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David Henderson understandably is flabbergasted by the obliviousness of a university president.

John O. McGinnis argues that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin will further energize the movement for school choice. Here’s his conclusion:

Carson is not only important for what it does for Establishment Clause jurisprudence but what it does for the school choice movement. That movement already has political momentum. First, many public schools have been heavily criticized for closing for too long during the pandemic with substantial losses of learning, particularly for the poorest students. Second, many parents are furious with what their public schools are teaching, viewing commonly used history curricula in particular as tendentious and unpatriotic. Many also worry about an emphasis on equity over excellence. As a result, a parental rights movement is emerging as a powerful electoral force.

School choice is the logical institutional manifestation of parental rights. A parent who can choose the school his or her child attends has more influence on the child’s education. At a traditional public school, a parent can only vote in a school board election, and once the school board is elected, he or she retains no substantial leverage at all. School choice provides the invaluable right of exit.

Carson assures those who want to send their children to religious schools that religious choices can never be excluded from a choice program. Thus, it energizes parents who want a religious alternative to the traditional public school to join with parents who want alternatives for secular reasons. The ruling thus contributes even more energy to one of our most important contemporary social movements.

Chris Freiman explains that “vouchers for religious schools don’t threaten the separation of church and state.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley reports on Betsy DeVos’s important efforts to free the hostages held by teachers’ unions. A slice:

As the teachers unions continue to throw their weight around the Democratic Party, Mrs. DeVos said their behavior during the pandemic has hurt their standing with Americans. “There’s a real tone-deafness to the kind of damage their politicized agenda and decisions have inflicted on kids, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years.” she said. “It’s the kids who could least afford to be locked out of school who were out the longest.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins decries the malignant mission creep of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Oodles upon oodles of excessive, useless government are foisted on us by enterprising appointees building résumés for an afterlife as an influence peddler “of counsel” at a D.C. law firm. Examples are legion, but consider the recent initiatives of Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chief, Gary Gensler.

Mr. Gensler would ordain that publicly traded companies, as part of their disclosure obligations, report their financial vulnerability to climate change and climate regulation. A fatuous New York Times headline declares that investors “deserve” such information. No, investors want such information, and diligently seek it out, if it bears on the expected value of their investments. Why not require disclosures about the financial impact of every conceivable tax-law change, man-made disaster or asteroid strike? Because markets already price securities in view of all the possible calamities that could cause them to go to zero. Collectively, investors are in a better position to judge such nonproprietary matters than is management, which has a daily business to run.

Chelsea Follett talks with GMU Econ alum Rosemarie Fike about the importance for women of economic freedom.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Dan Klein about Adam Smith and justice.

Writing at The Hill, the great Bruce Yandle explains that “inflation is putting a price tag on past political actions that only sounded free at the time.”

Mark Oshinskie writes about the oppressions of forced solitude. Two slices:

Those whom I knew were sure the lockdowns were for our collective benefit and would only last for two weeks. They stridently said we should all be nice and embrace this temporary disruption. I think many of the lockdowners perversely enjoyed being part of some (overblown) historical crisis and thought it was cool that humans could be so savvy and modern as to crush a virus; though they turned out to be wrong about that second part. Others just liked the time off from work.
I was dumbfounded, not only by the numbers of people who supported locking down but also by their certainty that doing so made sense; they expressed no doubt about this approach.

…..

The Urban Dictionary defines a “tool” as “someone who is not smart enough to realize that he is being used.” I decided that my ex-friend, and anyone else who was going along with the “Stay home” and “We’re all in this together” was a tool. Of course, like the other lockdowners I knew, he could afford to be a tool because he could work from home and loved to watch TV.

Among all of the other obvious nonsense, saying that by staying home, we’re together is perhaps the most plainly Orwellian. Plus, in clearly observable ways, we weren’t “all in this together” during the pandemic; its logistical and economic impacts varied widely across the population. And in our pluralistic society, we had never all been in anything together. Why should a respiratory virus suddenly unify everyone. I still can’t believe that people bought such cheesy Madison Avenue slogans.

K. Lloyd Billingsley accuses Fauci of “white coat supremacy.”

Harriet Sergeant reports on the “devastating toll” of lockdowns on children. (HT Toby Young)

Adam Brooks tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

When will everyone finally admit that the cost of living crisis is down to Lockdowns, the printing of money to pay for Lockdowns & the supply chain issues caused by them here and around the world?