of other things that we've come to regard as essential. Easier access to credit has meant that more consumers can buy more products and services, benefit from using them now, and pay for them out of future income -- buy now, pay later.

The article helpfully emphasizes the importance of the "pay later." Note also the Utopian Wonk tone of the paragraph, and be alert to the post hoc fallacy that the paragraph introduces. Its point: there are many more consumer goods in today's homes than there were in a 1960 house, let alone a 1930 house or a 1900 house ... these are modelled in the Boston Fed's education center. It is an empirical question, however, whether easy access to credit hastened the creation of thick markets that supported industrial-style production of these goods. On the other hand, Chinese manufacturers and big-box retailers strike me as likely losers from a national usury law.

And it's not as if consumers who would be denied credit by regulated banks don't have other options. Williams and Tyagi helpfully note that credit-card lenders use methods other than "Jimmy the finger-breaker" to salvage delinquent loans. That is a potential capstone paper in a money and banking class: do the crime statistics reveal any effects of credit card deregulation on convictions for loansharking. There is a rather polemical book, Walter Block's Defending the Undefendable (details or compare prices) that makes a case for the loanshark as someone willing to bear higher risks in order to provide credit to people who would not get money from The [Regulated] Establishment. The loanshark story was more compelling in the days when money lenders could discriminate along racial and class lines. But I digress.

The real folly in The Two Income Trap is this excursion into Utopian Wonkery:

Reregulation would help solve a litany of evils. The most important is worth its own headline: Limiting interest rates would halt the rapid rise in home foreclosures. With a lower ceiling on interest rates, lenders would lead the charge to reestablish an appropriate match between family income and mortgage size, which would have the effect of reducing the mass of families that are sucked into mortgages they have no hope of paying. Minority communities would no longer find themselves stripped of wealth by predatory subprime [referring here to higher-interest mortgages to more risky borrowers] lenders. And homeowners would no longer be suckered into second and third mortgages that promise to lower their monthly bills but that actually rob them of the family home.

Right. Some people might not qualify for home mortgages at all. And an interest rate ceiling does not preclude a secured line of credit ... any credit card company that offers you a home equity line of credit is offering a mortgage (in most cases a second or third, in my case it would be a new first, which is why I decline such offers) and there is no reason for policy makers to treat borrowing against home equity as illegal per se. But the real Utopian Wonkery is yet to come.

Interest rate regulation would take the ammunition out of the middle-class bidding war, helping to save families from the Two-Income Trap. Competition for the best neighborhoods would continue, but if no one could get a mortgage that ate up 40 or 50 percent of the family's entire income, then home prices would begin to settle down to Earth. To many economists, this is a scandalous notion, involving a reduction in Americans' "net worth." But that net worth isn't worth anything unless a family plans to sell its home and live in a cave, because the next house the family buys would carry a similarly outrageous price tag. Some families with weaker credit
histories or more modest incomes might find themselves limited to smaller houses, but they would also be far less likely to end up in a home that drove them into the bankruptcy courts. Moreover, as housing prices leveled off, more families would be able to afford a home without having to resort to a subprime mortgage. Reregulation of interest rates would bring relief to all families, not just those already in serious trouble.

The problem, as Warren and Tyagi noted in the promising beginning of their book, is that the competition for best neighborhoods is driven by competition for schools. A serious voucher and school choice program is more likely to pop the housing price bubble (where is that story about upscale neighborhoods objecting to vouchers account the capital losses they'd bring?) than a usury law. A usury law, on the other hand, will confine education-consuming parents of modest means to poorer schools. Warren and Tyagi find that a small price to pay for their avoidance of bankruptcy. Egad.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS has a homecoming (that's what October is for) at Accidental Verbosity. Say hi to Sadie.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT.

A number of columns suggest that there is much more at stake in the upcoming election -- at all levels -- than simply the liberation of Iraq. The latest from Thomas Friedman (requires registration) is as good a place as any.

