“…we are setting an ambitious goal: all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career – no matter who you are or where you come from.” – Barack Obama, Saturday Radio Address.

A few years ago I asked a friend and business owner why he put value on a college diploma when talking with entry level talent who had majored in subjects incredibly tangential to his job descriptions. He answered, “Well, it shows they can finish something.” That’s a pretty weak reason for a student and/or his family to lay out $50,000 to $250,000 of tuition and lost opportunity costs but I let him have his fantasy.

Former Heritage Foundation analyst Dan Lips lays out another kind of fantasy in National Review Online with a proposal to meet Obama’s goal in last weekend’s broadcast in light of the increasing cost of college in the U.S.. It’s a version of “virtual learning” accomplished online. That’s certainly not “college as we knew it” and not as it might or should be – a place where one seeks Truth and learns how to think – but maybe that education is unretrievable. Maybe all we can hope for are certificates of accomplishment in niche fields and employers like my friend.

Yet even with Lips’ online world, any bureaucracy including the academy deserves some closer inspection before we all jump on the web to search out our next degree. But this only makes sense if you agree with my premise that college has more of a role to play in one’s life than assuring a potential employer that you can “finish” something. Mr. Lips is rightly concerned about affordability – I’m thinking relevance. Read more on Read My Lips…

Popes in Rome have attempted to steer the Catholic flock away from the “seductive” forces of socialist ideologies threatening human liberty, which since the  late 1800s have relentlessly plucked away at  ”the delicate fruit of  mature  civilizations” as  Lord Acton once said.

Read more on Popes Say No to Socialism…

Writers on this blog have pointed to a lot of examples of effective compassion when it comes to charity and public policy. But what can ineffective compassion, or maybe just a lack compassion, look like? The Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina Andre Bauer made a comment saying government assistance programs for the poor was akin to “feeding stray animals.” I’m not highlighting the comment just to bash Bauer and you can watch the clip where he clarifies his comments. He continues in a follow up interview by offering up a much more articulate and measured response to the problems of government dependency.

Read more on Ineffective Compassion?…

In his essay, “Intellectuals and Socialism,” Friedrich Hayek asked how it was possible for a small group of people to have such influence on the ideas and politics that affected millions. He argued that it was because the socialists influenced the “influencers”–those “secondhand dealers in ideas” like the press, educators, and editors, who spread socialist thought into the mainstream.

Read more on Secular Uniculturalism and Christmas…

If you’re looking to catch up on the Climategate scandal, one of our interviewees from The Effective Stewardship DVD church curriculum, Steven Hayward, has an excellent summary and analysis here at The Weekly Standard.

Read more on Climategate Summary and Update…

“The Deal Professor,” Steven M. Davidoff, has a good piece at The New York Times website about the indispensability of finance to our economy. It briefly rebuts the view popularized in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, in which financiers are portrayed as greedy parasites. I left a comment at the web page, noting that our documentary The Call of the Entrepreneur makes a similar case. I include the comment below, since it may not pass muster with the page’s comment moderator:

Read more on The Inevitability of Finance And The Call of the Entrepreneur…

If it doesn’t faze you that

1. Uncle Sam badly mishandled the stimulus porkanaza
2. Congress would have directed bazillions to a surreally corrupt Acorn but for these two young heroes
3. Michael Moore’s Sicko is Wacko

Read more on Six Reasons to Reject Obamacare…

Back in September I posted an announcement about a new book that contributed in interesting ways to our understanding of patent/intellectual property issues. Now Julio Cole’s full review of the book in the Independent Review is available online. An excerpt:

Read more on Cole on “Patent Failure”…