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The Alaska Public Pension Fight and Lessons for the Nation

America’s big national challenge with retirement income is a deeply indebted Social Security system.

There’s also a significant problem at the state level, where many governors and state legislators have made extravagant promises of lavish retirement benefits to their (overpaid) bureaucrats.

But, in many cases, they haven’t set aside enough money to fulfill those promises.

The underlying problem is that states generally rely on the approach know as “defined benefits,” which means that they promise bureaucrats specific amounts of money based on factors such as salary and years of service.

But promising the money is easy, especially since government employee unions often are big contributors to the politicians making those promises.

A far better approach is use the “defined contribution” approach, which is the same model as the IRAs and 401(k)s that are common for private sector workers. The government pays specific amounts into the accounts of bureaucrats, who then decide how and when to use their funds in retirement.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this issue earlier this week. Here are some excerpts.

Unfunded pensions for public workers have become a huge fiscal burden on many states, and the smarter states like Florida have moved to limit future liabilities by moving to defined-contribution plans. That makes it all the more strange that Alaska may risk its future fisc by returning to defined-benefit pensions. …The plan would pay retirees a fixed amount annually… Payments would rise automatically with inflation each year… Retirees with three decades of experience would keep about 63% of their salaries, up from 53% today. …In 2006 Juneau replaced its fixed pensions with 401(k)-style plans. Retirement costs were growing so rapidly at the time that the main public-employee fund remains about $3 billion short of full funding today, though it’s added no new members since it was closed. Restoring the old pension system could deepen this hole in a hurry. An analysis by the Reason Foundation…projects a $9 billion liability over the long run. …Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy hasn’t taken a definite position. It should be an easy choice. Public-worker pensions create incentives for ever-higher taxes as current politicians seek near-term political support by adding to taxpayer liabilities that have to be paid on some future Governor’s watch. Down that road lies New Jersey or Illinois.

Fortunately, the waffling governor does not have to look very far for a better choice.

As explained by Ryan Frost for Reason, some lawmakers in the state’s House of Representatives instead want to expand the state’s defined contribution system.

Two competing public employee pension bills reached the Alaska House of Representatives last week. One would revert Alaska back to a fiscally unsustainable public pension plan that adds to the state’s debts, while the other would maintain important reforms and even allow the state’s teachers to access a better, more flexible retirement plan.…House Bill 302 (HB 302), sponsored by Rep. Ben Carpenter (R-Nikiski), would leave the defined contribution retirement plan (DCRP) open, increase the employer contribution rates for public safety, and—crucially—open access to the Supplemental Benefit System-Annuity Plan (SBS-AP) to teachers. …Under HB 302, public safety employer contributions would be substantially increased from 5% of pay to 9.74% of pay. …the decisions between House Bill 302 and Senate Bill 88 could well define Alaska’s fiscal landscape for generations to come, either ensuring a legacy of prudent, responsible stewardship of the state’s public sector retirement system or adding billions in debt for future Alaskans to pay.

The bottom line is that Alaska used to have a terrible system, and the state still has a huge unfunded liability because of that old system.

So it’s almost incomprehensibly foolish that some politicians in the state want to resuscitate the defined-benefit approach. Especially since they could expand their existing defined-contribution system instead.

P.S. For more information on the handful of state and local governments with defined-contribution systems, click here, here, and here.

P.P.S. Even though Alaska has a good tax system, that doesn’t mean it has good fiscal policy. The state collects a lot of energy taxes and that money finances a bloated (and often corrupt) government. Hopefully state lawmakers will wise up and enact a spending cap.

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch: The Cost of Unchecked Illegal Immigration on Americans—The BorderLine

Simon Hankinson  / January 26, 2024

Biden’s border policies are burdening taxpayers everywhere but especially in big cities. Costs are rising for housing, education, and health care. And how long can America keep providing “free” services to more and more illegal aliens? (Photo: Ariel Skelley/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Simon Hankinson

Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.

———————————————————

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” used to be American folk wisdom (and inspired a book by economist Milton Friedman). The greatest trick the American Left has played on young people is to convince them that free stuff is actually free. In fact, tax credits, student debt “relief,” COVID-19 stimulus, rent control, and other giveaways simply redistribute existing wealth or borrow money that must be repaid by taxpayers.

Relative to illegal immigration, it doesn’t matter how much you put aside for a rainy day if the rain never stops. Biden’s policies have locked in an unlimited flow of illegal immigration at the border. Many of those coming now have no U.S. relatives or employment waiting for them. They will continue to head for “sanctuary” megacities that offer free housing and benefits. Local authorities there seem to only now begin to understand the scale of demand with which they are dealing. Our open borders have resulted in housing shortages, closed schools, commandeered public spaces, and hospitals catering to patients no one voted to admit into the country while everyday taxpaying Americans wait in line.

It’s not as if all Americans are rich and can absorb the costs of paying for these people who aren’t paying for themselves—particularly in the places where illegal aliens are amassing.

At James Madison High School, which New York City closed down to house illegal immigrants for a few days due to bad weather, “73% of students are economically disadvantaged.” And as schools in New York and across the country absorb thousands more “limited English proficiency” students, they must hire more specialist teachers at additional cost.

Only a few months ago, New York Mayor Eric Adams was talking about a mere $4 billion to cope with illegal immigrants over the next couple years. Now, he says it will be more like $10 billion. Gov. Kathy Hochul included $2.4 billion in the state budget to help, but it will never be enough.

In announcing her budget, Hochul said she would focus on “fighting crime, fixing our mental health system, and protecting New Yorkers’ hard-earned money.” And yet, she plans to spend as much on supporting illegal immigrants as on mental health programs for the entire state.

Already, 39% of New York state’s population is eligible for Medicaid, which is jointly funded by the state and the federal government. The state also offers free or subsidized health care to some illegal immigrants, and starting this year, will allow those who are older than 65 to enroll in Medicaid. Far from “protecting” her taxpayers’ hard-earned money, Hochul seems to be locking them into rising costs.

The city of Philadelphia is best known as the place the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Today, its Kensingtonneighborhood was described by a French news site as “devastated by opioids.” Philly is also known for notoriously bad public schools and far-left activism.

Continuing its activism trend, the city council just voted to end “medical deportations,” banning hospitals from sending illegal immigrants to their home countries “without consent, consideration of health insurance eligibility, or consideration of health risks to the patient.” What does this mean for residents? If they pay health insurance premiums, they may pay more. If they rely on various free government programs, they will wait longer in line for services, as illegal aliens often consume them first and for free.

According to local public radio station WHYY, “Hospitals will have clearly defined guidelines to prevent deportation and ensure immigrant patients and their families are informed of all possible choices.” One of those choices is to remain in the U.S., regardless of their ability to pay, and even if there is free health care available in their home country.

“Advocates,” WHYY tells us, believe that illegal immigrants “deserve … basic human rights, which includes long-term health care.” Unilaterally declaring that health care is a “basic human right” is a breathtaking arrogation of other people’s money that the city of Philadelphia, states like Illinois and California, and the federal government will come to regret. Without a dedicated revenue source to pay for it and some kind of limit on new entrants, programs promising universal, lifetime, free care will slowly become bad checks that can’t be cashed.

Health care for American citizens and legal residents will become collateral damage. As a consular officer in Ghana 20 years ago, I received a visa application from a man who had returned home for a funeral and wanted to go back to New York, where he had lived illegally for many years. While evaluating his case, I discovered that he had received over a million dollars in free health care from the city and state of New York—after arriving on a tourist visa. Of course, he wanted to go back, but allowing unlimited access to our expensive health care system to people who did not pay into it doesn’t add up.

In Brunswick, Maine, the state government is renting 60 apartments for two years to house illegal aliens while they await immigration court decisions, which will take a lot longer than that—should they even bother to apply for asylum or fight the deportation process into which the Department of Homeland Security placed them when they were released after illegally entering the country.

The director of the state’s subsidized housing program said “We have thousands of folks coming … who want to make Maine home. We’re doing everything we can to help that situation.” He has no idea of the worldwide demand for free housing, even in frosty Maine.

Meanwhile in Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker wrote to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “plead for mercy” and ask that illegal aliens not be bused to Chicago during storms because of lack of shelters to put them in. “While action is pending at the federal level,” he wrote, “please … do not send more people to our state.”

Pritzker’s claim that “action is pending at the federal level” is a stretch. Serious immigration reform hasn’t been legislated since 1996. If Abbott took the bait and suspended busing illegal aliens to Illinois until Washington produced a consensus, he might wait forever.

