The Long Habit of Not Thinking a Thing Wrong

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When I was a little kid, the NFL fields actually had goalposts in the end zones. Yes, I know that sounds bizarre, but it’s true. Every end zone in the NFL was occupied by a hulking obstruction. Check it out.

Thankfully, sanity finally prevailed and the goalposts were removed from the end zones for the 1974 season and every season thereafter.

The Long Habit of Not Thinking a Thing Wrong

Human beings aren’t mavericks by nature. As a sage once remarked:

“[M]ankind are more disposed to suffer…than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

So it’s no wonder the NFL fields had goalposts in the end zones for some 40 seasons. Unless someone comes along and challenges the status quo, people accept stupidity as normal, as something as immutable as the earth’s rotation around the sun.

With that lamentable aspect of human nature in mind, then, I’d like to challenge seven examples of societal stupidity that need to go the way of goalposts in the end zones. Here we go.

Going to School for 13 Years and Not Having any Concrete Skills to Show for It

A local Fox affiliate in Baltimore recently reported that 41 percent of Baltimore High School students have a GPA below 1.0. Baltimore Public Schools currently spend $17,823 per student. That’s a lot of money, of course, and a huge investment on the part of the taxpayers. And what will the taxpayers get for that investment? Well, when it comes to the 41 percent of Baltimore High Schools students who are failing (a below D average is failing, right?), the taxpayers will be getting a big fat nothing.

My point here is not to pick on Baltimore students and Baltimore educators. Baltimore is just an extreme example of a problem that plagues every school district in the country. We school kids for 13 years, and very few kids emerge from all that schooling with any worthwhile skills to bring to the labor market. Virtually every graduating senior needs additional schooling if he or she wants to make more than the minimum wage.

Why? Why do we accept such a dismal return on our education investments? Our public schools have 13 years to prepare our children for adulthood, and the best they can do is prepare our children for minimum wage work? Talk about a colossal waste of time and money. That’s even more ridiculous than goalposts in the end zones.

Here’s a suggestion. Rather than keep K-12 education diploma-based, let’s make it skill-based. In order to graduate high school, you have to 1) know 8th-grade level math and English, and 2) successfully complete a certificate program that pertains to a concrete skill. There’s no reason why our high schools aren’t pumping out tons of certified plumbers, electricians, LPNs, CNC operators, and programmers. In fact, if we were doing K-12 education right, there wouldn’t be such a thing as community college.

Paying for 40 Courses When Only 10 to 15 Pertain to Your Major

The four-year college is one of the biggest scams in America today. And it’s not because our four-year colleges enroll the cognitively challenged, allow their students to pursue economically worthless degrees, and charge a king’s ransom for instruction that is largely led by poorly paid adjuncts. Nope, the thing that most makes our four-year colleges a scam is that in order to receive their prized credential—the vaunted bachelor’s degree—you have to take 25 to 30 courses that have nothing to do with your major.

Why are we doing this to our young people? Why are we forcing them to pay for a 40-course credential when all they really need is a 10-course credential? Why can’t, say, a would-be accountant just take the 10 accounting-related courses in a BS program and then start looking for a junior accountant gig after two semesters?

Here are two suggestions on how to get the BS out of a BS:

1. Give students the option. They can go for the full-monty BS (major-related courses plus major-unrelated courses) or the empty-monty BS (major-related courses only).
2. Encourage colleges to be more considerate of their students’ time, money, and prospects by making them co-signers to every student loan their students take out.

Car Dealership Business Model

I have many reasons to be bullish on Tesla. Gigapresses, octovalves, 4680 battery cells, FSD, and the Model S Plaid—these are prime examples of Tesla’s engineering prowess and why GM, Ford, and Chrysler should be pooping their pants. But the biggest reason GM, Ford, and Chrysler should be pooping their pants is this: Even if they manage to make an electric car as compelling as Tesla, they still have to sell their electric cars through dealerships. And this adds an unnecessary layer of cost and bother. Check it out.

Now compare the Mach-E buying experience to the Model 3 buying experience.

To buy a Model 3, you go to Tesla.com and click Model 3 on the menu bar. Next, you click the Order Now button and select your options. After you select your options, you click the Continue To Payment button and make your deposit. The whole process takes about a minute. Were I to actually make the purchase, I would then pick up my Model 3 at Tesla’s Raleigh store in two or three months.

Tesla’s buying experience couldn’t be easier. No smarmy salespeople, no obnoxious finance people, and no phony-baloney fees and dealer gotchas that bloat the agreed-upon price beyond recognition. The dealership business model is a joke.

No Upfront Pricing for Healthcare

Medical debt is allegedly the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in this country. And, yet, despite the obvious peril medical bills pose to the average person’s finances, medical care prices are an abject mystery. Healthcare providers refuse to be upfront with their pricing, and most healthcare consumers submit to this anti-consumer business model. Sadly, the typical healthcare consumer has been conditioned to believe that normal consumer behavior (i.e., asking what things cost and shopping around for the best deal) is somehow gauche or rude.

Never Truly Owning Your Home

Were I to stop paying my property taxes, the county government would eventually foreclose my home, sell it, and use the proceeds from that sale to make itself whole.

I certainly don’t begrudge the county government making itself whole. It needs all the tax revenue it’s due to run its operations. I do begrudge the never-ending nature of property taxes, however. There’s always a sword of Damocles hanging over your home. You can be in your home for forty years, be mortgage-free and retired, but if your property tax overwhelms your Social Security benefits and savings and you can no longer pay it, your home goes bye-bye.

