Socialism And Legos

This is my first "fisking" of a news article. We'll see how it goes, and maybe it won't be my last.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022107C

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.GREAT hook.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children's Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of "Rethinking Schools" magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.Schools teaching socialism? Who'da thunk it. I'm just surprised that it came from a private school - these people should be the ones preaching the opposite.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."Anybody remember what Franklin said about democracy? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner? What the rest of the founders called Democracy - MOB RULE?

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."And we all know that roughly a hundred million Russians and Asians throughout the last hundred years were murdered by capitalist societies...that the socialist countries still existing today are such BEACONS of freedom, prosperity, and peace. Give me a break.

They claimed as their role shaping the children's "social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity ... from a perspective of social justice."Again, maybe you call a hundred million dead in a hundred years equitable and socially just. Maybe you need to quit using drugs, or have your brain examined, too.

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. "If I buy it, I own it," one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.If I buy it, I own it. The only way you can get your paws on it is buy using a gun, or by employing someone to use one. There's nothing fair and equitable about forcible confiscation of private wealth.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes." Play how we want you to, or don't play at all.The teachers quote the children:

"A house is good because it is a community house."

"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes."I'm thisclose to typing something REALLY foul here. RCOB moment.

"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building."Damn straight. But:It's MORE important to have more power than other people over your building.

Given some recent history in Washington state with respect to private property protections, perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Municipal officials in Washington have long known how to condemn one person's private property and sell it to another for the "public use" of private economic development. Even prior to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, which sanctioned such a use of eminent domain, Washington state officials acting under their state constitution were already proceeding full speed ahead with such transactions.In the past, eminent domain was only intended to be used for things like highways, hospitals, and other PUBLIC necessities, and only for things owned by the state and federal governments. In Kelo, it was ruled that eminent domain could be exercised to give private property to PRIVATE entities, as long as those private entities would use the confiscated properties to raise tax revenue.

Every Supreme Court Justice who signed off on that should be hung. From lamp-posts. I'm thinking along the lines of "reactive targets." Sort of like .22 spinners, only bigger.

Officials in Bremerton, for example, condemned a house where a widow had lived for 55 years so her property could be used for a car lot, according to the Institute for Justice. And Seattle successfully condemned nine properties and turned them over to a private developer for retail shops and hotel parking, IJ reports. Attempts to do the same thing in Vancouver (for mixed use development) and Lakewood (for an amusement park) failed for reasons unrelated to property confiscation issues.

The court's ruling in Kelo, however, whetted municipal condemnation appetites even further. The Institute for Justice reports 272 takings for private use are pending or threatened in the state as of last summer. It's unclear if Legos will be targeted. But given what's being taught in some schools, perhaps it's just a matter of time.You're right its only a matter of time. I've been told for years by Europeans living in socialist countries that socialism can never come to the United States, much to their dismay. Start with the little tykes, and socialism will come a lot sooner than one thinks. It's the whole bloody principle of public schools - impressionable critters running around to the Prussian equivalent of Pavlov's bell, the whole perverse experiment is designed to drill out inquisitiveness and free thought, and create soldiers and factory workers, who will accept things without question. They're getting to them in their formative years, which is why this socialism crap is such a threat and needs to stop right NOW.