the tindog coffeehouse

Dallas Morning News columnist Jacuielynn Floyd framed the Texas State Board of Education’s incessant tussling over social studies standards perfectly:

But it glaringly underscores that this entire exercise, which I once naively believed to be part of an effort to produce intelligent, intellectually responsible citizens, is not about academics at all.

No, there’s nothing to see here but the same old blowhard talking points that currently pass for political discourse.

Religious conservatives who dominate the board don’t even bother trying to pretend otherwise. They’ve made it clear that they believe their mission is to even the score with what they see as snotty leftist academics who have poisoned public education.

It’s not about kids grasping history and learning to draw independent conclusions – it’s about who gets to run the indoctrination camp. …

Paradoxically, the saddest thing about all this is also the only consolation I can find.

It’s this: Ideological fist-pumping over such meddlesome trivia as substituting “free enterprise” for “capitalism” or “constitutional republic” for “democracy” won’t make much difference to teenagers who graduate without being able to punctuate, add simple fractions or find Panama on a map.

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President Bush (and yes, he’s still the president for two more months!) has come to the defense of free-market capitalism, rejecting calls from other nations for extreme regulation of financial markets:

“Government intervention is not a cure-all,” Bush was to say in New York, according to prepared remarks released in advance by the White House. …

“The crisis was not a failure of the free market system,” Bush said. “And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” …

“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market but too much,” Bush said. “It would a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I made a similar point, although not as explicitly, a few weeks ago:

Yes, tighter regulation of U.S. financial markets is necessary, especially in the short term. But the government is not the best decider of supply and demand; just ask the Soviet Union. So in that regard, we need to give the market plenty of room to sort itself out.

There seems to be a lot of debate on the Interwebs these days about whether good-ol’ American free-market capitalism is still alive.

First the Washington Post declared it dead on October 10th:

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism. …

“People around the world once admired us for our economy, and we told them if you wanted to be like us, here’s what you have to do — hand over power to the market,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. “The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis. And of course it raises questions about our credibility. Everyone feels they are suffering now because of us.”

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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking Congress to give the Fed more powers to regulate the financial system, in light of the collapse (and bailout) of Bear Stearns.

Paulson said the country had come to rely on the Federal Reserve in times of crisis, citing the Fed’s actions to broker a rescue of giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998 during the Asian currency crisis and the Bear Stearns episode this year.

“Our nation has come to expect the Federal Reserve to step in to avert events that pose unacceptable systemic risk,” Paulson said. “But, as we noted in our blueprint, the Fed has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risk across our entire financial system.”

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