All of a sudden, “education,” meaning a university education, was the path to a better life.  Education. Not work. Education.

On By M. WalgenbachIn SchoolsLeave a comment

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Simple. When the left decided to abandon the working class for thirty pieces of silver, they needed an excuse, something they could pivot to in lieu of unions, economic growth, and the dignity of labor.

So they reimagined the trades, no longer seeing them as noble professions that create and maintain the very structure of civilization, but as a sort of sub-basement ghetto that underprivileged people were stuck in due to lack of opportunity, inequity, and somehow racism, because they always slip that in there somewhere.

All of a sudden, “education,” meaning a university [education] specifically, was the path to a better life.  Education.

Not work.  Education.

You weren’t supposed to learn a skill, do it for money, have a home and a vehicle, and a middle-class lifestyle where you could afford to have a wife and raise some kids because you worked, then be able to retire in comfort when you got old.

No, you were supposed to go through academia as the gatehouse, and gatekeeper, of the middle class.

The message was to push out anyone who built physical objects, or otherwise worked with his hands, was only doing so because he wasn’t smart enough to do anything better.

As Barrack Obama, the arch-grifter of the modern left himself, put it:

“In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a prerequisite.”

And:

“Higher education cannot be a luxury reserved just for a privileged few. It is an economic necessity for every family. And every family should be able to afford it.”

That was the plan. Tell everyone, literally everyone, that they need to go to college, fund it all by pushing federally subsidized debt-slavery loans on 18-year-olds, and attack any objectors by accusing them of wanting to deprive people of the education that “everyone deserves”, and somehow racism, because that always gets slipped in there somewhere.

All of this, of course, is complete bullshit. Universities are not the ultimate expression of knowledge, ability, productivity, or indeed almost anything.

Universities are simply trade schools for intellectuals.

What is an intellectual? An intellectual, per Thomas Sowell, is someone whose work product is ideas.

So, when we understand this, we realize that the grand plan of the left, as articulated by Barrack Obama, is for everyone who matters to become an intellectual, and for everyone who isn’t an intellectual to not matter.

All the real people are supposed to sit around coming up with ideas, talking about them, and getting paid for it, while all the buildings are built, floors are cleaned, and devices are built, by foreign factories and imported laborers with limited English skills.

If anyone objects to this, they are simply told to go to university and join the intellectual class, so they can have not only a better life but also the right to an opinion.

This is why the left always speaks highly of the poor in the abstract, but the moment they start voting for Trump, they are no longer the poor, they are “uneducated” and “low information voters”.

The left’s brave new world is to consist of a permanent underclass of tradesmen and service workers, ruled by intellectuals and kept in check by playing them and the teeming masses of the third world off against each other.

Why?

Well, because socialism has always been a movement of, by, and for intellectuals. Communist revolutions may be fought by laborers, but they are always instigated, proselytized, and led by the universities.

How natural, then, that socialists would insist that all leadership, respect, and economic status be channeled through academia… because this makes them into a de facto ruling class.

To accomplish this, it was necessary to achieve two goals. First, to purge conservatives and liberals from academia, and second, to diminish the cultural influence and respect given to workers and entrepreneurs. The first goal has largely been accomplished. They are working on the second.

Stalin was said to have joked that, “The only country rich enough to afford communism was the United States.”

On By M. WalgenbachIn Great DepressionLeave a comment

That quote is from another of Amity Shlaes’ interview on the City Journal Podcast with Brian Anderson on her book, The Forgotten Man, December 11, 2019.

from the Independent Institute.

Before Roosevelt, we had the Hoover Dam, which is a pact among states.  That is it’s an interstate project written with Constitutionality in mind.  With Herbert Hoover, FDR liked the Constitution and did things Constitutionally.  When he became president, Roosevelt, 33, had a different attitude.  He wasn’t that legalistic; he just wanted things done.  So his vision along the same lines of the Hoover Dam was let’s generate power using water, hydropower, across the nation, kind of arrange the economy by river basin.  What’s wrong with that?  One, it’s a political grab, but, two, it turns out hydropower isn’t that efficient.  It’s not our favorite form of power today.  It’s a classic example of the government betting wrong on an industry.  In addition to that, they killed an industry that got it right, or let’s say, lamed it forever, put it in a forever wheelchair, which was utilities that were busy lighting up the South themselves.  And part of the TVA-style extravaganza was to provide electricity as you’ve written so often, the federal government crowding out local and private exercises.  It was a terrible offense to civil rights.  It was unconstitutional what the Black Committee did but it was also evil, I would say it’s evil, . . . it’s evil to kill the most promising industry in a depression, right?  That’s what they sought to do.  Evil for a number of other reasons.

TVA is popular for many, but it’s the #1 enemy for the environmental consequences, like the fertilizers that were in the mix, and what that did to the water of the South that we live with today.

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