Education, housing, and health care cost money. Every service has a price, and there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Read Other BorderLine Columns:

Concerns About Proposed Senate Border Security Compromise

Biden’s Border Madness Has Cheapened What It Means to Be an American

Nazi Name-Calling Is the Last Refuge of the Progressive

Chicago Mayor Lashes Out as Illegal Aliens Flood His Sanctuary City

Biden’s Border Chaos—Crime Soars as Punishment Vanishes

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Immigration, Part II: Turning America into a Welfare Magnet

In Part I of this series, I explained why it’s absurd to think illegal immigration can be stopped by sending foreign aid to less-developed countries, such as many of those in Central America.

Simply stated, government-to-government handouts have never been a successful strategy for turning poor nations into rich nations. Indeed, aid actually discourages countries from following the recipe that does deliver prosperity.

In today’s column, let’s address Milton Friedman’s famous dilemma about the incompatibility of open borders and welfare.

Like most libertarians, I want to solve the problem by getting rid of the welfare state.

Immigrants are a big net plus so long as they are coming to work and be productive.

Indeed, because of their entrepreneurial skills and work ethic, immigrants from many nations wind up earning more than native-born Americans.

That’s something to celebrate. The American Dream in action!

But will that story of success continue if the welfare state is expanded?

Two advocates of increased immigration are worried. First, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal recently explained that Biden’s agenda is a recipe for immigrant dependency.

…it is a growing belief on the political left that people should be allowed to enter the U.S. on their terms rather than ours, and that it is our collective responsibility to take care of them if they can’t take care of themselves. Milton Friedman said that open immigration and large welfare states are incompatible, and today’s progressives in Congress and the White House are eager to test that proposition.…Another concern is the left’s determination to sever any connection between work and benefits, something all the more worrisome since it is occurring while destitute foreign nationals with little education are being lured here en masse. …Earlier this month, the Biden administration quietly announced that it would no longer enforce a policy that limited the admission of immigrants who were deemed likely to become overly dependent on government benefits. What could go wrong? …In countries like Italy and France, generous aid programs have attracted poor migrants who are more likely than natives to be heavy users of welfare and less likely to be working. It’s a mistake to think it can’t happen here.

In a column last year for Reason, Shikha Dalmia warned that welfare programs undermine support for immigration.

…economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva…administered online questionnaires to 24,000 respondents in six countries: U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. The explicit aim was to study attitudes toward legal, not illegal, immigration. …restrictionists have succeeded most spectacularly is in depicting immigrants as welfare queens. …In America, over 25 percent of respondents said the person with the  ..immigrant-sounding name would pay less in taxes than he collected in welfare… The study’s findings pose a particular dilemma for Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who wants to combine grandiose welfare schemes like free health care, pre-K, and college for everyone with generous immigration policies, because the mere mention of immigration reduces support for such schemes. Respondents who were asked about immigration became less concerned about inequality and less supportive of soak-the-rich schemes. …as long as immigrants are seen as succeeding through their own grit, natives may have no real objection to them. What is most likely to sour the public on immigration are the grandiose universal freebies… Immigrants should be wary of Democrats bearing gifts.

Both Riley and Dalmia raise good points.

My modest contribution to this discussion is to provide a practical example.

In his so-called American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden included a huge giveaway program that will shower $3,000-$3,600 to non-rich households for every kid they have.

This is a one-year, one-time handout, but many Democrats (and some Republicans!) want to make these enormous per-child payments a permanent part of America’s welfare state.

If that happens, the incentive to move to the United States almost surely will skyrocket.

Here’s a map I made, showing the annual handout for two children in the United States and the average per-capita incomein some nearby nations.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there will be a huge incentive to migrate to America – but not for the right reasons. And my little example doesn’t include the value of any of the dozens of other redistribution programs in Washington.

The bottom line is that we shouldn’t have a welfare system that rewards dependency, whether for people in the country legally or illegally.

And if you like immigration in theory, you should be especially opposed to handouts that will undermine public support for newcomers in practice.

P.S. It’s much better to have immigration policies such as the ones proposed by former Congressman Jared Polis and current George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen.

Milton Friedman in 2004

Power of the Market – Immigration

MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION

MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION PART 2

March 18, 2021

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.
By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life.Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on co
    nstruction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.
     Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that was both compassionate and tough.
My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and Americans losing jobs,few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress..And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.

Milton Friedman wisely noted,  “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” 
Is it prudent to allow illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs? I don’t think so either!

FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part 

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Milton Friedman shows in this episode how the worker is best protected and it is not by the government!!!!!!!

The essence of what Milton Friedman is saying in this episode is found in this statement:

“The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”

L. WILLIAMS: Dr. Friedman and Walter Williams go back in history and they take a look at a situation where America was empty, where we didn’t have anything like the sophisticated industrial economy we have today, but had a much more agricultural and rural kind of economy and of course when the __ when the impoverished peasants of Europe, my ancestors and most of our ancestors, except for the slaves, which is another situation, but when these people came from Europe and came to a wide open continent with the most fertile soil then available to anyone in the world, naturally there was progress; and I or any of us would be mad to deny progress. But as that developed and as population increased and as we moved into a much more sophisticated industrial economy, we moved then into the situation in the 1930s, or earlier than that , at the end of the century. As some of the more skilled jobs came along, the labor movement didn’t happen by accident. Didn’t happen because there wasn’t a need there. The results of this development, even with all the wealth available in America, the results of this development was that many working people were not having anything like, by standards of civilization or whatever, anything like their fair share in this progress.

MCKENZIE: Now you’re arguing that in a free market, for labor, everyone benefits. Does that mean that you would favor abolition of all immigration restrictions?

FRIEDMAN: The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.

MCKENZIE: But this is true of every western industrialized country.

FRIEDMAN: That’s right and that’s why today __

MCKENZIE: Yeah.

FRIEDMAN: __ under current circumstances you cannot, unfortunately have free immigration. Not because there’s anything wrong with free immigration, but because we have other policies which make it impossible to adopt free immigration.

MCKENZIE: Well I’d like other reactions. Is it at all feasible to open the door of the labor market internationally now? Bill Brady?

BRADY: I would __ I would say yes providing they open the door to us. I think that the door to not only the labor market, the door to all markets should be __ should be open. That is the product markets.

W. WILLIAMS: My feelings about the undocumented workers of Mexican-Americans are inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. I think that the people should have the right to come to this country. Now, those who would say, you know, I hear a number of people saying that, well the immigrants are contributing to our unemployment problem. And I point this out to some people, I said, “look, you know, this is the same rhetoric that the Irish used when the blacks were coming up from the north, ” you know, they’re using blacks as scapegoats. They’re saying, “get those people back where they came from so that our members can get jobs, ” you know. Unions were as well doing this, you know, they called them scabs, strikebreakers, etcetera, etcetera. So I do not wish for Mexican-Americans to become the new scapegoats of our particular national problems. They are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __

(Several people talking at once.)

GREEN: I think that this country cannot have a group of workers to remain outside the framework of our laws and our protection. And as long as we have workers who are attracted to the United States because of the standards of living; and I think minimum wages play a part in that as part of that attraction. But it seems to me to have undocumented workers without providing either a means of protection for them and it seems to me that we’ve got to go to the question of providing the amnesty for those generations of workers who have come here over a period of time, now two, three, maybe four generations. We have to see that they have the same rights and protection of all other workers. And as it stands now, large numbers of them live outside the framework of the laws and statutes that we have on the __ on our books.

MCKENZIE: Comment Milton.

FRIEDMAN: They do and the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do. What Lynn Williams said before is again a travesty on what was actually going on. The real boost to the trade union movement came after the Great Depression of the 1930s; that Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism; it was not a failure of the private market system as we pointed out in another one of the programs in this series; it was a failure of government. It was not the case that somehow or other there was a decline in the conditions of the working class that produced a great surge of unionism. On the contrary __ unions have never accounted for more than one out of four or one out of five of American workers. The American worker benefited not out of unions, he benefited in spite of unions. He benefited because there was greater opportunity because there were people who were willing to invest their money because there was an opportunity for people to work, to save, to invest. That’s still the case today. You say, we have to provide them with something or other Ernest. Who are the “we”?

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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Francis Schaeffer’s own words concerning the founding fathers and their belief in inalienable rights

December 5, 2012 – 12:38 am

Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)

David Barton: In their words, did the Founding Fathers put their faith in Christ? (Part 4)

May 30, 2012 – 1:35 am

America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)

Were the founding fathers christian?