Property taxes would be much more ethical if they were finite. Here’s a suggestion:

Own your home for 20 years and no one in your home attends public school: goodbye property taxes.

Quick aside: Sadly, introducing a finite property tax would necessarily mean increased sales and income taxes. The cost of civilization ain’t cheap and lower property tax revenue would need to be offset with higher sales and income tax revenue.

Excessive Fines for Minor Offenses

Not long before I retired, I visited my company’s headquarters in Dallas for some training. And while there, I got a ticket for not wearing a seat belt. I was on my way to lunch with co-workers, sitting in the back seat, and the driver, a Texas native, was unaware that back seat occupants were lawfully required to wear their seat belts as well.

And what was the fine for this minor offense? One hundred and forty dollars!

Now call me nuts, but a $140 fine for a minor offense strikes me as wantonly excessive. And doesn’t the 8th Amendment to our Constitution prohibit such treatment?

How come our vaunted civil rights activists aren’t pushing back against excessive fines? Where’s the freakin’ ACLU when you need it?

Taking Civic Property Without Just Compensation

There are two kinds of property. The property you can feel and touch, and the property you can’t.

We are all familiar with the first kind of property. We all own stuff. We all interact with physical property as we go about our daily routines (trains, buildings, power tools, laptops, taco stands, etc.). And we are fairly familiar with the kind of property you can’t feel and touch. We know books, songs, and inventions are the intellectual property of the people who created them and we know these creators deserve copyright and patent protections.

There’s another kind of non-physical property, however, that is just as real and valuable as intellectual property but isn’t widely regarded as a kind of property. I’m talking about inalienable rights. Think about it. Each inalienable right enshrined in our Constitution gives a minority of one the power to tell the majority of all minus one to lump it. Inalienable rights are thus very valuable and should be understood as a kind of property—your civic property, if you will.

Now a question: Can someone who has committed no offense legally lose his or her property? The answer, of course, is yes. Sometimes private property has to make way for the common good. Think eminent domain—when the government condemns a swath of private homes in order to accommodate a new highway. But such takings aren’t executed without cost. Property owners must be justly compensated for their loss. I refer you to our glorious 5th Amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Now another question: If your inalienable rights are a kind of property—your civic property—and one of your inalienable rights is taken for the common good, shouldn’t you be compensated for that loss? Abso-freaking-lutely! And to show where I’m going with this, let’s look at the most egregious example of uncompensated takings of civic property in America today: affirmative action.

I don’t see the merits of affirmative action, whether we’re talking about preferential treatment for one’s skin color, one’s athletic ability, or one’s bloodline. I find it noxious. But there are people who are far smarter and nobler than me who think affirmative action is vital to the civic health of our society. And I’m willing to work with these people as long as they’re prepared to justly compensate those who have their civic property of equal protection of the law confiscated. Here’s an example of what I mean.

• Harvard has room for 2,000 new students annually.
• Harvard selects those 2,000 new students based purely on academics—SAT scores, AP class scores, high school GPA, etc.
• Harvard then reviews the 2,000 new students and determines if they have the preferred amount of diversity, athletic skill, and star power (i.e., they’re the progeny of the super-famous, super-rich, or super-powerful).
• Now let’s suppose that Harvard determines that it needs 200 affirmative action slots. Admissions based purely on academics didn’t get enough blacks, elite ice hockey players, or children of US senators. It then randomly selects 200 of the 2,000 accepted and informs those unfortunate souls that their admission to Harvard has been revoked in the name of affirmative action.
• Harvard compensates the 200 unfortunate souls who had their equal-protection-of-the-law property confiscated with a sum equal to the current tuition rate times four. Annual tuition at Harvard is currently $49,653. Harvard would thus have to pay each affirmative action victim $198,612.
• Finally, the cost of just compensation should only burden those who push civic property takings. Harvard spends roughly $2.8 billion annually on salaries, wages, and benefits. The cost of 200 affirmative action slots—$39,722,400—would thus be skimmed off the compensation of Harvard’s top administrators and full-time faculty.

This just compensation requirement could be applied to other areas of affirmative action as well. Let’s say a big-city police department needs 10 new captains. But there’s not one LGBT lieutenant in the top 10 finishers of the promotional exam, and this big city desperately needs an LGBT captain to fight crime. Easy enough. Randomly select one of the top 10 finishers and inform him or her that he or she won’t be selected because of affirmative action. But even though he or she will remain a lieutenant—in both rank and responsibilities—he or she will be paid as if he or she is a captain.

And, of course, just compensation for civic property takings shouldn’t just be confined to equal protection of the law takings. It should be applied to all civic property takings. Take away the free speech rights of tobacco companies to advertise—compensate the tobacco companies annually with cash payouts or tax credits. Take away a citizen’s protection against warrantless searches (i.e., sobriety checkpoints and stop-and-frisk)—compensate the citizen who suffers such a warrantless search with a $50 or $100 gift card. You get the idea. For far too long we have pooped on civic property rights and screwed the innocent. It’s time to apply the just compensation requirement we see in physical property takings (i.e., eminent domain) to civic property takings as well.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Are the seven things I’ve discussed here as stupid as goalposts in the end zones? Or am I the one who’s being stupid? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.