“Sanitary Fairs” sprung up spontaneously around the country and served Union soldiers traveling to or from the front. All-volunteer in nature, these were places of caring, rest, sustenance and all were born out of a patriotic sentiment and gratitude to the Union troops.

President Lincoln, The Great Emancipator

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty… Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty…

And how are things this morning in America? People will gather today to decry the taking of their property in the form of taxation, and nearly half of America will shake their heads and say that they can’t believe these Tea Party people are real. The people present at these Tea Parties, for their part, can hardly believe that recently in Wisconsin, public union employees were protesting, rallying, and decrying the “oppressive” actions of their government, whose objective was something as tyrannical as balancing their budget. Here we find ourselves.

We may yet have a long way to go. I recently heard a Congresswoman speaking before a group of Republicans, and her over-riding theme was that there are no easy answers with the budget; governing is hard work; it is difficult to find places to cut spending; and we have to govern. As a public service, I would respectfully submit the following to you, for your unattributed use, should you ever hear such a sentiment uttered.

We have district boards of education that manage the affairs of our district’s schools. We have county-wide regional superintendents of schools. We have state Boards of Education. We have a federal Department of Education. Now this last agency keeps growing and getting bigger, but are you aware of the degree? The measure of a company’s assets in excess of its liabilities is called its net worth, and the USDOE has a net worth of $87.6 billion; that is money that has been taken from Americans in taxes and built up, over time. This agency (you can see their annual report for yourself) spent $99.6 billion in 2010. If we’re challenged on where to cut expenditures, $100 billion a year plus the $87 billion in the bank is a good place to start. Let the states fund their educational systems however they please.

Indeed, we may have a long way to go. We’re as divided as we’ve been in a long time. Finding common ground will be a challenge, but our alternative – a bleak, acrimonious future of debt and failure – is not much of an alternative. If you attend a Tea Party, enjoy yourself, but remember that shouting and rallying only accomplishes so much. At some point, we need to get engaged and begin to take back the high ground in our relationship with government at all levels. At some point, we need to speak to all Americans on the serious Republic-threatening risks before us.

We may not ever come up with a definition of liberty that all people can agree upon, but it is worth trying.

State Senator Ed Maloney of Chicago recently introduced bill SB 136, whose purpose is to regulate homeschooling in Illinois. It seems the Senator thinks that the government should know where kids are and what they are learning.

Homeschooling is one of those manifestations of self-government that one would hope we would see continually growing, especially considering the results that homeschooling delivers. Perhaps the Senator is really interested in the children and he’s proposed this bill for the children. I’m waiting to hear that line.

Would the last business to leave please turn off the lights?

Meanwhile, the state is on life-support, and neighboring states are rolling out the welcome mat to our businesses and their employees. This story on Monday indicates that seven companies are cutting in excess of 630 jobs in Illinois in the coming months. Job-killing tax increases and runaway spending are creating an economic death spiral.

Our General Assembly is hard at work, however: proposing interfering in the lives of citizens by more regulation and increased paperwork. Faced with the prospect of an economic disaster born of uncontrolled spending and government of the insider, for the insider and by the insider, our General Assembly… wants to regulate homeschooling.

To Senator Maloney and every other legislator who doesn’t get it: government is failing. Like businesses, government fails because of management. Plain and simple, it’s the people in charge who determine success or failure. It may take a while, but eventually shareholders will bring in new management to run the enterprise. Given the mess you’ve created and continue to enable, our time is short.

But yours is shorter.

A great question came from the audience which highlights the difference between the candidates in this race, but also is a larger example of the problem that we have in America.  At the end of the debate, a woman stood up expressing concern that Rutherford would consider cutting functions in the Treasurer’s office.  What he actually said was that he would do a performance audit of all programs to make that decision, but was adamantly against growing services.

But back to the woman’s question/statement.  She expressed concern that cutting programs like financial education would be harmful for young people, who need to learn about credit, debt, and savings.

Financial education is... well, education.

Learning about money – credit, debt, savings, investments, budgeting, really anything one needs to learn to be a responsible and functioning member of society – is truly important.  But it is not the job of the State of Illinois to teach that.  It is the job of the most intimate unit of government: the family.

