“Peace, prosperity, liberty and morals
have an intimate connection.”

- Thomas Jefferson

Update:

The real issue here isn't what the parents believe, it is whether they or the State have the right and the responsibility to determine the best education for their children. This is fundamental, whether the State is totalitarian, benevolent or a right-wing theocracy. How would people react if their children were required by law to go to the latter? Will some parents fail spectacularly at this? Of course. And so do many schools. Yet the principles of liberty and freedom must be vigorously and vigilantly defended at every point, especially within the family.

We are better served by honoring and defending the rights of the individual than we are promoting the authority of the State. I learned that in school, once, a long time ago.

On the heels of an article in the St. Paul paper this week about the surge in homeschooling in the U.S., I read an article today about a German family seeking political asylum in Tennessee so that they can homeschool their children.

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — Homeschooling is so important to Uwe Romeike that the classically trained pianist sold his beloved grand pianos to pay for moving his wife and five children from Germany to the Smoky Mountain foothills of Tennessee.

Romeike, his wife, Hannelore, and their children live in a modest duplex about 40 miles northeast of Knoxville while they seek political asylum here. They say they were persecuted for their evangelical Christian beliefs and homeschooling their children in Germany, where state school attendance is compulsory.

When the Romeikes wouldn't comply with repeated orders to send the children to school, police came to their home one October morning in 2006 and took the children, crying and upset, to school.

"We tried not to open the door, but they (police) kept ringing the doorbell for 15 or 20 minutes," Romeike said. "They called us by phone and spoke on the answering machine and said they would knock open the door if we didn't open it. So I opened it."

The Romeike's case may sound extreme, but the fact is Germany is adamantly anti-home education, as I've reported in this blog on a couple of occasions. The first time was in November of 2006 in a post entitled Ve haf vays...

Stones Cry Out excerpted a story last week about German police forcibly delivering home-schooled children to the local state schools.

A Nazi-era law requiring all children to attend public school, to avoid "the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions" that could be taught by parents at home, apparently is triggering a Nazi-like response from police.

The word comes from Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit, or Network for Freedom in Education, which confirmed that children in a family in Bissingen, in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, have been forcibly hauled to a public school.

"On Friday 20 October 2006 at around 7:30 a.m. the children of a home educating family ... were brought under duress to school by police," the organization, which describes itself as politically and religiously neutral, confirmed.

A separate weblog in the United States noted the same tragedy.

Homeschoolblogger.com noted that the "three children were picked up by the police and escorted to school in Baden-Wurttemberg, with the 'promise' that it would happen again this week."

The Network for Freedom in Education, through spokesman Joerg Grosseluemern, said the Remeike family has been "home educating their children since the start of the school year, something which is legal in practically the whole of the (European Union)."

It kind of makes you wonder about a government that's afraid of what parents might teach their children...or that believes it is the rightful parent of the nation. Perhaps they've read their William Ross Wallace and know that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world," and they find that discomforting. I'm also amazed that this "Nazi-era" law is still on the books in Germany; it is all für der Kinder, no doubt.

This all reminds me of how the roots of the U.S. education system go deep into the Prussian model of the early 20th century (believe me, we got more than just "kindergarten" from this influence). I had started digging into this topic for a post a long time ago and got sidetracked; it might be time to resurrect this effort. For now, at least, we can appreciate that our money is the only thing the state forcibly takes from our homes and sends to public school.

Like the Pilgrims before them, the Romeikes came to America seeking religious freedom (not freedom from religion) and to live their lives free of government interference. Good thing for them they came to Tennessee, though, and not California where the education unions and courts march in goose-step together, as I wrote about here last March...

More compelling was one judge's written opinion:

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."

Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.

