New York City is raising the level of tax on cigarettes once again. By raising the cost of the habit, many of the cities elected officials believe they can stop people from smoking. You know, kind of like how prohibition did with alcohol. Cigarettes will no cost around $8.00 a pack. Some Democrats, and to this authors dismay Republicans, are trying to curb our freedom of choice, while simultaneously watering down the importance of self reliance in the name of the “public good.”

As noble as this seems, this initiative will do more harm than good. What good will a large population of people, that can not take care of themselves or make difficult decisions independently from the government, bring to this city? The answer: none. Teaching people that they do not need will power, because the government will protect them from themselves, is self defeating. Anything not in moderation can be harmful.

Too much calcium can cause kidney stones, we can not and should not expect the government to pass laws on the rationing of milk. Too much sugar rots teeth, but the government shouldn’t tell us how much sugar we can eat. One should think of the Senate testimony of Nick Naylor, a tobacco lobbyist in the fictional book, Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley. Naylor makes the argument that since the number one killer in the United States is heart disease, there should be restrictions placed on cheddar cheese before restrictions are placed on cigarettes. One could argue that New York City is heading in that direction anyhow. With calorie information required on menu's and a complete ban on transfats.

There is evidence that shows smoking is harmful to your health, but we as an informed and civilized population should be able to decide whether to smoke or not. I find it ironic that the same people that would deny you your right to smoke cigarettes, would defend your right to be taken off life support, kill yourself, or even take someone else off life support, if they meet a certain criteria. It is simply inconceivable that we just have no idea how bad smoking can be for us? We are reminded every time we see a bus, billboard, or subway advertisement. And every smoker has that one friend who reminds them just how bad smoking is for them. But people still smoke.

It is clear that the Democratic City Council members, peering down from their pedestal of nobility and holiness, decided that they know what is best for us. They must know what is best for us correct? That is why we elected them? Right? Absolutely not. The liberty to make such basic decisions about our personal lives is being hijacked by a minority of limousine liberal hucksters who honestly believe that the only way we won’t self destruct is if they legislate every aspect of our existence.

This is not about the right to smoke. This is about a general usurpation of the basic freedoms and liberties this country is founded on. It is about our freedom to live life the way we choose, so long as we do not encroach upon that same right in others. Something so basic, yet so crucial to the longevity of democracy should be left to the people, as it was intended to be.

A new argument is emerging in defense of anti-smoking legislation. They are now doing it not just to protect you from yourself, but to protect others from you. This is the best argument for draconian smoking bans. However, there has never been a study linking brief exposure to second hand smoke to cancer, heart disease, or early death. All the studies done on second hand smoke have been on people exposed for 25 years or longer. So the idea of protecting the non-smoking citizens, while sounding better than protecting us from ourselves, is a lie. In reality, they are protecting themselves from annoyance. Non-smokers like myself do not like inhaling smoke. It can be offensive to the senses. But, as Fran Lebowitz  wrote,  "being offended is the natural consequence of leaving ones home".

If, at the age of 18, we can make the decision to fight for this country, to vote for our representatives, to gamble, to live independently, to drive a car, or to get married, you certainly have the right to choose whether or not to smoke cigarettes. The information is out there, no one is hiding it. You know the risks, make a decision, it is your right. It is not the right of far removed officials and legislators who think they know what is best for you. The truth is, they know what we know, nothing more, and if this is left to stand, our ability to make decisions on other basic aspects of our lives will be vulnerable to restrictive legislation.

The No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) was passed through congress in May of 2001 and signed into law by President George W. Bush in January of 2002. The NCLB act reformed the federal government’s education policy by reauthorizing provisions from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society reforms. In addition to the policies which were reauthorized, the NCLB act created many new reform policies. When adopted by the individual states, the old as well as the new policies would allow the state governments to receive federal money for education. In 2006, NCLB’s budget was $25.3 billion, but with the expiration date of September 2007 passed, is reauthorization worth it?

The main factor that congress should consider, but won’t, is whether or not the federal government has any right to demand standards in education, and furthermore, if it is Constitutionally permissible for the federal government to fund public schools at all. The quick answer is that the federal government has no place in education. The federal government has specific enumerated powers and according to the tenth amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Thus, since the Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to involve itself in education, and it does not deny that power to the state, the power belongs to the state.Many critics of NCLB have pointed to the tenth amendment to strengthen their opposition. In response, many supporters of NCLB have stated that adoption of NCLB is optional. While it is true that if states do not accept federal education money they also do not have to accept the rules that accompany it, not accepting education money is not so simple. As Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute writes “turning down hundreds of millions of dollars is hard to do, especially since it is, in essence, money being returned to state taxpayers after the federal government grabbed it out of their hands.”

