Yesterday Rick Perry advocated abandoning textbooks in favor of computer technology.
Put aside nostalgia for a moment; yes, carrying textbooks is a symbol of your school years and mine. This is real progress. It will make producing, updating, and buying textbooks much cheaper and easier. Consider how many are associated with each American student. How many text books did you use from first grade through your last college class? In sheer poundage it’s a lot. We can agree going cyber will be a jolt to the senses of parents but we must admit it will save money, time, and trash. Who can’t get behind that?
This is noteworthy because liberals fancy themselves monopoly-holders on forward-thinking “progress”. Their ideas are heavy on PR traction and light on effectiveness.
Welfare, for example, works great for political grandstanding. It helps the poor people, don’t you know? These policies are never reviewed to see if they accomplish what they promise. Welfare has incentivized divorce and de-incentivized marriage, just to name one of many bad consequences. When low income families realize they’ll have more money if the parents divorce since single women get more welfare money than married women, what do we expect will happen? This kind of thing mostly happened in the early years of the welfare state. Low income people learned a long time ago how costly marriage is, and wonder of wonders, their marriage rates are low and illegitimacy rates are high.
So welfare has helped destroy the institution of marriage among low income people but remains a point of pride for liberal politicians who manage their images with such endeavors.
Welfare has accomplished the creation of a large Democrat voter block. So effectively, in fact, one might be excused for wondering if that was its purpose all along.
Perry’s genuinely progressive idea doesn’t tug at the heartstrings or generate white guilt the way “Progressive” ideas usually do, but it’s an issue that touches each of our lives and saves money, time, and trash. This is real leadership.
To try to rescue a term from years of abuse, this is progressive leadership.