The ruling sent shock waves throughout the estimated 166,000 home-educators in California as well as through the California legislature and even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said, "Every California child deserves a quality education, and parents should have the right to decide what's best for their children. Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children's education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts, and, if the courts don't protect parents' rights, then, as elected officials, we will." Interestingly enough, Schwarzenegger's signing of SB777 last year may be one of the things that have led many parents to abandon the public schools. Give the Governator credit though; he may not be great at logic but he definitely knows how to count votes and probably realizes that whatever other political beliefs a homeschooling family may have, telling them that they have no right to educate their own children trumps them all.

Personally, I'm not shocked. California has long been the most overtly hostile state toward home-educators (ironically it's own school system struggles to place a certified teacher in every classroom, yet would seek to mandate it in every home-school). Similarly, Education Minnesota has no love lost for home-educators and my hunch is that they wouldn't mind if their pet DFL pupils in the Minnesota legislature were to bring them a similar bill as if it were a bright, shiny apple.

Of course, it takes a real socialist mentality to proclaim that the State is the rightful owner of your children, as I've documented before regarding events in England and Germany. The Germans, in fact, are still embracing the 1937 law instituted by a certain mustachioed megalomaniac that mandates compulsory state school educations. Seventy years later they're still enforcing it by forcibly taking kids from their homes to school in police cars or even removing children from their parents' homes and hiding them in psychiatric hospitals for evaluation.

Maybe the Germans have this thing about control, but surely a liberal democracy and member of the European Union would have respect for things like rights and constitutions, right? After all, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union declares that "the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions". Yet according to the entry in Wikipedia where I got that quote:

Homeschooling in Germany is illegal with rare exceptions. The requirement to attend school has been upheld, on challenge from parents, by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Parents violating the law have most prominently included devout Christians who want to give their children a more Christian education than what is offered by the schools. Penalties against these parents have included fines (around €5,000), successful legal actions to take away the parents' custody of their children, and jail time for the parents.[1]

In a landmark legal case commenced in 2003 at the European Court of Human Rights a homeschooling parent couple argued on behalf of their children that Germany's compulsory school attendance endangered their children’s religious upbringing, promoted teaching inconsistent with their Christian faith — especially the German State's mandates relating to sex education in the schools — and contravened the declaration in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union that "the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions". In September 2006 the European Court of Human Rights upheld the German ban on homeschooling, stating "parents may not refuse ...[compulsory schooling] on the basis of their convictions", and adding that the right to education "calls for regulation by the State". The European Court took the position that the plaintiffs were the children, not their parents, and declared "children are unable to foresee the consequences of their parents' decision for home education because of their young age.... Schools represent society, and it is in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to educate does not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience." The European Court endorsed a "carefully reasoned" decision of the German court concerning "the general interest of society to avoid the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions and the importance of integrating minorities into society."

Good luck to the Romeikes. I know from first-hand experience that the U.S. immigration and asylum courts can be very difficult. My hope for the family, and for the U.S., is that we all will enjoy prolonged freedom. Freedom requires vigilance and conviction, even to the point of risking conviction, and I hope the examples of Germany and — closer to home — California, are educational.

A few years ago when home values were soaring my wife and I refinanced our house, taking out some equity to remodel part of our main floor while locking in a sub-5% fixed rate, 15-year mortgage (we hate paying interest). This was back in the day when you could finance 125 percent of your equity. The amount we needed was substantially less than this, and our loan officer kept trying to interest us in borrowing more. My wife wasn't having any of it (I think this might have been the same loan officer who gushed that our credit score "walks on water"). Frankly, it kind of creeped us out to think about taking on all this extra debt simply because we could, especially for intangibles such as travel or ephermerals that depreciate quickly, such as new cars (both of which were examples of things the loan officer suggested we could spend the extra cash on). Fortunately for us, our instincts were correct.

I think most people have an built-in sense, or skepticism, for those "too good to be true" deals, even if we eventually decide that the deal is "too good to pass up." Then, like the prize trout being reeled in we say, "I knew there was a catch!" It's hard to resist, though, when the rest of the school is jumping in the boat on their own. Most of us have the scars on our lips to show for it.

