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Bravo to Anne Northup and to Judge Heyburn, and Good Luck to the Education Study Group

by Theresa Fritz Camoriano

·        We send our elected officials to Washington expecting them to stand up for us and make tough decisions, but usually they sell us out in favor of various organized interest groups.  Recently, Anne Northup was willing to make one of those politically tough decisions.  She showed her respect for the taxpayers by voting to reduce subsidies for Amtrak, despite the fact that she will have to take the political heat for closing down the Louisville-to-Chicago route.  Northup's action begins moving Amtrak in the direction of self-sufficiency, which is long overdue.  It is ridiculous to require taxpayers to pay over $200 in subsidies for every Louisvillian's trip to Chicago, and I appreciate Northup's being willing to say so.

·        Judge Heyburn gave a prison sentence of 71 months to Kevin Lee Earles, the Kentucky bridge inspector who demanded bribes from the company painting the Kennedy Bridge.  Earles' attorney objected to the severe sentence, saying that is the type of sentence received by people who sell cocaine, as if selling cocaine were a much worse offense.  But Mr. Earles' offense is far worse than that of a cocaine dealer, who simply sells an illegal product to willing buyers, because  Mr. Earles used the power of the state of Kentucky to extract his money.  Indeed, one company lost its contract promptly after it refused to pay the bribe Earles demanded.  Earles also brandished a gun and threatened the lives of the contractors and their families.  According to The C-J, "Heyburn called Earles' offenses 'an egregious violation of the public trust' and said they brought 'severe disrepute to the people who are supposed to be serving the commonwealth.'"  Judge Heyburn was exactly right.

·        A group of business people is organizing to study the education system in Jefferson County, Kentucky to see what can be done to improve it.  The study is especially concerned with minority students and poor students, who regularly lag in achievement scores.  I hope these business people will not get so bogged down in the details of their study that they forget to look at the big picture.  The basic problem with education is that it is a monopoly enforced by the government.  Unlike the way businesses normally operate, with consumers having the freedom to choose to spend their money where they think they get the best deal, the "customers" of government's education monopoly don't have a choice.  We are all forced to continue to support the government's education monopoly, whether we like it or not.  This lack of competition and lack of free choice on the part of consumers eliminates any incentives for the monopoly schools to improve their service.  If the business people will focus on that core problem, they can come up with solutions that will really make a difference.  As Walter Williams has said, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan couldn't have come up with a better way to keep blacks down than the current government education system.

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