Joe Biden, Wokeness, Big Government, and Popularity

Other than just-for-the-fun-of-it election predictions, I generally stick to economic analysis rather than politics.

But I acted as a pundit in this interview about Joe Biden’s waning popularity (in my defense, I also used the opportunity to slip is some criticism of his agenda).

My assertions about Biden pushing a hard-left agenda aren’t new.

I made the same point during the 2020 election campaign.

And I take second place to nobody in criticizing what he’s been doing ever since he got inaugurated.

Indeed, the only thing I’m uncertain about is whether I should be more upset about his class-warfare tax agenda or his proposals to expand the burden of government spending.

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think my comments about Biden’s leftist ideology are controversial. Not even back in 2020.

For instance, here’s the headline from a Vox column that year by Matt Yglesias.

And here’s a headline from a column that same year by Michael Kazin in the New York Times.

Both of those columns said the same thing – namely, that Biden had embraced a leftist agenda (and both authors were very happy about that development).

I also would direct people to this 2019 Washington Post column by Lane Kenworthy, which observes (with approval) that Democrats have moved to the left.

If you want even more evidence, this analysis from 538 also makes the same point.

And a report from Pew notes that there’s a much bigger gap now between Republicans and Democrats – and it’s almost entirely because the median Democrat is now much farther to the left.

There’s one other point from my RT interview that’s worth highlighting.

I mentioned that we’ve had a strange realignment in the United States. Many rich people have moved to the left while lots of low-income people have moved to the right.

Is this because Democrats are pushing some policies that disproportionately help upper-income people, such as student loan bailouts and expanding the deduction for state and local taxes?

Maybe that’s part of the answer, but I mentioned in the discussion that social and cultural issues are probably the main reason.

In other words, wokeness may be the big dividing line nowadays in American politics – which is not exactly good news for libertarians who want the focus to be statism vs. liberty.

P.S. I also used the interview to explain that Reagan was special because he was able to enact big changes (notwithstanding America’s separation-of-powers system). But unlike other presidents who oversaw big changes (such as LBJ and FDR), Reagan actually pushed through reforms that were good for the nation.

P.P.S. I don’t like the idea of government-financed media, but my philosophical objections haven’t prevented me from appearing on PBS, BBC, and France 24, so I figured it was okay to also appear on Russia Today.

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Great Moments in Government Schooling

I don’t like Joe Biden being a lackey of the teacher unions, and I think the entire Department of Education should be eliminated.

That being said, intervention from Washington is the not the main cause of America’s education problems. The real problem is that we have an inefficient monopoly system that is – for all intents and purposes – run for the benefit of teachers and bureaucrats.

All of us should be upset that we see more and more money going to more and more employees, but we don’t get any progress in boosting academic outcomes.

I sometimes think the system can’t get any worse.

But then I read something that almost makes me think that politicians want the system to be a failure.

Here’s a story from Yahoo! News that I first assumed was from the Babylon Bee. But it’s not satire, it really happened.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation. Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744…, an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation, according to the Oregonian. …The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards… Backers argued…the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” …Republicans criticized the proposal for lowering academic standards. “I worry that by adopting this bill, we’re giving up on our kids,” House Republican Leader Christine Drazan said.

I don’t know which part of the story is more reprehensible. Should we be more outraged that state politicians wants to eliminate standards, or should we be more outraged that supporters are implicitly (at the very least) racist in thinking that minority students can’t perform?

This is equivalent to breaking your bathroom scale because you don’t like your weight.

In any event, we have more evidence that government schools squander lots of money and deliver very poor results.

Which means we have more evidence in favor of school choice.

P.S. Since I’m pointing out the failure of government schools, I can’t resist sharing a couple of older stories

Here’s a bizarre story from New Jersey (h/t: Reason).

Ethan Chaplin, a Glen Meadow Middle School student, told News 12 last week that while he was twirling a pencil with a pen cap on in math class, a student who bullied him earlier in the day yelled “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.” He was suspended for two days and then underwent five hours of a physical and mental exam at Riverview Medical Center’s crisis unit, his father told NJ.com.

We have another crazy example of political correctness run amok, as reported by the New York Post (h/t: Daily Caller).

Meet 8-year-old Asher Palmer, who was tossed out of his special-needs Manhattan school for threatening other kids with a toy “gun’’ — which he made out of rolled-up paper. …[His mom] was incensed that Principal Micaela Bracamonte told other staffers in an email that Asher “had a model for physically aggressive behavior in his immediate family.’’ Spadone thinks Bracamonte was referring to her husband because he served in the military during the Kuwait war. If that was the reason for the comment, she said, “I find it offensive and inappropriate.’’ As far as the toy gun is concerned, she said Asher, a first-year student, made it out of a piece of paper after discussing military weapons with his dad.

I’ve previously shared many stories of anti-gun political correctness in government schools (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Makes me wonder whether that kind of nonsense is even more counterproductive to kids that some of the excesses of critical race theory.

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More Child Abuse at Government Schools

I’ve shared examples of brain-dead behavior by bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Agency.

But the folks at the TSA may be paragons of wisdom and judgement compared to administrators at government schools.

Those bureaucrats seem incapable of improving test scores, even when they get showered with tax dollars, but they’re always ready to go overboard when kids…gasp…play with toy guns.

Or even when they pretend a stick is a gun. Or when they pretend their fingers are a gun.

Here’s a crazy example that just happened.

A 12-year-old Overland Park girl formed a gun with her fingers, pointed at four of her Westridge Middle School classmates one at a time, and then turned the pretend weapon toward herself. Police hauled her out of school in handcuffs, arrested her and charged the child with a felony for threatening. …according to Johnson County District Court documents, on Sept. 18, the girl “unlawfully and feloniously communicated a threat to commit violence, with the intent to place another, in fear, or with the intent to cause the evacuation, lock down or disruption in regular, ongoing activities …” or created just the risk of causing such fear. …“I think that this is something that probably could have been handled in the principal’s office and got completely out of hand,” said Jon Cavanaugh, the girl’s grandfather in California, where the girl is now living. He said his granddaughter has no access to a real gun and she had no intent of harming anyone. “She was just mouthing off,” he said.

School bureaucrats also over-react if students like a picture of a toy gun.

Here’s a story from two years ago.

An Edgewood Middle School student was handed a 10-day suspension for “liking” a picture of a gun on Instagram with the caption “ready.” The parents of Zachary Bowlin posted a picture of the intended suspension notice which read, “The reason for the intended suspension is as follows: Liking a post on social media that indicated potential school violence.” “I was livid, I mean, I’m sitting here thinking ‘you just suspended him for ten days for liking a picture of a gun on a social media site,” father Marty Bowlin said. “He never shared, he never commented, he never made a threatening post… anything on the site, just liked it.” The picture in question is of an airsoft gun, and according to the students’ parents, their child didn’t comment on the post but simply liked the picture.

We’ll wrap up with another bizarre case from this year.

School bureaucrats also don’t approve if students engage in legal behavior when they’re not at school.

Two male students at Lacey Township High School in New Jersey posted photos of guns on Snapchat. One of the boys captioned his photo with “hot stuff” and “if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, you know where to go.” The photos were not taken at school. They were not taken during school hours. They did not reference a school. They auto-deleted after 24 hours, which was well before the school became aware of them. And yet, administrators at Lacey Township High School suspended the boys for three days, and also gave them weekend detention. This was a clear violation of the students’ First Amendment rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union has now filed suit. …The two students had visited a gun range owned by an older brother on Saturday, March 10, 2018. They practiced shooting with “legally purchased and properly permitted” guns, according to the lawsuit. They also took a few photos and posted them on Snapchat. None of the snaps were threatening, and none of them referenced a school. Nevertheless, a parent of another student heard about the photos and contacted school authorities. On Monday, the boys were forced to meet with an assistant principal and an anti-bullying specialist, who quickly decided to punish them for clearly constitutionally-protected speech.

Kudos to the ACLU for getting involved on the right side.

I wish it was because they supported the 2nd Amendment as well as the 1st Amendment, but their involvement is a plus regardless.

But that’s a separate issue.

For today, our topic is misbehavior by school bureaucrats. Is there a way of discouraging these ridiculous suspensions?

The good news is that schools often back down when these episodes of political correctness get exposed. And maybe legal action also could help.

But I suspect the only effective answer is busting up a hopelessly bad government school monopoly.

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Government Schools + Anti-Gun Political Correctness = Child Abuse

Several years ago, I would regularly share horror stories about innocent kids being abused by politically correct government school administrators who overreacted to anything remotely resembling a gun.

I even had a U.S. vs. U.K. stupidity contest that featured many examples of anti-gun lunacy, though Canada may actually win the prize for the most absurd case of political correctness.

But I eventually stopped sharing these types of stories because it seemed there were so many and I felt like I was making the same points over and over again.

Time for the hiatus to end. I’ve run across a handful of stories that are so preposterous that I can’t resist revisiting the issue.

Here’s our first example. A local television station in North Carolina reports that a little girl was suspended because she pretended that a stick was a gun while playing with her friends.

A local mother is outraged after her 5-year-old daughter was suspended from school because of a stick that resembled a gun. …It started Friday when her mother got a call from the principal about a playground incident. Caitlin explained that she and her two friends were using their imaginations, playing “King and Queen.” In this case, Caitlin was the guard protecting the royals and picked up the gun to imitate shooting an intruder into the kingdom. Hoke County Schools said Caitlin posed a threat to other students when she made a shooting motion, thus violating policy 4331. …Miller says Caitlin was alienated by her friends and teachers as a result of the suspension. She hopes that the school will issue some sort of apology to her daughter.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is insane.

POLL: Should 5-year-old girl be suspended for playing with 'stick gun'? https://t.co/vQpNDwk1LZ

— ABC11 EyewitnessNews (@ABC11_WTVD) March 29, 2017

Now for our second story.

It’s about a very dangerous 11-year old girl who – gasp!! – . A Florida television station has the details.

A South Florida couple is outraged after they said their daughter was suspended from her middle school for using a child butter knife at lunchtime to cut a peach. …Souto’s daughter is an honor roll student at Silver Trail Middle School in Pembroke Pines. …Ronald and Andrea Souto told Local 10 News reporter Michael Seiden that their 11-year-old daughter was suspended for six days for bringing the knife to school. “This is a set of a spoon, fork and knife for toddlers — one year old,” Andrea Souto said. “It is made for children to learn how to eat properly. She’s used it since she was baby.” According to the school district, the girl violated the county’s weapon policy when she used her butter knife in the cafeteria to cut the peach. …Ronald said he hopes what happened to his daughter will bring change to the district, specifically new polices when it comes to weapons.

But this rogue child didn’t just get suspended. She may become an actual criminal.

The Soutos said they were shocked about the suspension and are now concerned that their daughter’s act of kindness could lead to criminal charges. …The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office. It’s unclear whether prosecutors will file charges.

Our third story comes from a St. Louis TV station and it involves a four-year old boy who was suspended for a shell casing.

Hunter, 4, has been suspended from his preschool for bringing a shell casing from a fired bullet to school. He’d been at the preschool for about a year, she said, and now was in tears. Neither she nor Hunter’s dad knew it, but he found something he thought was pretty neat and he took it to school Tuesday to show his friends. …Hunter’s parents got a letter from the school’s director saying Hunter had been suspended for 7 days. …It turns out the casing came from a visit with Hunter’s grandpa who is a Caseyville police officer, Jackson said. …The school’s vice-president e-mailed her that he was notifying the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

The last sentence is particularly chilling since DCFS bureaucrats presumably have the power to take children from their families. So imagine the horrible position of Hunter’s parents, who not only have to deal with their kid being suspended for doing nothing wrong, but also have to worry about the state kidnapping their child if some anti-gun bureaucrat woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

Our fourth and final story is courtesy of the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, where a teenager was expelled for a year because of a water gun.

