Joe Fouché

Seattle’s ‘green jobs’ program a bust – seattlepi.com.

Government cannot create a single productive job. The sooner we get over this fallacy, the better.

Why the U.S. Needs a New Nuclear-Waste Strategy – TIME.

I didn’t know about the naturally-occurring fissile uranium vein story before. That’s pretty cool.

We need reforms to our collection of sex crime laws. The unintended consequences are getting out of hand.

Perverted Justice – Reason Magazine.

Interesting discussion of the healthcare industry here:

Magazine Preview – If Health Care Is Going to Change, Dr. Brent James’s Ideas Will Change It – NYTimes.com.

We have built up medical doctors in this country to be brilliantly intuitive gurus that are constantly making measured decisions. In reality, the result of all this coddling and sky-high spending on treatment is mediocre care. One face-palm quote:

Perhaps the clearest example is the Pronovost checklist. As many as 28,000 people in this country die each year from infections that come from intravenous lines. Several years ago, Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins physician, developed a simple list of five steps that intensive-care doctors should take before inserting an IV line, in order to prevent the introduction of bacteria. The checklist reduced the infection rate to essentially zero at 108 hospitals in Michigan where it was adopted. Pronovost published the results in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2006. But most intensive-care doctors are still not using the checklist. To insert an IV line, they continue to rely on their own judgment.

The latest report on US math education is in, and results are disappointing many.

Compulsory state education is antithetical to libertarian principles. The sooner we move towards separating the school system from the state, the better. That said, plenty of other nations are doing a far better job. It’s not very satisfying to sit around, advocating bombing the schools and starting over. So, what can we start to fix?

• End compulsory attendance. It’s clear that disruptive and apathetic students should be redirected out of the classroom. Send them home, or send them to a practical vocational program where they can at least learn something like fixing cars, pipes or drywall. Those are pretty well-paid occupations, by the way. No one will send their children, you say? Have you considered the extraordinary lengths taken by parents to educate?
• Eliminate external support. In well-off neighborhoods, schools are of course fantastically better due to parental support. Since we believe in equal government, and apparently we want government-based education, how about outlawing all other outside financial support? If you wish to contribute to our education system, you can fill in a blank item on your tax return and pay as much extra to the IRS as you want.
• Raise community college and state university standards. We can’t let the next rung of the system function only for remediation of those who are failed by the high school system. By making it a little more difficult to enter community colleges we raise the value of the high school system.
• Make teaching a viable career. We need to attract real talent into long term careers in the teaching profession. Notice that if we had a free market system, this would be automatically taken care of, as successful schools could pay out the proportion of revenue they see fit. But, failing that, massive government guaranteed benefits set up for those who spend ten or twenty years in education might have an effect.
• We must make firing teachers easy. Right now it is close to impossible in many school systems to fire, even when clear misconduct is cited. Once we pump up their effective salaries to be comparable with other jobs, we need to dial back the job security to match. If you aren’t creating value, or the school’s administration simply doesn’t want or need you around, time to go. There are challenges in dealing with the unions in this matter, but it can be accomplished.

How is it that we trust and encourage our bureaucrats to solve intricate problems like Middle East security, health care restructuring and financial regulation when they can’t deliver a decent education with one of the highest budgets around?