Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Charles Murray’
May 11th, 2015 at 3:01 pm
Resist the Nanny State with Private Citizen Defense Funds

Charles Murray at AEI has a thought-provoking idea for pushing back against the Nanny State: private citizen defense funds.

“People don’t build tornado-proof houses; they buy house insurance,” Murray explains. “In the case of the regulatory state, let’s buy insurance that reimburses us for any fine that the government levies and that automatically triggers a proactive, tenacious legal defense against the government’s allegation even if – and this is crucial – we are technically guilty.”

Defending the technically guilty is designed to make overzealous regulators think twice before going after someone. The point is to concentrate enforcement resources on the worst offenders – not the weakest targets.

Murray suggests two ways of funding his citizen defense initiative. “The first would be a legal foundation functioning much as the Legal Services Corporation does for the poor, except that its money will come from private donors, not the government. It would be an altruistic endeavor, operating exclusively on behalf of the homeowner or small business being harassed by the regulators. The foundation would pick up all the legal costs of defense and pay the fines when possible.”

But wait, there’s more!

“The other framework would be occupational defense funds. Let’s take advantage of professional expertise and pride of vocation to drive standards of best practice,” says Murray. “For example, the American Dental Association could form Dental Shield, with dentists across America paying a small annual fee. The bargain: Dentists whose practices meet the ADA’s professional standards will be defended when accused of violating a regulation that the ADA has deemed to be pointless, stupid or tyrannical. The same kind of defense fund could be started by truckers, crafts unions, accountants, physicians, farmers or almost any other occupation.”

Though it would be nice if some of the great ideas touching on regulatory reform – for example, the REINS Act – are signed into law someday, the wonderful thing about Murray’s idea is that it could go into effect without any helping hand from government.

You can read the entire article at the Wall Street Journal.

February 23rd, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Studies Don’t Support Obama’s Pre-K Initiative

After surveying the leading studies on early childhood intervention, social scientist Charles Murray offers sobering, and much-needed, advice on what’s really at stake:

So what should we make of all this? The take-away from the story of early childhood education is that the very best programs probably do a modest amount of good in the long run, while the early education program that can feasibly be deployed on a national scale, Head Start, has never proved long-term results in half a century of existence. In the most rigorous evaluation ever conducted, Head Start doesn’t show results that persist even until the third grade.

Let me rephrase this more starkly: As of 2013, no one knows how to use government programs to provide large numbers of small children who are not flourishing with what they need. It’s not a matter of money. We just don’t know how.

Asking [the right] questions forces us to confront a reality that politicians and other opinion leaders have ducked for decades: America has far too many children born to men and women who do not provide safe, warm and nurturing environments for their offspring — not because there’s no money to be found for food, clothing and shelter, but because they are not committed to fulfilling the obligations that child-bearing brings with it.

This head-in-the-sand attitude has to change. If we don’t know how to substitute for absent, uncaring or incompetent parenting with outside interventions, then we have to think about how we increase the odds that children are born to present, caring and competent parents.

Answering Murray’s questions would require a different sort of leadership than proposing yet another multi-billion dollar federal program.  In a word, it would require statesmanship.

Don’t expect the current president to be rising to that challenge any time soon.