I think that's why so many people are feeling more than a little queasy about the direction of the economy and the proposed borrowing our way to prosperity budget offered by President Obama. How does it make sense that, if we're in a crisis caused by unchecked borrowing, even more borrowing will get us out? And who are we borrowing from, and what's the vig? Having learned a few things the hard way we tend to push back a little when the salesman says "you've got act by midnight tonight!" At the same time we really want to believe that things aren't really so bad, and it will all work out in the long-run, because to believe otherwise calls into questions all those nice little assumptions that allow us to sleep at night. So when the salesman try to allay our concerns with testimonials "Four out of five socialists prefer..." or say that this the "new and improved deficit, now with less rich people" we kind of say, "What the heck, and, you know, I think my next diet will be the one that works, too!"

"Besides," the salesman says, "It's really not my deficit...I inherited it!" So then we think, "Well, yeah, we've always had deficits, Winston, so what's a little more?" If the Bush administration left us with the equivlent of a budget hangover, perhas a little hair of the dog makes sense. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words — and likely a few trillion dollars as well.

As the Washington Post illustrated the other day:


SOURCE: CBO, White House Office of Management and Budget | The Washington Post - March 21, 2009

That's not the Republicans providing that chart, or The Center for the American Experiment, or even Joe the Plumber; it's the Washington Post, using numbers from both the President's office and the ostensibly non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. As sickening as the Bush fiscal record is (and yes, the numbers above do include money spent on Iraq and Afganistan), the current administration plans to take a case of the flu and turn it into Ebola.

As the Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl points out:

• President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion.
  
  
• President Bush began a string of expensive finan­cial bailouts. President Obama is accelerating that course.



• President Bush created a Medicare drug entitle­ment that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade. President Obama has proposed a $634 billion down payment on a new govern­ment health care fund.



• President Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. Presi­dent Obama would double it.



• President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama has already in­creased this spending by 20 percent.



• President Bush tilted the income tax burden more toward upper-income taxpayers. President Obama would continue that trend.



• President Bush presided over a $2.5 trillion increase in the public debt through 2008. Setting aside 2009 (for which Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for an additional $2.6 trillion in public debt), President Obama’s budget would add $4.9 trillion in public debt from the beginning of 2010 through 2016.

Perhaps someone can graph this for me: now that it's been established that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold, how long before the UN decides that our economy is too important to be left in the hands of Americans and requires global oversight?

HT: Bogus Gold.

Are you one of the "95 percent" of Americans promised a tax-cut by President Obama? By all means, keep your fingers crossed and "hope" you get a little taste before pending "changes" in other tax laws and regulations swipe it right back out of your pocket.

A couple of weeks ago I highlighted a move by Congressional Democrats to tax your employer-sponsored health benefits. Today I have a couple more stories that suggest more back-door tax increases on your insurance are in the works.

One of the major features of life insurance and annuities has long been the ability to "build-up" cash values tax-free inside certain types of life polices and within annuities, with income taxes being taken when the funds were withdrawn, presumably in retirement when your income tax bracket is (hopefully) lower. It's a similar mechanism to how a 401k works. Additionally, life insurance death benefits paid to your survivors have also been tax-free. All these tax deferrals act as incentives for consumers to take individual responsibility in planning for retirement and the financial security of one's family.

This is not an strategy reserved only for the wealthy; cash value life insurance policies and annuities are mainstays of middle-class financial planning, while the more affordable term life plans (with no cash build-up) provide an important and accessible safety net for families with common sense but modest means. There are those, however, who love raising taxes every bit as much as they hate the thought of the individual doing anything for himself when the government could be doing it less efficiently. An example on the radar screen is out west where the Oregon State Revenue Committee is claiming that exempting these private funds imposes too much of a burden on the state which currently can't get its hands on that money:

The federal government exempts life and annuity benefits from taxation, but Rep. Chuck Riley, D-Hillsboro, Ore., the sponsor of the Oregon bill, H.B. 2854, has argued that conformity with federal income tax rules is too costly, and that Oregon should tax some kinds of income now excluded from federal taxable income.