May 23, 2012 – 7:04 am

3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

John Quincy Adams a founding father?

June 29, 2011 – 3:58 pm

I do  not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his  father was. However, I do think he was involved in the  early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good  Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

“Sanctity of Life Saturday” Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part E “Moral absolutes and abortion” Francis Schaeffer Quotes part 5(includes the film SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS) (editorial cartoon)

July 6, 2013 – 1:26 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)

Article from Adrian Rogers, “Bring back the glory”

June 11, 2013 – 12:34 am

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

“Schaeffer Sundays” Francis Schaeffer’s own words concerning the possibility that minorities may be mistreated under 51% rule

June 9, 2013 – 1:21 am

Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book  really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

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Adrian Togers sermon “Is JESUS God?”

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Sermon Overview

Scripture Passage: Matthew 27:22

In Matthew 27, Jesus Christ stood on trial before Pilate. In this account, we come face-to-face with the most present, pressing, and pertinent question ever asked: Is Jesus God, as He claimed to be? 

If He is not, He is a fraud, imposter, and deceiver. What we decide—or not decide—about Jesus will dictate our eternity.

Scripture gives us four reasons why we believe that Jesus is God.

First, all the attributes of God the Father are found in Jesus. 

All throughout the Gospels, we find that Jesus was the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament. He is described as God is described in Psalms and Isaiah: the King of Glory, the first and the last, the Lord of Hosts.

He is also shown to be God by the adoration He received.

Scripture says God alone is to be worshiped (Luke 4:8). Knowing this, Jesus allowed Himself to be worshiped (Matthew 28:9). For Him to allow this, Jesus was either guilty of ultimate arrogance and the sin of idolatry, or He is God.

Third, Jesus is shown to be God by His own admission. 

In John 8:58, Jesus says, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” By quoting Exodus 3:14, Jesus is admitting He is God.

Adrian Rogers says, “The Jehovah of the Old Testament is the Jesus of the New Testament.”

Finally, Jesus is shown to be God by His mighty abilities.

• Because He is God, He is able to save (Hebrews 7:25); anyone who wants to be saved can be saved through Him.
• He is able to subdue (Philippians 3:21); all things—every speck of dust, every mountain and celestial body must obey Him.

• He is able to secure (2 Timothy 1:12); those who are saved are kept saved. He is able to supply every need we may have.

Each of us has the opportunity, like Pilate, to decide what we do with Jesus. We can either accept Him or reject Him, love or despise Him—but we cannot be neutral

Apply it to your life

What do you believe about Jesus Christ—will you crown Him or crucify Him?

Adrian Rogers says, “I love Him with all of my heart. To explain Him is impossible. To ignore Him is disastrous. To reject Him is fatal.”

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Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System – Failures in Educatio…

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Another School Choice Victory

The 2020s, at least so far, should be known as the school choice decade. Here are some examples of progress, starting in early 2021.

• West Virginia
• Arizona
• Iowa
• Utah
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Indiana
• Oklahoma
• North Carolina

But if this map from the Education Freedom Alliance is any indication. I’ll be addressing the issue many more times over the next two years.

By the way, this map changed very recently.

That’s because Alabama became the most recent state to adopt choice. Here are some details from a local news outlet.

HB129, called the CHOOSE Act, would create education savings accounts, or ESAs, for families of students to use toward eligible education expenses. The Senate Education Budget committee approved the House version in a hastily rescheduled meeting Tuesday afternoon. The final vote Wednesday was 23-9 and fell along party lines, with Republicans voting yes and Democrats voting no.…“It was an honor to work with Governor Ivey and her team to swiftly pass a school choice bill that she declared her number one priority this Session,” Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, said in a statement after the vote. …“Children are our future, and there is no greater responsibility for lawmakers than ensuring our kids have every resource needed for academic success regardless of their zip code,” Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Reed said. …The first ESAs will be available in the 2025-26 school year and will be limited to eligible students. All students will be eligible for ESAs at the start of the 2027-28 school year. …The parent of a student receiving an ESA must agree to pay the remaining amount of tuition or expenses beyond the $7,000 cap.

Congratulations to Alabama families.

I’ll close with the observation that the great school choice news in recent years has only been possible because the American system still has a decent amount of federalism.

Not as much as we used to have, unfortunately, but still enough that sensible states have the liberty to do good things (bad states, by contrast, will continue to neglect children and instead use their education systems as a way of transferring money to teacher unions).

P.S. One takeaway is that the Department of Education in Washington should be abolished.

Milton Friedman – Educational Vouchers

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Los Angeles Government Schools and the Case for School Choice

The case for school choice is very straightforward and very persuasive.

• Better educational outcomes.
• More educational freedom.
• Lower costs for taxpayers.
• Reining in teacher unions.
• Better government schools.

All of these factors help to explain why school choice is expanding all across the nation (at least in places where lawmakers are not controlled by teacher unions).

Today, though, let’s set aside the national arguments and focus on a local example from the reliably crazy state of California.

Heather McDonald has a sobering column about Los Angeles government schools in City Journal.

Much of her article focuses on ideological indoctrination of students, but here’s the passage that caught my attention.

Any school system that can afford climate advocates (as part of a black uplift plan, no less) is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Any school system that runs a massive system of subcontracting for “psychiatric social workers” and “counselors” is not hurting for taxpayer dollars.Such a system has more money than it knows what to do with. Indeed, the LAUSD budget for the 2022–23 school year was $20 billion—more than that of some nations. Divide that pot among the district’s 397,623 K-12 students, and taxpayers are paying the equivalent of an Ivy League tuition—over $50,000—for every student, every year. Add “clients” in other functions that the LAUSD has embraced— early education centers, infant centers, and adult education—and the district spends a still-lavish $35,341 per student. The LAUSD is not underfunded. It is overfunded. The reasons for student failure lie elsewhere than in allegedly inadequate resources.

Wow.

I wrote about the failing Los Angeles government schools system back in 2010, but the focus then was about under-performing teachers.

Today, the issue is an over-funded system. The government schools are getting $35.000-$50,000 per student, yet doing a crummy job.

How crummy?

Howard Blume of the L.A. Times wrote about the bad news last October.

In math, …about 7 in 10 students do not meet standards. …for Black students…, only 19% met the learning standards in math. …Latinos make up about 3 in 4 students; about 24% met learning standards. …L.A. Unified math scores still were below levels from the 2017-18 school year, two years before the pandemic resulted in campus closures. The same is true for English scores, which were slightly down overall compared with last year, with 41.2% of students meeting standards. Among all district students, scores dropped by half a percentage point.

The only practical answer to this mess is school choice.

Instead of squandering $35,000-$50,000 per student of government schools that produce bad test scores, divvy up the money and give families some type of voucher or educational savings account that can be used to pay tuition at higher-performing private schools.

Families could opt to stay in government schools, of course, especially if they value indoctrination.

But it’s safe to assume most families will be more interested in better education.

Time to expand this map!

Milton Friedman: It is an interesting thing, if you look at the facts, the one area, the area in which the low-income people of this country, the blacks and the minority, are most disadvantaged is with respect with the kinds of schools they can send their children to. The people who live in Harlem or the slums or the corresponding areas in LA or San Francisco, they can go to the same stores, shop in the same stores everybody else can, they can buy the same automobiles, they can go to supermarket, but they have very limited choice of schools. Everybody agrees that the schools in those areas are the worst. They are poor. Yet, here you have a Democrat who allege their interest is to help the poor and the low-income people. Here you have to take a different point. Every poll has shown that the strongest supporters of vouchers are the low-income blacks, and yet hardly a single black leader has been willing to come out for vouchers. There were some exceptions, Paul Williams in Milwaukee who was responsible for that, and a few others.

Georgia Democrat stands alone in state party in supporting school choice, calls her critics hypocritical

‘Why is no one fighting for young Black minds?’ Georgia State Rep. Mesha Mainor asks

By David Rutz ,  Brian Flood | Fox News

EXCLUSIVE – A Democrat in the Georgia General Assembly who angered her party by supporting a recent school choice bill says fellow progressives are hypocritically abandoning some of the state’s most vulnerable people.

“Why is no one fighting for young Black minds? Why isn’t that one of the things that we’re fighting for?” State Rep. Mesha Mainor said, adding, “I actually say you’re a hypocrite. That’s what I tell them directly. You are being a hypocrite. There are state lawmakers right now where their children are in schools that they’re not even zoned for… They’re lying about their address, state lawmakers, but they won’t vote for this bill.”