A family is up in arms after their 16-year-old daughter was expelled from Prattville High School for having a water gun on campus. …she was banned from school property and any extra-curricular activities for the same period. …She said a male classmate handed the toy to her daughter “as a joke.” “…the second you picked it up, you know its plastic and a toy,” she said. “So we can understand the initial reaction, not knowing it wasn’t a real gun. But after the principal and school officials knew it was a water gun, things should never have progressed this far.” …The family wants any reference to the expulsion removed from Laney’s academic records, McPhillips’ letters read. …If the expulsion isn’t removed from Laney’s academic record, the family is considering filing legal action

I suppose there are two big-picture lessons to be learned.

First, it’s hard to be optimistic about the education system after reading this type of story.

If bureaucrats at government schools don’t have common sense, how can they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Maybe (especially given the shocking lack of results after record levels of staffing and funding) we should break up the government school monopoly and let parents choose better-quality schools.

Second, keep in mind that anti-gun statists know they can’t win the intellectual argument against private gun ownership, so they’re trying to stigmatize anything remotely connected to guns in hopes of eventually winning the political argument.

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Bureaucracy and Political Correctness vs Common Sense

A few years ago, I put together an amusing collection of stories comparing truly bizarre examples of political correctness and bureaucratic idiocy in the United States and United Kingdom.

I was especially impressed (in a you-must-be-joking fashion) that a British job placement office got in trouble for discrimination because they sought “reliable” and “hard-working” applicants. Sounds impossible to believe, but consider the fact that the EEOC bureaucracy in the U.S. went after a trucking company because it didn’t want to employ drunk drivers.

And I’ve shared jaw-dropping reports of anti-gun political correctness in American schools, as well as a proposal to ban skinny models in Britain.

Let’s expand on this collection of horror stories.

Reason reports that some bureaucrats in New York City think that it is sexual harassment for a professor to base grades in part on effort and classroom behavior.

A professor at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College was ordered to make changes to his syllabus because it amounted to sexual harassment. The professor, David Seidemann has refused to comply, and for good reason. …a university administrator expressed three grievances about the syllabus. First, and most quizzically, the grading portion of the syllabus suggests sexual harassment. It reads, “Class deportment, effort etc……. 10% (applied only to select students when appropriate).” …Seidemann told me in an email that his department chair said “the 10% section could be construed as a prelude to sexual harassment,” and had to be changed at once. This order apparently came from the Director of Diversity Investigations and Title IX Enforcement. In the course of Seidemann’s interactions with the director, he realized something quite stunning: there was no record of anyone actually complaining about the syllabus. The university had apparently launched this investigation on its own. …The professor refused to meet with the Director of Diversity Investigations, preferring to talk via email so that the conversation could be documented. This eventually caused the director to abandon the investigation: the matter is now officially closed, according to Seidemann. The professor is pleased with the result, but little else.

If you read the entire story, it appears that the bureaucrats decided that “effort” could be interpreted as an invitation for female students to trade sex for higher grades. At least I think that’s the implication.

In which case, there must have been rampant sexual harassment when I was young because our report cards in elementary school always included our teachers’ assessment of our “effort.” And all the way through college, I periodically had classes in which grades were based in part on “participation.”

I guess I was so young and naive that I didn’t realize my teachers and professors were inviting me to offer sex for grades (my grades often were low enough that it was probably best I didn’t run the risk of having them go even lower).

More seriously, I’m glad the professor stood up against the absurd accusations put forth by the diversity bureaucrats. I especially like that he insisted on having everything occur via email so he couldn’t be victimized by the selective memory of some pencil pushers who probably try to justify their comfortable sinecures by claiming an occasional scalp.

Bureaucrats in Knoxville, Tennessee, also seem to be amazingly skilled at seeing sexual harassment where it doesn’t exist.

The student, Keaton Wahlbon, had to take a geology quiz featuring the following question: “What is your lab instructor’s name? (if you don’t remember, make something good up).” Wahlbon followed the instructions: he didn’t remember, so wrote down the first generic girl name that came to mind—Sarah Jackson. Unbeknowst to Wahlbon, Sarah Jackson is a real person: a pornographic model. Of course, there are hundreds (thousands?) of other Sarah Jacksons in the world, and Wahlbon had no idea that his lab instructor would interpret his answer in such a specific and malicious manner. His answer was marked “inappropriate” and he received a grade of zero on the quiz. Wahlbon appealed to his professor, Bill Deane, but Deane maintained that Wahlbon had committed sexual harassment. Wahlbon contacted the head of department because, well, that’s nonsense. …no resolution has been reached yet. But according to The Knoxville News Sentinel, the university is now investigating the matter as if a complaint had been filed—even though no one has taken such an action.

Wow, this is surreal. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Wahlbon was thinking of the pornographic model when he wrote “Sarah Jackson” on the quiz. How is this sexual harassment? I don’t claim to be an expert on such matters, but I’m under the impression that harassment occurs when someone with power in a relationship makes some sort of sexual advance (or even tells a dirty joke). So how can a student harass a teacher? Or even a teacher’s lab instructor?

You can say that Wahlbon is guilty of displaying bad taste, but then we get to the issue of whether he actually meant the Sarah Jackson. If it was a more uncommon name (such as Jenna Jameson, the famous Republican-supporting porn star), then you could safely assume (though not legally prove) that he intended to make a boorish joke. But is the Sarah Jackson so famous that it’s safe to think that’s who Wahlbon had in mind? For what it’s worth, I never heard of that Sarah Jackson (though I once dated a girl with that name).

By the way, the British have similarly brainless people in their nation.

Though they express their political correctness in non-sexual ways (what a surprise), such as the principal who has banned running on the playground.

The headmaster of Hillfort Primary School in Liskeard, Dr Tim Cook, introduced the ban to prevent the little blighters injuring themselves. Instead, kids at Hillfort can blow off steam at playtime by playing with Lego, Jenga, and even dancing, as part of the school’s plan to reduce ‘negative behaviours’. Cook has responded by reassuring parents that their children are not completely prohibited from running – they are just not allowed to run across the playground. Have the nippers been given a small area to run around instead? Getting dizzier and dizzier as they charge about in circles? …Arguing that the ban is for safety reasons is pathetic. It’s running, not sword-swallowing. Grazed knees are part of growing up, and do not, or at least should not, result in lawsuits.

Fortunately, British parents seem a bit more sensible than their bureaucratic overlords. They’re petitioning to allow their kids to…gasp…do more than walk on the playground during recess.

There’s also lunacy in Australia. And since I’m a parent, I’m especially horrified about what happened to a father who wanted to protect his stepdaughter from sexting.

A man who found out that his 15-year-old stepdaughter was sexting her boyfriend proceeded to download the evidence to bring it to the school and the police to ask them to intervene. …Intervene they did. Now the dad has been convicted on child pornography charges and placed on the sex offender registry. This, despite the judge understanding exactly why the man, Ashan Ortell, 57, held onto the images. “There is no suggestion of any exploitation of them by anybody,” ruled Judge Jane Patrick, over in Australia, which is becoming as daffy as the United States. “You made no attempt to conceal the images. In fact, you were so concerned that you contacted the authorities about the images.”

If you read the entire story, I’m guessing that the cops went after the dad because he was badgering them for not doing anything about his stepdaughter. And I sympathize with the cops for choosing not to make a big deal out of two teenagers sexting, but did they really have to go after the guy for having the images when nobody thinks he had any unsavory intent or motives?

Keep in mind that this took place in the nation that awarded workers compensation to a woman who injured herself while having sex and also threatened fines against companies that pointed out the downside of a carbon tax.

All that being said, Australia is still my top choice for where to go if (when?) America suffers a Greek-style fiscal and economic collapse.

P.S. I’ve come across lots of crazy government decisions in my time, so I’m not surprised by today’s material. Though since I mentioned Greece, that government deserves some sort of prize for subsidizing pedophiles and demanding stool samples before letting entrepreneurs set up online companies.

And let’s not forget that European courts that have ruled that there’s an entitlement to free soccer broadcasts and a right to satellite TV. About as nutty as the Finnish court that ruled there’s a right to broadband access, and as crazy as the Bolivian decision that there’s a human right to receive stolen property.

P.P.S. In his speech to the 2008 Democratic Convention, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said “Government, as Barney Frank likes to say, is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

If that’s true, then the above examples show that we “choose” to do some really foolish things. In reality, as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reminds us, we don’t choose. That’s why this poster contains a much more accurate assessment of what really happens when government gets involved.

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The Foreign Edition of Great Moments in Government

It would require several people, working around the clock, to provide daily updates about the bizarre and senseless actions of the crowd in Washington.

And you’d need many additional people to monitor the foolish decisions in state capitals.

I certainly try to do my small part, sharing example of jaw-dropping vapidity by our overseers in government (especially in New York City and California).

But I don’t like to discriminate, which is why I periodically highlight inane behavior by foreign bureaucrats and politicians. And we have two perfect examples today. We’ll start north of the border.

Here are some passages from a CBC report about nanny-state overkill from Canada (h/t: Lenore Skenazy).

Clayton, 8, and Kristopher Cadieux, 10, started their business last summer, digging up worms and selling them as bait for $2.50 per dozen. But after a complaint from a neighbour, the brothers received a note from the city saying they were breaking a bylaw and had to shut down their business. The mayor of Cornwall, Leslie O’Shaughnessy, explained that the bylaw requires all personal business sales be conducted within the home, without outdoor signage. …The city told the brothers to move their business inside their home, and to take down their signs on their front lawn. …Kristopher said the worm enterprise only brought in about $34 a month last summer, and he doesn’t understand why he and his brother are being told they can’t sell worms from their front lawn.

How dare these kids display entrepreneurship.They’re almost as bad as the Canadian kid who got in trouble for stopping a knife attack.

But I still think America wins the prize for teaching kids bad lessons. After all, local government officials have heroically thwarted rogue operators of unregulated and unlicensed lemonade stands, in California, Georgia, and Oregon!

Without adequate government supervision, you never know what might happen. If you allow kids to engage in voluntary exchange, maybe that will be the gateway step to other forms of anti-social behavior. Such as snow removal without government approval. Or giving topless haircuts without a cosmetology license!

Our second example of foreign government stupidity comes from the United Kingdom, which is infamous for astounding – and embarrassing – episodes of political correctness.

But this latest example, reported by the U.K.-based Metro, represent the ultimate triumph of the P.C. culture (h/t: Amy Alkon).

…according to one school, Wonder Woman and her Golden Lasso of Truth are…not suitable lunchbox fodder. According to Redditor twines18, who posted a copy of the letter and offending lunchbox on Imgur, the lunchbox contravened the schools dress code which states children aren’t allowed to bring ‘violent images’ into the building. The letter states: ‘We have defined “violent characters” as those who solve problems using violence. Super heroes certainly fall into that category.’

Part of me is convinced this is a joke, but it seems legit.

And let’s remember this is coming from a nation where anti-gun fanaticism results in jaw-dropping displays of government stupidity.

Anyhow, here’s the letter that was sent to the parents.

So solving problems using violence is bad?

