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Tucker Carlson said out loud (on his TV show on 26 April) what tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans have been thinking and what AIER has been saying for months: mandating masks on young children, as Michigan is now doing, is child abuse.
Article by Robert E. Wright from AIER.
Unfortunately, masking children so that the adults around them (wrongly) feel safer is just one of many government policies that hurt kids while augmenting state power. Such policies are reprehensible but many people fall for them because policymakers and pundits attribute good things to their policies when in fact the policies are just as ineffective and harmful as masking wee ones.
Public education is an obvious example, one that many others have examined over the decades. It exposes a repeating pattern of a private system being accused of insufficiently serving the poor and the state and then slowly being supplanted by a public system that creates problems that dwarf those of the private system. Although superior private systems exist and have proven that they can produce smarter students at lower cost, governments in many parts of the country greedily protect their market share and increase taxes instead of educational efficiency. For all the deets, read Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies.
The pandemic revealed, if nothing else, the mighty political power of teachers’ unions able to leverage zero data to justify keeping their schools virtual, which means virtually closed. A snow or hurricane day here and there provides students with a treat, but a Covid-Zoom year is just plain child abuse (and taxpayer abuse).
Even before America’s children reach the formal K-12 educational system, the state has already negatively influenced most of their lives by artificially inflating the cost of their care. The once venerable New York Times recently claimed (4/27) that childcare costs are too high for low income workers to afford, suggesting that government, which is to say taxpayers, should provide aid in the form of “free” universal pre-K starting at age three. Apparently, even the world’s best nappers need to be woke!
A major impediment to President Biden’s vision, though, is that unlike K-12 education, which switched from mostly private to mostly public in the nineteenth century, many Americans alive today still remember the good old days of childcare. That was when a grandma, an aunt or older sibling, or a neighborhood mom (or occasionally a dad) watched other people’s kids, sometimes for free (as my Pa did), sometimes on a rotating mutual basis (e.g., you watch my kid on M, W, F and I will watch yours T, Th, and Sat.), and sometimes for a modest cash payment “under the table” (outside of the tax system).
The older the children, the more time they were left to fend for themselves, negating the need for any childcare at all by the time they reached the primary grades. When I was in the first grade in the mid-1970s, for example, I was already a “latchkey kid” who let myself into the house after school and did chores until Ma or Pa arrived home and cooked dinner in those pre-microwave days (at least for us). We lived rural but we had a landline and a gun and neighbors who could have heard three shots and who would have responded if they had. Many of my friends lived in town, where members of the community kept eyes on neighborhood kids as they played. “The street” watched urban latchkey kids too, except in crime-ridden areas where parents advised that they “shelter-in-place.” But even there, kids from the same building would gather in the apartment with the most snacks or best television reception and hang out until adults got home from work.
That was spontaneous order in all its glory, imperfect but the best achievable because everyone was free to discover the options that worked best for them at any given time or place. After the family farm went bust we moved into a (largely segregated I now realize) public housing project where the latchkey kids were so numerous that people feared us, rather than vice versa, like ten 10-year-olds on rusty bikes could be anything more than a noisy nuisance. Similarly, if a grandma passed or the regular babysitter rejoined the formal workforce maybe another mom or a disabled dad took her place, no government bureaucrat required.
Over the years, though, bureaucrats decided that they could do better than the private system. Occasionally, a caregiver abused or neglected a child and it made the news and politicians promised they would put an end to that! Kindergarten teachers complained that incoming students were insufficiently prepared for the rigors of classroom discipline but that too could be solved by regulation, or so it was claimed. And all policymakers salivated at the thought of the tax dollars to be collected if only childcare could be formalized.
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Add in pressure from daycare companies (at least one of which is publicly traded) and the next thing you know one needs an occupational license to watch other people’s kids, latchkeying shifts from being a way to teach children to be independent to being (allegedly) a form of child abuse, and parents begin to helicopter not just over infants and toddlers but through K-12 and six years in college!