But since the federal government has no constitutional right to involve itself in education, they compromise with the states. The compromising between the federal government and the state governments turned the original 36 page NCLB act that President Bush submitted into the 1100 page bill that he signed 8 months later. The underlying problem is that the strings attached to that money have been constructed in such a way as to allow states to maintain the majority of the sovereignty in education, and at the same time, allow the federal government to demand results. For example, the federal government offers money to a state in exchange for adherence to the federal policy. The state then defines how to analyze the data, which allows them to shape results in a way that appears as though they are making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The state then sends those results back to Washington. This leads to what some scholars have called the “race to the bottom.”

So if Congress will not end NCLB because it is illegal, than surely they would if it was not working. So, is it working? No. The Results that NCLB have produced are minimal. Holding school accountable for the achievement of students has become more difficult, and assessing the true cost of NCLB requires in depth research. To understand the true cost, it is necessary to use a cost-benefit analysis. The federal funding that states receive establishes an enormous burden on state and local governments. In 1994, a report from the General Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that “the federal government was the cause of 41% of the administrative burden at the state level despite providing just 7% of overall education funding.” NCLB has increased the funding as well as the burden that the federal government already placed on the states. For instance, NCLB “increased state and local governments’ annual paperwork burden by 6,680,334 hours, at an estimated cost of $141 million.”

The administrative burden that NCLB places on local and state governments is second only to the decline in accountability. The tying of federal education dollars to AYP, progress the states themselves define, has encouraged “all states to lower standards to avoid federal sanctions.” States all over the country are lowering standards in the attempt to avoid sanctions at the federal level. Even worse than this, many states are simply lying about their numbers. One statistic that the federal government requires yearly progress in is graduation rates. This is supposed to be measured as the percentage of students that earn regular diplomas within four years. However states have found ways to manipulate this data to paint a better picture of their “progress.” Some states count students that have obtained GED’s, other states only count dropout rates, leaving out students that transfer only to fail later. For example, a Study by Jay Greene found that North Carolina’s true graduation rate was estimated at about 63%, a number far below the 92.4% that the state had reported. Upon further investigation, it was uncovered that North Carolina based its graduation rate on the “percentage of diploma recipients who got their diploma in four years or less.” This manipulation of the data undermines performance and severely cripples public schools.

So why not dismantle the entire public school system? Why not place education on the free market? At first consideration, outrage at this concept seems normal. But what are people so mad about? On the surface it seems as if the worry is that low income families will not have the money to send their children to school. But in a market system there will always be some level of education available for all families, in all income brackets. The concern than becomes the quality of the education you are able to purchase. Faced with this question, I would suggest you analyze the quality of education that is available now, through the public system. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 50% of Highschool seniors did not know what 87% of 10 is. Furthermore, the NAEP report stated that 58% could not name Plato as the author of “The Republic,” and 54% could not identify the half century during which the Civil War occurred.

This is the education your tax dollars fund. Think about whether or not that tax money could be used to send our children to a better, private school.

Searching through political cartoons, I came across this gem that describes the current political climate perfectly.

The Appeaser

It's titled The Appeaser. And it is drawn by someone we all know. Dr. Seuss. Now it isn't that Dr. Seuss was a clairvoyant, but that he, unlike many around him, realized the threat that Hitler posed to the world. Like Winston Churchill, he attempted to warn those around him, and like Churchill's peers, many of them closed their eyes and turned deaf ears, in hopes of avoiding another war.

And what exactly happened? One of the most violent wars in world history took place across all of Europe, instead of in Germany alone.

Sound familiar? If it does, than you are in the same boat as I. Knowing that we are headed down the same path, and yet we are powerless to stop it. Many in Washington are simply not willing to do what it takes to answer the threat Islamic-fascism poses to the western world.

I could not count how many times I have heard the excuses, "One mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter," or "Jihad is not a violent term, it simply means 'a struggle'." Perhaps in a darkly ironic way, history is trying to wake us up to the evil we face today.

