Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai interviews one of the wisest men in America, economist and favorite Limbaugh fill-in Walter Williams.
Kokai asks Williams if people undertand that government’s larger than it’s supoposed to be and if he’s optimistic that government will get back on the right track. Williams replies:
If they fully understood it, I wouldn’t have a job, because my job is to try to convince my fellow Americans on the moral superiority of liberty, and its main ingredient is eliminate government…….I’m hoping that the most optimistic thing I can say — I’m hoping that it’s ignorance among many of the American people that explains why they’re not heeding the Constitution. I’d be fearful, and sometimes I think it’s the case, that contempt for the United States Constitution may explain their view. And if the latter is true, then it’s hopeless. But if people are ignorant of the limitations of the Constitution, then there’s hope, because you can educate, you can talk to people, you can convince people, you can cajole.
This is true on the local level, too, and the local officials who get it are few and far between.
Examples have been everywhere this week. I hate to keep harping on this, but Greensboro Coliseum director Matt Brown is a major example. No matter what the deal is between Brown and just-announced City Council candidate Keven Green, it’s just plain crazy that Brown is the highest-paid city employee. Somebody please tell me what important function of city government Brown oversees that requires a higher salary than the city manager? A huge example of government’s misplaced priorities, if you ask me.
Then there’s the Guilford County School system, where Superintendent Terry Grier has been moaning all week about budget cuts. Note that, for all Grier’s moaning, the school board simply passed an interim budget last night after spending endless hours discussing the name of a new school.
This week’s focus on GCS’ possible budget cuts is school social workers. I asked JLF education analyst Terry Stoops about it, and he cleared me up on the different functions county and school social workers perform, though he added there probably is “some overlap.”
And it is true, as independent school consultant Michael Christopher points out in today’s N&R, that schools systems face greater challenges produced by society at large:
….. the American family has changed radically. Teachers report widespread frustration by the lack of involvement of parents in their children’s education in both poor and well-to-do districts. The consequences are so far-reaching that schools have become the substitute for family life for many and thus are expected to not only teach academic, athletic and artistic skills, but to become de facto community and “moral” centers. Given that reality, schools have had to supplant the classroom teacher with other professionals trained in social work and psychological counseling.
Fair enough, but, in my opinion, it’s also fair to ask if the school system should really be in the expanded business of social work when their true mission is to educate children. Meanwhile, the public at large gets a major guilt trip to go along with a three-cent property tax hike.
The majority of citizens and the mainstream media just assume the expansion of government in all forms and at all levels is just the way it is. Thank God for people like Walter Williams who continue to educate the American people, no matter how difficult the task.