If passed as written, the bill would take effect on or after Jan. 1, 2010.

H.B. 2854 was first read March 2. To pass, the bill would need approval by a three-fifths majority.

The National Association for Life Brokerage Agencies, Fairfax, Va., has put out a statement opposing the bill, noting it would tax both the death benefits and earnings on the inside build-up of life insurance and annuities.

This “unfairly targets individuals and families who have taken responsibility for their financial future by preparing for retirement and planning for unforeseen circumstances,” NAILBA says in the statement. “Any changes to the tax system must not limit or disadvantage protection and security products, but rather strengthen them.”

It should be pointed out that "conforming" with the federal regulations doesn't "cost" Oregon anything; it merely keeps money away from them, which really galls those inclined to think that your money (and children) belong to the State. It is also part and parcel of the mindset that, as with the earlier health insurance article, portrays having life insurance as a lucky break and unfair advantage and therefore worthy of confiscation and redistribution. While this particular article refers to Oregon only, if it passes it's not much of a stretch to see other states trying the same thing.

On a related note, there is a recurring movement afoot in the federal government to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act which provides a limited anti-trust exemption to the insurance industry. This arises periodically, but now they are using the AIG imbroglio to justify this latest grab (though the connection is tenuous):

Two House Democrats have introduced a bill that would repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act insurance industry antitrust exemption.

The bill, H.R. 1583, the Insurance Industry Competition Act, would give the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission the authority to apply antitrust laws to anticompetitive behavior by insurance companies.

The bill would keep the McCarran-Ferguson provision that puts jurisdiction over insurance regulation in the hands of the states.

The bill was introduced by Reps. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., and Peter DeFazio D-Ore.

Taylor and DeFazio have introduced similar bills in earlier Congresses. They say the controversy over bonuses paid to American International Group Inc., New York, employees highlights the need for action on the antitrust issue.

The current insurance industry antitrust exemption gave AIG a free pass to become “too big to fail,” and “now the U.S taxpayers are on the hook to bail them out or risk even further turmoil in an already fragile economy,” Taylor and DeFazio say in a statement. “This legislation would close that exemption.”

Admittedly, McCarran-Ferguson is a rather esoteric issue in a complex environment, and "anti-trust" always sounds like it's in the best interests of the public. What the Act does, however, is allow states to regulate insurance companies operating within their jurisdiction rather than bringing it all under federal oversight. The result, however, is to make the insurance products — both life & health and property & casualty — more affordable. Federalizing insurance regulation would, like the initial efforts at "health-care reform" would strengthen the biggest players while harming or even eliminating the smaller companies, and would result in higher costs for consumers, not lower.

As someone who's worked in marketing and advertising in this industry for a long time I know that I have complained on many occasions about the challenges of working with 50 different state insurance commissions in order to get products and even certain advertising approved. While I've often thought it would be simpler to deal with just one entity I also see how state control benefits consumers.

Politicians have long been masters of saying one thing and doing another; of staging a distraction in the park while the pickpocket goes through the crowd. When you hear the music playing, be sure to look over your shoulder.

I've read emails that tell how the US government once took over the infamous Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada because of unpaid taxes...and subsequently managed the business into the ground. The moral of the story was if the government can't even make a go of selling sex and whiskey, how does it expect to be the de facto, nationalized owner of banks and insurance companies?