I guess that means this school doesn’t teach the kids about World War II. After all, Churchill and other U.K. leaders obviously took the wrong approach. I’m sure a big group hug would have sufficed to stop Hitler and the rest of the National Socialists.

P.S. Speaking of England, the U.K.-based Spectator reports that local universities have an unfortunate habit of filling the heads of foreign students with very bad economic theories. And when those students gain power in their home countries, you get very bad results.

Varoufakis was a product of British universities. He read economics at Essex and mathematical statistics at Birmingham, returning to Essex to do a PhD in economics. With the benefit of his British university education he returned to Greece and, during his short time in office, obliterated the nascent recovery. …But Varoufakis is not alone. Plenty of other visitors to our universities have been influenced by the teaching here and returned to their countries to wreak havoc. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India…was influenced by British intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, a socialist, Bertrand Russell, who once remarked ‘communism is necessary to the world’, and John Maynard Keynes. He returned to India and started to put the ideology into practice with state planning, controls and regulations. This was a calamity. …Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania,…read economics and history at Edinburgh (as did Gordon Brown). Naturally he was surrounded by leftist academics and apparently ‘encountered Fabian thinking’ in particular. The experience made it all but inevitable that Tanzania would endure a bloated bureaucracy, shortages and miserably low growth. …the London School of Economics can rightly claim more than its share, of course. Jomo Kenyatta, first prime minister of Kenya after independence, went there. …overblown, corrupt state industries and attempted import substitution took their toll, so that GDP growth per capita was low and, in some years, negative. …Pierre Trudeau…came to the LSE for his doctorate. He did not finish it but the LSE nonetheless gave him a finishing course in leftist economics. Under his rule, Canada introduced wage and price controls while inflation, unemployment and the national debt all rose. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, variously president and prime minister of Pakistan, went to…Oxford. …once he had gained power, declaring ‘socialism is our economy’, he nationalised the steel, chemical, cement and banking industries along with the flour, rice and cotton mills. Economic growth slowed to a crawl.

Wow, what a rogue’s gallery of statist politicians.

Though, to be fair, I don’t think you automatically get bad ideas by studying economics in the United Kingdom. It’s a function of being “taught” be misguided professors.

After all, just think what must happen to foreign students in America who take classes from Paul Krugman. If these examples (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) are any indication, they probably experience un-learning.

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The U.S. vs U.K. Wimpiness Contest

It’s time for an updated version of the U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest.

This ongoing series has featured amazing feats of inane government, including the world’s most pointless road markings, photo-ID requirements for drain cleaner purchases, and a government so incompetent that it couldn’t give money away.

Today’s contest, though, is going to focus on examples of wimpiness from both sides of the Atlantic.

Here’s an excerpt from a story out of the United Kingdom. Apparently, one neurotic mother thinks her son is some sort of incompetent misfit.

OMG, he’s going to become a serial killer!!

A mother was left horrified after her 10-year-old son returned form Tesco’s supermarket with a pumpkin carving kit which included a sharp serrated blade. Natalie Greaves from Sheffield in South Yorkshire described her reaction to Shay returning home with the one pound kit: ‘I went berserk when he came home with it. ‘I couldn’t believe that he could pick that sort of thing up as a child – there should have been an age restriction on it.’

“Horrified”? “Beserk”? You must be kidding. If there’s someone in that family who shouldn’t be allowed around sharp objects, it’s the mother.

It’s almost enough to make me think the kid would be better off in foster care, notwithstanding my libertarian instincts that even bad homes are oftentimes better than state control.

But I also wonder what this says about the entire nation. Back in 2012, I shared some laughably pathetic examples of anti-gun political correctness from the United Kingdom and wondered how such inane behavior could exist in a country that “once ruled half the world.”

Needless to say, this story doesn’t reflect well on our cousins across the ocean.

But Americans are in no position to make fun of others since there are plenty of examples of brain-dead political correctness in the United States.

After all, you don’t want to throw stones if you live in a glass house. And when it comes to absurd anti-gun hysteria, government schools make Americans look like infantile idiots.

Here are parts of a story from a local news outlet in Alabama.

A Mobile mother is not happy about a controversial Mobile County School contract her daughter signed without her consent. The contract promises that her daughter will not kill or injure herself and others. …She said E R Dickson school officials crossed the line when they had her daughter sign a Mobile County Public Safety Contract without her being present.

This sounds serious. Are we talking about a 16-yr old gang member? A 17-yr old with psychiatric issues? A 15-yr old with a history of violence.

Ummm…not exactly.

The student, a 5-yr old girl named Elizabeth, was playing like a normal kid. Here are some of the details.

School officials told Rebecca they had to send Elizabeth home after an incident in class.  “They told me she drew something that resembled a gun,” said Rebecca. “According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said, ‘pew pew,” said Rebecca. She said her child was given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts. “[They] Asked her if she was depressed now,” said Rebecca. Without her permission, Rebecca said her child was given the Mobile County Public School Safety Contract to sign stating she wouldn’t kill herself or others. “While I was in the lobby waiting they had my 5-year-old sign a contract about suicide and homicide,” said Rebecca. …Rebecca is pushing to have the incident removed from her child’s record. She said school officials have requested Elizabeth see a psychiatrist.

As I’ve argued before, in cases like this it’s the school bureaucrats who need counseling.

So which nation wins the prize for the worst example of P.C. wimpiness?

I’m ashamed to say that the United States probably deserves that dubious honor. After all, the story from the U.K. involves one weird parent while the U.S. story involves a deliberate decision by an arm of government.

Though I will point out that it’s not just one screwy parent in the United Kingdom. Wimpiness appears to be pervasive.

The mum-of-three checked online and found similar carving kits with restrictions allowing only people over-18 to buy it. A Tesco spokesperson responded to this mother’s anger… ‘We were concerned by this incident and acted immediately to ensure all pumpkin carving knives will trigger an age restriction till prompt.’

So maybe the U.K. story belongs in the U.K. vs. U.S. private sector political correctness contest.

P.S. Let’s shift to a different topic. I recently wrote that the jihad against tobacco at the U.N.’s World Health Organization was a classic (and tragic) case of resources being diverted from something that genuinely matters, such as fighting deadly infectious disease.

A column in the Wall Street Journal makes the same point, only it identifies the silly crusade against sugar as the main example of mission creep.

The WHO’s record of handling epidemics over 30 years reveals a health system that is getting worse, not better. On at least four occasions the U.N. organization has failed to deal with major outbreaks of communicable disease. …The list of internal problems that cause the WHO to fumble when faced with an epidemic is no secret. …an array of disparate programs within the WHO—such as the current crusade against processed sugar and sugar beverages—have diverted time, attention and money from higher priorities, such as tracking and responding to epidemic diseases.

And the Washington Examiner has opined on the same issue.

Years of dramatically overstaffed city agencies, over-generous retirement promises to public employee unions, and white-elephant development projects had left the city unable to police its streets, keep street lamps on, maintain parks, or provide other basic government services, no matter how much the city government raised taxes. The lesson of Detroit is one that governments everywhere can learn: In a world with finite resources, governments that try to do too much end up neglecting even the essential. Detroit’s case is a microcosm of what Americans are now experiencing nationwide in several different areas — the evident inability of public health officials to manage the Ebola scare competently is just one of them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that instructed a mildly symptomatic patient with known exposure to Ebola to board a commercial flight this week, spends millions annually on bonuses for top employees, bicycle paths, farmers markets, and other luxuries. …Even if they enjoy using the money the nation has for disease control and vaccine research to fund instead research on origami condoms and to appease politically active bicyclists, public health bureaucrats might do better in the future putting their massive budgets toward basic preparedness for precisely the kind of emergency the CDC was created to address.

I realize I’m being repetitive, but the moral of the story is that big government is incompetent government. As Mark Steyn has humorously explained, “our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it.“

The link between small government and effective government is something Calvin Coolidge understood. Needless to say, that’s not the attitude of the current occupant of the White House, which is why this bit of humor is worth sharing.

I think the unintentional video on Obama’s new Ebola Czar is even funnier, but whoever put this together gets high marks for cleverness.

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More Child Abuse at a Government-Run School

From a macro perspective, the most distressing aspect of America’s education system is that taxpayers spend a lot of money (more than any other people in the world, on a per-student basis) and we get very mediocre results.

And it’s getting worse over time. This famous chart, prepared by my colleague Andrew Coulson, shows how spending and bureaucracy have skyrocketed since 1970 while test scores have been stagnant.

Blacks and other minorities are the biggest victims. They are trapped in the worst-performing schools, largely because leftist politicians would rather curry favor with union bosses then help the poor.

But I don’t want to focus on these depressing macro issues.

Instead, we’re going to look at a depressing micro issue. To be more specific, let’s share a story about brain-dead political correctness (another one to add to a depressing collection).

Here are some details from a local news report.

First-grader Darin Simak is a little shy, a little upset and a little confused about why he can’t go back to Martin Elementary in New Kensington.

So what happened? Did he stab a classmate? Set fire to the classroom? Steal from the school’s petty cash fund?

No, none of those options. Instead, he did something far worse.

At least in the minds of brainless school bureaucrats.

Jennifer Mathabel said her son left his usual backpack in a friend’s car the night before, so he packed another one but missed the toy gun inside. “So I send my child to school. My child discovers a fake toy gun at about 1:30 p.m. He turns it in to the teacher and he’s sent to the office and suspended,” said Mathabel.

Yup, you read correctly. Darin found a toy gun in his backpack, and apparently he’s been successfully brainwashed that toy guns somehow are bad, so he gave it to the teacher.

The teacher then acted like a functionary from the Cuban KGB and turned Darin over to her superiors.

Not surprisingly, Darin’s mom is not happy that she’s paying taxes to subsidize such stupidity.

…she felt her son shouldn’t be suspended, and still sent him to school Thursday morning. “I got a phone call from the principal at 9 a.m., and she said, ‘Darin is not to be in school,’ and I said, ‘I’m sending him to school because he is entitled to be in school and be educated,'” said Mathabel. …The New Kensington-Arnold School District superintendent said that bringing a toy gun to school violates the district’s policy at the highest level and requires a child to be suspended immediately until a meeting can be held to discuss what happened and whether punishment is warranted.

You’ll be happy to know that our story has a happy ending.

Actually, allow me to modify that sentence. It’s a happy ending only in the sense that the school bureaucrats graciously and mercifully decided not to expel Darin.

Instead, he was suspended for two days.

Darin will not be expelled. The school district held a meeting and decided to suspend the first-grader for two days.

Astounding, in a horrible way. Makes you wonder whether government-run schools should be considered a form of child abuse.

Since we’re on the topic of government-run education (or mis-education, to use a clunky but more accurate phrase), let’s divert to the topic of common core.

Robby Soave of Reason explores an additional reason to dislike this new form of bureaucratized centralization.

Opponents of Common Core have plenty of ammunition by now: The standards erode local autonomy, are costly to implement, and some experts dispute their rigor. But an underexplored aspect of this problematic national education reform is the massive financial incentive that certain textbook and standardized test companies have to keep the U.S. on board with it. …the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)—recently invited curriculum companies to compete for the contract to design the tests. Textbook giant Pearson won the contract, surprising no one.

Soave explains why this should make parents (and taxpayers) worried.

A PARCC press release described the selection of Pearson as the result of a “competitive bidding process.” But it’s hard to tell whether the process was truly competitive, given that Pearson was the only company to even submit a bid. …Keep in mind that the contract is worth so much money that officials haven’t even attached a formal price tag. Instead, they have used the phrase “unprecedented in scale.” …it certainly undermines the notion that this is a “bottom up” education reform when state and federal lawmakers are colluding with mega corporations to dictate the tests to local school districts.

