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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.

I generally call this the hostage-taking approach: "You fix the public schools, or your kids suffer". Or in the perhaps more common form "You hand over more money for the public schools or your kids suffer." It's not about skin in the game. Skin in the game might be having legislators and school boards have THEIR kids in public schools. J. Random Taxpayer (even J. Random Wealthy Taxpayer) who sends his kids to private schools is not trying to play the game without having skin in it; he's trying to get out of the game.

first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year

He's probably going to laugh at you and inform you there's no such thing as an innocent n-word.