Society

To return to schools. Did you know that it’s a bad thing for a school to be popular? Nor did I. But according to Scott Lemieux a voucher programme is pointless because it can’t save every child overnight and, anyway, there aren’t enough places at private schools in the first place. This rather conveniently ignores the fact that real school choice is not just a question of competition between private and state-sponsored schools but within the state sector itself. Anyway, Mr Lemieux writes that: A market in education wouldn’t function like other markets. Whereas more customers (within reason) for a department store mean more profits, more students for a school

Megan McArdle has been on a rare old tear recently, pushing the argument for school choice, here and here and here and here and here. It will not surprise some readers that I rather agree with her. Clearly, however, this just proves my foolishnesss. Did you know that it’s impossible to make a good faith argument in favour of school choice or any programme that gives poor families greater input into where their children are educated? Me neither. Time for me to be telt, obviously. Exhibit A) Matt Yglesias: …the United States already “allows” poor parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems in much the same way

Appropriately enough – this being Halloween don’t you know- Slate has this week been running a series of dispatches from my own native heath (Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here). Kate Bolick asks, essentially, why are there so many haunted castles and ghostly apparitions in Scotland? Think what you want. I’m not here to convert you. Either you believe in ghosts or you don’t, and if you don’t—well, it’s probably because you haven’t seen one. They say the best believers are those who began as skeptics. Take Bella Beck (not her real name; she asked that I not use it), a suitably matter-of-fact academic at the

So, Fred Thompson is just a conservative good-old-boy from Tennessee whose folksy charm is his biggest selling point. OK, well then you might expect that Fred would be a champion of traditional Tennessee values. Not so! The Los Angeles Times reviews the 88 cases Thompson prosecuted as a US Attorney in Nashville between 1969 and 1972 and discovers that though: There were a few bank robbers and counterfeiters. But more than anything, Thompson took on the state’s moonshiners and a local culture, rooted in Tennessee’s hills and hollows, that celebrated the independent whiskey maker’s battle against the government’s revenue agents. Twenty-seven of his cases involved moonshining — more than any