Dear John Letter #1 -- Why the oscars snubbed "Superman"

Dear John,

how do you square your praise for “Waiting for Superman” movie and the moves by Wisconsin governor to challenge unions with your blank check support for Democratic party?   

(here is quote from earlier email exchanges about the move "Waiting for Superman"--

Sam --I am sure you have seen it, but "Waiting for Superman" basically bolsters everything I think we all agree on with regard to Teacher's Unions. The situation in DC was unbelievable, when she offered the teachers $123K a year instead of $62K a year if they de-certed the union and had some accountability,and the union immediately shot it down. The other debacle was rteh NYC set up where they spend $100M a year on teachers who they can't fire to sit in a room and play cards. What a joke. J )

and here is quote from John on unions--

I am all for breaking unions and think Dems need to realize this.) 

Teacher unions in particular and unions in general are the heart and soul of Democratic party.  the Dems support the unions and the unions finance and support the Dems in one big self reinforcing funding cycle -- all at the expense of tax paying public. 

if you see the problem with unions, you have to see the inherent hypocrisy built into the DNA of Democratic party.  I’m not saying the GOP isn’t hypocritical.  It is.  The GOP loves the Federal reserve and subsidies for everything and then claims it is for the free market and low taxes and low regulation.

you can’t be for markets and also for a money printing machine which finances a massive industrial military complex.  Once you put the money printing machine into the mix, you better be for regulation because the markets won’t work any more.

that is the hypocrisy at the heart of the GOP.  I agree with you John that the Republican “free market” rhetoric is a bunch of crap.  Its crap because the GOP isn’t for free markets.  its for big government subsidies and big military.

What I am just suggesting, like I’ve done before, is that we are held hostage by a two party system that pretends to be for the protection of the little guy (either through welfare state or military protection) but really is for more power for the power elites in both parties that take turns at the public trough.   

Obama talked a good game about being a post partisan President, but he can’t walk the walk really because teacher unions and unions in general hold the Dem party hostage as we saw in Obamacare when the unions blocked higher tax on Cadillac health insurance plans – which union bosses enjoyed!!!

Now the unions are blocking education reform.

Any fantasy land system that you want to implement that puts government in charge of fixing important parts of US economy / society will be stuck with the same fundamental contradictions / constraints.  Your buddy Paul in his blog article bitches about what a wimp Obama is about not following through with all of his big idea promises.  It isn’t that Obama is a wimp.  It is that the ideas themselves are impossible to implement because there is some entrenched interest that the Dem Party is beholden to  -- whether trial lawyers or teacher unions or big pharma or big finance.   big finance is the latest addition to the Dem Party list.  Geithner bailed out all of the big banks, and investment banks. 

It isn’t that Obama is a wimp, it is that big labor and big business interests have blocked the truly big reforms that progressives want to pursue. 

John, you want the government to build high speed trains.  Wait until unions and special interest get a hold of that system.  You’ll get high speed trains in places that have the most powerful member of congress.  the system won’t make economic sense.    The same thing happened with the Federal highway system, which was doled out according to power interests in congress!  LBJ was master mind behind allocation of Fed funds for highway system to push his liberal social agenda.  You might like the social agenda, but then you have to hold your nose about how much waste went into the highway system – one reason the system is failing now.  lots of roads which weren’t needed were built that require fixing, thus draining resources from other roads which are needed. 

The way I see it, we’ll only get real education reform if/when our political elites cannot opt out of the public school system.  And we’ll only get real economic reform when elites aren’t held hostage by all of the special interests that they’ve given goodies to over the years.  as soon as the government gets in the game of choosing where high speed rails go, the system will be hijacked by political power interests.  Who is going to be in charge of making sure the system doesn’t’ get hijacked, John?  your system can’t work because it requires there be a mechanism that works above the democratic process.  that is a very slippery slope to benevolent dictatorship.

Every government program has a built in constituency.  You may say, lets get rid of the waste.  But it is very hard to determine what really is wasteful.  What you call waste, someone else calls a necessary program.

The only real solution to government waste is to limit government involvement in the first place.

John, if you really do appreciate Waiting for Superman you also have to see why the public school system holds the disadvantaged hostage in a government monopoly.  Liberals are against monopolies except when the government is in charge.

We are supposed to believe that since government isn’t going for profits it can deliver for the public good.  that is a load of rubbish.  Once we hand over a job to public sector, like managing public education, we all become hostage to the system that is hijacked by special interests.  The profit motive isn’t the problem.  the government is the problem.

Oh well forget all of this blather … get in line my fellow sheep!  The man knows best…

Why Oscar snubbed 'Superman'
Orange County Register
By: K. Lloyd Billingsley
2.25.2011

"Waiting for Superman," though hailed as "powerful" by President Barack Obama, popular with audiences and a winner at the Sundance Film Festival, failed to gain an Academy Award nomination. That should come as no surprise.

The problem is not, as some contend, the filmmaking craft of director Davis Guggenheim or the accuracy of "Waiting for Superman." Rather, Guggenheim broke ranks on liberal orthodoxy, and in the dream factories there can be no pardon for that.

"Waiting for Superman" tracks students who are trying to escape America's government monopoly education system, what supporters call "public education." Though a well-documented failure, as the groundbreaking study "A Nation at Risk" noted in 1983, that system is a stronghold of liberalism and, as former Secretary of Education William Bennett put it, the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

As a voting Academy member recently told me, liberal Democrats dominate the ranks of those who hand out Academy Awards. They are not likely to reward movies that reveal government monopoly education as a bust. The same is true for teacher unions.