If you want to know more about the shortcomings of common core, I cite both George Will and one of Cato’s education experts in a post back in January.

But all you really need to know is that we’ll get a far better system of education if the federal government has less involvement, not more involvement.

Indeed, we should get rid of the entire Department of Education. Canada is doing better on education than the United States, and there’s no role for the national government in Ottawa.

Not that I’m a big fan of what state and local governments are doing.

The ideal system would be based on markets and competition. Which means we should copy nations with widespread school choice, such as Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

We have some school choice in America, and the evidence is very strong that we get better results.

P.S. The virus of political correctness is so bad in America’s education system that some schools have even cancelled award ceremonies because they might make some students feel excluded.

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Four Great Moments in Foreign Government Stupidity…and some Embarrassing Political Correctness in America

While I mostly focus on bad government policy in the United States, I also think we can learn lessons from what’s happening in other nations.

In some cases, I share positive stories, such as the success of privatized Social Security in Australia, nationwide school choice in Sweden, and genuine spending cuts in the Baltic nations.

In most cases, though, I’m pointing out bad policy.

Some topics deserve special treatment, such as the ongoing horror story of government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom.

In other cases, though, I share one-off stories about government incompetence and stupidity.

*Such as taxpayer-financed friends for mass murderers in Norway.

*Financing a giant “Burger Boy” in the United Kingdom.

*Promoting welfare tourism in the European Union.

*Spending $30 to collect $1 of tax in Germany.

*Regulation of coffee enemas in Japan.

Today, we’re going to share more stories of feckless behavior by foreign politicians and bureaucrats.

From Canada, we learn that the government of Manitoba is micro-managing daycare lunches in such bizarre ways that a family was fined because “grains” weren’t included in their kids’ meals.

Kristin Barkiw of Rossburn, Manitoba, Canada brought two of her children home from Little Cub’s Den daycare when she saw that her kids were sent home with a note. …the message told the mom she had failed to provide a nutritionally balanced lunch for her children, 5-year-old Logan and 3-year-old Natalie.  Not only that, Kristin was fined $10, $5 per child, for missing grains in their lunch of leftover roast beef, carrots, potatoes, an orange and milk. Further, the note said that the daycare staff gave Logan and Natalie Ritz crackers to fulfill the nutritional requirement of grains, which some see as a less than nutritious option. The nutritional regulation for daycare lunches is actually law in the province. The Manitoba government’s Early Learning and Child Care lunch regulations state that daycare programs must ensure children are given a lunch with a meat, a grain, a milk product and two servings of fruit and vegetables and any missing food groups must be supplemented by the care provider.

Heaven forbid that parents actually be in charge of what their kids eat!

You won’t be surprised to learn that France is on the list. It appears the government’s rail system is staffed by numbskulls.

France’s SNCF rail company has ordered 2,000 trains for an expanded regional network that are too wide for many station platforms, entailing costly repairs, the national rail operator said on Tuesday. A spokesman for the RFF national rail operator confirmed the error, first reported by satirical weekly Canard Enchaine in its Wednesday edition. …Construction work has already begun to displace equipment and widen hundreds of train platforms to accommodate the new trains, but hundreds more remain to be fixed, he added. …The RFF only gave the dimensions of platforms built less than 30 years ago, but most of France’s 1,200 platforms were built more than 50 years ago. Repair work has already cost 80 million euros ($110 million).

I guess I’m not surprised by that story since the French once built an aircraft carrier with a flight deck that was too small.

In Sweden, a novelty tourist hotel made of ice will have to install fire alarms.

The Ice Hotel, which is rebuilt every year in northern Sweden out of enormous chunks of ice from the Torne River in Jukkasjärvi, Kiruna, will this year come equipped with fire alarms – and the irony isn’t lost on the staff. “We were a little surprised when we found out,” hotel spokeswoman Beatrice Karlsson told The Local. …While it might sound crazy that a building made of water needs to be equipped with fire alarms, the fact that the hotel is built from scratch every year means it needs to abide by the rules that apply to every new building, rules set by the National Housing Board (Boverket).

If I had to pick a prize from today’s list, this might win the prize. It’s a stunning display of government in action. Though probably not as bad as the time it took a local government in the U.S. two days to notice a dead body in a community swimming pool.

And from Germany, we have a story about massive cost overruns incurred by a pan-European bureaucracy that supposedly helps encourage fiscal discipline.

“Do as we say, not as we do”

It was meant to cost £420m of European taxpayers’ money but the bill for the new headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) has more than doubled to £960m and could rise even further. The bank is the key enforcer of austerity measures in the troubled eurozone nations, but appears to be having trouble keeping its own finances in order. The 45-storey glass and steel building, made up of two joined towers, will be more than 600ft tall when it is finished. But it has already been under construction for a decade and is three years behind schedule.

Of course, it goes without saying that cost overruns and delays are par for the course with government.

Just in case anyone thinks I’m picking on foreigners, here’s a story that makes me ashamed to be American. Or, to be more precise, it makes me ashamed that we have some of the world’s most pathetic bureaucrats.

Honors Night at Cole Middle School is no more. Parents got an email from Principal Alexis Meyer over the weekend saying some members of the school community “have long expressed concerns related to the exclusive nature of Honors Night.” The email goes on to say students will be recognized in other ways. …Parents and students are not happy with the change. “How else are they suppose to learn coping skills, not just based on success, but relative failure, it might not be failure, but understand what it takes to achieve high levels,” said parent Joe Kosloski. …“That made me wanna work harder and a lot of other people work harder, so just the fact you can’t work towards it anymore then there is no goal,” said 8th grade student Kaitlyn Kosloski. Changes are also being made to the middle school’s sports awards.

You read correctly. They also won’t recognize athletic success.

I guess everyone gets a participation medal.

Except, of course, we still single out kids who commit horrible crimes in school. Such as having toy army men, eating a pop tart the wrong way, building a motion detector for a school science experiment, or countless other “offenses” that trigger anti-gun lunacy by brainless bureaucrats.

The moral of these stories, both from America and around the world, it that government is not the answer. Unless, of course, you’ve asked a really strange question.

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Using the 1st Amendment to Protect the 2nd Amendment

I’ve explained on several occasions (here, here, and here) that we can be optimistic about the fight to preserve our rights to keep and bear arms.

Simply stated, politicians are increasingly scared to go after gun owners and we keep seeing more and more evidence that Second Amendment freedoms make society safer.

And courts are beginning to do a better job of upholding the Constitution. A recent example comes from Arizona, where the government was trying to simultaneously undermine both the First Amendment and Second Amendment.

The latest example comes from Arizona, where a pro-gun group won a legal fight to post notices about firearms training. A controversial gun-safety ad campaign is about to return to Phoenix, after the city lost its attempt to censor the project sponsored by a gun-safety training group, TrainMeAZ, LLC. The Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, which represented TrainMeAZ, LLC, was granted summary judgment for its client Thursday by the Arizona Court of Appeals, preventing Phoenix from blocking the ads. …Officials at the time told Alan Korwin, owner of TrainMeAZ, that the message was too controversial and had garnered a complaint, and so had to be removed or changed. …“Gun-rights advocates nationwide are fond of saying the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment, which is totally true,” Korwin said. “In this case, however, it’s the other way around — free speech and the First Amendment have protected our right to keep and bear arms, and in particular, our right to train our selves and our precious families in real gun safety.”

This is welcome news, particularly since the court ruled unanimously against the government’s attempt to censor.

P.S. Back in 2012, I shared an IQ test for criminals and liberals. The test had only one question, which was whether criminals would be more likely to rob the house of a gun owner or a anti-gun activist.

Here’s a humorous sign sent to me by the Princess of the Levant. I hope it’s photo-shopped, simply because I like to think no homeowner is dumb enough to invite burglars.

 

And if you like this kind of humor, here are more examples.

P.P.S. While there have been some positive developments in the fight for firearms freedom, the news isn’t all positive. We continue to get jaw-dropping examples of anti-gun political correctness from government schools.

P.P.P.S. On a totally separate topic, I’ve already created a Moocher Hall of Fame, but I think I need to also set up a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

I already have a list of potential members, but there’s an overpaid drone at the Environmental Protection Agency who surely deserves to be one of the charter members.

Just how much porn does a person have to watch on their computer at work to get fired from the Environmental Protection Agency? Apparently two to six hours a day will let you hold onto your job….the employee confessed to spending, on average, between two and six hours per day viewing pornography while at work. Apparently, the employee, whose identity has not been revealed, earns about $120,000 a year and has still not been fired.

Though perhaps we should be applauding this bureaucrat. After all, if you look at some of the things EPA bureaucrats do when they’re “working” (see here, here, here, and here), the country may be safer if they spend more time watching porn.

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Let’s Call a Penalty on the NFL’s Anti-Gun Bias

There are certain groups of people who support gun control for very logical reasons.

Criminals are obviously big fans of gun control because they prefer unarmed victims.

Dictators also are big supporters of gun control because they want unarmed subjects.

Other segments of the population like gun control for inexplicable ideological reasons.

International bureaucrats advocate for gun control because they apparently think government should be daddy and citizens should be children.

Foreign politicians impose gun control because…well, I’m not sure why, but probably because they’re weenies.

And some American politicians want gun control because it appears they viscerally oppose individual freedom.

But I’m at a loss to understand why other segments of the population are on the wrong side of the gun issue. Why, for instance, does the National Football League have a policy prohibiting this very simple and innocuous ad from airing during the Super Bowl?

You may be thinking that the NFL simply doesn’t want to get involved in a controversial issue. And I wouldn’t be upset if that was the motivating factor.

But don’t forget that they allowed these two political clowns to appear in this ad during last year’s Super Bowl.

In other words, it’s okay for a couple of hack politicians to peddle anti-Second Amendment nonsense, but the NFL is barring a company from airing an ad designed to sell a legal product.

So what’s going on? I’m guessing the League is barring the ad from Daniel Defense for reasons of political correctness.

But your guess is as good as mine.

If you want more information about this kerfuffle, here’s a video about the controversy from the National Rifle Association.

For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with everything in the video. It’s wrong for the NFL to block the ad, but that doesn’t mean it’s censorship or a violation of the First Amendment. That occurs when government is prohibiting a voice from being heard. When a private entity does it, it’s just empty-headed political correctness.

P.S. Maybe we should be happy the NFL gave Mayor Bloomberg air time. When he gets involved in fights to restrict the Second Amendment, the good guys seem to win.

P.P.S. Here’s my favorite video from the NRA.

P.P.P.S. If you like pro-Second Amendment videos, here’s a great collection.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at Switzerland’s strong gun culture and the importance of self defense as a protection against oppression.
• And some very powerful testimony to some weasels on Capitol Hill (make sure to pay attention around the 5:00 mark).
• Ice-T talking about the real reason to defend and support the 2nd Amendment.
• A Reason TV video with five facts for Vice President Biden’s task force.
• A look at how a young woman can defend herself.
• Debunking the left’s “black NRA” parody.
• A 15-year old speaking truth to power.

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More Great Moments in Government Schooling

The government’s monopoly education system is a travesty mostly because taxpayers spend record amounts of money and we get very poor results.

But I’m also irked at the way government schools engage in absurd displays of political correctness, particularly when it comes to make-believe weapons.

Terrorist!!

A little boy was suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade while playing by himself in Colorado.

A school wanted to force a deaf child to change his name because, when using sign language to say who he is, his fingers looked like a gun.

