Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-29, Steve Lamb penned:

And public schools are doing such a fine job of educating, too!
You are aware that there are people who believe public
schooling was, and is, a bad idea and this would be best
removed?

There are people who believe that amending the Constitution to prevent
gay marriage is somehow a worthwhile cause. People believe all sorts
of crazy stuff.

I won't go so far as to say that the idea that public school is a bad
idea is crazy, but I would certainly say I'd want an awful lot of
evidence before I would want to act on it.

I'm a product of public education through high school, and a state
college, and my public school routinely outperforms vast swaths of
private schools. Granted, that's not to say all public schools are
better than all private schools, but it suggests that public schools
aren't inherently awful.

People who have no interest in nature pay taxes to preserve
national parks.

Same here.

Not sure what you're agreeing with. I support national parks, and I
vote to spend money on local parks. And I'm not sure wtf anyone is
doing in the Front Range of Colorado if they don't like nature, but
hey, I'm sure they exist, and maybe it bugs them that the rest of us
keep voting to protect our land.

I agree that social security is all sorts of screwed up, but not
because it involves collecting money and spending it in ways that
might not directly benefit the person paying.

It is a large part of it because it's pretty much a fact that the
peo ple would have been better off with the money to invest and
save on their own Yes, people can come up with specific cases of
individuals who represent the exception. But we're talking the
by-and-large masses here, not the "a friend of a friend's aunt's
grandma..."

I honestly don't believe this. It might be different if good
financial practices were required in the high school curriculum, but
they're not. (That's an idea I've read about in a couple of financial
books now, and it makes a lot of sense.) Very few people are all that
good at investing. Particularly, because there's a lack of
understanding of the market, people panic when they lose money, pull
their money out, and then never get the benefit of the upswing.

Everything I've read suggests that financial experts, people who have
a financial education and study the market as their job, are lucky to
pick a winning stock 50% of the time. What makes you think that
someone with a full time job, child rearing responsibilities, etc is
going to even do that well? (And yes, you can invest in funds
instead, but that still requires a fair amount of attention to earn
enough interest to stay ahead of inflation.)

--
monique

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