The leading edge of the American baby boom generation is now just two presidential terms away from claiming its Social Security and Medicare benefits. "With unfunded entitlement liabilities at $74 trillion in today's dollars - an amount far exceeding the net worth of our entire national economy - and with payroll taxes needing to double to cover the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare, how can any serious person not call entitlement reform the transcendent domestic policy issue of our era?"

That's challenge number 1, and I will have more to offer on that challenge tomorrow.

The second group of boomers barreling down the highway are the young people in India, China and Eastern Europe, who in this increasingly flat world will be able to compete with your kids and mine more directly than ever for high-value-added jobs. Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they'll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

That's challenge number 2, but the education establishment is still not up to it. "Access" -- defined as keeping the unprepared or the unmotivated in the schools -- and "diversity" -- defined as tweaking the admission standards to achieve some sort of proportionality, still take up too much of the establishment's time.

The third group of boomers our next president will have to deal with is from the Arab world. The Arab region has had the highest rate of population growth in the world in the last half century. It has among the highest unemployment rates in the world today. And one-third of the Arab population is under the age of 15 and will soon be entering both a barren job market and its child-bearing years. There are eight Saudis under age 15 for every one between ages 45 and 60.

This is why I believed so strongly in trying to partner with the people of Iraq to establish some sort of decent government there that might serve as a beachhead for more progressive governance in the Arab world. I have not given up hope for this, but it may turn out that we made too many mistakes and that Iraqis are too divided for such a project to succeed. If so, the next president is going to need plan B - some combination of oil conservation that reduces our exposure to this region, a new military strategy and a renewed focus on promoting better government there through diplomatic and economic means. The Arab world is not even close to educating its baby boomers with the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. Left untended, this trend is a prescription for humiliation and suicide terrorism.

Thus, the liberation of Iraq is a challenge -- but not the only challenge -- to policy makers.

THE WEEKEND'S MOST PROFOUND TRIVIAL COMMENT. That recognition, which might be awarded sporadically, goes to a member of the Northern Illinois University football broadcast team, who asked all and sundry, "Ohio State lost in overtime at Northwestern. They lost at home to Wisconsin. What are they doing ranked 25th in the country." No longer. Ohio State has dropped out of the sportswriters' poll (after a shellacking at Iowa) and Northern Illinois has gathered a few votes.

The weekend's football has been a morale-builder at Cold Spring Shops. First, Northern Illinois turned a slim halftime lead into a 28-3 advantage the first three times it had the ball. Final score 42-10. Alas, some lowlives decided that Homecoming would be a good occasion to, well, behave like lowlives. (Marquette doesn't have a homecoming, but has a problem with lowlives as well.)

Later that Saturday, Wisconsin stole a win from Purdue, despite some barely-legal chop blocking by Purdue that put three of Wisconsin's front four on the bench with ankle injuries. That leaves Wisconsin undefeated among Big Ten teams, and high in the rankings, with Northwestern ... if memory serves, that's the team that delivered the reality check in 2000 ... coming into Camp Randall. But it's OK to dance with Sean and then prepare.

Then we turn to the Packers. It's all a question of which team shows up. This week, the team that came oh-so-close to the conference finals last year showed up, and turned out the lights on Detroit, at their dome. There's one more game each with Detroit and Chicago, and two with Minnesota, which provides the team with the possibility of winning the division, if the right team shows up from now until January. (January? Yup. Last regular season game is January 2 at Chicago. I miss having football done, except for the college games on New Year's Day, by just after Christmas.)

BLESS ME THIS IS PLEASANT, RIDING ON THE RAIL. The weekend's weather featured one blustery Saturday, just right for winding up a conference, and one cool sunny Sunday. Compare and contrast: making 300 km/h on a German Inter-City with riding a hayride car (a flatcar fitted with railings and bales of hay) behind two interurban coaches on a preservation railroad. But both are applications of the electric railway principle. And there were several well-restored examples of the interurban art form placed in the sunlight. Pictures later. Today is another good day for research.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Professor Ray is not happy with the circumlocutions so-called "inclusive" language imposes:

English has only "he" and "she" for reflexive personal pronouns. We once said, "Everyone has his own opinion." The reflexive pronoun case must agree with the subject. "Everyone" is singular. The predicate nominative must also be singular. Therefore, "his" was always understood to stand for both male and female nominatives. But `80's feminists wouldn't stand for it, so it became a politically correct mandate to say "Everyone has his or her opinion." That's now three words, to be politically correct, instead of one.