Mainor’s deep-blue 56th House district stretches from southwest Atlanta up into the Midtown area and includes schools in dire need of improvement. Asked why she supported the school choice bill that ultimately didn’t pass, she responded she prefers the term “parent choice.”

“I support parent choice because some parents have children in schools where their needs are not being met,” she told Fox News Digital. “In my district in particular, we have schools with 3% reading proficiency, 3% have obtained math proficiency by the eighth grade. And so to say that this is just how it is and that the kid needs to just suffer these consequences, I don’t agree with that. And I don’t think that all parents agree with that either.”

Georgia General Assembly member Mesha Mainor, D., discusses why she calls school choice “parent choice” and how she has bucked her party to support vouchers for students at underperforming schools.(Fox News Digital)

School choice has been a subject of intense debate for years, with teachers union-backed Democrats often fiercely opposing such measures as siphoning funding from public schools. Proponents say parents and children deserve opportunities for the best education and shouldn’t be punished for living in poorly performing districts. 

School choice advocates also support expansion of charter schools, which have grown greatly in Georgia in recent years and many of which count minority students as a majority of their enrollments. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that are independently run and include students who aren’t in the immediate area; teachers unions often oppose them as well since their teachers generally aren’t unionized.

“We should be voting at times just for our district and at times for the entire state of Georgia,” Mainor said.

The bill that would have expanded opportunities for students who attend Georgia’s lowest-rated schools was surprisingly shot down last month due to opposition from some rural Republicans.

Georgia Senate Bill 233 would have created $6,500-vouchers for students at schools performing in the bottom-25 percent in the state, to help pay for private school tuition and homeschooling expenses if they were inclined. Gov. Brian Kemp, R., pushed for it, and it appeared to have the votes to pass under the Republican-controlled Golden Dome, until 16 House Republicans voted it down.

It’s not dead yet, as it could still be brought for a vote at a later time. Any political battles in Georgia now attract outsized attention, given the state’s battleground status in presidential elections.

Georgia has emerged as one of the country’s top battleground states.(Charlie Creitz/Fox News)

Opponents of the bill said the vouchers would hurt local public school systems needing additional funding, particularly those in poorer communities. The state planned to deduct public schools’ funding for each student that takes their education dollars elsewhere.

The move was “so unexpected… that Democrats broke decorum and cheered its failure from the chamber’s floor,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. 

Mainor was the only Democrat who voted for it, and her fellow party members let her hear about it. A Democrat in the State Senate, Josh McLaurin, offered $1,000 to anyone who would primary her. State Rep. Michelle Au, D., linked to an AJC article about Mainor facing a primary challenge and wrote, “This is about floridly whipping votes in favor of a harmful bill we took a CAUCUS POSITION AGAINST.” 

McLaurin represents Sandy Springs, an affluent city known for its array of corporate headquarters in north Fulton County. Mainor retorted that he doesn’t have children, represents a district with thriving schools and has “no idea of what it means to live in a poverty-stricken community with no resources, with no hope.”

“To me, it’s ludicrous,” she said. “I think my fellow Democrats – and not all of them, I hate to say that because it’s not all of them – some of my colleagues will march in the streets for abortion rights. I’m pro-choice. They were crying on the floor for transgender rights. They were very outspoken about anti-Semitism. My problem is, why is no one fighting for young Black minds?…  And so to say that all these other issues are important, but a child living in poverty that’s of color is at the bottom of your totem pole of priorities, that’s a problem with the value system if you ask me.”

“I can only assume it’s because poor Black children are not their priority,” she added. “Let’s put it like that. Until the Democratic Party wants to put poor Black children as a priority, then State Representative Mesha Mainor will continue to vote against them when it comes to these educational needs.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp supported a school choice bill in March that surprisingly didn’t pass. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

Fox News Digital reached out to McLaurin for comment.

She also said it was “absolutely the truth” that Democrats are afraid of running afoul of powerful teachers unions; the Georgia Federation of Teachers has made removing Mainor from office a pet project. 

“Teachers don’t necessarily agree with what the teachers union supports, because guess what? Teachers have children in failing schools. Teachers have children that have special needs that benefit from these services. So I think the teachers union is actually out of touch with their own constituency,” Mainor said.

Her constituents, she says, don’t care if she votes on a straight party line, but instead thank her for keeping their needs in mind. Born and raised in Atlanta, Mainor said her mother used someone else’s address, so her daughter could attend one of the better public high schools in the city.

She also disagreed with the notion that more money needs to be put into public schools, but instead there needed to be more responsible fiscal governance from local boards.

“I don’t think throwing money at a system that’s not working is the answer. I think going in and looking at how the money is spent is what needs to be done first,” she said.

Axios reported Mainor has voted with Republicans on other major issues since she took office in 2021, including a ban on localities lowering police budgets and a controversial oversight board for prosecutors.

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire after an Atlanta police vehicle was set on fire during a “Stop cop city” protest in Atlanta, Georgia, United States on January 21, 2023.  (Benjamin Hendren/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

A physical therapist who is also pursuing a doctorate in business administration, Mainor said her Christian faith helped guide her to run for office, pointing in part to Priscilla Shirer’s book, “Discerning the Voice of God.” She is a single mother with two children, one of whom is about to head to college.

“I’m not a part of anybody’s system. I’m not part of anybody’s ‘in’ crowd,” she said. “God said to run, and so we’re going to run. And I won… The moment I hear I need to get out, I will get out.”

The Georgia State Department of Education recently identified 175 low-performing schools in need of additional support, with issues like poor graduation rates and falling behind on key skills. All of them are Title 1-schools, meaning at least 40% of the student body comes from low-income families, GPB reported.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Fox News’ Landon Mion contributed to this report.

Arkansas’ Sanders Signs Ambitious Education Reform Agenda of School Choice, Anti-Indoctrination

Jason Bedrick  / @JasonBedrick / March 09, 2023

Arkansas’ new governor, Sarah Sanders, on Wednesday signed into state law a major education-reform initiative. Pictured: Then still a candidate for governor, Sanders addresses the America First Policy Institute Agenda Summit in Washington last July 26. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Jason Bedrick@JasonBedrick

Jason Bedrick is a research fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday signed into law what she called “the largest overhaul of the state’s education system in Arkansas history.”

The “Arkansas LEARNS” initiative is an ambitious reform agenda that expands school choice, modernizes school transportation, restructures teacher compensation to pay more for performance, provides supplemental education for struggling students, and prohibits Arkansas public schools from indoctrinating students. 

“We’ve seen how the status quo condemns Arkansans to a lifetime of poverty, and we’re tired of sitting at the bottom of national education rankings,” Sanders said. “We know that if we don’t plant this seed today, then there will be nothing for our kids to reap down the line.”

Perhaps the boldest component of the initiative is the creation of Educational Freedom Accounts, which are similar to education savings account (ESA) policies in 11 other states. With an ESA, families can pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculums, online learning, special-needs therapy, and more. ESAs empower families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and best meet their children’s individual learning needs.

Eligibility for the ESAs phases in over three years. In the third year of the ESA program’s operation, all K-12 students will be eligible. In the first year of the ESA program (the 2023-24 academic year), all incoming kindergarten students in Arkansas will be eligible. So will students with disabilities, homeless students, children in foster care, the children of active-duty military personnel, students assigned to low-performing district schools, or children enrolled in one of Arkansas’s other school choice programs.

According to a recent Morning Consult survey, 7 in 10 Arkansans support an ESA policy. Support is even higher among parents of school-aged children, 78% of whom support ESAs.

The Arkansas LEARNS initiative will significantly improve the state’s national standing on education issues. Last year, Arkansas ranked No. 18 in the nation for education choice on The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The enactment of a universal ESA would have boosted Arkansas to No. 5 in the nation, assuming other states’ policies remained constant. Of course, competition for the top five will be fierce as states such as Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas are also considering adopting universal education choice policies.

Arkansas’ initiative also takes important steps to protect school students from being exposed to indoctrination or discrimination.

The law requires the Arkansas Department of Education to review its “rules, policies, materials, and communications” to ensure that they are in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and do not “conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law or encourage students to discriminate against someone based on the individual’s color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex, age, marital status, familial status, disability, religion, national origin, or any other characteristic protected by federal or state law.”