As the late Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman noted, teacher unions actually run the government monopoly education system. "Waiting for Superman" interviews people who, for good reason, are somewhat less than worshipful of teacher unions, whose ranks include desk sleepers and other opponents of reform. Liberal critics cried foul, but "Waiting for Superman" could have been much harder on teacher unions.

For example, it could have shown them applauding when President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan quashed DC Opportunity Scholarships, a popular and successful school- choice program. Those enrolled in the program were mostly poor African-American children, but in the unions' scale of values, politics and money come before the interests of students and parents.

"Waiting for Superman" could have tabulated how many union teachers, administrators and politicians, while interning students in failed, dangerous government schools, send their own children to private schools. That is a trend across the country.

Guggenheim, meanwhile, can boast impeccable liberal credentials. He directed Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the Oscar-winning documentary for 2006. He also directed a biographical film for Barack Obama. Even with those credentials, in the Hollywood ethos, it is not permissible to doubt liberal orthodoxies, much less attack them. Guggenheim is certainly guilty of that, but he should not let the Oscar snub bother him.

Plenty of good documentaries and dramatic films alike fail to gain Academy Awards, or even nominations. Guggenheim doubtless will try again but he has already succeeded on several fronts. He showed courage in tackling this subject in the first place. Echoing the title of another highly regarded film about public education, he stood and delivered.

In fine style, he exposed a failed government education establishment. Best of all, he inspired parents and students to buck that reactionary establishment, whatever the odds, and seek better schools. So in their eyes the film is a winner.

The lesson of "Waiting for Superman" is that parents and students everywhere need more choice in education. Legislators and policy makers across the country should give it to them by establishing full choice in K-12 education, as a matter of basic civil rights.

Dear John Letters -- Introduction

I will upon occasion sprinkle in "Dear John letters" on this blog.

John is my long time college buddy.  He is one of the funniest guys alive and smart as a whip.  I love him.  but he also drive me crazy sometimes and I'm sure I do the same to him.

That is because John is a died in the wool liberal / progressive.  and a very outspoken one at that.  For that reason John provides me with the perfect foil for the ideas I am promoting in this blog.

Dear John letters will be a standard part of the blog -- until and as long as John continues to engage in political dialogue.  At some point he might just say no mas.... we'll see...

John sees problems in the world and he wants to fix them.  I say wait a minute.  Before you solve the problem, you better figure out or at least try to figure out whether there is an underlying cause of the problem.  John doesn't want to look for underlying causes of economic or social problems.

i believe john epitomises the hubris embedded in the progressive world view that assumes every problem is fixable as long as we put our minds to it and come to some logical conclusion about the way to fix it.

the way i see it the "modern" world is obsessed with technological quick fixes, whether it be in medicine or public policy.  we generally don't think in terms of underlying causes of bad health; that would be too difficult.  we look to treat symptoms so we can avoid painful trade offs that life throws our way.  high cholesterol -- take a pill.  over weight.  take another pill.  pills, surgery, public policy.  fix the symptoms. 

John wants to fix problems now.  And in almost every argument we have he proposes a solution that requires a Federal government program. 

I argue that many of the problems he wants to fix were caused in the first place by a previous well intended Federal government fix. Or I argue that the problem has no fix and we must learn to deal with it rather than use the government to fix it given the fact that the government fix will lead to cycle of unintended consequences and worse results than problem the policy was aimed at fixing in the first place. 

One perfect example of this way of thinking is epitomized by the Federal Reserve.  it was established to prevent business cycles, protect the poor from boom/ bust. what happened?  we didn't have a Great Depression until AFTER the Fed was established in 1913!  we got rid of business cycles for almost 20 years leading up to 1929; in fact the Fed engineered an unprecedented economic boom in the roaring 1920s, but this was followed by an unprecedented bust.  That is the law of unintended consequences at work.  We solve one problem with a government solution only to cause a bigger one.

John is incredibly well read and informed about the finer points of policy issues whether it be about health care reform or green energy or high speed trains.  you name it, John has all of the lingo down and he has a plan that sounds reasonable.  I say to John, you can't just going around trying to fix problems without first identifying the underlying cause of the problem (which is either a problem that can't be fixed by government in the first place e.g. income inequality or pollution) or is a problem caused  by some previous government fix the symptom intervention.

John consistently ignores what he considers my theoretical musings.  he wants to debate the fine points of the problem and the proposed solutions.  i claim that it is a waste of time to get bogged down in the fine points of policy that ignores not only the underlying causes of the problem that he wants to fix with government interventions, but also ignores the unintended consequences of proposed solutions that must be implemented by a benevolent government.  

i say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  John systematically avoids engaging in debates about whether the road to hell really is paved with good intentions or not.  he always brings the argument back to the details of each individual debate we have about specific policy. 

i say to john:  you and your fellow progressives fundamentally and systematically miss the forest for the trees.  you fix symptoms and miss underlying disease.  you are stuck in a mode where more technology is always the answer. 

and so we go round and round.  i try to bring the debate up to the level of a debate about fundamental implications about our competing world views, and John brings the debate back to the details of each issue.

John epitomises the progressive world view; for that i am thankful because he forces me to think and to test my ideas.  as long as he is willing to engage with me in debate, i will continue to post Dear John letters on this blog.