I don't think about brothels much, but the story keeps coming to me as the AIG saga staggers through the never-ending news cycle as the company's executives and new congressional overseers compete to kill the company in the most Darwin-award winning manner. The current bonus brouhaha may merely be the arsenic icing on a cake made with too many cooks. First, it is incredibly dunder-headed to pay bonuses for behavior that put your company — and the economy — into a tailspin. I work in this industry and regardless of what the contracts say, I've not heard of bonuses being paid for screwing up. I do know that the financial services industry is as brand-conscious (if not more-so) as any industry out there and this kind of publicity is like shooting both of your feet off. You could even speculate whether the company would come out ahead in the long run by refusing to pay the bonuses and fighting it out in court even if the eventually had to fulfill the contracts. The perception that they were trying to do the right thing could have been worth hundreds of millions alone — and avoided a congressional coup-de-grace.

Now Congress is shocked — shocked — that gambling is going on, even though it wrote the rules years ago that led AIG into this thicket, then steadfastly refused to do anything to provide oversight, and finally wrote the specific codicil in the bail-out (thank you, Sen. Dodd) that requires companies that take bail-out money to pay scheduled bonuses. Now, to divert the possibility that any blame might come back on them, they're stomping about, beating their paper-thin chests about the evil and greedy company misusing a small fraction of the billion-dollar suppository of tax-payer dollars Congress shoved up you-know-where — apparently forgetting that the U.S. taxpayer now owns that company and this grandstanding is driving the stock-price down to penny-stock status.

What Congress is also forgetting, as it threatens ever-more-onerous regulations, is that the market — thank you very much — has already exacted its sanctions. (Not only in terms of stock-price and public perception; my company has already benefited by AIG's stumbles as both customers and top producers have come over to us).

On top of that, what message does it send to PTSD investor community when the government starts threatening confiscatory taxes based on feelings rather than the rule of law? AIG operated on the assumption that it was "too big to fail" but after the last week I'm beginning to think everyone connected with this circus is too stupid to live.

Update:

When I wrote "too stupid to live" up above I didn't mean it in a "take them out and shoot them" way, but in the extinct Dodo bird way.

I wanted to be clear about that.

A convicted would-be bomber and accessory to murder and armed robbery has been paroled from prison in California and is returning to Minnesota.

That may be "so what?" news for folks not from around here but it has been quite a story in Minnesota since 1999 when Kathleen Soliah (now known as Sara Jane Olson), one of the FBI's "most wanted", was found living a politically progressive, upper-middle class life in a toney St. Paul neighborhood. Soliah/Olson, a sympathizer and possible member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patty Hearst fame) in the 70s had disappeared 23 years prior to her arrest following her grand jury indictment for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the killing of a female bank customer and for participating in two attempts to bomb police cars in retaliation for a police shoot-out that killed many of her SLA friends. During the time she was "missing", she adopted her new identity, married a St. Paul physician, raised a family, performed in several community theater productions and became well-known in activist circles for her support various liberal causes.

Her friends in turn took up her cause after her arrest, with well-known St. Paul office-holders Andy Dawkins and Sandy Pappas especially front and center protesting that she had lived a good life in the intervening years while also introducing the novel "everyone was an anarchist bomb-thrower in those days anyway" defense. Olson, nee Soliah, for her part pretty much denied anything other than being an admirer of the SLA. A lot of people, or at least the media, seemed to be buying it, too but a couple of things happened. One, the government started releasing more details of its case against her. The second thing was 9/11.

Any indulgence or sympathy for youthful, terroristic activities began to dry up, and Olson ultimately accepted (then tried to renege on) a plea bargain on the charges of planting bombs under two California police cars. After she started serving her sentence she was also convicted of the accessory to murder charge, and seven years were added to run concurrently with her original 14-year sentence, to be served in California. A year ago she was just about to be paroled a year early due to a clerical error but this was discovered and corrected and she returned prison. The calendar has now turned, but in the days leading up to her release the respective police unions in California and Minnesota, as well as the governors of the two states, have each insisted that they didn't want her serving her parole anywhere near them. The public statements became a political side-show in a time when there are some real issues to be dealt with. Nevertheless, Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson is back in Minnesota after serving seven years of her sentence, with three years of parole to come.

Personally, I think I'm ready to call it square.