The law also prohibits school faculty and staff or guest speakers from compelling students to “adopt, affirm, or profess an idea in violation” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such as that people of one race or ethnicity are inherently superior or inferior to anyone else, or that individuals should “be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex” or other characteristics protected by law.

The statute makes clear that it does not prohibit the discussion of ideas and or the teaching of history.

Students in Arkansas will still learn about the ugly aspects of American history, such as slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. However, the law will appropriately prohibit lessons that divide students into “oppressors” or “oppressed,” based solely on skin color or that associate certain traits with particular skin colors.

As Tony Kinnett recently reported in The Daily Signal, there are recorded instances of such lessons in critical race theory in Arkansas classrooms, despite the best efforts of mainstream media outlets to deny it.

With the enactment of the Arkansas LEARNS initiative, Sanders has raised the bar for conservative education reform. Arkansas will now be among the top states that empower families to choose the learning environments that work best for their kids.

Arkansas has also taken an important step to ensure that traditional public schools are focused on education, not indoctrination.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

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JANUARY 27, 2023 3:28PM

Friday Feature: School Choice Milestones

By Colleen Hroncich

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As we wrap up our National School Choice Week look at the history of school choice, I’m going to explore some notable milestones in the U.S. over the years. For more in‐​depth coverage, be sure to check out our new School Choice Timeline.

When we talk about school choice, we generally mean a program where public funding follows students to nonpublic schools. This becomes particularly important after the mid‐​1800s, when state governments began to mandate taxpayers fund and children attend specific schools established and run by local government entities. Prior to that, education was typically a private or local concern—the domain of parents or small communities.

The oldest school choice program in the U.S. is Vermont’s town tuitioning program. Vermont’s founding constitution, adopted in 1777, required the legislature to establish a school in each town. As the state grew and the population became more dispersed, some towns could not support a public school. In 1869, the legislature passed a law allowing students from a town without a public school to attend any public or private school in or outside of Vermont, with the sending town paying the receiving school’s tuition. Originally, parents could choose religious private schools, but that option was removed by the state’s supreme court in 1961. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Carson v. Makin overturned a similar ban on religious schools in Maine’s town tuitioning program. In response, the Vermont Secretary of Education notified superintendents that “School districts may not deny tuition payments to religious” schools that otherwise meet the criteria for the program.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, created in 1990, is the country’s first modern private school choice program. Right in line with Milton Friedman’s 1955 idea for a tuition voucher, the program offers private school vouchers to low‐ and middle‐​income families who live in Milwaukee. In its first year, 341 students used vouchers to attend seven private schools in the city. This year, 129 schools in the metro Milwaukee area are participating in the program, enrolling nearly 29,000 students. The value of the voucher increases when state aid to school districts increases. Today there are 26 voucher programs running in 15 states plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico.

Arizona introduced the Individual Income Tax Credit Scholarship Program, the nation’s first tax credit scholarship, in 1997. It provides tax credits to individuals who donate to school tuition organizations that provide scholarships for private school tuition. While the tax credits are worth 100% of the donation, they’re capped at $611 per donor. There is no cap on scholarship values, students can receive multiple scholarships, and every K–12 student in the state is eligible to participate in the program. There are now 26 tax credit scholarship programs in 21 states.

While I’ve long known that Milton Friedman is considered the father of school vouchers, I only recently learned he later suggested “partial vouchers”—which sound a lot like education savings accounts (ESAs). Here’s how he described them in a 2006 EducationNext interview:

Moreover, there’s no reason to expect that the future market will have the shape or form that our present market has. How do we know how education will develop? Why is it sensible for a child to get all his or her schooling in one brick building? Why not add partial vouchers? Why not let them spend part of a voucher for math in one place and English or science somewhere else? Why should schooling have to be in one building? Why can’t a student take some lessons at home, especially now, with the availability of the Internet? Right now, as a matter of fact, one of the biggest growth areas has been home schooling. There are more children being home schooled than there are in all of the voucher programs combined. 

Friedman’s words proved prophetic when Arizona created the nation’s first ESA in 2011: the Empowerment Scholarship Account program. Originally limited to students with special needs, the program allows parents who opt out of public school to receive a portion of state education funding in an account that can be used for a variety of approved educational purchases—like private school tuition, tutoring, or education therapies.

Other states adopted similar ESAs that were restricted to various populations (students with special needs, military families, economically disadvantaged families, children assigned to low‐​performing public schools, etc.). In 2021, West Virginia made a huge jump forward with Hope Scholarships, an ESA that’s open to every child in public schools (93% of kids in the state). Last year, Arizona re‐​claimed the ESA crown by becoming the first state with universal eligibility. Already this year, Iowahas joined the universal ESA club and Utahis on the verge. Other states are poised to follow suit. After decades of baby steps, universal school choice is on the march.

Our coverage this week—Neal’s introductory post, my look at Milton Friedman, Neal’s exploration of religion and school choice, and my piece on school choice and the courts—has been designed to highlight Cato’s new School Choice Timeline. There are a lot of misconceptions about the origins and goals of school choice. We hope the timeline adds clarity to conversations around school choice so it can be debated on its merits rather than with false attacks about its origins.

Censorship, School Libraries, Democracy, and Choice

A big advantage of living in a constitutional republicis that individual rights are protected from “tyranny of the majority.”

• Assuming courts are doing their job, it doesn’t matterif 90 percent of voters support restrictions on free speech.
• Assuming courts are doing their job, it doesn’t matter if 90 percent of voters support gun confiscation.
• Assuming courts are doing their job, it doesn’t matter if 90 percent of voters support warrantless searches.

That being said, a constitutional republic is a democratic form of government. And if government is staying within proper boundaries, political decisions should be based on majority rule, as expressed through elections.

In some cases, that will lead to decisions I don’t like. For instance, the (tragic) 16th Amendment gives the federal government the authority to impose an income tax and voters repeatedly have elected politicians who have opted to exercise that authority.

Needless to say, I will continue my efforts to educate voters and lawmakers in hopes that eventually there will be majorities that choose a different approach. That’s how things should work in a properly functioning democracy.

But not everyone agrees.

A report in the New York Times, authored by Elizabeth Harris and Alexandra Alter, discusses the controversy over which books should be in the libraries of government schools.

The Keller Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, passed a new rule in November: It banned books from its libraries that include the concept of gender fluidity. …recently, the issue has been supercharged by a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups.The organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. …“This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” said Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group focused on education… The restrictions, said Emerson Sykes, a First Amendment litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union, infringe on students’ “right to access a broad range of material without political censorship.” …In Florida, parents who oppose book banning formed the Freedom to Read Project.

As indicated by the excerpt, some people are very sloppy with language.

If a school decides not to buy a certain book for its library, that is not a “book ban.” Censorship only exists when the government uses coercion to prevent people from buying books with their own money.

As I wrote earlier this year, “The fight is not over which books to ban. It’s about which books to buy.”

And this brings us back to the issue of democracy.

School libraries obviously don’t have the space or funds to stock every book ever published, so somebody has to make choices. And voters have the ultimate power to make those choices since they elect school boards.

I’ll close by noting that democracy does not please everyone. Left-leaning parents in Alabama probably don’t always like the decisions of their school boards,just like right-leaning parents in Vermont presumably don’t always like the decisions of their school boards.

And the same thing happens with other contentious issues, such as teaching critical race theory.

Which is why school choice is the best outcome. Then, regardless of ideology, parents can choose schools that have the curriculum (and books) that they think will be best for their children.

P.S. If you want to peruse a genuine example of censorship, click here.

More Academic Evidence for School Choice

Since teacher unions care more about lining their pockets and protecting their privileges rather than improving education, I’ll never feel any empathy for bosses like Randi Weingarten.

That being said, the past couple of years have been bad news for Ms Weingarten and her cronies.

Not only is school choice spreading – especially in states such as Arizona and West Virginia, but we also are getting more and more evidence that competition produces better results for schoolkids.

In a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Professors David N. Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart & Krzysztof Karbownikfound that school choice led to benefits even for kids who remained stuck in government schools.

They enjoyed better academic outcomes, which is somewhat surprising, but even I was pleasantly shocked to see improved behavioral outcomes as well.

