Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider explore what happens when a state government is taken over by a combination of libertarians, who want to diminish government and taxes, and Republicans, who have spent decades attacking government as “the enemy.” It turns out they are indistinguishable. .
This is a don’t-miss edition of their reader-supported “Have You Heard” podcast (with transcript available).
Among the services cut were garbage collection and animal control. So people in the state are getting used to seeing bears ransacking their garbage.
The situation is growing dire for the state’s public schools. The libertarians want to eliminate public education. They want to replace it with charter schools, vouchers, home schooling, and pretty much anything that a parent wants to do.
Under the leadership of Governor Chris Sununu and Frank Edelblut, the home schooler he selected as state commissioner of education, the state is well on its way to its goal of privatizing and/or abolishing public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Um, potential grizzlies, people. Arm the kindergartners!
Grizzly Policy
If Betsy had her way
The bears would all be dead
But luckily, today
The science rules instead
The Bear Necessities
An AK in pre K
Keeps bears on the run
If Bets had the last say
The bears would be gone
Bears ransacking garbage are not the result of lack of animal control but lack of human control.
I have personal experience with this.
Just a couple days ago, I had a bear get into my trash. I knew it was a bear because I heard it dump over the barrel and when I turned on the outside light the bear went crashing into the woods with a trash bag in its mouth.
It was my own fault.
I knew there were bears around because I saw a female and her two cubs just last week.
If you live in bear country, you have to either keep your trash indoors until pickup day or you have to keep it in a bearproof container.
No amount of “animal control” — short of killing all the “problem” bears (who are just hungry after a long winter snooze) — is going to remedy the problem.
But human control — getting the people to change their habits — can easily resolve the problem and make it easier on the bears and on the humans who have to pick up the trash after the bears get into it.
On the same subject:
Over a half century ago, Yellowstone National Park had a significant problem with bear/human interactions. Anyone who visited the park during those years would remember bears everywhere — along the roads and in the campgrounds.
The problem stemmed directly from the park service policies.
The park had open garbage dumps near the campgrounds which attracted bears from far and wide. When the bears got done with the entre at the dump, they would go looking for desert in the campgrounds. Like idiots , people!e would even take photos of bears (including grizzly bears) at close range.
What greatly mitigated the problem were changes in policy and in human behavior.
First, the park service closed the dumps. Second, they relocated bears to remote back country areas of the park and regularly placed fresh kills of elk and dear in these areas to keep the bears in them and away from the campgrounds. Third, they discouraged direct human interaction with bears. No more selfies with bears.
Though this did not completely eliminate the bear human interactions, it greatly alleviated the problem and greatly reduced the number of “problem” bears that had to be “dealt with” (is, killed)
Human behavior is usually easier to change than animal behavior, especially when the animal behavior involves Hostess Twinkies
The changes in park service policy were a direct result of the extensive studies and suggestions by grizzly bear biologists John and Frank Craighead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_and_John_Craighead
Apparently, libertarians have created a situation in which the trash does not get picked up. So, you would have to keep your refuse indoors forever and change your name to Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout who could not take the garbage out. Or you could give your trash to a libertarian billionaire and ask him to put it on his rocket to the moon. Warning: He will probably demand that you pay for rocket gas or buy the Tesla car trash container on the rocket.
By the way.
I found and picked up the trash IN the woods.
Luckily, the bear did not find much of interest because it did not even remove all the contents of the bag.
I just can’t bear it when you talk like this!
To bare the facts on bears
And human/bear affairs
Unbearable may be
But critical to see
So grin and bear it
I’ve bearly scratched the surface
On human/bear relations
My madness has a purpose
So bear with me, have patience
On a related note, my brother in law’s new sugar shack (for making maple syrup) was scratched by a bear recently.
So these two guy walk into a bear.
And sit down on bear stools…
I once walked into a bear after rounding a bend on a trail in Wyoming.
Luckily it was a black bear and immediately turned off the trail, although there were grizzlies in the area.
And one guy asks the other: why did you go over the mountain?
And the other replies: to see what I could see.
You say a lot about humans and human government: we keep hiring brawn, not brains, to handle social problems
Brains not Brawn
We should be hiring brains
Instead of hiring brawn
So bears should take the reins
And humans just be gone
Yogi Bear is fatter than a millionaire
That’s because he smarter than a genius who’s rare
Libertarians are a scourge on a civil society and human race. Their small government belief allows the wealthy to feed on the carcasses of the poor without regulation. They presume that the magic market will solve all our problems. Their goal is to profit from our natural resources without regard for anyone but themselves. Libertarians are social Darwinists. Libertarian belief was a cute, impractical idea when it was just Ron Paul espousing it. Now we have a bunch of libertarian policymakers undermining our belief in the common good and dictating public policy.
When universal public education is gone we’ll all have the ed reform “movement” to thank.
I hope people like the “reinvention” of education, which turns out to be a low value voucher and a list of unregulated contractors. All the endless hype and nonprofits and think tanks and university departments and somehow they all ended up at a low value voucher. Think what we could have saved on marketing and promotion if they had just said that at the beginning.
I think the public will deeply, deeply regret this decision. It’s a bad deal.
You won’t find a single dissenter in ed reform. No discussion, no debate, no analysis.
None of them break ranks on any of the agenda, because if they do they’d have to consider where their “choice” promotion is inevitably and inexorably leading, and that can’t happen.
They’ll all end up at universal vouchers. It’s the only way the privatization agenda can ever work. Most of them are halfway there already and with no dissenters permitted they’ll all be carried along with the furthest Right and most passionate privatizers – that’s already happened within the echo chamber.
