Zero Tolerance

Have you seen this one? A ten-year-old girl in Ocala, Florida, was arrested and stuck with felony weapons charges after bringing a small steak knife to school and using it...to cut her steak.

I gotta tell you, folks, this whole Zero Tolerance issue really boils down to the fact that our schools are run by the government. When you look at private schools, there are almost no instances of ZT policies to be found. The reason for that is simple: market pressure forces these private schools to be more judicious in their handling of incidents. If the parents of the kids in a private school don't like how the administration handles incidents like this, they can easily pull their kid - along with their tuition money - out of the school.

These market pressures don't exist in the government education system. Public schools are funded through tax money that is forcibly taken from the local residents, regardless of their use of the school, so there is no incentive for the school to provide any real service. Bad teachers are effectively impossible to fire, local elections are almost universally ignored (causing bad incumbent school board members to easily win reelection with vote totals in the double digits), and the people don't really have the option of withholding their funding in order to effect change.

Now, if more people could homeschool their kids or send them to private school, we could at least minimize the number of kids ruined by these bad 'educators'. Unfortunately, due to the massive amount of money we pay in taxes and the value of our dollar going into the toilet, not many people can afford to either pay private school tuition or have one parent stay home to handle the schooling. Most families in America are forced to have both parents working full time just to make ends meet - which is understandable considering that the average wage earner works nearly half the year just to pay their tax bill! That may sound high, but when you take into account federal, state, and sometimes local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gas tax, cigarette tax (for smokers), car registrations and licensing fees, and all of the other money that has to go to government at all levels, it's about spot on.

Add to all that the hidden inflation tax which hits the lower and middle class the hardest, destroys the value of any savings they might have, and causes them to run faster and faster just to stay in one place, and it's no wonder that we have such huge problems with crime, drugs, and destroyed families! People turn to crime because it frequently pays more than any honest work job they can get after exiting our useless education system, turn to drugs to escape the horrible realities we face every day, and can't hold families together because they have no time outside of working (to support the ever-growing weight of the state) to spend together and bond.

And that's why I support Ron Paul.