School choice programs have been growing in the United States and worldwide over the past two decades, and thus there is considerable interest in how these policies affect students remaining in public schools. …the evidence on the effects of these programs as they scale up is virtually non-existent. Here, we investigate this question using data from the state of Florida where, over the course of our sample period, the voucher program participation increased nearly seven-fold.We find consistent evidence that as the program grows in size, students in public schools that faced higher competitive pressure levels see greater gains from the program expansion than do those in locations with less competitive pressure. Importantly, we find that these positive externalities extend to behavioral outcomes— absenteeism and suspensions—that have not been well-explored in prior literature on school choice from either voucher or charter programs. Our preferred competition measure, the Competitive Pressure Index, produces estimates implying that a 10 percent increase in the number of students participating in the voucher program increases test scores by 0.3 to 0.7 percent of a standard deviation and reduces behavioral problems by 0.6 to 0.9 percent. …Finally, we find that public school students who are most positively affected come from comparatively lower socioeconomic background, which is the set of students that schools should be most concerned about losing under the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.

It’s good news that competition from the private sector produces better results in government schools.

But it’s great news that those from disadvantaged backgrounds disproportionately benefit when there is more school choice.

Wonkier readers will enjoy Figure A2, which shows the benefits to regular kids on the right and disadvantaged kids on the left.

Since the study looked at results in Florida, I’ll close by observing that Florida is ranked #1 for education freedom and ranked #3 for school choice.

P.S. Here’s a video explaining the benefits of school choice.

P.P.S. There’s international evidence from Sweden, Chile, Canada, and the Netherlands, all of which shows superior results when competition replaces government education monopolies.

———-

Milton Friedman chose the emphasis on school choice and school vouchers as his greatest legacy and hopefully the Supreme Court will help that dream see a chance!

Educational Choice, the Supreme Court, and a Level Playing Field for Religious Schools

The case for school choice is very straightforward.

• Monopoly government school systems cost a lot of moneyand do a bad job.The interests of the education bureaucracy rank higherthan the educational needs of kids. Poor families are especially disadvantaged.
• School choice puts parents in charge. Lots of evidence, including from overseas, shows choice improves educational outcomes. And private schools cost less, so taxpayers also win.

The good news is that there was a lot of pro-choice reform in 2021.

West Virginia adopted a statewide system that is based on parental choice. And many other states expanded choice-based programs.

But 2022 may be a good year as well. That’s because the Supreme Court is considering whether to strike down state laws that restrict choice by discriminating against religious schools.

Michael Bindas of the Institute for Justice and Walter Womack of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference make the case for a level playing field in a column for the New York Times.

In 2002, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution allows school choice programs to include schools that provide religious instruction, so long as the voucher program also offers secular options. The question now before the court is whether a state may nevertheless exclude schools that provide religious instruction. The case, Carson v. Makin, …concerns Maine’s tuition assistance program. In that large and sparsely populated state, over half of the school districts have no public high schools. If a student lives in such a district, and it does not contract with another high school to educate its students, then the district must pay tuition for the student to attend the school of her or his parents’ choice. …But one type of school is off limits: a school that provides religious instruction. That may seem unconstitutional, and we argue that it is. Only last year, the Supreme Court, citing the free exercise clause of the Constitution, held that states cannot bar students in a school choice program from selecting religious schools when it allows them to choose other private schools. …The outcome will be enormously consequential for families in public schools that are failing them and will go a long way toward determining whether the most disadvantaged families can exercise the same control over the education of their children as wealthier citizens.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized on this issue earlier this week.

Maine has one of the country’s oldest educational choice systems, a tuition program for students who live in areas that don’t run schools of their own. Instead these families get to pick a school, and public funds go toward enrollment. Religious schools are excluded, however, and on Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear from parents who have closely read the First Amendment.…Maine argues it isn’t denying funds based on the religious “status” of any school… The state claims, rather, that it is merely refusing to allocate money for a “religious use,” specifically, “an education designed to proselytize and inculcate children with a particular faith.” In practice, this distinction between “status” and “use” falls apart. Think about it: Maine is happy to fund tuition at an evangelical school, as long as nothing evangelical is taught. Hmmm. …A state can’t subsidize tuition only for private schools with government-approved values, and trying to define the product as “secular education” gives away the game. …America’s Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote the First Amendment to protect religious “free exercise.”

What does the other side say?

Rachel Laser, head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, doesn’t want religious schools to be treated equally under school choice programs.

Here’s some of her column in the Washington Post.

…two sets of parents in Maine claim that the Constitution’s promise of religious freedom actually requires the state to fund religious education at private schools with taxpayer dollars — as a substitute for public education. This interpretation flips the meaning of religious freedom on its head and threatens both true religious freedom and public education.…The problem here is even bigger than public funds paying for praying, as wrong as that is. Unlike public schools, private religious schools often do not honor civil rights protections, especially for LGBTQ people, women, students with disabilities, religious minorities and the nonreligious. …If the court were to agree with the parents, it would also be rejecting the will of three-quarters of the states, which long ago enacted clauses in their state constitutions and passed statutes specifically prohibiting public funding of religious education. …It is up to parents and religious communities to educate their children in their faith. Publicly funded schools should never serve that purpose.

These arguments are not persuasive.

The fact that many state constitutions include so-called Blaine amendments actually undermines her argument since those provisions were motivated by a desire to discriminate against parochial schools that provided education to Catholic immigrants.

And it’s definitely not clear why school choice shouldn’t include religious schools that follow religious teachings, unless she also wants to argue that student grants and loans shouldn’t go to students at Notre Dame, Brigham Young, Liberty, and other religiously affiliated colleges.

The good news is that Ms. Laser’s arguments don’t seem to be winning. Based on this report from yesterday’s Washington Post, authored by Robert Barnes, there are reasons to believe the Justices will make the right decision.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court seemed…critical of a Maine tuition program that does not allow public funds to go to schools that promote religious instruction. The case involves an unusual program in a small state that affects only a few thousand students. But it could have greater implications… The oral argument went on for nearly two hours and featured an array of hypotheticals. …But the session ended as most suspected it would, with the three liberal justices expressing support for Maine and the six conservatives skeptical that it protected religious parents from unconstitutional discrimination.

I can’t resist sharing this additional excerpt about President Biden deciding to side with teacher unions instead of students.

The Justice Department switched its position in the case after President Biden was inaugurated and now supports Maine.

But let’s not dwell on Biden’s hackery (especially since that’s a common affliction on the left).

Instead, let’s close with some uplifting thoughts about what might happen if we get a good decision from the Supreme Court when decisions are announced next year.

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think we’re getting close to a tipping point. As more and more states and communities shift to choice, we will have more and more evidence that it’s a win-win for both families and taxpayers.

Which will lead to more choice programs, which will produce more helpful data.

Lather, rinse, repeat. No wonder the (hypocritical) teacher unionsare so desperate to stop progress.

P.S. There’s strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

Free To Choose 1980 – Vol. 06 What’s Wrong with Our Schools? – Full Video
https://youtu.be/tA9jALkw9_Q

Why Milton Friedman Saw School Choice as a First Step, Not a Final One

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Kerry McDonald

EducationMilton FriedmanSchool ChoiceSchooling

Libertarians and others are often torn about school choice. They may wish to see the government schooling monopoly weakened, but they may resist supporting choice mechanisms, like vouchers and education savings accounts, because they don’t go far enough. Indeed, most current choice programs continue to rely on taxpayer funding of education and don’t address the underlying compulsory nature of elementary and secondary schooling.

Skeptics may also have legitimate fears that taxpayer-funded education choice programs will lead to over-regulation of previously independent and parochial schooling options, making all schooling mirror compulsory mass schooling, with no substantive variation.

Friedman Challenged Compulsory Schooling Laws

Milton Friedman had these same concerns. The Nobel prize-winning economist is widely considered to be the one to popularize the idea of vouchers and school choice beginning with his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education.” His vision continues to be realized through the important work of EdChoice, formerly the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, that Friedman and his economist wife, Rose, founded in 1996.

July 31 is Milton Friedman’s birthday. He died in 2006 at the age of 94, but his ideas continue to have an impact, particularly in education policy.