By that I mean that Jihad's true meaning could be substituted for a nicer sounding 'struggle.' But remember that Mein Kampf also meant 'my struggle,' and it will cost us dearly to ignore it once more.

The term is less important than the actions of those that believe in it. Everywhere across the Muslim world, they say "death to America," or call us "infidels." Openly they call for our destruction, yet we sit still, giving them time. They may not be rearming the Rhineland, but the message is the same. Hitler made no secret of his intentions, and they make none of theirs, yet we wait.

Iran is currently trying to create nuclear weapons. My greatest fear is that we will wait for an official declaration of war from Iran, or Syria. Or that we will sit idly by as they assemble a nuclear arsenal. And then, only then, will we realize that they do not need to declare war officially, or invade another country as Hitler did. For they will only have to push a button, to destroy Israel. Or ship a nuclear weapon into one of the many American Ports to kill millions of American citizens. I will quote from George Orwell, something that seems to fit, "War is evil, but often the lesser evil."

                                "When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at
                                   oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise
                                    more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness." -George Orwell

I recently read a couple articles that dealt with the changing role of the family for an English assignment. Of course they were assigned articles, so I was unable to do my own research of the topic, but was forced to write solely on the information provided to me. But, I am not confined to such a narrow view point here, so I looked up some information.

The two articles I read were Karen Lindsey's "Friends as Family," and Barbara Kingsolver's "Stone Soup." Both articles are supposed to offer a perspective on the changing image and concept of family in the United States. However, both articles offer the same perspective of the concept of family in the United States, and more importantly, both are ridiculous.

Karen Lindsey's argument begins and ends in the opening sentence of her essay. She states simply that "the traditional family isn't working." This kind of brevity is unparalleled in the world of research. Surely, if her essay was any good (which it is not), she would have won the 1981 award for "shortest and most profound research completed by a feminist," at the annual National Organization for Women's awards ceremony.

Lindsey goes on to say divorce rates are high, and even those that stay married do so "under grim conditions." She cites domestic abuse rates to uphold her theory that marriage is worse for women than being single. The statistics say differently. For example, The U.S Department of Justice records the highest per capita rates of intimate violence towards women, between the years 1993-98, were among women ages 16 to 24. Currently the average age at marriage in the US is 26.8 years for men, and 25.1 years for women. This would mean that more women experience domestic abuse before they are married then they do after they are married.

Besides that, intimate partner violence only made up 22% of the violent crime against women between 1993 and 1998. This leads one to think that perhaps those, like Karen Lindsey, are trying to use violence against women to attack the family, as opposed to actually helping women avoid other forms of violent crime.

Also important is that Lindsey did not include any statistics that dealt with factors such as poverty rates among single parent households, or graduation rates among students in single parent households versus those in two parent households, or drug and alcohol abuse by children in single parent households versus children from two parent households.

According to the U.S Department of Commerce, nearly 60% of children living with just their mother were below or near the poverty line. Similarly, about 45% of children raised by divorced mothers and 69% of those raised by never-married mothers live in or near poverty.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that "fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse. Even more startling, 75% of teenage suicides occur in households where a parent has been absent.

These statistics are absent from Lindsey's essay.

Another Issue that Lindsey raises in her essay is the concept of "the new narcissism." That is to say, the concept that people, since the 1960's are only concerned with themselves and their own pleasure or well being. This theory, which I am inclined to believe, is written off by Lindsey as a lie. She writes that the theory of "new narcissism" is only used by "apologists for the family," and it is "more than a myth. It's also a lie." After this, Lindsey goes on to address the differences between a myth and a lie, never fully explaining her statement.

Kingsolver, while never officially discussing the concept of the "new narcissism," does admit that "we're social animals." This is an interesting choice of words to describe the human need for interaction. Typically, when one thinks of an animal, one thinks of an organism obsessed with its own survival or well being; an organism that pursues groups because it is safer for them, not because they enjoy the company of other animals. This is why you typically see, on the Discovery Channel, a pack of Coyotes fighting each other for a scrap of food, but uniting in each others defense against an external threat.

In the end, neither essay offers a very good, or even acceptable answer to the many questions about the concept or image of the family in American society. Lindsey's essay distorts reality with one sided statistics, while denying most, if not all, aspects of the opposing viewpoint. That reason, among others, is most likely why her book, from which this essay is taken, went out of print a year after it was initially released. Yet it is still used in college english classes. This is, to say the least disheartening.