My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

April 6 offers all legal adult Wisconsinites another opportunity to head to the polls to choose who will control thousands of school boards, city councils, courtrooms, county boards, and other important local government bodies. These elections are always important, but the performance of government during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted just how important they are. From our schools to our local health officials, we have seen just how incompetent, authoritarian, and heroic they can be.

 

The importance of local elections has not been lost on the state’s liberals and big-government advocates. During the Walker era, when the political left was ineffectual at the state level, they began a concerted effort to recruit candidates for local elections. There efforts have paid off all over Wisconsin with left-leaning candidates getting elected even in some of the most conservative parts of the state.

 

There is nothing wrong with recruiting, organizing, training, encouraging, and funding local candidates. It is not a conspiracy or anything untoward. In fact, it is incredibly smart and laudable. Not only have the liberals managed to advance their ideology throughout Wisconsin, but they have also created a farm league of candidates to run for state or national office.

 

Conservatives are behind the game. There have been pockets local organization, but nothing on the scale of liberals. Without conservative organizations vetting candidates, conservative voters need be extra careful when voting.

 

[…]

 

Conservatives throughout the state must follow the liberals’ lead and begin recruiting, training, encouraging, and funding fellow conservatives to run for local offices. Winning elections does not happen by accident. It happens after a lot of work. The work does not end after the election. Conservatives must then support conservative elected leaders when they govern according to their convictions.

 

Work. Determination. Grit. There is no other path to success. Get to work, conservatives. Local government matters.

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. I continue with my ruminations on remedial Enlightenment thought with a current example of where it should apply. Here’s a part:

The very need for government is rooted in the understanding that humans are naturally flawed and need to cede individual power to a collective in order to secure the individual liberties of all. While that seems counterintuitive, the tragic arc of human experience proves the point. But ceding power to a central authority creates a different threat to individual liberties: concentrated power.

 

Because humans are flawed, they will naturally seek to concentrate power for their own purposes. Even while such efforts to concentrate power may be justified in the name of some higher good, the evolution of concentrated power is always the same. The more power is concentrated, the more it is used to quash the individual liberties of others for the benefit of the few, or the one. Without concentrated power, even the most tyrannical among us is impotent. With concentrated power, even the well-meaning can slide into tyranny.

 

Understanding the nature of power in the hands of humans, our Founders structured our government with the express purpose of dividing the collective power of the people into as many parts as possible and using the personal interests and ambitions of each individual to check the others. The goal of dividing power is not that it will enhance the greater good, but that it will restrain the bad. As Federalist 51 explains, “the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual, may be a centinel over the public rights.”

 

To bring this concept into 2021, we turn to the current controversy over the distribution of COVID-19 relief money being distributed to states by the federal government. In the most recent distribution of our great-grandchildren’s money, the state of Wisconsin expects to receive about $3.206 billion for the conveniently elastic purpose of “COVID relief.”

Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week.

The COVID-19 pandemic and our collectively flawed public policy response to it have wrought incalculable harm on our nation, state, and communities. One of the top three consequences that we will be feeling for decades to come is the assault on our children’s education. The early indicators are that many of our children have lost a year or more of their educations with marginal kids being impacted the most. It will take many years to recover as this class of kids moves through the rest of their education and many of them will feel the impact well into adulthood. We know the problem. What are we going to do about it?

 

We have learned a lot about the state of our education system during this pandemic. Many people like to claim that education is a priority. The varied responses to the pandemic revealed who really believes that it is a priority. When the pandemic first emerged with cataclysmic projections a year ago, all schools rightfully sent kids home and scrambled to do the best they could. Within a few months, however, we already knew much more about the virus, the populations at most risk, and how to mitigate the spread. With this knowledge, some schools — particularly private schools, but some government schools — began opening their doors again with hybrid and in-person models. Meanwhile, all schools increased their technological capability to deliver online learning. It is worth noting that we have not seen any significant spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations or deaths from schools that opened for in-person learning. As we look to the end of the 2020-2021 school year and the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, what are we going to do to get kids caught up? Part of the solution is for the state to allow more flexibility for local districts. For example, under the current law, government school are not permitted to open before Sept 1. This is a long-established accommodation to Wisconsin’s summer industries that rely on the young labor force and families continuing the time-honored summer holiday tradition.

 

Wisconsin should lift this restriction and allow government schools to open early. This impacts private schools too. While private schools can already open any time they choose, their access to constitutionally required school bussing is tied to the schedule of the local government schools. By opening more days for schools to operate, it provides schools with more flexibility for scheduling options to accommodate more students.

 

Wisconsin could go one step further and enable government schools to move to year-round school too. If education is important to us, then we must treat it as a continual effort and not one relegated to convenient seasons.

 

With that flexibility must come more accountability. One of the ways we show what is important to us is by where we spend our money. We have seen a great variance in the response by government school districts with some of them utterly abandoning our children. Given what we know about the virus today and the experience with schools that have
been open all year, taxpayers should question whether they should continue to fund schools that remain closed to in-person learning. Teachers are receiving vaccines today and the expectation is that every teacher who wants it will be vaccinated within the next month. There is no rational reason for schools to remain closed.

 

If we truly care about education, then we must be willing to put our money where our mouths are and defund schools that refuse to teach our children. In the same thought, we must be willing to shift funds to the schools are, and have been, faithfully educating our kids throughout this pandemic. Throwing money into schools that have been failing our kids is not caring about education. Funding failure is an affront to education.

 

Irrespective of the public policy choices we make, the primary educators of any child remain their parents. Every parent should take a long, hard look at their kids’ school and the education their kids have been receiving. Is it good? Has the school been holding up their end of the bargain in the educational partnership? Have the kids been successful? If not, why not? And if not, why would you continue to send your kids there? Prioritizing education starts at home.