When Government Offers You Lemons, Grow Avocados

In North Carolina there has been a surge in home schooling that is attributed, in this article by EAGnews.org, to parents’ rejection of the Common Core curriculum. According to the article, there has been a 27-percent increase in the number of home schools since 2011-12, and the number of children attending home schools now exceeds the number attending private schools. The best news is that over 180,000 children in North Carolina are attending either private schools or home schools, and therefore are not being indoctrinated by government schools.

I hope that, even when North Carolina makes the changes to the curriculum discussed in the article, parents keep their kids out of the government schools. One reason they’d be likely to do this is that they have already overcome the anxieties and obstacles associated with starting the homeschooling process, so they’re already more comfortable with it. Parents everywhere need to realize that Common Core is just the latest step in the government takeover of education; what existed before Common Core likely wasn’t much better in terms of content or pedagogy. More importantly the government school system, founded upon compulsory taxation and other forms of government force, was just as immoral before Common Core. For more on this topic, read “The New Abolitionism” by C. Bradley Thompson.

If only there were an analogous alternative for those of us wishing to escape the effects of Obamacare! (Unless you are a doctor who can afford his own hospital equipment and hire a private nursing staff, home medicine is not a realistic alternative.)

Fox News reports that a (slim) majority of Americans continue to oppose Obamacare. But this is little comfort to those companies who want to continue to offer quality health insurance to their employees while avoiding the so-called “Cadillac Tax.” In order to avoid the tax, employers are “shifting workers into plans with higher deductibles,” and “increas[ing] premiums for spouses who have access to other plans.”

From the article:

Robert Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates said he doubted many will end up paying the tax.

“What we’re finding is almost no employers are going to be hit by this ‘Cadillac tax.’ You’d be stupid to get hit by this ‘Cadillac tax,’” he said. “They’re all cutting their benefits right now.”

Already the “Cadillac tax” has been delayed, due to pressure from unions and other groups with political pull. Between the delay, and the fact that employers are cutting plans to avoid the tax, government won’t be getting the revenue it projected, which means Obamacare will cost a lot more than we were told it would. Nothing new for government, unfortunately.

A bit of good news from China: an entrepreneur there has modeled the solution to the problem of minimum wage hikes: cute robots that cook and deliver food in restaurants, each costing only $6,500. In China, that’s “roughly equal to the salary of a human employee.” Here, the salary of an employee is over twice that. Moreover, according to the robots’ inventor, restaurant owner Song Yugang, “The robots can understand 40 everyday sentences. They can’t get sick or ask for vacation. After charging up for two hours they can work for five hours.”

So, while I completely support the option some restaurants are choosing–adding a “minimum wage surcharge” to their tabs to show customers the effect of minimum wage increases–these cute robots make the same point in a way that avoids confrontation, and saves the employer a lot of money and headaches.

Bonus: you don’t have to buy a healthcare plan, “Cadillac” or otherwise, for a robot 🙂