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July 29, 2010

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Teachers Unions vs. Online Education

Kids live on the Internet. Why aren’t they learning online too?

Katherine Mangu-Ward

State governments spend between $10,000 and $15,000 annually on each of the nation’s 55 million school kids, making primary and secondary education a $1 trillion market. Under ordinary circumstances, that kind of money attracts entrepreneurs. But the uncertainties of politics, the powerful opposition of the teachers unions, and the astonishing technological backwardness of the education establishment discourage would-be entrepreneurs and, perhaps more importantly, potential investors. In the 2010 annual letter from his charitable foundation—the biggest in the United States, with a $33 billion endowment—Bill Gates listed online education as one of his top priorities. 'Online learning can be more than lectures,' he wrote.

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Got Environmental Problems? Think Government.

Foreign Policy identifies true environmental catastrophes, but misses the main cause.

Ronald Bailey

Foreign Policy largely missed one of the central features of all of the ecological catastrophes it highlighted: defective or non-existent property rights. In the case of the BP and Nigerian oil spills, the resource is owned by the government which sets up the rules for how resources are managed. The Chinese coal seam fires and the draining of the Aral Sea took place under communist regimes where private property was outlawed. In the sad case of Haiti, lack of secure property rights means that few have any incentive to reforest land. And the absence of property rights in the ocean results in it being treated as a global dump. The lesson is that establishing clear property rights encourages resource exploiters to behave responsibly. And if they don’t, property rights enable rest of us to hold resource exploiters responsible for the damage they do.

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Bono and Buttman

If indecency is unconstitutionally vague, why isn't obscenity?

Jacob Sullum

Last week an appeals court in New York overturned the federal ban on broadcast indecency, and a judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed obscenity charges against porn impresario John "Buttman" Stagliano. The two cases show that prohibiting vaguely defined categories of speech undermines the rule of law as well as freedom of expression.

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