Nobody says you have to live on one side of the political spectrum or the other. Think for yourself, and go where you choose. Here's my spectrum; what does yours look like?

"Shovel-ready" FAIL

This is a true story. One of my clients is a very large (multinational, multi-billion-dollar) construction company. I've done some video projects for them, and in fact the image accompanying this post is from a video I shot for them on the day I was told this story. I've strategically blurred parts of the image to keep from getting in hot water with the client; here's hoping that works.

It was a video & photo shoot of a large highway/bridge project, and I was escorted around all day by the site manager, a nice older guy who'd had a 30-year career managing big projects. During the hours we were together, I asked a lot of questions, including questions about whether the company had benefited from Obama's stimulus plan, the so-called "shovel-ready" projects grants. This is what he told me.

"It started out good," he said. "We bid on this big bridge project and won the bid. But to get the job, we had to agree to a whole new set of rules on who we had to hire, how many of each type of person we had to hire, what we had to pay them, etc.

"It was a big problem for us to find the workers matching the description we were given. We simply could not find enough people with the skills we needed who were also willing to work on a very hard job in tough conditions.

"There are plenty of people out there who are willing to do this job, but we couldn't use those people, we had to use the people the government wanted us to use. So we worked at it and spent a lot of money chasing down applicants until, finally, we had a full crew. And that lasted about a day. By the second day, some of the workers who had shown up the first day decided 'the hell with it, this is too hard,' and they simply did not come back. By the end of the first week, we no longer had enough manpower to get the work done."

See, this is where the so-called Obama Stimulus runs off the rails. Using public monies to create infrastructure--fine, I'm all for that. But telling the construction companies how to do the work--micromanaging their operations and saddling them with wholly unrealistic rules and using racial quotas to further a social agenda---well, now you've just taken a good premise and strangled it.

The irony is, nearly every construction worker I meet on these shoots is a member of a minority group. Usually Hispanic, but with a good mix of blacks. The government didn't need to introduce more diversity into this population of workers, because frankly, the hard-labor jobs within the construction trade are so unpleasant that people with better options tend not to take them.

But try telling that to the pointy-headed progressive do-gooders who controlled the purse strings in this particular case. No, they were out to create jobs AND make new opportunities for people of color! Only they forgot one important thing--the second part of that whole lead-a-horse-to-water parable.

You can't make the horse drink, and you can't make people work at an admittedly nasty job when the alternative is getting a small but livable allowance from the government.

Take away the allowance, though, and now those bridges get built. Is this so hard to figure out?

I wouldn't want one of those jobs. I would do almost anything to avoid it. But I wouldn't go on welfare to avoid it--I would show up, every day, and work.

As for the too many people who would go on welfare to avoid it--well, we need to stop worrying so much about those people, and spend more time worrying about bridges, schools, crooked bankers, whether or not global warming is real, and many other pressing priorities.

Put A Tourniquet On That Bleeding Heart Already, Part II

(From Bryan Caplan, on the excellent http://www.econlib.org/):

When someone drops out of high school, overeats, or fails to exercise, you tell us that their behavior is only "human." But if a conservative or libertarian objects to paying taxes to help people who make these choices, you get angry. Question: Why are you so forgiving of people with irresponsible lifestyles, but so outraged by people who don't want to pay taxes to help people with irresponsible lifestyles? This seems morally perverse. If you're going to single anyone out for condemnation, it should be the person who behaves irresponsibly in the first place, not the complete stranger who asks, "How is this my fault?"

It's tempting to insist, "We're all sinners." But the hard fact is that there's a lot of variance in the population. People with extremely responsible lifestyles are just as human as anyone else. They're not gods, just mortals who do the right thing. We should hold them up as role models, instead of attacking them if they complain that they're taxed enough already.

(Rick adds: treating your local public school like a daycare center and showing zero interest in your child's education is also a "lifestyle choice." And don't expect me to pay for that one either. Of all the perverse subsidies high-achieving people are asked to pay to support the poor choices of low-achieving people, one that has to be absolutely off the table is the idea of busing high-performing students to low-performing urban schools).

The Important Lesson of the $5 Fine

In Chicago, where Rahm Emmanuel is trying to hold low-SES parents accountable for their childrens' school performance and behavior, the parents have spoken: No Way.

And this story holds an important lesson for us as we go into the final phase of redistricting.

With Emmanuel's blessing, a well-regarded charter school has been fining parents $5 per violation for their kids' transgressions, including dress code violations and breaking school rules.

This policy inspired several hundred parents to march on CPS headquarters, claiming the school was forcing them to "take food off their tables" and endure other profound hardships.

This is what happens when you put conditions on what was previously a no-strings-attached entitlement. When you move somebody's government cheese.

The parents could have responded by imposing appropriate discipline at home, stopping the fines by insisting their children comply with the charter's well-publicized rules, but instead they chose to take a stand AGAINST accountability, AGAINST high standards, AGAINST, in fact, their own childrens' best interests.

The problem of parents who can't be persuaded to send their children to school ready and willing to learn is so racially and politically charged that in none of the voluminous discussions about SES on this forum have any of the 04W or Southside commenters been willing to go anywhere near it.

"Those parents" are indefensible, so instead, some of our intellectually dishonest and self-serving neighbors are continuously trying to redirect the conversation to how "privileged" we are in our "enclaves" and accusing us of not caring about children on the wrong side of some street.

Give them their due: the apologists for all these failing parents are loud and persistent, like a really bad case of tinnitus.

And pretty soon this political football is going to the BOE and City Council, where it will get kicked all over the lot, Errol Davis's reasonableness notwithstanding. Did you read the Tweets yesterday? Politicians and BOE members can hardly wait for Errol Davis to give them a plan so they can have their way with it.

I want you to remember this:

All the parents who could not be bothered to dress their kids appropriately, help with homework or impose discipline at home nevertheless had plenty of time and energy to rally at Chicago Public School HQ today for their right not to be held accountable.

These are the people whose values we reject, wherever they happen to live. And a great many of them live right here.

When the 04Wers and Kirkwooders and others decide they actually want to take on the problem of uninvolved parents, that's when they can come to us and ask us to make sacrifices to help their schools get better. Not until then.

Oh, you can try to force us to do it--and maybe Mr. Davis will cave or the BOE/Council will strongarm him. But you haven't thought of one thing--if and when that happens, we will just build a charter school here in our little "enclave."

We'll secure public funds; we'll make it better than any school APS runs right now--even SPARK or MES.