The best ACTUAL explanation for how government takeovers of life turns citizens into totally dependent:

Canada Post – Kate Tennier: Why does more classroom time actually hinder learning?

Although it may sound illicit, “moral hazard” is in fact a dry term used by economists to describe the phenomenon whereby an insured party’s behaviour becomes less vigilant due to the belief that they are protected from the risks they are insured against. …

The first comes from a story told by a remedial reading teacher. After a week of individualized instruction, the mother of one of her students announced she would no longer need to read with her son at home because the “teacher was taking care of that at school.” The mother thought her son’s literacy skills were “insured” so she became negligent about insuring them herself, even though the vigilance a parent provides — reading with a child at home — has a much greater long-term impact than that which schools can offer. …

A third and final example of moral hazard — and one that more closely lives up to its name — involves the visit paid to me by a mother of one of my grade one students during a year of heavy schoolyard brawling. She was surprised this would happen in a Catholic school because she thought discipline would be stricter. As I indicated to her, behaviour could actually be worse for that very reason — because parents thought the “moral and behavioural education” of their children was being insured, they were less inclined to be involved in it themselves. (Public school parents are not immune to this phenomenon due to that system’s highly self-regarded “character development programs,” which are increasingly appropriating the role of moral educator there as well.)

But blame can hardly be placed on parents or learners themselves because the system has built this dependency-creating moral hazard into itself to justify its continued existence. Indeed, since the advent of common schooling in the mid-19th century, parents have been browbeaten into relinquishing both their money and their cherished responsibility to educate.

See? Science. People love saying that government control turns citizens into children, but they never actually say how, and if you’re ever in an argument with someone who thinks otherwise you both just end up saying “Cuz!” “Cuz what?” “Cuz!” etc. Of course I skipped most of the sciencey bits and went straight for the anecdotes but hey.

Date: Nov 19th, 2009 · Comments RSS · Tags: Science and Nature