Friedman saw vouchers and other choice programs as half-measures. He recognized the larger problems of taxpayer funding and compulsion, but saw vouchers as an important starting point in allowing parents to regain control of their children’s education. In their popular book, Free To Choose, first published in 1980, the Friedmans wrote:

We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther. (p.161)

They continued:

The compulsory attendance laws are the justification for government control over the standards of private schools. But it is far from clear that there is any justification for the compulsory attendance laws themselves. (p. 162)

The Friedmans admitted that their “own views on this have changed over time,” as they realized that “compulsory attendance at schools is not necessary to achieve that minimum standard of literacy and knowledge,” and that “schooling was well-nigh universal in the United States before either compulsory attendance or government financing of schooling existed. Like most laws, compulsory attendance laws have costs as well as benefits. We no longer believe the benefits justify the costs.” (pp. 162-3)

Still, they felt that vouchers would be the essential starting point toward chipping away at monopoly mass schooling by putting parents back in charge. School choice, in other words, would be a necessary but not sufficient policy approach toward addressing the underlying issue of government control of education.

Vouchers as a First Step

In their book, the Friedmans presented the potential outcomes of their proposed voucher plan, which would give parents access to some or all of the average per-pupil expenditures of a child enrolled in public school. They believed that vouchers would help create a more competitive education market, encouraging education entrepreneurship. They felt that parents would be more empowered with greater control over their children’s education and have a stronger desire to contribute some of their own money toward education. They asserted that in many places “the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location” and suggested that voucher programs would lead to increased integration and heterogeneity. (pp. 166-7)

To the critics who said, and still say, that school choice programs would destroy the public schools, the Friedmans replied that these critics fail to

explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn’t, why anyone should object to its “destruction.” (p. 170)

What I appreciate most about the Friedmans discussion of vouchers and the promise of school choice is their unrelenting support of parents. They believed that parents, not government bureaucrats and intellectuals, know what is best for their children’s education and well-being and are fully capable of choosing wisely for their children—when they have the opportunity to do so.

They wrote:

Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else. Social reformers, and educational reformers in particular, often self-righteously take for granted that parents, especially those who are poor and have little education themselves, have little interest in their children’s education and no competence to choose for them. That is a gratuitous insult. Such parents have frequently had limited opportunity to choose. However, U.S. history has demonstrated that, given the opportunity, they have often been willing to sacrifice a great deal, and have done so wisely, for their children’s welfare. (p. 160).

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Voucher Programs Today

Today, school voucher programs exist in 15 states plus the District of Columbia. These programs have consistently shown that when parents are given the choice to opt-out of an assigned district school, many will take advantage of the opportunity. In Washington, D.C., low-income parents who win a voucher lottery send their children to private schools.

The most recent three-year federal evaluationof voucher program participants found that while student academic achievement was comparable to achievement for non-voucher students remaining in public schools, there were statistically significant improvements in other important areas. For instance, voucher participants had lower rates of chronic absenteeism than the control groups, as well as higher student satisfaction scores. There were also tremendous cost-savings.

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has served over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools.

According to Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and a prolific researcher on the topic, the recent analysis of the D.C. voucher program “reveals that private schools produce the same academic outcomes for only a third of the cost of the public schools. In other words, school choice is a great investment.”

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created in 1990 and is the nation’s oldest voucher program. It currently serves over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools. Like the D.C. voucher program, data on test scores of Milwaukee voucher students show similar results to public school students, but non-academic results are promising.

Increased Access and Decreased Crime

Recent research found voucher recipients had lower crime rates and lower incidences of unplanned pregnancies in young adulthood. On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

According to Howard Fuller, an education professor at Marquette University, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and one of the developers of the Milwaukee voucher program, the key is parent empowerment—particularly for low-income minority families.

In an interview with NPR, Fuller said: “What I’m saying to you is that there are thousands of black children whose lives are much better today because of the Milwaukee parental choice program,” he says. 
“They were able to access better schools than they would have without a voucher.”

Putting parents back in charge of their child’s education through school choice measures was Milton Friedman’s goal. It was not his ultimate goal, as it would not fully address the funding and compulsion components of government schooling; but it was, and remains, an important first step. As the Friedmans wrote in Free To Choose:

The strong American tradition of voluntary action has provided many excellent examples that demonstrate what can be done when parents have greater choice. (p. 159).

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

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Sagan in 1987

Carl Sagan on God | ScienceToday

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Sagan in University of Chicago‘s 1954 yearbook

This post is the third in a series and the first and second deal with my response letter of January 10, 1996 to Carl Sagan and this post quotes from the letter and makes some conclusions about both Carl Sagan and Charles Darwin’s common views. 

Recently I have been revisiting my correspondence in 1995 with the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who I had the privilege to correspond with in 1994, 1995 and 1996. In 1996 I had a chance to respond to his December 5, 1995letter on January 10, 1996 and I never heard back from him again since his cancer returned and he passed away later in 1996. Below is what Carl Sagan wrote to me in his December 5, 1995 letter:

_________

Lynn Alexander married Carl Sagan when she was 19 years old. The happy couple at their wedding. Dorion Sagan, their first son, was born two years later

Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)

I was introduced to when reading a book by Francis Schaeffer called HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT written in 1968. 

Charles Darwin and Carl Sagan both could not accept that humans are not special and just a product of chance. They philosophically believed that we are the result of chance but Charles Darwin and Carl Sagan had to live  in the world that God made with the conscience that God gave them. This created a tension. As you know the movie CONTACT was written by Carl Sagan and it was about Dr. Arroway’s SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE (SETI) program and her desire to make contact with aliens and ask them questions. It is my view that Sagan should have examined more closely  the accuracy of the Bible and it’s fulfilled prophecies from the Old Testament in particular before chasing after aliens from other planets for answers. Sagan himself had written,”Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death…If some good evidence for life after death was announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere antedote”(pp 203-204, The DemonHaunted World, 1995).

Sagan said he had taken a look at Old Testament prophecy and it did not impress him because it was too vague. He had taken a look at Christ’s life in the gospels, but said it was unrealistic for God to send a man to communicate for God. Instead, Sagan suggested that God could have written a mathematical formula in the Bible or put a cross in the sky. However, what happens at the conclusion of the movie CONTACT?  This is Sagan’s last message to the world in the form of the movie that appeared shortly after his death. Dr Arroway (Jodie Foster) who is a young atheistic scientist who meets with an alien and this alien takes the form of Dr. Arroway’s father. The alien tells her that they thought this would make it easier for her. In fact, he meets her on a beach that resembles a beach that she grew up near so she would also be comfortable with the surroundings. Carl Sagan when writing this script chose to put the alien in human form so Dr. Arroway could relate to the alien. Christ chose to take our form and come into our world too and still many make up excuses for not believing.

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Lastly, Carl Sagan could not rid himself of the “mannishness of man.” Those who have read Francis Schaeffer’s many books know exactly what I am talking about. We are made in God’s image and we are living in God’s world. Therefore, we can not totally suppress the objective truths of our unique humanity. In my letter of Jan 10, 1996 to Dr. Sagan, I really camped out on this point a long time because I had read Sagan’s  book SHADOWS OF FORGOTTON ANCESTORS  and in it  Sagan attempts to  totally debunk the idea that we are any way special. However, what does Dr. Sagan have Dr. Arroway say at the end of the movie CONTACT when she is testifying before Congress about the alien that  communicated with her? See if you can pick out the one illogical word in her statement: “I was given a vision how tiny, insignificant, rare and precious we all are. We belong to something that is greater than ourselves and none of us are alone.”

Dr Sagan deep down knows that we are special so he could not avoid putting the word “precious” in there. Francis Schaeffer said unbelievers are put in a place of tension when they have to live in the world that God has made because deep down they know they are special because God has put that knowledge in their hearts.We are not the result of survival of the fittest and headed back to the dirt forevermore. This is what Schaeffer calls “taking the roof off” of the unbeliever’s worldview and showing the inconsistency that exists.

Now let us look at Charles Darwin, and let me start by quoting Francis Schaeffer from his talk In the spring of 1968 which centered on Charles Darwin’s autobiography:

Darwin in his autobiography  Darwin, Francis ed. 1892. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters[abridged edition]. London: John Murray, and in his letters showed that all through his life he NEVER really came to a QUIETNESS concerning the possibility that chance really explained the situation of the biological world. You will find there is much material on this [from Darwin] extended over many many years that constantly he was wrestling with this problem. Darwin never came to a place of satisfaction. You have philosophically ONLY TWO possible beginnings. The first would be a PERSONAL beginning and the other would be an IMPERSONEL beginning plus time plus CHANCE. There is no other possible alternative except the alternative that everything comes out of nothing and that has to be a total nothing and that has to be a total nothing without mass, energy or motion existing. No one holds this last view because it is unthinkable. Darwin understood this and therefore until his death he was uncomfortable with the idea of CHANCE producing the biological variation. 