Human nature being lazy, the extra weight was soon dropped. The whole sentence became truncated, I should say, corrupted, into "Everyone has their own opinion." "Everyone," which is singular, is followed by "their," which is plural. This is a grammatical catastrophe, committed daily by English speaking writers, journalists, and reporters alike. These former guardians of the language have fallen slaves to the legally protected enterprise of political correctness. The people follow. It all happens because saying "his or her" all the time is awkward, and seems entirely unnecessary. Political correct talk is so pretentious and tedious that it has caused grammatical errors to become a permanent part of the English language. (Try using correct grammar on your own computer. You'll be erroneously `corrected.')"

Perhaps something like "ter" or "est" will emerge ... there were people playing with the former in the early 1970s.

EVALUATING THE DEBATE. Dynamist helpfully located a transcript of the debate I skipped to work on a railroad. Sean at The American Mind has a roundup of commentary on the debate ... or to be precise, joint interrogation by Bob Schieffer, for those of you who wish to compare, contrast, or find an argument to raise with me. Here are a few things that stand out.

President Bush: You know, there's a lot of talk about how to keep the economy growing. We talk about fiscal matters. But perhaps the best way to keep jobs here in America and to keep this economy growing is to make sure our education system works.

I went to Washington to solve problems. And I saw a problem in the public education system in America. They were just shuffling too many kids through the system, year after year, grade after grade, without learning the basics.

And so we said: Let's raise the standards. We're spending more money, but let's raise the standards and measure early and solve problems now, before it's too late.

No, education is how to help the person who's lost a job. Education is how to make sure we've got a workforce that's productive and competitive.

Got four more years, I've got more to do to continue to raise standards, to continue to reward teachers and school districts that are working, to emphasize math and science in the classrooms, to continue to expand Pell Grants to make sure that people have an opportunity to start their career with a college diploma.

True up to a point, although not much help to the individual who made a human capital investment (or not) on the basis of the incentives 20-30 years ago. That was the big problem in Detroit when I worked there. No point doing college prep when the assembly lines would pay well to use you from the neck down. And today, the problem with the college diploma is that it might be, well, not indicative of much. There is still excess capacity in some parts of the academy.

President Bush: It's your money. The way my opponent talks, he said, "We're going to spend the government's money." No, we're spending your money. And when you have more money in your pocket, you're able to better afford things you want.

I believe the role of government is to stand side by side with our citizens to help them realize their dreams, not tell citizens how to live their lives.

A mixed metaphor, Mr. President? Where is the line between "standing" and "telling?"

President Bush: There's a -- no, look, there's a systemic problem. Health care costs are on the rise because the consumers are not involved in the decision-making process. Most health care costs are covered by third parties. And therefore, the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care. And there's no market forces involved with health care.

It's one of the reasons I'm a strong believer in what they call health savings accounts. These are accounts that allow somebody to buy a low-premium, high-deductible catastrophic plan and couple it with tax-free savings. Businesses can contribute, employees can contribute on a contractual basis. But this is a way to make sure people are actually involved with the decision-making process on health care.

Secondly, I do believe the lawsuits -- I don't believe, I know -- that the lawsuits are causing health care costs to rise in America. That's why I'm such a strong believer in medical liability reform.

In the last debate, my opponent said those lawsuits only caused the cost to go up by 1 percent. Well, he didn't include the defensive practice of medicine that costs the federal government some $28 billion a year and costs our society between $60 billion and $100 billion a year.

