Parable Of The Swim Team

IN THIS COMPLEX world, how can an ordinary person cope without instruction from the experts? That’s the rationale for liberal colonialism, under which the average American is ruled by a colonial administration of liberal experts. Just like the colonialists of the nineteenth century, liberals find themselves called to minister to the natives of the inner cities and suburbia of America.

Without the tutelage of experts, after all, many people will stumble, and we can’t allow that to happen.

Or is it possible that ordinary people are perfectly able to run their lives without expert supervision?

The real problem with colonialism only surfaced once the European imperialists had lost their nerve and gave up their colonies. They had imposed a foreign system upon an aboriginal people and destroyed their aboriginal culture. Unable to replicate the colonial culture, and unable to return to the Garden of Eden of their aboriginal culture the former colonies collapsed in ignominy and shame.

What will happen when the liberal colonial masters lose their nerve and withdraw from the schools and the welfare offices of America? For over a century they have relieved their colonial subjects from all responsibility for educating their children and living a responsible life? Will the suburbs and inner cities of America collapse into disorder like the former colonies of Africa? Perhaps not. We’ve learned from the school choice movement and the welfare reform of 1996 that ordinary people can be responsible for their lives. Indeed, there is a hint that they may turn out to be better at running their lives than the experts.

Now comes the heart-warming story of the Mighty Marlins, the Marysville, Washington swim team.

It used to be that the swim club in Marysville was run as an extracurricular activity by the Marysville School District. But a couple of years ago, the parents got fed up. The swim coach supplied by the school district wasn’t up to the job and the good kids were leaving for other, better swim programs.

So the parents went to the school district and offered to take the program private. They would hire their own coach; they would rent pool time at the Maryville-Pilchuck pool; they would collect the fees. No problem, said the school district; the program was losing money, even though it charged the members of the swim team extra.

Of course, under private management the Marysville Marlins Swim Club thrived. There are now over 90 kids on the swim team, even though the club has to pay for their coach and pool time.

And even though the monthly fee now covers the expenses of the swim team for each student, the program is now making money.

Recently the school district expressed an interest in taking over the newly profitable Mighty Marlins Swim Club.

The great conceit of the twentieth century was the notion that we should turn over the commanding heights of society to the rational control of the experts, and thereby reap a bountiful harvest from their knowledge and efficiency. Ordinary people just weren’t educated enough, or wise enough to know enough about education to know where to send their children to school or understood enough about investments to be able to save for retirement. So the best thing would be to turn the responsibility over to experts. Instead of the higgling of the market, economic affairs would be rationally organized by the state. Instead of the down-at-heel dame school, children would be educated at the well-staffed, well-equipped common school. Instead of the chaos of private charity, the poor would be served by helping professionals. Instead of the second-rate lodge doctor, people would have health insurance and be treated by the best doctors available. Instead of venal insurance companies and stock jobbers, the people would be served by an efficient government pensions scheme.

Why didn’t it work? The experts have a number of reasons. Mises wrote that the experts would fail because they couldn’t compute prices. Hayek said that they would fail because a few hundred government planners can’t outperform millions of consumers. But maybe the answer is simpler than that. Maybe what you really need is a bunch of people who care enough to make a difference. Like the good people at the Mighty Marlins Swim Club.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

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At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
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