Speaking of which, a six-year old in Maryland was suspended for saying “pow” while having his fingers shaped like a gun.

All this sounds crazy, but at least school bureaucrats are consistent in their nuttiness. Not only are they against non-existent grenades and imaginary guns, they all have a zero-tolerance approach for bows and arrows that don’t exist.

Here are some of the details about what happened at a Pennsylvania school.

A ten-year-old boy has reportedly been suspended from school after he ‘fired’ an imaginary bow and arrow at another pupil. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania, is said to have been suspended for one day after making the gesture and now faces expulsion. According to the Rutherford Institute, which is defending the youngster, Johnny was accused of breaching the school’s regulations on using weapons, even though the bow and arrow were not real. He was reprimanded after the girl he ‘fired’ the bow at notified a teacher.

It’s ridiculous that the little boy was suspended, but you also have to wonder about the mental stability of the little girls who ratted him out. Is she just a run-of-the-mill tattle tale? Or is she in training to become a tax bureaucrat in Chicago? Or maybe she went through training on how to be a snitch in the United Kingdom?

But we also have another story of political correctness run amok in government schools. Bureaucrats in Colorado have nabbed a sexual predator.

Are we talking about a 17-year old gang member who was raping and sexually assaulting other students.

Well…not quite. Here’s what Fox News is reporting.

A 6-year-old boy has been suspended from a Colorado school for kissing a girl on the cheek. School officials in Canon City are accusing the boy of sexual harassment and they want it on his school record. The boy’s mother tells KRDO-TV…the girl did not object to being kissed. She told the station that the two children like each other.

To be fair, maybe the boy is genuinely pestering the girl and – notwithstanding what his mother says – the attention is unwelcome. In that case, some punishment is warranted, particularly since it happened twice.

Though I’m not sure I would categorize it as sexual harassment. This is what makes this story worth sharing. It illustrates the lack of common sense that seems inevitable when bureaucrats are in charge of anything.

And since we’re talking about a lack of common sense, here are previous examples of school bureaucrats going overboard for political correctness.

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• 

  Lockdown!!

  Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.

• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.
• Bureaucrats suspended a kindergartener for having a lego-sized toy gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended two boys for playing with toy guns while off school property.

You’ll notice that all these examples involved non-imaginary objects. Real toy guns. Real army men. Real pencils. Real motion detectors. Real Lego pieces.

Aren’t we lucky that government is there to protect us! Sort of the same way they protect us with regulations, as Dave Barry has explained.

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The Two Types of Child Victimization at Government Schools

You would think the bureaucrats who run government schools would want to focus on the basics, such as teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.

After all, no nation spends more per pupil on education than the United States. And based on some Cato Institute research, I suspect the OECD estimate of about $15,000 per student is a low-ball estimate of the burden on American taxpayers.

So what do we get for all this money? To be blunt, the results are miserable, with Americans ranking well below average compared to our overseas competitors.

Here are some comparisons on both literacy and numeracy from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. You’ll have to click the images to get an enlarged view. But maybe you won’t want to do that since it’s depressing to see that Americans are near the bottom for math skills and well below average for verbal skills.

Geesh, this is embarrassing. I like Slovaks, but I don’t want Americans to be less intelligent. I also like Belgians, but why are they kicking our tail? And I really like Estonians, but they’re putting us to shame.

So how is the education establishment dealing with these dismal results?

Well, they keep asking for more money. But as this remarkable chart from the Cato Institute illustrates, throwing more money at the system is a great way of building bureaucracy. But it sure doesn’t do much for kids.

So you could say this is a form of child abuse. But that would trivialize the plights of kids who are grossly mistreated. So let’s say that the sub-par education provided by government schools is a form of child victimization. Or mistreatment. Or some word that signifies how they are not well served by the government’s education monopoly.

But let’s also remember that sub-par education is not the only bad thing that happens in government schools.

We also have amazing (in a bad way) episodes of intrusive and abusive political correctness.

Here’s a story from Massachusetts about a student being punished for doing the right thing.

It’s tough for Eleanor Cox to talk about how heartbroken her daughter Erin is over the punishment she received for doing what she thought was right. …Two weeks ago, Erin received a call from a friend at a party who was too drunk to drive. Erin drove to Boxford after work to pick up her friend. Moments after she arrived, the cops arrived too and busted several kids for underage possession of alcohol. A North Andover High School honor student, Erin was cleared by police, who agreed she had not been drinking and was not in possession of alcohol. But Andover High told Erin she was in violation of the district’s zero tolerance policy against alcohol and drug use. In the middle of her senior year, Erin was demoted from captain of the volleyball team and told she would be suspended from playing for five games. …the parents of Erin’s teammates have started a petition to support her.

I’m dismayed, of course, that the school wants to punish someone who didn’t do anything wrong, but what really irks me is that the school wants to regulate and control behavior that takes place off school property and outside of school hours.

To be blunt, it’s none of their you-know-what business. Parents should have primary responsibility for their kids and law enforcement has a role if they’re breaking the law.

Let’s now travel down south and read part of a report about how some mindless school bureaucrats punished an autistic student because he drew a picture of a bomb and brought the drawing to school.

…it all started when her son had made the hand-drawn picture of the bomb during the weekend at home. Parham said Rhett is a fan of the video game Bomber Man and drew the cartoon-ish like explosive. She told FOX Carolina on Monday that her son took the picture to Hillcrest Middle School, and that’s where problems arose. Parham said she was told that her son showed the picture to some older children, who reported him to school administration. …She said her son was suspended indefinitely by the school.

Fortunately, the government backed down after the story generated some unfavorable attention for the bureaucratic drones.

But we should ask ourselves why it even got to that stage. And perhaps get some counseling for the little brats who snitched on him. Sounds like they’re future IRS agents in training.

Sadly, this is just part of a pattern we’ve seen in government schools, with bureaucrats hyperventilating over normal kid behavior. Here are some other examples.

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.
• Bureaucrats suspended a kindergartener for having a lego-sized toy gun.
• Bureaucrats wanted a deaf child to change his sign-language name because it required him to shape his fingers in a way that resembled a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended two boys for playing with toy guns while off school property.

Now ask yourself to key question: Do we want to maintain and perpetuate a failed government school monopoly, or should we implement school choice to get better results and less political correctness?

Heck, we should be able to reform our schools if there’s already choice in countries such as Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

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Are Government Schools a Form of Child Abuse?

I’m a big fan of school choice. If we bust up the government education monopoly and create a competitive education market, we’ll get a much better education system at much lower cost.

This isn’t just idle theorizing. The evidence shows that competition produces better results.

That will be especially good news for children from poor and minority neighborhoods, as even the Washington Post has admitted.

There’s even good evidence for school choice from other nations, such as Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

And since we’re looking at international evidence, it’s worth noting that America spends more per student than any other nation, yet gets very mediocre results.

However, there’s also a non-educational argument for busting up the government school monopoly. Simply stated, we have to rescue kids from brainless school bureaucrats who impose crazy forms of anti-gun political correctness.

What am I talking about? Well, check out these excerpts from a Fox News report.

Natural Born Killers

Two seventh-grade students in Virginia Beach, Va., were handed long-term suspensions Tuesday that will last until the end of the school year for playing with an airsoft gun in one of their front yards while waiting for the school bus. WAVY-TV reports that 13-year-old Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark will face an additional hearing in January to determine if they will be expelled for “possession, handling and use of a firearm” because the guns were fired at two others playing in Caraballo’s yard. …Khalid claims he never took the toy gun to the designated bus stop or Larkspur Middle School, according to the report. Two other students who fired guns were also suspended.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. The kids were punished for playing with toy guns while on private property.

Yet apparently school bureaucrats don’t think their power is limited by school boundaries.

A neighbor saw Khalid shooting the airsoft gun in his yard and called 911, telling the dispatcher, “He is pointing the gun, and it looks like there’s a target in a tree in his front yard,” the station reported. …The school’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy on guns extends to private property, according to the report.

At least one of the parents has the right view of things.

If you outlaw Zombie Hunters, only outlaws will have Zombie Hunters

Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, said it’s ridiculous that her son and his friends were suspended because they were firing the airsoft gun on private property. “My son is my private property. He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school,” Caraballo told the station.

Now let’s add some important caveats. Even though the toy guns only shoot little plastic pellets, it seems that the boys may have shot at some kids who weren’t part of their play. That’s something that should be punished.

And it’s also possible that the boys are troublemakers and the school was simply using this episode as an excuse to get rid of them.

So maybe there’s some sort of “rough justice” happening behind the scenes. Simply stated, there’s probably a back-story.

But there’s no question that we’re seeing a bad trend.

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.
• Bureaucrats suspended a kindergartener for having a lego-sized toy gun.
• Bureaucrats wanted a deaf child to change his sign-language name because it required him to shape his fingers in a way that resembled a gun.

It’s almost to the point where sending your kids to a government school could be considered a form a child abuse.

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Question of the Week: Can You Explain Why this Beer Can Is Politically Incorrect?

As part of my question-of-the-week series, a reader sent me a story and asked if I could identify why putting the Puerto Rican flag on a beer can – as part of a celebration of New York City’s Puerto Rican Day – was politically incorrect.

I may not be the best judge of such matters, largely because I’m often oblivious to popular culture. It was only about five years ago, for instance, that I learned “oriental” was now inappropriate. And even though I’m not sure why that term is supposed to be bad, I switched to “Asian.”

But even with my self-confessed naiveté on such matters, I have no idea how to react to the following story.

As you can see from this Foxnews.com excerpt, a beer company is being attacked, but I don’t understand what it’s done wrong.

I have no clue why the Puerto Rican flag is offensive

Public officials and Puerto Rican groups had expressed outrage after the company used an image of the island’s flag on a specially-made Coors Light beer can made on occasion of New York City’s Puerto Rican Day Parade. MillerCoors is the main sponsor of the parade, which is on Sunday. …MillerCoors sent a letter to “Boricuas for a Positive Image,” a group that planned protests against the company over the beer can, and said it was pulling the product from distribution. “We apologize if the graphics on our promotional packaging inadvertently offended you or any other members of the Puerto Rican community,” wrote Nehl Horton, chief public affairs and communications director for MillerCoors, to one of the group’s organizers. “MillerCoors has a strong history of supporting the U.S. Latino community…” …The National Institute for Latino Policy said the beer company wasn’t the only one at fault. The group also said blame must be placed on the parade’s board of directors. New York City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito told the New York Daily News that the company’s decision to pull the product was a “victory.” But the Puerto Rican politician said she wasn’t entirely satisfied.  “I feel strongly at this time that the Board of Directors should resign and make room for new leadership for future parades,” Viverito said in a statement.

So why is this a victory for the Latino community? Is the Puerto Rican flag somehow offensive? And, if so, shouldn’t Puerto Rican politicians change it?

Or is it only offensive if an “Anglo” company uses it on merchandise? But the beer company was sponsoring (i.e., financing) the event, so their intentions obviously were completely benign. Surely that’s not a cause for protests?!?

Or is it that the Puerto Rican community doesn’t want to be identified with beer? That seems implausible. I can see why Mormons, Muslims, or Southern Baptists wouldn’t want their imagery on a beer can, but  Latinos? Or Catholics? I’ve already admitted my lack of knowledge about popular culture, but I assume even I would know if Puerto Ricans were anti-beer.

I realize that a Google search could probably help me determine why some people are upset about the flag, but the fact that such a step would be necessary suggests that political correctness may have gone too far. As a general rule, I think it’s good manners and common courtesy to respect the preferences of other groups, but if you can’t figure out why they’re upset without doing a bunch of research, it seems that we’ve reached the point where people should chill out.

