The paper copy of this week's Isthmus has an interesting (and rather unflattering) profile of John Matthews, the head of Madison's teachers union. While the entire article is interesting (and sadly not available online) I was really struck by this:

The book, Class and Schools, explores the broader social and cultural influences behind the racial and income achievement gaps in public schools. Rothstein documents the disparities between children's out-of-school experiences, based on their family's income and education. Even by age 3, kids from nonprofessional families have a measurable deficit in vocabulary recognition - a pattern that only gets worse as they grow older, affecting public schools from kindergarten on.

Matthews, who holds one of the most important if less visible jobs influencing the quality of Madison's public schools, finds this alarming and significant. "Why don't our policy makers do something about this?" he bellows.

I find his attitude alarming and significant. If something's "wrong", government has to fix it. And, if you do right and you're successful, you may just find that the cure is way worse than the disease.

Imagine that you're a good parent. You sacrifice for your child. You change your lifestyle to not only give your kids things, but also to give them time. Your neighbor, on the other hand, doesn't do this. Your kids are on the fast track to success. But wait - your government comes along and says that not only are they going to take from you in the form of taxes, but your kids are going to have to sit through a curriculum designed to cater to the lowest common denominator.

It doesn't end there. Imagine again that you've scrimped and saved for a down payment on a home. Your neighbor, on the other hand, took advantage of an easy no-down-payment loan and bought their dream house. Now they, and many others like them, can't afford their mortgage payments. As banks start to foreclose, you naturally feel a little sorry for them, but you're also a little happy because you expect that housing prices will start to fall. Not so fast my friend. The government is going to bail out your neighbors. Again, not only are they going to use your tax money to do so, but by doing so, they're going to make it even harder for you to buy a house. Sorry!

And, since it's an election year, you're about to get a "rebate" check. Of course, if you make "too much" you might not get the full amount. Why? Well, the government wants to use some of your money to give a "rebate" check to your neighbor who doesn't even pay taxes.

Besides having some crappy neighbors, you also have a crappy government. Too often our government's, both liberals and "conservatives", idea of fixing something is to make us all equal. Government is like a glacier, turning both mountains and meadows into equally flat land.

If we're all the same, we're all going to be unremarkable. It's like the old horse racing cliché, "If they finish together then they can't all be good." There's no great virtue in being equal. I'd rather have a Secretariat or a Bill Gates than a bunch of $25,000 claimers.