You’ll notice what immediately went by the wayside in ed reform plans- “accountability”
They had to drop it to privatize, so they did. We’ll soon reach the inevitable crash, where the only schools ed reformers will be policing will be the public schools they don’t support, didn’t and don’t attend, and work to replace.
It’ll get still nuttier, because it’s incoherent.
If your ideology dictates that all publicly funded schools are “public”, then you have to make a decision on “accountability”. You can either police the private contractors like you do the public systems, or drop the policing of the public systems.
Ed reformers are still deluding themselves that they can have both- a publicly funded private system that is not regulated or “held accountable” and a public system that they regulate and police and dictate to, and they can’t.
They’ve adopted this much narrower version of “public” that eventually has to disallow them issuing dictates and mandates to public schools, because why treat the two sets of schools differently? Why would public schools accept that lousy deal, where they get the entire public duty as a condition of funding and the private schools ed reformers prefer get all the funding but none of the duty? It’s wildly inequitable.
This is a change, in the Biden Administration:
“Christian Rhodes: Chief of Staff, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education
Jessica Cardichon: Deputy Assistant Secretary for K-12, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, U.S. Department of Education
Tina Hike-Hubbard: Chief Communications and Community Engagement Officer, Baltimore City Public Schools (MD)
Brandon Pinkney: Principal, Walter P. Carter Elementary/ Middle School, Baltimore, MD”
They invited a public school to a public school discussion! I didn’t know that was allowed. Surely all public school policy should be made by people who work full time replacing our schools with private contractors. Isn’t that how it’s done?
It’s about time! I’ve been concerned that all those Gates people in the DOE would try to neutralize the impact of Cardona and Marten. The public schools that educate most of our students should always be part of any discussion or decision in public education.
One former employee of Gates (BIA) and the U.S. Dept. of Ed. may not be able to fill a potential slot. Seth Andrew was arrested as Diane noted in a post.
Andrews will get a slap on the wrist (at worst) if he is even convicted , which I doubt.
You simply can NOT lose when you have friends in high places AND friends with boatloads of money.
Not losing in that case is as certain as taxes and dying of old age.
On second thought, if you have friends in high places, having to pay taxes is actually not a sure thing.
But dying of old age still is — probably for some time, at least.
So the real question is: What is a true Libertarian?
Some people claim that government is the problem and actually advocate consistent solutions. However much I disagree with these people, I can at least give them credit for being consistent. They oppose laws that restrict human behavior such as drug use, support a woman’s right to have a private consultation with her physician, and oppose laws like seat belt requirements (even as they wear seat belts themselves).
Most people who claim libertarian philosophy are not consistent, however. Their opposition to governmental activity stops when someone else’s behavior starts taking money from their large bank account. They prefer to be powerful enough to act in the position of government much the same as the powerful landlords of Europe assumed powerful positions of government in the Medieval period. They are not libertarians. Rather, they are opportunists who would use a philosophy to take power. They are indistinguishable from the communists who took the place of the Russian aristocracy after the revolution. As George Kenan pointed out in his Long Telegram, these people would use the philosophy of Lenin to achieve the goal of personal power.
This, of course, is the paradox of the idea of the libertarians. When operant, this is just anarchy, leading directly to strong man rule, the opposite of what libertarianism wants. Governance is a way people relate to each other. To argue for less of it is to argue that we should relate to each other less. Leave me alone on my island, regardless of what John Donne said.
This won’t end well.
The Libertarian Party has less than 700,000 members, but are those libertarians the same as the ones that belong to Charles Koch’s Kochtopus political subversion machine also known as ALEC that has all but taken over the Republican Party and is struggling to get rid of Donald Trump, the cog in the machine they build over the last fifty to sixty years?
FIVE THIRTY EIGHTH ran an interesting piece this morning explaining how the Republicans don’t need majorities to rule the country. The GOP has spent decades manipulating/buying elections at the local, state, and federal levels in addition to packing the U.S. Supreme Court by subverting the process used to appoint the justices to achieve their goals.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/
The Libertarian Party is a tiny party, but many members of the Republican Party have many of the same beliefs. We can see libertarian fingerprints all over the Trump administration. He supported deregulation, market based education and individual rights over the common good.
These people are not true libertarians any more than some of the medieval popes were christian. They are cynical, power-hungry operatives looking for domination of others both philosophically and economically. This is the antithesis of libertarian. But black is white and white is black. just listen to me.
“Employees at High Tech High – the largest charter school chain in San Diego County – have filed a petition with the California Public Employment Relations Board, asking to be recognized as a union.
High Tech’s organizing effort is part of a growing movement to unionize charter school workforces locally and across the state. In recent years, teachers at Preuss School and Gompers Preparatory Academy, two of the most high-profile charters in San Diego, successfully unionized.”
Real dilemma for ed reformers- their near-religious devotion to charter schools running right into their opposition to the existence of labor unions.
I think they jettison the unionized charter schools in favor of continuing to work to abolish labor unions, because none of their funders are going to back any entity with unionized employees.
https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/high-tech-high-employees-ask-to-be-recognized-as-union/
Any employer that exploits employees should expect that employees will join a union. Exploitation is generally foundational to the establishment of unions. Working people have died and fought long and hard for the right to organize. Collective bargaining is a way to ensure employers will listen and improve working conditions and wages. It is no surprise that charter school employees would see the benefit to being a member of a union.
No story about libertarians should ignore Paul Weyrich, funded by Charles and David Koch. Weyrich co-founded ALEC and the religious right. On 4-29-2021, ALECExposedNH updated info. about New Hampshire HB 544. (GraniteStateProgress.org )
What do Librarians have against government, anyway?
Aren’t many of them employed by the government?