P.S. For examples of the wrong kind of political correctness, click here.

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America’s Dysfunctional Education System Has Jumped the Shark

I give up.

I’ve been having some fun over the past couple of years by mocking education bureaucrats for absurd examples of anti-gun political correctness.

I have made fun of teachers and other bureaucrats when they wet their pants about tiny Lego guns. I laugh at them when they go after little kids for half-eaten pop tarts that ostensibly have gun shapes. And I abuse them for getting their panties in a wad about pencils, fingers, and…um…well, air.

I’m even willing to enjoy a laugh when idiot bureaucrats bust a 5-year old girl because her pink bubble blower vaguely resembles a gun. Or when they nail a little boy for toy army men.

But in recent months, the exercise has become a chore because I’ve slowly come to realize that bureaucratic stupidity is becoming the rule rather than the exception.

And now I think it’s time to throw in the towel and give up. Why? Because there’s really no hope for government schools when you come across a news report about some moronic paper pushers in Nebraska who wanted a deaf boy to change his sign-language name because it requires his hand to vaguely resemble a gun.

A clear and present danger?!?

Hunter Spanjer says his name with a certain special hand gesture, but at just three and a half years old, he may have to change it. “He’s deaf, and his name sign, they say, is a violation of their weapons policy,” explained Hunter’s father, Brian Spanjer. Grand Island’s “Weapons in Schools” Board Policy 8470 forbids “any instrument…that looks like a weapon,” But a three year-old’s hands? “Anybody that I have talked to thinks this is absolutely ridiculous. This is not threatening in any way,” said Hunter’s grandmother Janet Logue. …”We are working with the parents to come to the best solution we can for the child,” said Jack Sheard, Grand Island Public Schools spokesperson. That’s just about all GIPS officials will say for now.

The good news is that it appears the bureaucrats have backed off following a public outcry.

But it’s nonetheless outrageous that people like Jack Sheard get our tax dollars and then even contemplate making life harder for a deaf kid.

I realize it’s a gross exaggeration to say that all public school teachers are bad and that all government schools are a failure, but we’re getting closer and closer to the point where the presumption should be that good parents send their kids to private schools whenever that’s a feasible option.

And from a policy perspective, we need to bust up the government school monopoly and implement school choice. And not because suburban kids are being victimized by political correctness. That’s a nuisance, not a crisis. It’s far more important to have competition in education to rescue the kids trapped in failed inner city schools.

We now have lots of good data on the benefits of school choice.  There’s also strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

So next time we see a news report about bureaucrats running amok and ruining the education system, our energies should be focused on promoting school choice, not attacking political correctness.

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The Continuing Wussification of America

I’ve shared some bizarre horror stories about adults being victimized by anti-gun fanaticism, including the Washington, DC, man who got fined $1,000 for saving a child’s life and a British man who got arrested for finding a gun and turning it over to the police.

But I get more worried about the future of the country when I read reports of children being subjected to this kind of politically correct nonsense.

Consider, for instance, these absurd details from a local news report.

A Massachusetts kindergartener has been given detention and could be suspended from the bus after bringing a Lego-sized gun to school last week. …the incident happened on an Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus in Palmer last week. A 6-year-old had the toy gun, which is slightly larger than a quarter, on the bus and it was seen by another student, who alerted the bus driver. The boy’s mother, Mieke Crane, said her son had to write a letter of apology to the driver, was given detention and could be temporarily suspended from the bus.

Reading that passage, I don’t know whether to be more angry with the bratty tattle-tale kid who told the bus driver, or with the bus driver who obviously must have informed the school.

Both of them could use some serious counseling.

But that’s just part of the story.

The school sent home a letter to parents explaining what happened, stressing no gun was on the bus and there was never any danger. “(The driver) said he caused quite a disturbance on the bus and that the children were traumatized,” Crane told WGGB.

A letter to parents about a tiny plastic toy gun?!? Are the bureaucrats in this school so under-worked that they have time to waste on such nonsense? If I was a parent in this school district, I would put my kids in a private school.

Especially if it’s true that “children were traumatized” by a piece of Lego. I wouldn’t want to take the risk that wimpiness and poor cognitive skills could be transmitted by proximity to my kids (perhaps causing them to need “emotional support” animals in college).

By the way, this is not an isolated example. To get depressed about the future of the country, read these posts about children being exposed to foolish thinking.

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.

Stories like this make me wonder whether I should emigrate, though the rest of the world tends to be in worse shape so the moral of the story is that we need to save the United States from the brainless (and overpaid) bureaucrats who are trying to ruin our children.

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Very Funny but Very Un-PC British Video on Welfare and Immigration

I’ve shared this bit of political incorrect terrorism humor from England, as well as this somewhat un-PC bit of tax humor.

But perhaps motivated by the scandal of giving welfare to terrorists, this new video is the most amusing thing I’ve seen from across the ocean.

I almost didn’t post this because it singles out immigrants from the developing world, but since I’ve shared horror stories from home-grown moochers in the U.K., as well as examples of scroungers from Europe who are robbing British taxpayers, I think I’ve covered all the bases.

But in the spirit of inclusiveness, here are other satirical videos worth sharing.

My all-time favorite video satire is from Iowahawk, featuring the Pelosimobile.

And I’ve always thought this left-wing attack against libertarianism is very funny.

And this Tim Hawkins video on the government Candyman is great, as is another version of the song.

Speaking of Tim Hawkins, his home-schooling video is superb.

This spoof of the Chevy Volt also is extremely well done.

Last but not least, here are two brutal Obama teleprompter videos.

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If You Outlaw Pencils, only Outlaws Will Have Pencils

I wouldn’t blame foreigners for thinking the United States is a bit schizophrenic.

This is a nation where you can own a tank or a machine gun, and it’s a country where there are probably more guns than people.

Yet it’s also a country where little kids get suspended for throwing imaginary grenades while playing alone on a playground. A country where cops arrest 10-year olds for having toy guns. And a country where small children get kicked out of school for pretending their hands are guns and saying “pow, pow.”

And now, apparently, it’s a country where kids can’t point a pencil at a buddy and make shooting noises.

Oh my God, It’s an assault pencil!

Here are some of the absurd details from a local CBS news report.

Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.” Marshall, a former Marine, said he believes school officials overreacted. …Bradshaw said the policy has been in place for at least two decades. It also bans drawing a picture of a gun and pointing a finger in a threatening manner. Marshall said his son has good grades and no history of being disruptive in class. On the suspension note, the teacher noted that the boy stopped when she told him to do so. He said school administrators failed to use common sense.

I’m almost at a loss for words. This wasn’t just one brainless bureaucrat. At the very least, both a teacher and an administrator were involved in this farce.

These are the people we want educating our children?!?

At least the dad had the cojones to criticize the bureaucrats.

With apologies to Martin Niemöller, I can’t resist this bit of satire.

First they came for the pop tarts,
and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t care for breakfast pastries.

Then they came for the pink bubble blowers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a bubble blower.

Then they came for the cupcakes,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cupcake eater.

Then they came for pencils,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

By the way, the United States is not the only nation suffering from a pathetic and wimpy form of political correctness. Here are some examples of how our cousins across the ocean have gone bonkers about guns.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

These are all example from my series comparing brainless policies in the United States and United Kingdom. Though I’m ashamed to say that this latest story puts the United States in the lead in this government-stupidity contest.

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Preposterous Waste, Pentagon Style

National defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government, but that doesn’t mean the military should get a blank check to spend unlimited amounts of money.

To make sure taxpayers get the best bang for the buck (no pun intended), there should be a sober assessment of threats to national security and a plan to defend against those threats without adding superfluous expenditures.

That being said, America already accounts for close to 50 percent of world military spending, with another 25 percent of the global total coming from nations that are allied to the United States, so I’m fairly confident that we’re not under-spending on the Pentagon.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t worry that much about the sequester, particularly since military spending actually climbs by about $100 billion over the next 10 years.

But I would like the Defense Department to have some flexibility to reallocate funds so that we spend money on national security rather than boondoggles.

And there are some absurd examples of waste at the Pentagon, including “green” jet fuel that costs 15 times as much as regular fuel. Here are some of the mind-boggling details from the Washington Examiner.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently warned that sequestration would cause “suspension of important activities, curtailed training, and could result in furloughs of civilian personnel” but the spending cuts haven’t killed the green fuels program, as the Pentagon has continued purchasing renewable fuel at $59 per gallon. “In March, Gevo entered into a contract with the Defense Logistics Agency to supply the U.S. Army with 3,650 gallons of renewable jet fuel to be delivered by the second quarter of 2013,” Gevo announced this week in its first quarter financial report. “This initial order may be increased by 12,500 gallons.

This is even worse than the bizarre $600,000 frog statue than the Defense Department selected to adorn a new $700 million office building.

I realize that the $700 million office building should be the bigger issue, but I can’t help but be irked by the thought that taxpayers are being raped and pillaged for the frog.

In any event, the $700 million for the office building is pocket change compared to the amount of money we misallocate to subsidize Western Europe to protect against a Warsaw Pact military alliance that no longer exists!

Yes, it’s true that America’s main fiscal problem is entitlement spending. And, yes, domestic discretionary spending is a bigger problem than the defense budget.

But wasting money in those areas is not a reason to also have waste at the Pentagon.

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Canada Wants to Join the Government Stupidity Contest

A recurring feature on this blog is the US vs UK government stupidity contest, which features examples of idiotic behavior by politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic.

Recent winners of this dubious honor include a rather amazing example of British road painting and a horrid incident of anti-gun political correctness by American school bureaucrats.

Our neighbors to the north must be envious that they’re not part of this contest. Based on what just happened in Quebec, Canada probably deserves to be in the conversation.

Mon Dieu!

First some background, courtesy of a story from the Guardian. It seems that the provincial government actually has language police.

They are known as the language police, a unit within the regional Quebec government that seeks to protect French from the rising tide of English. It deploys inspectors to rein in recidivist anglophones, take on big corporate transgressors such as Guess, the Gap and Costco and conduct spot checks to follow up thousands of public complaints.

But sometimes, these tax-funded Keystone Cops go too far.

Le Crime

Now, however, zealots in the Office québécois de la langue française (Quebec Board of the French Language) may have gone a step too far in picking a fight with an Italian restaurant… After a five-month investigation into an anonymous complaint, Massimo Lecas received a letter from the board telling him that his establishment, Buonanotte, had broken the law by including the words “pasta” on the menu and “bottiglia“, the Italian word for bottle, instead of the French word bouteille. Outraged, Lecas posted the letter for 2,500 of his Facebook friends to see. In doing so, he unleashed a political tempest over one of the most sensitive topics up for debate in the province. The outcry has forced the Quebec government to rein in its language inspectors, ensure exceptions to the rules are made for ethnic food and restaurant menus and order a review of how it handles public complaints.

Job security

By the way, this is not an isolated incident.

Lecas’s decision to go public with the letter from the language inspector has prompted other restaurateurs to come forward. One told how he was ordered to cover his microwave’s on/off switch and the redial button on a telephone with tape because they were in English. The chef’s grocery list, which was written on a kitchen chalkboard, was also found to have broken the law: steak frites may be a staple of Parisian bistros but, according to Quebec law, biftek is the only acceptable term. …Quebec’s recent budget included one notable increase: the yearly allotment for the language police.

So Canada definitely can make a claim that it belongs in the government stupidity contest. Though, to be fair, I should acknowledge that other governments also merit consideration.