I didn't sympathize with her story when she was finally captured and I didn't appreciate the local DFL's embrace of her and their attempts to minimize the serious offenses she committed. Nor do I downplay the seriousness of her intent and participation back in the day, or discount that her actions contributed to the death of another mother who will never come home. I was satisfied, however, to see her ultimately convicted and for the political and moral equivalency smokescreens to get hosed down. I also appreciated it when the amount of time she served turned out to be greater than the "two, three years, tops" predicted by the experts at the time she plead.

The fact is, she has done a significant amount of time and absorbed a (justified) amount of public humiliation. Points have been made. Frankly, I don't feel our community is a more dangerous place with her in it, and I don't expect a wave of police bombings or bank robberies even though some of her comments during her trial and incarceration suggest that she still harbors more than a little resentment against "The Man".

The possibility exists that she might become a public figure again due to her infamy, but outside of a small, hard-core group of supporters I don't think she has the credibility or gravitas to be anything better than a distraction at best — and a liability at worst — for any cause or campaign she aligns with.

If she wants to come back here, be with her family, and live a quiet, invisible life, I'm fine with that and I don't have any interest in following her around and I hope she will be left in peace. If she desires a more public platform then the abuse that will likely be heaped on her — as with the time she spent incarcerated — will be something she brought on herself.

Bob Greene is a master, and writer who's style influenced my early days. He's done a number of tributes over the years, but none have been better than the one he just offered to Paul Harvey who passed away Saturday at the age of 90:

I've never been one to attend the performances of symphony orchestras, but off and on, for more than 35 years, I gave myself the gift of something even better:

I would go and sit with Paul Harvey as he broadcast his radio show.

It was music; it was thrilling. I met him in the early 1970s, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Chicago, and that's when he allowed me, for the first time, to sit silently in his studio as he did his work. Over the years, whenever I felt a need for a Paul Harvey fix, he was always welcoming, and we came to know each other well. I would sit there wordlessly and observe absolute excellence.

He would invariably be wearing a smock when I arrived -- he had been working since well before the sun came up, and the smock would cover his shirt and tie. It was the kind of smock a jeweler might wear, or a watchmaker -- it was crisply pressed, the uniform of an expert craftsman. I never asked him why he wore it, but I suspect that was the reason -- pride in craftsmanship.

He would be at the typewriter, honing his script. He was famed for his voice, but the writing itself was so beautiful -- his respect for words, his understanding of the potency of economy, his instinct for removing the superfluous. The world heard him speak, but the world never saw him write, and I think he honored both aspects of his skill equally.
...
And then the signal from the booth, and. . .

"Hello, Americans! This is Paul Harvey! Stand by. . . for news!"

And he would look down at those words that had come out of his typewriter minutes before -- some of them underlined to remind him to punch them hard -- and they became something grander than ink on paper, they became the song, the Paul Harvey symphony. He would allow me to sit right with him in the little room -- he never made me watch from behind the glass -- and there were moments, when his phrases, his word choices, were so perfect -- flawlessly written, flawlessly delivered -- that I just wanted to stand up and cheer.

But of course I never did any such thing -- in Paul Harvey's studio, if you felt a tickle in your throat you would begin to panic, because you knew that if you so much as coughed it would go out over the air into cities and towns all across the continent -- so there were never any cheers. The impulse was always there, though -- when he would drop one of those famous Paul Harvey pauses into the middle of a sentence, letting it linger, proving once again the power of pure silence, the tease of anticipation, you just wanted to applaud for his mastery of his life's work.

He probably wouldn't have thought of himself this way, but he was the ultimate singer-songwriter. He wrote the lyrics. And then he went onto his stage and performed them. The cadences that came out of his fingertips at the typewriter were designed to be translated by one voice -- his voice -- and he did it every working day for more than half a century: did it so well that he became a part of the very atmosphere, an element of the American air.

Read the whole thing to get the "rest of the story" about an American legend. Good day!