Pun Salad

²⁹ The Lord is far from the wicked,
    but he hears the prayer of the righteous.

Today's Pic du Jour: a suggested t-shirt for the Lord.

Hm, that comes off as a tad sacrilegious. Sorry.

My credentials: I spent around 20 years as a student, and 22 years working for the University Near Here, 7 of those years as an Instructor in Computer Science. Comparable amounts of time for the wife and kids.

At this point, about 20% of the way through the book, I am in complete agreement with Bryan Caplan. As Robert Frost points out in another context: "But waste was of the essence of the scheme."

Or as Mel Brooks put it (in a still different context): "We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs here, gentlemen!"

That said, I encourage you to read (for free) a couple articles adapted from the book at Reason. The first: Going to College Is Selfish. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but…

If you've always been a strong student, spending your time and money on education pays well. The evidence is overwhelming. Even after scrupulously correcting for ability bias—the brains, discipline, and other advantages you'd possess with or without school—formal education provides a big career boost. At an individual level, investing in your own education often compares favorably to not just corporate bonds, but long-run stock market returns.

Since individuals' investment in their own education is personally rewarding, you might infer that government investment in society's education would be socially rewarding. But this is a classic "fallacy of composition." If one person stands up at a concert, he sees better; it does not follow that if everyone stands up at a concert, everyone sees better. The same goes for education. Yes, schooling is selfishly lucrative—at least for strong students. On a societal level, however, it is shockingly wasteful for students weak and strong. Federal, state, and local government spends far too much money educating Americans.

The second article: A Heretical Plan for Cutting Spending on Education.

In the U.S., spending on public elementary, secondary, and tertiary schools now amounts to almost $1 trillion a year. Private education also relies on subsidized student loans and other government support. This gives society a nearly foolproof remedy for educational waste: Cut budgets for public education and subsidies for private education. Give schools less taxpayer money. The central question isn't "How?" but "Where do we start?"

Bryan argues the best education policy would be "no education policy at all: the separation of school and state". He goes on to assure the reader that it isn't necessary to accept his "crazy extremism" in order to acknowledge the overall correctness of his supporting argument.

With metronomic regularity, every thousand days or so, Americans should give some thought to the longest war in their nation’s history. The war in Afghanistan, which is becoming one of the longest in world history, reaches its 6,000th day on Monday, when it will have ground on for substantially more than four times longer than U.S. involvement in World War II from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day (1,346 days).

Will asks: what's the point, here? Do we have one?

When Apple CEO Tim Cook accepted the Newseum Free Speech award last spring, he emphatically declared that Apple has no higher value than the promotion of free speech and robust debate. "We work to defend these freedoms by enabling people around the world to speak up. And . . . we do it by speaking up ourselves," Cook said. "Companies can and should have values."

But when it comes to China, Apple's values vanish. Last year Apple scrubbed hundreds of virtual private network applications, with which Internet users can bypass government censorship, from its App Store in China. It thereby denied hundreds of millions of Chinese residents their only realistic means of accessing the Internet without restriction. "This App Store purge just created one of the biggest setbacks for the free Internet in China's history," commented TechCrunch, an industry publication.

Jacoby calls this "nauseating hypocrisy." He's right.

IT'S TIME WE FOUGHT BACK NOW WHO'S WITH ME pic.twitter.com/dXe2na3yRU

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) March 11, 2018