Darwin, C. R. to Graham, William 3 July 1881 (letter written less than a year before Darwin’s death and less than 40 years before your birth, Dr Barlow):

Nevertheless you have EXPRESSED MY INWARD CONVICTION, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is NOT THE RESULT OF CHANCE.* But THEN with me the HORRID DOUBT ALWAYS ARISES whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Francis Schaeffer comments:

Can you feel this man? He is in real agony. You can feel the whole of modern man in this tension with Darwin. My mind can’t accept that ultimate of chance, that the universe is a result of chance. He has said 3 or 4 times now that he can’t accept that it all happened by chance and then he will write someone else and say something different. How does he say this (about the mind of a monkey) and then put forth this grand theory? Wrong theory I feel but great just the same. Grand in the same way as when I look at many of the paintings today and I differ with their message but you must say the mark of the mannishness of man are one those paintings titanic-ally even though the message is wrong and this is the same with Darwin.  But how can he say you can’t think, you come from a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s conviction, so how can you trust me? Trust me here, but not there is what Darwin is saying. In other words it is very selective. 

Evidently Darwin was telling his friends that he was an agnostic and that he did not think that God had anything to do with it but it was all left to the hands of chance. Is that the way you are reading this?

What two pieces of evidence did Darwin wrestle with?

(Charles Darwin)

If you want evidence then you will only be given the same evidence that Charles Darwin had. I am going to quote 2 passages, and they both have a common message. That message has 3 points: 1) The conscience tells us of God’s existence. 2) Creatioon tells us the same. 3) If we reject both of those then God will eventually remove conviction from our hearts. 

Don’t hold this against me, but I got this first passage out of the current issue of CREATION MAGAZINE:

At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep [#1] inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons...Formerly I was led by feelings such as those…to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that [#2] whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. [#3] But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…(Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1911, Vol. a, page 29).

Romans 1:18-21 Amplified Bible:

¹⁸ For [God does not overlook sin and] the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who in their wickedness suppress and stifle the truth, ¹⁹ because that which is known about God is [#1] evident within them [in their inner consciousness], for God made it evident to them. ²⁰ For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, [#2] being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made], so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense. ²¹ For even though ^[a]they knew God [as the Creator], they did not ^[b]honor Him as God or give thanks [for His wondrous creation]. On the contrary, they became worthless in their thinking [godless, with pointless reasonings, and silly speculations], and their [#3] foolish heart was darkened.

Charles Darwin became an agnostic because he chose to reject the two pieces of evidence God gave him. Take a minute and read the enclosed letter to the editor of THE HUMANIST MAGAZINE. Where did our conscience come from if not from God? In your book SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS you quote Darwin’s wife warning him of the dangers of scientism on page 47. Wouldn’t it be wise to heed her advice????

Darwin and Sagan both realized just like modern man that humanism leads to meaningless. Francis Schaeffer in his book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? makes these points below concerning this:

Section 3 The humanist base leads to meaningless

An overwhelming number of modern thinkers agree that seeing the universe and man from a humanist base leads to meaningless, both for the universe and for man—not just mankind in general but for each of us as individuals. Professor Steven Weinberg wrote these words in his book THE FIRST 3 MINUTES: A MODERN VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE while he was looking down from an airplane:

• It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. … It is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
  • (1993), Epilogue, p. 154

When Weinberg says that the universe seems more “comprehensible,” he is, of course, referring to our greater understanding of the physical universe through the advance of science. But it is an understanding, notice, within a materialistic framework, which considers the universe solely in terms of physics and chemistry—-simply machinery.

If everything “faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat,” all things are meaningless.

Section 4 Tension results when you have an inadequate worldview

The greatest dilemma for those who hold an inadequate worldview is that it is impossible to live consistently within it. The playwright Samuel Beckett can “say” that words do not communicate anything—and that everything, including language, is absurd—yet he must use words to write his plays, even plays about meaninglessness. The list of contradictions can be extended endlessly. The truth is that everyone who rejects the Biblical worldview must live in a state of tension between ideas about reality and reality itself. If a person believes that everything is only matter or energy and carries this through consistently, meaning dies, morality dies, love dies, hope dies. Yet! The individual does love, does hope, does act on the basis of right and wrong. This is what we mean when we say that everyone is caught , regardless of his worldview, simply by the way things are.

Section 5 The Bible is God’s revealed truth and it tells us about our origin.

The scriptures tell us that the universe exists and has form and meaning because it was created purposefully by a personal creator. This being the case, we see that, as we are personal, we are not something strange and out of line with an otherwise impersonal universe. Since we are made in the image of God, we are in line with God. There is a continuity, in other words, between ourselves, though finite, and the infinite creator who stands behind the universe as its final source of meaning. Unlike the evolutionary concept of an impersonal beginning plus time plus chance, the Bible shows how man has personality and dignity and value. Our uniqueness is guaranteed, something which is impossible in the materialistic system!!!!!!

(Francis Schaeffer pictured)

Carl Sagan On God and Creation

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The Cosmos Just Is?: Carl Sagan vs William Lane Craig

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Play media

Sagan is one of those discussing the likelihood of life on other planets in Who’s Out There? (1973), an award-winning NASA documentary film by Robert Drew.

From People For Life.com

A Christian Manifesto
by Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer
The following address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title.

What we have, and take so poorly for granted, is unique. It was brought forth by a specific world view and that specific world view was the Judeo-Christian world view especially as it was refined in the Reformation, putting the authority indeed at a central point — not in the Church and the state and the Word of God, but rather the Word of God alone. All the benefits which we know — I would repeat — which we have taken so easily and so much for granted, are unique. They have been grounded on the certain world view that there was a Creator there to give inalienable rights. And this other view over here, which has become increasingly dominant, of the material-energy final world view (shaped by pure chance) never would have, could not, has, no basis of values, in order to give such a balance of freedom…It is the same with the television programs. Public television gives us many things that many of us like culturally, but is also completely committed to a propaganda position that the last reality is only material / energy shaped by pure chance. Clark’s Civilization, Brunowski, The Ascent of Man, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos — they all say it. There is only one final view of reality that’s possible and that is that the final reality is material or energy shaped by pure chance.

Best of Carl Sagan on Religion

https://youtu.be/ADqBLaTpAKM

How Carl Sagan Strengthened My Faith

Below are Francis Schaeffer and his son Franky:

In 1992 I began to write skeptics letters after reading their books and articles and watching their films and I was introduced to Carl Sagan’s name by a book published in 1968 by Francis Schaeffer.

Francis Schaeffer in his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT (Chapter 4) asserts:

Because men have lost the objective basis for certainty of knowledge in the areas in which they are working, more and more we are going to find them manipulating science according to their own sociological or political desires rather than standing upon concrete objectivity. We are going to find increasingly what I would call sociological science, where men manipulate the scientific facts. Carl Sagan (1934-1996),professor of astronomy and space science at Cornell University, demonstrates that the concept of a manipulated science is not far-fetched. He mixes science and science fiction constantly. He is a true follower of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). The media gives him much TV prime time and much space in the press and magazine coverage, and the United State Government spent millions of dollars in the special equipment which was included in the equipment of the Mars probe–at his instigation, to give support to his obsessive certainty that life would be found on Mars, or that even large-sized life would be found there. With Carl Sagan the line concerning objective science is blurred, and the media spreads his mixture of science and science fiction out to the public as exciting fact. 

Sagan in 1980

Carl Sagan on the Existence of God

RC Sproul confronts Carl Sagan.

Sagan in Rahway High School‘s 1951 yearbook

Sagan discusses FAITH when there is no evodence

Carl Sagan on Religion

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The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt)

Biblical Archaeology is Silencing the critics! Significantly, even liberal theologians, secular academics, and critics generally cannot deny that archaeology has confirmed thebiblical record at many points. Rationalistic detractors of the Bible can attack it all day long, but they cannot dispute archaeological facts.

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Carl Sagan

Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …

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Francis Schaeffer the Founder of the L’Abri community

The Cosmos Is All That Is

Francis Schaeffer wrote in 1981 in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO chapter 3 The Destruction of Faith and Freedom:

Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it. 

How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age

FEATURED ARTIST IS TITIAN

TIZIANO VECELLIO DI GREGORIO (c.1476-1576)

After the premature death of Giorgione, Titian became the leading figure of Venetian painting of his time. His use of color and his taste for mythological themes defined the main features of 16th century Venetian Art. His influence on later artists -Rubens, Velázquez…- is extremely important.

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