1. In Germany, the government misplaced the sensitive blueprints of its new $2.3 billion spy headquarters.
2. In Italy, the government of supposed technocratic experts managed to appoint the wrong person to a job that shouldn’t exist.
3. In the European Union, watching free soccer broadcasts is now a human right.
4. In Greece, bureaucrats actually demand stool samples from entrepreneurs applying to set up online companies.

The moral of the story is that government – in all nations – is a festering black hole of waste. And if you ever feel that these incompetent and foolish people deserve more of our money, then I suggest you move to France, where the nation’s President generously has promised that nobody will have to surrender more than 80 percent of their income to the government.

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Political Correctness Run Amok in Massachusetts

This may be even worse than all the examples of anti-gun political correctness that I’ve shared.

Get a load of what some anti-achievement nutjobs in Taxachusetts have decided.

John Gillis has two students at the middle school who have worked hard to make the honor roll this year, but they won’t be able to attend the school’s annual honors night to celebrate their achievement. That’s because the school administration has decided to end the long-standing tradition… “We took it from an exclusive nighttime ceremony where only honors students were invited and rolled it into our end-of-the-year assembly,” Principal David Fabrizio said. “That way, everybody can celebrate their and their peers’ achievements.”

Yes, let’s all get participation medals simply for breathing. But it gets worse.

Fabrizio said that it is the school’s job to monitor both academic and social emotional growth. Concentrating on grades, “as strange as it sounds, can impinge upon the learning process,” he wrote. “The honors night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average,” Fabrizio wrote.

Too bad this didn’t exist when I was in school. I never once made the Honor Roll when I was a young slacker. Too bad political correctness hadn’t taken hold back then. I could have been taught that it was okay to never achieve anything.

But perhaps that would have made my life easier. Instead of engaging in the Sisyphean task of trying to roll back the welfare state, I could be doing something really productive…like being an overpaid bureaucrat making life harder for those who actually are trying to create wealth for the economy.

P.S. Take a wild guess whether Principal Fabrizio supports class-warfare tax rates as a way of mitigating the “devastating” differences between those that produce and those that don’t.

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The Continuing Wimpification of America

I’ve reached the point where I can’t even get agitated any more.

The anti-gun ideology in government schools has led to so many stupid incidents that all I can do is shake my head and be thankful my kids somehow were spared this nonsense.

OH MY GOD!!! Call a SWAT team and child protective services!

Our latest story comes from Michigan, where a third grader brought some cupcakes to school for his birthday. That seems innocuous, but the boy’s mother (gasp!) decorated them with toy army men.

The school decided “to remove the Army soldiers from the cupcakes” and called the boy’s family to inform them that they had committed a thought crime.

Last week, Casey Fountain’s third-grade son had a birthday party at his school in Caro. His wife decided to whip up 30 cupcakes for the boy’s classmates. She topped the treats with plastic army guys like the ones countless boys and girls have played with for decades. Fountain says he never thought his innocent act of party planning would lead to controversy. Fountain says the principal of Schall Elementary School called him personally and told him that dressing the cupcakes with soldiers was, in the principal’s words, “insensitive” considering recent gun-related tragedies.

This definitely belongs in the Hall of Fame for brainless political correctness and hysterical overreaction. Other members of this distinguished Hall of Fame include:

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

At some point, you have to ask whether sending your kids to a government school not only puts them at risk of a substandard education, but also is a form of child abuse.

P.S. Actually, I am getting agitated the more I think about this. For all intents and purposes, the principal was equating soldiers with crazy mass killers. Why hasn’t this person been fired?

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More Insane Political Correctness and Absurd Anti-Gun Nonsense

I weep for my country. We are becoming pathetic fools and total wimps.

Consider these jaw-dropping examples of behavior by adults who work in government schools. I think they must be competing for the Stupid Official of the Year Award.

The contestants include:

• The bureaucrats who suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• The bureaucrats who suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• The bureaucrats who busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• The teacher in Rhode Island who caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• The bureaucrats who evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• The bureaucrats in Florida who kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

Here’s another example that belies belief. It starts innocently enough, as reported by a Baltimore news outlet.

Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter today explaining there was a disruption in school.

A “disruption”? What, pray tell, happened. A fire? A theft? A gang fight?

Well, brace yourself lest you faint in fright at what you’re about to read.

At Park Elementary school, Josh was enjoying his breakfast pastry when he decided to try and shape it into a mountain. Josh said, “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t.” Josh takes full responsibly for trying to shape his breakfast pastry, but admits it was in innocent fun. He told FOX45, “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.” When his teacher saw the strawberry tart he knew he was in trouble, he recalls, “She was pretty mad…and I think I was in big trouble.”

Oh, Heavens. Get the smelling salts!

What was the punishment for this thug?

Josh’s dad received a phone call from the school saying that Josh has been suspended for two days because he took his breakfast pastry and fashioned it into a gun. Josh’s dad was astounded to learn the school chose such a harsh punishment, even after no one was hurt.

But here’s the real kicker. The supposed adults who run the school (and are in charge of educating children) decided that an artfully chewed pastry was “an inappropriate gesture.”

Late Friday afternoon a letter went home with students explaining the incident saying, “A student used food to make an inappropriate gesture.” But Josh’s dad is not happy saying, “I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it’s a pastry.., Ya know?”

The dad had the right reaction.

And the real moral of the story is that we need to break up the government-run education monopoly and allow school choice.

P.S. Mindless political correctness is not limited to the United States. There are also unbelievable examples from the United Kingdom.

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In a Remarkable Display of Government Stupidity on Steroids, Cops Arrest a 10-Year Old for a Toy Gun

As part of my US v UK government stupidity contest, I’ve shared some really bizarre examples of anti-gun/anti-self defense political correctness.

At first I thought the Brits were more brainless.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

Though, to be sure, there’s lots of foolishness in America.

• A Rhode Island boy got in trouble for bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• A little boy got suspended for making a pistol shape with his fingers.
• Another little boy got suspended for playing cops and robbers.

The Brits were in the lead because they actually arrested people who did done nothing wrong.

But now the United States may deserve this booby prize. Here are some details of a Kafkaesque story from RT.

School administrators in Virginia suspended a 10-year-old boy earlier this month after he was caught with an orange-tipped toy gun in his backpack. Now as he awaits his next meeting with his probation officer, his mother opens up about the incident. …she is still in disbelief over what the entire event has done for her son, herself and the community.

But he wasn’t just suspended. He then got arrested.

Just one day after her fifth-grader’s toy gun was discovered on a school bus leaving Douglas MacArthur Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, his mom says he was arrested, dragged to court and questioned, photographed and fingerprinted. “Any time we get a call like this, we take it very seriously until we can determine the extent of the weapon, if it’s real or not, and what the student intends to do with it,” Alexandria Police Department spokesman Jody Donaldson told the Washington Examiner after the boy’s arrest.

Now that the bureaucrats are getting laughed at, they’re beginning to say the whole episode may have been a mistake. Gee, you think?!?

Today, though, Donaldson admits that things may have been a bit different had the authorities taken a breath before they rushed to respond. “If we were able to investigate right away, the outcome might have been different,” she tells the Post. Ms. Gilbert agrees and thinks authorities acted a little too overzealously. Even the mother who first reported the gun that her daughter saw on an Alexandria school bus tells the paper, “It’s such a bad handling of the situation, it was ridiculous.”

But this isn’t a laughing matter. The little boy’s life has been turned upside down.

…the boy has been forced to switch schools and has been entangled in a legal nightmare surely to serve as a thorn in the side of his family for years to come. That, of course, isn’t even taking into consideration what sort of effect the entire incident will have on the boy, who now has a record with local authorities.

It’s quite embarrassing that this happened in my state of Virginia.

You’d expect this kind of vapid political correctness in New York, not in the south.

But the infectious disease of bureaucratic brainlessness is spreading all over Dixie.

Here are some excerpts from a story about some first-rate government stupidity that recently was on display in Alabama.

A high school student in Florence said he has been suspended because of a picture of a gun. Daniel McClaine Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School, said he saved the picture as his desktop background on his school-issued computer. A teacher noticed it and turned him in. …the district policy states students are prohibited from “sending or displaying offensive messages or pictures,” and cannot access, send, create or forward pictures that are considered “harassing, threatening, or illegal.”McClaine said he read the guidelines but does not consider the picture threatening to anyone. …Daniel’s father said after ABC15 contacted the school, the administration backed down and will let his son return to school on Monday instead of Wednesday.

The good news, so to speak is that Daniel wasn’t arrested and the school’s bureaucrats backed down and canceled the suspension.

But it’s hard to be optimistic about the education system after reading this type of story.

If bureaucrats don’t have common sense, how can they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Maybe the bigger lesson (especially given the shocking lack of results after record levels of staffing and funding) is that we should break up the government school monopoly and let parents choose better-quality schools?

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Courageous Pennsylvania School Officials Nab 5-Year Old Terrorist

It appears that my contest between the United States and United Kingdom for the most inane government policy how has to be augmented by a new contest between Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Just yesterday, I mocked Maryland officials for suspending two little boys for the horrific crime of playing cops and robbers (and noted that this is not the first time such stupidity has been displayed by Maryland school officials).

Preferred Weapon of al Qaeda

Apparently, the pencil-neck bureaucrats in Pennsylvania are jealous that their neighbors are getting a lot of attention, so they’ve branded a five-year old girl as a terrorist threat for talking about her pink toy gun that shoots bubbles.

Yes, bubbles.

Here are some of the absurd details from a local news report.

Talking with a friend about a pink toy bubble gun got a five-year-old kindergarten girl in the Mount Carmel Area School District labeled as a terrorist threat, according to an attorney.The incident occurred Jan. 10 while the girl was waiting in line for a school bus, said Robin Ficker, the Maryland lawyer retained by the girl’s family. …Talking with a friend, the girl said something to the effect “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself” in reference to the device that shoots out bubbles. The girl did not have the bubble gun with her and has never shot a real gun in her life, Ficker said. Elementary school officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girls the next day, Fickler said. He said the girl did not have a parent present during the 30 minutes of questioning. The result, he said, was that the student was labeled a “terrorist threat” and suspended for 10 days, Ficker said. The school also required her to be evaluated by a psychologist, Ficker said. “This little girl is the least terroristic person in Pennsylvania,” he said.

In yesterday’s post, I speculated that it was a teacher who reported the little boys for playing cops and robbers and I said that teacher should be suspended.

I also said the principal should be fired for punishing the boys for acting like boys.

But after reading this story, I realize that I was being wimpy. These stories show that the time has come to end the government school monopoly.

We already know that government schools do a rotten job, consuming ever-larger amounts of our tax dollars for a system that produces very mediocre results (check out this chart if you don’t believe me).

But that’s just part of the argument for school choice.

We also need to protect our kids from being exposed to bureaucrats who are jaw-droppingly stupid.

“I want to work for the IRS when I grow up”

Actually, WordPress is telling me that “droppingly” isn’t a word. So maybe instead we should take Instapundit’s advice and reward these idiot officials with some tar and feathers.

And I hope the tattle-tale punk from the bus stop who ratted out the little girls is condemned to some sort of grade-school purgatory featuring never-ending wedgies.

On a more serious note, I hope the parents sue the you-know-what out of the school.

Then I hope Pennsylvania’s state legislature and Governor quit screwing around and implement a sweeping school choice plan, as they supposedly were going to do two years ago.