Good libertarian opener, with a dig at the trial lawyers. But you've had a Republican majority in both houses since 2002 and the medical reform that emerged was a taps-open prescription drug "benefit" that has the potential to turn all drugs into flu vaccine. The sentiments are fine, but where are the savings accounts?

Senator Kerry: In the Senate we passed the right of Americans to import drugs from Canada. But the president and his friends took it out in the House, and now you don't have that right. The president blocked you from the right to have less expensive drugs from Canada.

We also wanted Medicare to be able to negotiate bulk purchasing. The VA does that. The VA provides lower-cost drugs to our veterans. We could have done that in Medicare.

Medicare is paid for by the American taxpayer. Medicare belongs to you. Medicare is for seniors, who many of them are on fixed income, to lift them out of poverty.

The Senator, on the other hand, would prefer to turn all prescription drugs into flu vaccine. And he's pandering to his Silent Generation base, who avoided poverty by stealing prosperity from future generations. (Yes, I'm being provocative. I also have documentation of this for an upcoming post. As the election approaches, I'll be more active on political economy topics.) The Senator, unfortunately, subscribes to the fiction that each can live at the expense of everyone else.

Senator Kerry: Here's what I do: We take over Medicaid children from the states so that every child in America is covered. And in exchange, if the states want to -- they're not forced to, they can choose to -- they cover individuals up to 300 percent of poverty. It's their choice.

So you change the management and you shuffle some money through Washington. Right. But wait! There's more!

Senator Kerry: In addition to that, we're going to allow people 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare early. And most importantly, we give small business a 50 percent tax credit so that after we lower the costs of health care, they also get, whether they're self-employed or a small business, a lower cost to be able to cover their employees.

You know, there is a serious intellectual argument for the government as a minimum-variance pooler of risk, and a serious empirical question about whether that monopoly can in fact value the risk more efficiently than competing insurers, each of which faces a higher variance but a stronger incentive to estimate it correctly.

On to the next act of theft by the Silent Generation, otherwise known as the Social "Security" system.

President Bush: I believe that younger workers ought to be allowed to take some of their own money and put it in a personal savings account, because I understand that they need to get better rates of return than the rates of return being given in the current Social Security trust.

And the compounding rate of interest effect will make it more likely that the Social Security system is solvent for our children and our grandchildren.

I will work with Republicans and Democrats. It'll be a vital issue in my second term. It is an issue that I am willing to take on, and so I'll bring Republicans and Democrats together.

And we're of course going to have to consider the costs. But I want to warn my fellow citizens: The cost of doing nothing, the cost of saying the current system is OK, far exceeds the costs of trying to make sure we save the system for our children.

Good answer. Did he spend too much political capital on "cost of doing nothing" after the liberation of Iraq?

Senator Kerry, on the other hand, will complain but otherwise hope the problem can be finessed.

Senator Kerry: I have a record of fighting for fiscal responsibility. In 1985, I was one of the first Democrats -- broke with my party. We balanced the budget in the '90s. We paid down the debt for two years.

And that's what we're going to do. We're going to protect Social Security. I will not privatize it. I will not cut the benefits. And we're going to be fiscally responsible. And we will take care of Social Security.

Note he did not rule out means testing, or taxing benefits differently, or raising the retirement age ...

Senator Kerry: Now, if later on after a period of time we find that Social Security is in trouble, we'll pull together the top experts of the country. We'll do exactly what we did it he 1990s. And we'll make whatever adjustment is necessary.

If he's elected, don't say I didn't warn you.

President Bush finally got to say what had to be said.

President Bush: People need to remember: Six months prior to my arrival, the stock market started to go down. And it was one of the largest declines in our history. And then we had a recession and we got attacked, which cost us 1 million jobs.

Now for something different: immigration policy.

President Bush: Many people are coming to this country for economic reasons. They're coming here to work. If you can make 50 cents in the heart of Mexico, for example, or make $5 here in America, $5.15, you're going to come here if you're worth your salt, if you want to put food on the table for your families. And that's what's happening.