While this doesn’t exactly qualify as a faithful reductio ad absurdum example, we can wonder if government is indeed responsible for educating young people on money matters, where does government’s responsibility end?  Shall government be responsible for educating young people on matters of diet?  How about on matters of God?  Perhaps matters of personal relationships – should they be friends with the people they are friends with?  Or more immediately, should you get up out of that chair or not?  Shall we have a state Department of Everything, wherein you can get answers for anything at all you choose not to figure out for yourself?

Rutherford made a good point in his answer to this question.  We can think up a hundred great-sounding programs and legislate them all into perpetual existence.  But Illinois is $13 billion in the hole.  As a parent, we teach our children to tie their shoes, brush their teeth, and bathe themselves at some point.  We don’t expect that we’ll be helping them with this when they are 16 or 17 years old.  As it relates to our national responsibility problem, we need to stop expecting someone else to do the things we are supposed to do.  In time, this will reorder responsibilities among units of government and create a lasting and more free society.

The $787 billion economic stimulus program Obama signed into law soon after taking office included $4.3 billion in competitive grants for states, nicknamed the “Race to the Top” fund. States must amend education laws and policies to compete for a share of the money.

The Education Department is expected to announce its first of two rounds of awards in April. More than 30 states were expected to apply by Tuesday’s deadline.

Obama will ask lawmakers for another $1.35 billion so that states not chosen in either award round will have a chance to compete for money, according to the officials, who spoke anonymously Monday because the president had not announced his plans.

This all sounds rather innocent, on a superficial level.  States merely improve their education and get money from Washington.  An artful spin on this might even be that Washington is encouraging competition among the States; who could object to that?  There are a couple problems with this view, however: one problem is the effects of such policies and one problem is the sustainability of such policies.

The Department of Education’s budget for 2009 is a remarkable $64.9 billion.  I won’t make the argument in this space that the education system in the United States is a complete failure.  While a whole host of data could be drawn upon to make that argument (such as college completion rates remaining essentially unchanged, an indication of how  well-prepared students are upon graduation), that’s not the issue for now.  The question we have to ask is this: should the federal government be in the business of education?

The Federalist Papers

I generally consult James Madison when questions of propriety and responsibilities among the spheres of government come up.  Not surprisingly, in the entirety of the Federalist Papers, not a word is made about what level of government should be responsible for education.  Which is not to say that Madison didn’t have an opinion on the matter, as he notes in Fed #39:

In this relation, then, the proposed government [contemplated by the new Constitution] cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

It’s a recurring theme in the Federalist Papers, if you’ve taken the time to read them.  The Constitution that was to be ratified required explanation about what it authorized the federal government to do, and just as importantly, what it didn’t authorize the federal government to do.  Of course, Fed #45 also notes:

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.

Perhaps another time we could recount the reasons for our arrival at this point. Certainly there are multiple causes for our ailment. One can point to the progressive left agenda dating back to the New Deal as one such cause. A general apathy about the purpose of government is another. Given time, a book could probably be written detailing each step along the way to today’s environment in which the most distant spheres of government are the most “important” and intrusive.

What we can conclude is that an entire re-ordering of the roles and responsibilities of each sphere of government is necessary.  Our current trajectory – ever more centralized, ever more intrusive, ever more unresponsive – is fiscally unsustainable and has the seeds of future failure sown in it.  The operative question we must ask in relation to government actions or programs is this: whose responsibility is it?  Just as we must do for ourselves that which only we can rightly do, so too should States do for themselves that which only what they rightly should be doing.  Abdicating our responsibility and allowing the larger sphere of government to do for us what reason and experience dictate we must do for ourselves may seem innocent enough, but it ever shall be the first chapter in the story of tyranny.

This article describes the wholly unsurprising failure of “Reading First” a federal reading program designed to help improve student reading comprehension.

The program, Reading First, was designed to help boost student performance in low-income elementary schools, but failed to improve reading comprehension, says the study from the Institute of Education Sciences, part of the Education Department.

There was no difference in comprehension scores between students who participated in Reading First and those who did not, the study found.

The findings released Thursday threw the program’s future into doubt.

Thank goodness for small favors; pity that it cost so much to learn an obvious truth. Our Founders knew that responsibilities belonging to the people had no business being co-opted by distant spheres of government. We’ll be forced to repeat this lesson until we insist our representatives adhere to the deliberate design and construction of the Constitution.