Formalization of daycare brought with it taxation and regulation, which drove up costs substantially while arguably lowering the quality of service. Occasional bad actors still abuse or neglect the children in their care, the average child to caregiver ratio has increased markedly to take advantage of scale economies, kids still wiggle and squirm in their kindergarten seats, and poor people have been deprived not only of inexpensive child care but of the opportunity to provide childcare as a way of supplementing family income while caring for their own youngins.
As I showed in Fubarnomics, every time some bureaucrat or politician says “This is a problem, we need more government” they are ignoring, or have forgotten, that government intrusions caused, or at least exacerbated, the problem in the first place. We do need a Great Reset, away from paternalistic government programs and toward local, polycentric systems like the spontaneous childcare networks we once enjoyed. What works in one time and place may not in another and bureaucrats are too weakly incentivized to know what is best for anyone, much less everyone. By the time they figure it out and actually do something, the situation has already changed.
So push back on government-owned education and government-regulated childcare, if not for yourselves then for the children, the poor, defenseless, masked, emotionally and physically damaged future leaders of our country.
‘The Purge’ by Big Tech targets conservatives, including us
Just when we thought the Covid-19 lockdowns were ending and our ability to stay afloat was improving, censorship reared its ugly head.
For the last few months, NOQ Report, Conservative Playbook, and the American Conservative Movement have appealed to our readers for assistance in staying afloat through Covid-19 lockdowns. The downturn in the economy has limited our ability to generate proper ad revenue just as our traffic was skyrocketing. We had our first sustained stretch of three months with over a million visitors in November, December, and January, but February saw a dip.
It wasn’t just the shortened month. We expected that. We also expected the continuation of dropping traffic from “woke” Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but it has actually been much worse than anticipated. Our Twitter account was banned. Both of our YouTube accounts were banned. Facebook “fact-checks” everything we post. Spotify canceled us. Medium canceled us. Apple canceled us. Why? Because we believe in the truth prevailing, and that means we will continue to discuss “taboo” topics.
The 2020 presidential election was stolen. You can’t say that on Big Tech platforms without risking cancellation, but we’d rather get cancelled for telling the truth rather than staying around to repeat mainstream media’s lies. They have been covering it up since before the election and they’ve convinced the vast majority of conservative news outlets that they will be harmed if they continue to discuss voter fraud. We refuse to back down. The truth is the truth.
The lies associated with Covid-19 are only slightly more prevalent than the suppression of valid scientific information that runs counter to the prescribed narrative. We should be allowed to ask questions about the vaccines, for example, as there is ample evidence for concern. One does not have to be an “anti-vaxxer” in order to want answers about vaccines that are still considered experimental and that have a track record in a short period of time of having side-effects, including death. One of our stories about the Johnson & Johnson “vaccine” causing blood clots was “fact-checked” and removed one day before the government hit the brakes on it. These questions and news items are not allowed on Big Tech which is just another reason we are getting canceled.
There are more topics that they refuse to allow. In turn, we refuse to stop discussing them. This is why we desperately need your help. The best way NOQ, CP, and ACM readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We are on track to be short by about $4100 per month in order to maintain operations.
The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. We had 5,657,724 sessions on our website from November, 2020, through February, 2021. Our intention is to elevate that to higher levels this year by focusing on a strategy that relies on free speech rather than being beholden to progressive Big Tech companies.
During that four-month stretch, Twitter and Facebook accounted for about 20% of our traffic. We are actively working on operating as if that traffic is zero, replacing it with platforms that operate more freely such as Gab, Parler, and others. While we were never as dependent on Big Tech as most conservative sites, we’d like to be completely free from them. That doesn’t mean we will block them, but we refuse to be beholden to companies that absolutely despise us simply because of our political ideology.
We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above.
As the world spirals towards radical progressivism, the need for truthful journalism has never been greater. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going.
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