And so in order to take pressure off the borders, in order to make the borders more secure, I believe there ought to be a temporary worker card that allows a willing worker and a willing employer to mate up, so long as there's not an American willing to do that job, to join up in order to be able to fulfill the employers' needs.

That has the benefit of making sure our employers aren't breaking the law as they try to fill their workforce needs. It makes sure that the people coming across the border are humanely treated, that they're not kept in the shadows of our society, that they're able to go back and forth to see their families. See, the card, it'll have a period of time attached to it.

It also means it takes pressure off the border. If somebody is coming here to work with a card, it means they're not going to have to sneak across the border. It means our border patrol will be more likely to be able to focus on doing their job.

Now, it's very important for our citizens to also know that I don't believe we ought to have amnesty. I don't think we ought to reward illegal behavior. There are plenty of people standing in line to become a citizen. And we ought not to crowd these people ahead of them in line.

Hmm, were both of them reading this?

Senator Kerry: Number one, the borders are more leaking today than they were before 9/11. The fact is, we haven't done what we need to do to toughen up our borders, and I will.

Secondly, we need a guest-worker program, but if it's all we have, it's not going to solve the problem.

The second thing we need is to crack down on illegal hiring. It's against the law in the United States to hire people illegally, and we ought to be enforcing that law properly.

And thirdly, we need an earned-legalization program for people who have been here for a long time, stayed out of trouble, got a job, paid their taxes, and their kids are American. We got to start moving them toward full citizenship, out of the shadows.

Unfortunately, the Senator still is making light of 40 years of research in labor economics.

What we need to do is raise the minimum wage. We also need to hold onto equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That's not right in America.

And we had an initiative that we were working on to raise women's pay. They've cut it off. They've stopped it. They don't enforce these kinds of things.

And here we go again with "comparable worth." None of the Senator's court intellectuals understand compensating differentials?? The President appears to reply with a non-sequitur, but think about it. Why do homes in school districts with high test scores command higher prices?

President Bush: But let me talk about what's really important for the worker you're referring to. And that's to make sure the education system works. It's to make sure we raise standards.

On the merits, I view the President as having made the better case. But he's had majorities in both Houses of Congress. Why aren't some of these libertarian policies on the calendar?

DISCRETIONARY LOCK IN? Kevin at Truck and Barter is not happy that the Washington Post's Christopher Stern is not happy with monthly connection charges for Internet providers, health clubs, cable television, and newspaper subscriptions. More income committed to fixed charges means less income available for discretionary purchases such as food, clothing, tapes (or do you buy disks now) to watch or to hear, and books.

There is a connection between rising fixed commitments and the Two Income Trap (details or compare prices) and once the latest conference ends I will offer some more comments. For now a tease. The authors of Two Income Trap do not like the easy access to credit at high interest rates on offer today. The article quotes Jeremy Rifkin in such a way as to suggest he approves of easier access to credit. (I love a good fight, let's you and him have one!)

Rifkin points to the proliferation of tree-lined gated communities where 40 million Americans now have, in effect, their own private parks with swimming pools and bike paths. Until the mid-20th century, parks were largely viewed as public spaces. Rifkin claims that the move away from free radio and free television toward subscription models is just one example of a broader trend, with more Americans finding themselves paying premiums for traditional services such as education and health care.

The barriers are highest for consumers on the lowest economic rungs, those without credit or credit cards, according to Rifkin. "Credit cards are what open the door for those who can afford to live in this society," Rifkin said.

The number of consumers who have access to credit cards and electronic bill-paying services is large and growing. According to Synovate Inc., a research firm that follows the credit card industry, 75 percent of all households have access to a credit card. And more than half of people under 35 have paid at least one bill through online banking services.

The short form of the Two Income Trap is that more of the two incomes are going for the fixed charges and for debt service, leading to yet a different drain on the discrectionary income.

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE? Gus at Liberty and Power discovers more crushing of dissent.

