Talk about irony! I am absolutely convinced that God has a well developed sense of irony!
Consider this. These are all true, by the way. The director of safety at a certain company was named Lucky. The the head of quality at a certain organization was named Low and even had a national award named after him - the Low Quality Award. I swear I am not making this up.
And now - drum roll please - the new US Attorney General is named - wait for it - Lynch!
I could never make up fiction like this and have anyone even believe it for a second.
History is the most boring and pointless (for the student) of any subject foisted on young minds by public schools. It is the history that the state wants you to learn. It is not the real history of anything.
It also goes without saying that you can't learn something you don't want to learn and I think that most people are uninterested in history, but the public school approach is utterly barren - useless dates without any backstories and the vapid names of all the US Presidents. Who cares.
Surprising to me that decades after having departed public schools that I have discovered history, or at least certain areas of it and I find it is quite fascinating.
Consider this from Gary North regarding the early 20th Century:
Progressivism rested on four key assumptions regarding institutions.
First, the messianic redemptive power of tax-funded education. This was
said to be neutral education intellectually, yet also moral. Second,
universal suffrage. The democracy was seen as redemptive. Third, the
need for political legislation to redistribute concentrated wealth.
Fourth, the need for professional bureaucrats to administer the various
political programs of wealth redistribution -- no political patronage,
no political spoils. This was to be enforced by Civil Service laws.
Now that is not like any history I ever studied in high school - a cogent, one paragraph summary of the whole Progressive Era - four simple ideas, stated simply.
He continues:
A conspiracy view of history denies the authority of all four.
Public education does not stop rich men from manipulating the masses.
Second, universal suffrage is helpless to root out the powers behind the
thrones. Third, the super-rich manipulate the politicians, who in turn
create tax code loopholes. Fourth, bureaucrats are impotent. This
means that the pillars of Progressivism have failed to root out the
power of wealth. It means that Progressivism's program of social
redemption has failed. Worse, it has served as a convenient cover for
ever-greater concentrations of wealth and power. It means that
Progressivism is a false religion. Academic historians fight conspiracy
views of history. They understand that conspiracy views of history, if
widely accepted, would lead to the political rejection of the
Progressives' agenda. It would undermine the legitimacy of
Progressivism.
The most dangerous version of the conspiracy view
of history is Murray Rothbard's. He argued that the Progressives were
dupes from day one. They were pawns in the chessboard of the
power-seekers who sought state power in the name of democracy, only to
use this power to keep rivals out of their markets. The far Left argues
this way, too. So, Rothbard used New Left historian Gabriel Kolko's
book, The Triumph of Conservatism (1963), to support his case
against the Progressives' push to establish federal regulation of big
business. The result of this political agenda was the opposite of the
rhetoric: the entrenchment of big business. Kolko and Rothbard showed
that the Progressives' agenda was funded from the beginning by big
business.
This makes a lot more sense to me than the "trust busters" and the Bugsy Malone public school version of the Progressive Era. Of course, this is not the official version of history, but it sure is a lot more interesting, and, I believe, a lot more honest.
This study of the Progressive Era led me to coin a phrase - money is not the root of all evil, Progressivism is the root of all evil. Just think of all the changes of that era, creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, imposition of income tax, direct election of Senators, etc. The world was transformed from the one my great grand parents knew. The only feddle gummint agent they ever ran into was the postman. How different it is now, and certainly not for the better in terms of liberty.
Lest you think I exaggerate, please realize that the US would not have gotten into WWI without the twin horrors of income tax and the feddle reserve bank. Those obscenities provided for the financing of the global bloodletting. Further, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler most likely would not have become the monsters they did had the warring nations of Europe been left alone to conclude their own peace in 1918 or before.
These facts are conveniently left out of the public school version of US History!
