The Whitewater School Board meeting for Monday night was technically perfect – an agenda of more than a dozen items, dispatched in little over forty minutes.

I know that summer days are long and hot, but I cannot avoid observing that there was a perfunctory quality to it all.

We can list any number of personnel changes, and agenda items completed, but that approach belies the routine, almost weary quality of a meeting.

The energy for a different approach comes more easily from a different environment, of more choices.

We may not have more schools from which to choose, but we can have more choice within our schools.

More on increasing choice, competitiveness, and energy in August.

I contended in Part 1 that conventionality takes hold quickly in s public body, in the absence of choice and the competition that it creates.

That’s why I have contended before that ideology matters little, after a while: politics devolves from principled ideology into self-interested incumbency. Liberal, conservative, moderate – long-term incumbents all start to think and act alike.

Energy matters less than longevity and defense of incumbency.
Education shouldn’t be like this, but it is – the near monopoly of government over children’s education makes the embrace of the ordinary enticing, safe, and predictable.

I posted previously on Andrew Coulson’s observation that public education costs more nationally than ever, but produces a result no better than decades ago.

How did the world’s richest nation, with so many sharp people, wind up in this predicament?

We abandoned the opportunities for choice in education.

Choice produces competition between objects from which one may choose.

Mistakes are not a matter of intellect, but of a system without incentives. There were and are plenty of smart Russians, but Soviet planning provided no incentive to talent and effort.

Without the competition that choice imposes, stagnation, business as usual, and conventionality take hold.

The Janesville Gazette has a troubling story on the decline in payrolls, by 3.1% over the last year, in Janesville.

Smaller Whitewater (less than one quarter the size of Janesville) will feel the influence of economic hardship in its larger neighbor.

The link to the Gazette story is at

http://www.gazettextra.com/weblogs/latest-news/2008/jul/30/janesville-area-among-nations-worst-job-losses/

Over at the fine group blog the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin posts in reply to an article in Dissent that contends Hayek is no longer relevant.

Hayek remains relevant, as Somin notes, not only for a critique of socialism, but for his critique of the anti-growth, anti-change right, too.

The excellent post may be found at

http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1217058723.shtml

NASA is fifty years old today, but it is not a happy anniversary. NASA’s human exploration program is uninspiring, and her next-generation spacecraft is behind schedule already.

America has changed much in the last fifty years, and the high-tech cachet of NASA has passed to dozens of private American companies.

Google, for example, is commemorating the date with a small picture of outer space on its website; that’s more recognition than the government agency will receive from many.

NASA’s early planning accomplishments may have run their course, ill-suited to the tasks ahead.

Meanwhile, private investors like Richard Branson offer new and creative ideas for exploration.

America does not lack for clever people – she sometimes lacks only the free and creative arrangements to unleash their talents.

The modern trend toward the familiar use of a first name and the grandiose description of municipal officials as visionaries combines to produce unintentionally funny results.

An example is when a member of our Common Council, without irony, can describe our city manager’s plan for Whitewater, Wisconsin as the “…vision of Kevin.”

The combination of the supposed power of vision and the first-name basis description of a municipal manager make the designation more, not less, odd and ridiculous.

Why does every municipal official in America insist on proclaiming a vision? I am sure that Edison, Marie Curie, and Salk were visionaries. I am less confident that the designation or ability resides in the thousands of municipal officials across America.

It’s an intoxicating designation, though, that belies a self-effacing manner.

Imagine going to work each day as town visionary – that’s something comforting and believable only to the foolish.