The board of trustees of Florida Gulf Coast University voted 11 to 1 to prohibit Williams from speaking at a convocation, unhappy with her statements lamenting the Bush administration's environmental policies and saying that her speech would lack "balance." All 11 of those who voted against her, including university President William Merwin, were appointed Gov. Jeb Bush. Merwin has given money to the Bush/Cheney campaign. Vice President Dick Cheney is holding a campaign rally on the university campus this Thursday. Hacks from beginning to end.

He is correct to point out that censorship is censorship, liberating or not. But this is a bit much:

I have less and less sympathy for those who find time to direct most of their intellectual fire at the left, which is out of power completely, while ignoring the Right, which is making a travesty of everything this country stood for that was worthwhile. Rather like shooing off the neighbor's dog for pooping in your lawn while your house burns down.

Florida Gulf Coast University. Not Harvard. Not Wisconsin. Not Claremont. Not Duke. Not Northern Illinois. Not Massachusetts. Where's the fire?

ECON CLASS SURE IS TOUGH. Read. Understand. Draw your own conclusion.

A LOOPHOLE BIG ENOUGH TO DRIVE A GRAVY TRAIN THROUGH. The Flemish Beerdrinker writes a few words in praise of public-private partnerships.

Investment in public services is guaranteed, while governments can keep their budgets in order.

These were popular in the construction of railroads in Europe and Latin America in the 19th Century, and governments lost a lot of money on them. (Just one nugget from the railway conference. Has to be a thesis in there somewhere.)

In the United States, the promotion generally took the form of land grants, and those didn't work terribly well either. The unsubsidized railroads such as Hill's Great Northern, and Hill's colleagues' Canadian Pacific tended to be more profitable. The one public-private partnership that turned into a serious money machine was The Pennsylvania Railroad.

A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. Critical Mass has been reading history.

In the early chapters of Left Back, Ravitch writes extensively about the debates that surrounded the rise of the progressive education movement during the early decades of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to those progressives who (quite unprogressively, it seems to me) argued that it is basically not possible to train the mind to reason well and remember much. They used this premise to justify a socially deterministic tracking curriculum that barred all but the most elite, college-bound children from a traditional academic curriculum, and that instead emphasized vocational training. Learning for its own sake was considered impractical and elitist even as the rationale for not teaching academic subjects was itself elitist: The subjects taught in the traditional academic curriculum--Latin, Greek, algebra, and so on--were felt to be well beyond the abilities of most people, who could neither reason nor remember well enough to master them. Progressive education as it was initially conceived and implemented by educationists across the country was thus in many ways profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in its conception of human potential and in its correspondingly rigid notion of school not as preparation for life as a thinking citizen but as preparation for specific manual jobs.

We have had so much progress that Latin, Greek, and algebra are now held to be beyond the abilities of university graduates. I suppose that's called access.

IS THIS THE HILL YOU WANT TO DIE ON? Bill Sjostrom manages to tie a story about the Sjostrom house cat becoming a mouser to an essay by a Labor Member of Parliament who put the row about foxhunting into perspective.

It was obvious from the start that it would end badly. The loss of proportion is staggering. Whatever progressive politics is about, or worth taking on opposing interests for, it is not about views on alternative methods of pest control. Talk of invoking the Parliament Act is like declaring a state of emergency because of a patch of fog on the M4.

I dislike the idea of blood sports. Some of the people who engage in them seem especially unlovely. Unseating the toffocracy is appealing. The trouble comes when we start converting personal prejudices into state action. Not only do we stir up all sorts of unnecessary trouble, we wander into a bog of hypocrisies, inconsistencies and contradictions.

I like the Right Honorable Gentleman's thinking, and would like to see more of it. How much of state action is a conversion of personal prejudices? Half? Three fifths? 99.44%? Makes you go hmmm...

