Author: Crowhill Report

Trust the police, but only if you have an effective watchdog

A basic Crowhill political principle is that some people have to have power to create and maintain a successful society, but you can never trust anyone with power. Power will corrupt. It’s a matter of when, not if.

It looks like the Brits are getting another example of this principle. Daniel Morgan murder report: the ‘devastating’ verdict for Scotland Yard

Police will become corrupt. It’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter how many nice people become policemen, or how many good, self-sacrificing things policemen do. They’ll eventually cover for one another, lie, hide evidence, take bribes, etc., unless there’s a strong force to keep them in line.

Which is, of course, the secret to handing out power. You give group A power, but you give group B the power to kick them back in line.

“Defund the police” is a childish reaction. If you believe there’s corruption in the police department (and of course there is), the slogan should be “audit the police,” or “investigate the police,” or “double the funding for public defenders,” or something along those lines.

She gets it. She really gets it!

I actually knew what Juneteenth was, but I found this refreshing.

Juneteenth — the annual observance celebrating the end of slavery in the United States in 1865 — is a holiday that many Americans haven’t heard of until recently. That has caused some to wonder if it’s just some new “woke” holiday invented by Marxist academics, the creators of the historically inaccurate 1619 Project, or some other group on the left.

I’m sure that is exactly what a lot of people are wondering, and with good cause. There’s so much nonsense being spoken and spread, it’s likely to make people suspicious of anything they haven’t heard of before.

“Is this yet another bit of nonsense from BLM or the 1619 people?”

No, it’s a legit holiday, and maybe it should be a national one. We need to remember our sins, but we also need to remember that we’re improving.

The good side of critical race theory

Mrs. Crowhill and I usually split the newspaper over our morning eggs. She gets the front page and I get the commentary and sports section. (I hardly ever read the sports section.) I often look at the front page over lunch.

This morning, Mrs. C pointed out a good thing about critical race theory: it’s causing parents to pull their kids out of the government-run indoctrination centers falsely called “schools.”

This movement — if, please God, it is a movement — is about 40 years late, in my opinion. Before then, while the government technically ran the system, they were controlled locally. And that is the key. We need to push things down to the local level wherever possible. Let people make their own decisions about how to run their lives, whether or not some distant bureaucrat approves.

Leaving aside the leftward bias in education, the anti-parent attitude, the simple incompetence …. The very idea of the central government running the school system sounds like something straight from a communist playbook. (Although Mao took a different path and closed the schools, which the government also should not be able to do.)

Since I started paying half-decent attention to public policy issues (maybe 1982?) there have been about a thousand straws that should have broken the camel’s back. “Surely this will be a step too far and people will pull their kids out of the ‘public’ schools.”

Nope. It’s asking too much for parents to give up the McMansion and the nice car so they can afford religious, private or homeschooling.

Mrs. Crowhill and I decided early on that we would rather live in a trailer and homeschool than live in a nice house and send them to the government-run schools. We’ve been fortunate to have nicer accommodations than that.

Anyway, maybe, just maybe critical race theory will be the final straw. I hope so.

“The world was awful until I came along”

That seems to be the attitude of lot of moderns.

This evening I heard a talk by Niall Ferguson in which he pointed out that most republics have failed, and that the interesting thing about the USA is that a republic survived. That should make us wonder — what is it about the USA that allowed it to survive as a republic?

That made me think about the classic distinction between conservatives and liberals, viz., when a liberal finds an inconvenient fence he tears it down, while the conservative first tries to find out why the fence was built.