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Suspended for Playing Cops and Robbers?!? The Continuing Wussification of America

I’ve had fun documenting and comparing examples of government stupidity in both the United States and United Kingdom, and today’s story clearly belongs on those lists.

Send this kid to a re-education camp!

It’s also an example of a perverse anti-gun mentality.

How else can you explain a school in Talbot County, Maryland, suspending a couple of young boys for the supposedly horrible offense of making gun shapes with their fingers while playing cops and robbers?!?

Here are some of the details from a local news report.

There’s controversy at a Talbot County school after two 6-year-old boys were suspended while playing cops and robbers during recess and using their fingers to make an imaginary gun. “It’s ridiculous,” said parent Julia Merchant.

There’s a reason this story may seem familiar.

This is the second time a Maryland child has been suspended for such play. Earlier this month, 6-year-old Rodney Lynch was suspended from his Montgomery County school after pretending to fire an imaginary gun more than once.

He fired his finger more than once? That might mean he has a semi-automatic finger! Oh, the horror.

Amazingly, the school in Montgomery County backed down after parents objected.

The school reversed its decision after Rodney’s parents appealed. “They’re saying he threatened a student, threatened to shoot a student. He was playing,” said Rodney’s father, Rodney Lynch Sr. …A number of parents agree. “Suspending them is a bit harsh and I don’t think that’s gonna do any good for the parent, child or school,” said Janet Geotzky.

It’s unclear what’s going to happen with this new incident (or, more accurately, non-incident) in Talbot County.

But I know what should happen if we want to discourage further episodes of political correctness run amok.

1. The person (I assume a teacher) who filed the initial complaint should be suspended.
2. The bureaucrat (I assume school principal) who suspended the boys should be fired.
3. The children (all of them, not just the two who were suspended) should be given toy guns and encouraged to play like normal kids.

Have I missed something?

The Un-Free State

What else should be done to stop the continuing wussification and wimpification of modern society?

P.S. It’s probably no coincidence that these displays of government stupidity took place in Maryland. This is the state, after all, that crashed on the Laffer Curve, imposed regulations making it difficult for summer camps to protect kids from sunburn, and considered a law to give bums panhandling permits.

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Suspending a Little Boy for Playing Toy Gun with His Hand? I’m Embarrassed for my Country

I’ve shared several horror stories of government incompetence and bureaucratic nonsense as part of my series comparing stupid policies in the United States and United Kingdom.

This has been a neck-and-neck battle, with the United Kingdom recently throwing down the gauntlet with a decision to take kids away from their foster family because the mom and dad didn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

The United States responded by paying to have a bunch of bureaucrats attend a conference so they could learn how to respond to a zombie attack.

I’m not sure which of those decisions wins the prize for government stupidity, but today’s story suggests that it’s time to start chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A.”

After all, surely the United Kingdom can’t surpass the moronic decision by Maryland school bureaucrats to suspend a little boy for pretending his hand was a gun and “shooting” another child.

Here’s all you need to know, as reported by the Washington Examiner, about this laughable – yet nauseating – example of nanny-state political correctness.

I guess he should play with dolls instead

A Montgomery County elementary school student was suspended for a pretend gunshot… The 6-year-old, who attends Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, made a gun with his hands, pointed it at another student and said “pow,” according to Robin Ficker, the boy’s attorney. He was given a one-day suspension, with a conference on the matter planned for Jan. 2, the day students return to school from winter break.

This is not an isolated incident. There are other examples of embarrassing stupidity in America.

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.

Seems like the United States wins this contest for government stupidity.

But, wait, maybe I was blinded by patriotism. Perhaps I wanted America to win and that caused me to overlook equally inane decisions in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, that was the case. Showing that stupidity can reign supreme on both sides of the Atlantic, it turns out that two boys in England were reprimanded for make gun shapes were their hands.

But that’s not all. There have been other idiotic episodes of anti-gun lunacy in the United Kingdom.

• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• A prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.
• A bookstore putting shooting magazines in the porn section.

And let’s not forget the woman who got in trouble with the police for trying to scare away some thugs by brandishing a knife in her own home.

So I guess that means we still have a tie. In the contest for government stupidity, the United States and the United Kingdom are both winners.

And the citizens of both nations are losers, but let’s not allow that pesky little fact take away from this exciting contest.

P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Montgomery County is a suburb of Washington, DC. And, as you can see from this map, it is filled with overpaid bureaucrats and lobbyists. Since these are the people imposing so much bad policy on the rest of the nation, at least they’re being consistent and subjecting themselves to foolishness as well.

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Stories Like this Lead Me to Think there’s No Hope for the United Kingdom

I don’t like bloated government. It undermines economic performance by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy and often leads to destructive tax policy.

But when trying to build support for good fiscal policy, it often helps to cite specific examples of wasteful and foolish government. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been comparing examples of government stupidity and political correctness in the United States and the United Kingdom.

After all, how many people would want to pay more taxes after reviewing these bizarre episodes of government in action?

From the United Kingdom

• A job-placement center got in trouble for discriminating against incompetent people by seeking “reliable” and “hard-working” candidates.
• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• The government wanted to require “competency tests” for pet owners.
• An ID requirement to buy teaspoons.
• The most useless sign in the history of the world.
• A proposal to ban skinny models.
• A prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.
• Denying children a home because the foster family didn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

From the United States

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• The EEOC hindering trucking companies from weeding out drunk drivers.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• And how can we omit the politicians in San Francisco, who decided that banning happy meal toys was an appropriate use of government coercion.
• We also have regulations in Maryland governing the application of sunscreen at summer camps.
• A local politician in Maryland wanting a licensing process to be a bum.
• And proposals in Seattle to require life vests on swimmers who are more than five feet from shore.

I’ve even shared some instances of moronic behavior from the private sector, and I have another story that may belong in that category.

In this instance, we’re talking about the critical need to protect people from pudding. I’m not joking. Here are some of the details of a very odd report in the Daily Mail.

If you’re lucky enough to look about 18, there’s a good chance you’ll be asked to provide ID at the supermarket to buy alcohol, knives or glue. Now an addition has been made to that list of potentially hazardous items – chocolate pudding. Robert Nemeti was amazed when he was asked for ID while buying a microwaveable pudding at Tesco. Mr Nemeti, 24, was going through the self-service checkout when an on-screen warning announced that his purchase had to be ‘approved’. …‘The woman who was monitoring the self-service checkouts came over and asked me for identification showing I was 18. I asked her why and was stunned when she told me: “It gets hot when you cook it – and you may burn yourself”. Surely the same can be said of many of the products they sell in any supermarket? Health and safety has gone crazy if you now have to prove you can be trusted with a chocolate pudding.’ He added: ‘I explained that I didn’t have any ID. Thankfully she agreed that I looked over 18 and she scanned her staff pass to approve the sale.’ Mr Nemeti managed to cook and eat the dessert that evening without injury.

Gee, I’m glad that Mr. Nemeti managed to eat the pudding without causing a fire or suffering burns.

There’s not much I can add to this story. Is this an example of crazy government over-protectiveness, sort of nanny state run amok? Perhaps somewhat similar to Nurse Bloomberg’s attempt to ban large sodas? I don’t know. There aren’t enough details.

Or maybe it’s the fault of the private sector, with some corporate bureaucrat justifying his job by coming up with idiotic rules? Though, to be fair, that’s less destructive than American corporate bureaucrats who have special skills when it comes to getting bailout money.

No warning label?!? Such reckless corporate irresponsibility!

Could it be because the English are learning about America’s lawsuit culture and businesses are having to defend themselves from preposterous legal claims by imposing equally preposterous rules? That would be the indirect fault of government.

But whatever the cause, it’s a sorry sign for civilization. I’ve previously explained that I’m very pessimistic about the United Kingdom’s fiscal outlook. Based on this story, I also should worry about the nation’s mental outlook.

But I’m not throwing stones blindly. I’m fully aware that the United States is a glass house, whether the metric is reckless fiscal policy or a dearth of common sense.

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For Nutty English Bureaucrats, Ideological Bias and Political Correctness Are More Important than the Well-Being of Children

Earlier this month, as part of my ongoing series comparing bone-headed bureaucracy in both the United States and United Kingdom, I wrote a post about a moronic green-energy subsidy program in the U.K. that was so convoluted that nobody in the entire country signed up for it.

Only government could be so bloody incompetent that it can’t even do a good job of giving away subsidies and handouts.

Since I’m a big believer if fairness (properly defined), I normally take turns in this series, first featuring an example of government stupidity in the U.K., followed by an example of foolish bureaucracy in the U.S., and so on and so on.

But I have to break the pattern. Check out these excerpts from a story about English bureaucrats deciding that a foster family no longer could take of kids because they support the United Kingdom Independence Party, which doesn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

The husband and wife, who have been fostering for nearly seven years, said they were made to feel like criminals when a social worker told them that their views on immigration made them unsuitable carers. …Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, described the actions of Rotherham borough council as “a bloody outrage” and “political prejudice of the very worst kind”. …The couple, who do not want to be named to avoid identifying the children they have fostered, are in their late 50s and live in a neat detached house in a village in South Yorkshire. The husband was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years and works with disabled people, while his wife is a qualified nursery nurse. Former Labour voters, they have been approved foster parents for nearly seven years and have looked after about a dozen different children, one of them in a placement lasting four years. They took on the three children — a baby girl, a boy and an older girl, who were all from an ethnic minority and a troubled family background — in September in an emergency placement. They believe that the youngsters thrived in their care. The couple were described as “exemplary” foster parents: the baby put on weight and the older girl even began calling them “mum and dad”. However, just under eight weeks into the placement, they received a visit out of the blue from the children’s social worker at the Labour-run council and an official from their fostering agency. They were told that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip. The wife recalled: “I was dumbfounded. Then my question to both of them was, ‘What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’ “Then one of them said, ‘Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries. “I’m sat there and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is going off here?’ because I wouldn’t have joined Ukip if they thought that. I’ve got mixed race in my family. I said, ‘I am absolutely offended that you could come in my house and accuse me of being a member of a racist party’.”

What a disgusting mix of ideological bias and political correctness.

I agree that government officials shouldn’t place children in homes where there’s racism. So if the bureaucrats discovered that a household had people from the English equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan or the New Black Panther Party, then it’s understandable and appropriate that they don’t get to take care of foster children.

But I’ve met many people from UKIP and I keep close track of what’s happening in the English political world. From everything that I can tell, UKIP is a mainstream political party that seems most concerned about the loss of sovereignty to the European Union.

Are there some racists in UKIP? I’m sure that some exist, just as there racists in the Labour Party, Conservative Party, and Liberal Democratic Party. And, for what it’s worth, there are some racist Republicans and some racist Democrats. Like other collectivist impulses, racism is probably an inherent flaw in the human species.

But I’m digressing. The purpose of this post is to express disgust at bureaucrats in England who decided that belonging to UKIP automatically meant a foster family was racist. Even worse, these bureaucrats then took three children from this family, which means they put political correctness and ideological bias ahead of the best interests of the kids.

Let’s hope that those children aren’t now stuck in an orphanage or some other sub-standard form of institutionalized care.

P.S. If you want to be entertained and to learn more about UKIP, I’ve posted some remarkable videos of their MEPs as they speak at the European Parliament.

Farage is the head of UKIP, and he completely skewers the head bureaucrats of the European Commission in this speech.

His most famous speeches specifically eviscerated the “damp dishrag” of the European Commission.

Here’s Nigel Farage mocking European bailouts.

And since you know my favorite issue is tax competition, you’ll understand why I like these two short speeches by UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

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