And if Bill can link two unrelated ideas, so can I. Look at this:

The fact is that we routinely do unspeakable things to animals; hunting is scarcely up there with our ordinary cruelties. I have just watched a local council pest control officer on television explaining how he kills rats by giving them a poison that stops their blood clotting until they eventually die. I have yet to hear such practices denounced from the Commons benches. If sport is the issue, then why not ban all killing of animals, birds and fish for pleasure? Exchanging substance for symbolism is the worst form of hypocrisy.

Hmmm, that sounds like warfarin, useful for preventing clotting in humans as well as for killing rats. (I forget the story ... was the second use the byproduct of animal testing in the quest of the first use gone wrong? If nature gives you lemonades and all that ...) Its name pays tribute to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation at the University of Wisconsin (current motto: we don't want to schedule Northern Illinois!)

NEVER MIND VERMONT AND NEW HAMPSHIRE. Professor Althouse has recommended some Southern Wisconsin locations for leaf excursions, based on a poll of the law school faculty in Madison. Not a bad list. Let me add a bit of local knowledge. Several of the sites require the use of the State Highway 113 free ferry at Lake Wisconsin, which is a treat in itself (your tax dollars at work) and a pleasant journey break. Too bad there aren't many trains on the adjoining railroad bridge. On the other hand, the Circus World Museum nearby is open (do they serve cotton candy?) If you take the walk around Lake Geneva, you pass the Lake Geneva Yacht Club, which is home to two two-time winners of the Rolex Yachtsman and Yachtswoman of the Year Awards, and temporary home of the America's Cup (now at some other Lake Geneva.) Also in the Kettle Moraine area is the last piece of traditional interurban track in North America at the East Troy Electric Railroad, which has more train service in the fall -- most preservation railways have their busiest days in the summer, particularly if they're hosting Thomas.

(Superintendent's footnote for railroad enthusiasts: Yes, the South Shore Line still offers interurban passenger service including the center-of-the-street trackage in Michigan City, but there's this little matter of the diesels on the freight trains.)

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE? Feature?

"Understanding each side from the other side -- that plus his legal training as a litigator is his intellectual framework," said Paul Nace, a friend for more than 30 years. "It's simple to have gut reactions; it's more challenging to submit your gut reactions to the rigor of intellectual debate. If the president had submitted his gut reactions to intellectual debate, the nation would have been better served."

Or bug?

"The campaign structure and strategy either fail to offer evidence of how Kerry would govern or raise warning flags," Jones said. "Such a review by no means dooms a Kerry presidency. But he's put a heavy burden on the American people to decide how he would govern."

This Washington Post report on Senator Kerry's management style (via Betsy's Page) is worth your time, and the hassle of registering to read it.

GOING TO HAVE TO READ THE TRANSCRIPT. I skipped the third debate to work on the Fox Valley O Scalers railroad. Possibly a mistake. I notice from the after-action and this summary that immigration policy and third-party payments in medicine came up.

AND BACK TO BEING ADORABLE... Just lost my pouch, but regained a friendly connection. Thanks!

I THOUGHT THIS PICTURE LOOKED FAMILIAR. During the diplomacy that preceded the liberation of Iraq, Instapundit posted this picture:

And here's (it's image 81) where I first saw that face:

"A Frenchman weeps as German soldiers march into the French capital, Paris, on June 14, 1940, after the Allied armies had been driven back across France."

Will we see a repeat as the jihadis take Paris?

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? Robert Reich (via Right Wing News) has read the book (details or compare prices) and come to a somewhat different understanding of it than have I. Methinks the intellectual wing of the Democratic Party downplay the cultural issues at their peril. To my mind, it does no good to let the lifestyles of the rich and famous (love children, recreational drugs, farming out the kids to nannies) trickle down to everybody (I think Bob Tyrrell made this point some years ago) and Mr Reich's invocation of the old us-against-the-power themes neglects the reaction to that to his peril. Mr Reich refers to another book, The Right Nation, that is on my to-buy list. (It includes inter alia a comparison of Speaker Hastert's district (where I live) with Minority Leader Pelosi's.) I promise some book notes (and a card deck update) once the latest conference is done.