In the video below, Indian scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems in education: the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. The reason this problem exists is because the state has a monopoly on schooling. It has marred incentives. Why would an individual go to a 'trouble zone', or into a rural area, for exact same pay they would receive for teaching in a ‘trouble free' environment near a city?

How much money should teachers be paid? What are the costs and benefits? One of the many problems of socialism is both the lack of incentives it produces and the inability for central planners to get the right information to make the correct decisions. They lack the pricing mechanism supplied by the market – that of profit and loss.

What is amazing is that even in some of the poorest areas, parents are willing to spend $2 a day to educate their children, even when public schools are available.

When James Tooley first discovered low-cost private schools for the poor in urban slums and rural areas in India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and China, aid agency officials and local government administrators did not receive the news warmly.

Most flat out denied that such schools existed. Even if they do exist, said the experts, they can’t possibly be any good. School owners that run for-profit schools in shantytowns and poor villages are just exploiting poor communities. Their teachers are untrained and poorly paid. Their buildings are cramped, dark and filthy. Worst of all, kids don’t learn anything there—they come out “half-baked,” one education official told him.

But what Tooley found, in four years of site visits and a five-country study described in his book The Beautiful Tree, throws a wrench in this familiar-sounding reasoning. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of students in the impoverished areas he studied were in fact attending these allegedly nonexistent schools, even when public options were available.

The initial problem outlined, has now essentially been solved.
 

So which would you prefer?

New Labor member of the NSW Legislative Council, Luke Foley, a enviro-fanatic and member of the socialist left faction, has gone on the attack against Islamic fundamentalism in his inaugural speech.

I think we may be seeing this more and more from the left, showing that they are not, and never were, really pro-Islam, but will use whatever icebreaker they can to break up what little is left of western entrepreneurial capitalistic culture, and usher in their global green religion.

At least Muhammed was a businessman. The Greens want to destroy business and send everyone back to the jungle.

I'll take Islamic fundamentalism over Green fundamentalism anyday.

You know how greenist left-wingers like to demonise the industrial revolution via their claims of widespread, slave-like child labour?

A little hypocritical when you see the disturbing child abuse that that takes place in green propaganda advertisements ...

Most people think "inflation" is a general rise in prices, hence when they see "inflation" in the 2-3% band, and only rising 0.2% over a month (as is currently the case), they don't get too worried, thinking they are only paying an extra 20 cents for something that cost $100 a month ago.

What they don't understand is the critical difference between monetary inflation and price inflation.

Monetary inflation is the act of injecting new money (created out of thin air by the RBA) into the economy and it is the phase when your existing money is stolen by the government via a loss of value. Price inflation, a rise in the actual price, is not required for this hidden 'inflation tax' to be effective.

The reason for this is simple. Take the example of something that costs $100. In an organic market economy, when there are technological advances in the productive process, there is a natural tendancy for the price of most goods to DECREASE over time. So you might buy something for 100 bucks in 2008, and a year later the same thing only costs 95 bucks. But when you have a central bank engaging in monetary inflation, the same thing might cost $101. Unless you are aware of the monetary aspect to inflation, you might only think you are paying an extra dollar, when in fact you are paying an extra 6 dollars.

The same principle applies even when there is NO price inflation. For example, due to the speed of technological innovation, the price of mobile phones go down in spite of the monetary inflation. If you remove monetary inflation then the price of mobile phones would go down EVEN FASTER.

The point is that you are still subject to a hidden inflation tax whether the end prices go up or down.

I hadn't seen this criticism of Marx before and when I did I laughed, because it's so true ...

"The most remarkable fact about this unprecedented prestige of an author is that even his most enthusiastic admirers do not read his main writings and are not familiar with their content. A few passages and sentences from his books, always the same, are quoted again and again in political speeches and pamphlets. But the voluminous books and the scores of articles and pamphlets turned out by Marx are, as can be easily shown, not perused even by politicians and authors who proudly call themselves Marxians. Many people buy or borrow from a library reprints of Marx's writings and start reading them. But, bored to death, they usually stop after a few pages, if they had not already stopped on the first page."

The next time you meet a marxist, ask them what primary works they have read of his. If they hold the position that communism has never existed, remark that crude communism has and point them in the direction of "Private Property and Communism" in Marx's Economic Manuscripts.

Whenever Paris Hilton, and others like her, start running dry in the media coverage, something "spontaneous" seems to magically happen to get their name back in the media. Like a sex tape being released (that they always act like they don't want to be released, but really do).

Well ..... Paris Hilton has been arrested for drug possesion for the 8 hundred thousanth time.

I know of no better reason to decriminalise drug use than removing this woman's face from the front page of news websites everywhere.

Tony Windsor is a very strange and confusing fellow.

Superficially he seems like a dinki-di bloke from the bush. However, despite this, he has been a ferally vicious advocate for a 'price on carbon' and a grand crusader against coal mining on the Liverpool Plains in his Northern NSW electorate of New England.

So if he is, in fact, a dedicated green fanatic, why did he sell his property to a coal mine?

We know that many in the green movement are simply in it for a dollar. Al Gore, of course, has financial interests in green energy and carbon trading corporations. Perhaps this all can all be explained by Windsor's persistent advocacy of bio-fuel subsidies. Is Windsor hiding anything?

 Malcolm Fraser says Australia is too closely tied with the US, saying:

"Where is our sense of independence? Our sense of self? I don't think we have one "

Well Mr Fraser, one might ask you the same question given you and your greenist friends support international treaties which completely destroy Australia's national sovereignty. Mr Fraser doesn't want independence for Australia, he just prefers Australia as a UN dependency rather than a US one.

Chris Leithner was on 612 ABC Radio last night (Monday the 23rd of August). In case you missed it, the discussion with Steve Austin can be heard here. The interview covers how the "US Empire is broke, and that when people belatedly realise it, rates will rise appreciably, the prices of assets will fall, bankruptcies will rise, etc. Also the simple reality that savings, not consumption, creates wealth."

As if we have to go beyond Australia's borders to find the nightmarish failures of socialised healthcare, however this was too good to pass up:

Over-worked nurses asked mother-of-two Elin Andersson to strip the sheets from her own hospital bed and tidy up before she was discharged from a hospital in Sundsvall, northern Sweden, local newspaper Sundsvalls Tidning said. The request was among a list of problems Ms Andersson had at the hospital.

Ah, the wonders of Euro-socialism.

When will the irrational bigotry against a free-market approach to healthcare end, and allow us to have a decent healthcare system?