Rodent Regatta

This interview is long. It is also going to raise your blood pressure unless you’re prepared to think critically about things like race, diversity, affirmative action and the nature of minorities in America.

If you are concerned about that notion of critical thinking, learn more here.

An interview with a campus head of diversity
By Craig J. Cantoni
(For Internet publication)

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and four other justices have ruled that societal interests are served by diversity on college campuses. The reality is that the university brand of diversity and multiculturalism has backfired on campus, resulting in races segregating themselves into their own separate dormitories and organizations, and in race mongers taking control of faculty training and spouting divisive diversity drivel.

Don’t believe me? Then read the following interview that I conducted with the former head of diversity at Arizona State University a few years ago. The interview has been posted on my web site since, and it has proved to be very popular with readers across the nation.

The initials ”DH” stand for the diversity head in the following, and the initials ”CC” stand for me.

CC: Could you please define ”diversity” for me?

DH: Diversity has to do with blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native-Americans.

CC: I’m not so sure that you defined the word, but, nevertheless, let’s go on. So, diversity does not include Egyptian-Americans?

DH: Well…uh…you see…

CC: Or Iranians, or Bosnians, or Pakistanis, or impoverished Appalachian Scots-Irish?

DH: I use the government categories.

CC: Hmm, that’s interesting. I thought our system of government is based on the noble idea that we are all equal. I also thought that for the last 30 years it has been illegal in this country to give preferential treatment in employment and elsewhere to some groups over others based on skin color, ethnicity, race or nationality. My mistake. Let’s go on.

DH: Go ahead. You requested the meeting.

CC: Thank you. The description of the course that you are conducting for faculty here says that it will address ”diversity challenges, conflict resolution and the First Amendment in the classroom.” Could you give me an example of a diversity challenge in the classroom?

DH: Sure. The other day I had a Hispanic woman say in my class that ”all whites are ignorant.” An untrained professor might have responded to that by shutting her down or putting her down. But instead, what I did was ask the class for their thoughts on what she said. Interestingly, some other Hispanics spoke up and said that they didn’t agree that all whites were ignorant. You see, professors aren’t trained in how to handle that kind of conflict. In the Institute here, our goal is to give them the skills they need to deal with these types of situations.

CC: I must be ignorant myself. Must be a white thing. Did I miss something? Does the subject of whether whites are ignorant or not have something to do with learning math, engineering, double-entry accounting and other subjects? Do the laws of math change depending on the skin color of the professor or student?

DH: You’re missing the point.

CC: You got that right. What is the point?

DH: The point is that a university is a microcosm of society. It is a place of learning. It is a place where we address rather than ignore societal issues.

CC: Perhaps a sociology class might be a place to address racism and other social issues, but I’m not so sure that a racist comment should be allowed in a classroom or that the racial views of a student are relevant to other areas of study. I can’t help but wonder what you would have done if a white had used the ”N” word in class. Do I sense a double standard?

DH: Not at all. We value all viewpoints. You could have accused us of double standards in the past when we conducted diversity training the old way.

CC: I’m afraid to ask, but what was the old way?

DH: The old way was to separate whites from minorities in the class and have the minorities tell the whites what it is like to live in a white world as a minority. That made the whites defensive.

CC: Imagine that. That’s the problem with whites. They not only have pale skin, but they are thin-skinned. And to top it off, they are ignorant. I’m sure glad that I’m olive-skinned. Let me give you a little background about myself. It’s relevant to a question I want to ask you in a moment, so please bear with me. One of the reasons I went into human resources in the early 1970s was to advance the idea of equal opportunity. At the time, I was a big proponent of affirmative action and fought many groundbreaking battles on behalf of blacks and women.

Then, in the early 1980s, well before Roosevelt Thomas started the diversity movement with his landmark Harvard Business Review article, I would go on retreats with people of color to get in touch with my deep-seated feelings about race. And, oh yes, I got my undergraduate degree from St. Mary’s University of San Antonio, a school where half the student body is Mexican-American. At the time, I viewed my Mexican-American friends as the sons and grandsons of immigrants, just like me, who were trying to better themselves and live the American dream. At the time, we didn’t affix labels to each other and, in fact, thought that racial and ethnic labels should be done away with. My question is this: Do you wonder why someone like Craig Cantoni is so opposed to your brand of diversity?

DH: I can’t speak for you. But I’m sorry to hear that you are against diversity.

CC: Yeah, whatever the word means. It’s kind of like being against motherhood and apple pie. Let’s shift the subject from me. Let me ask you a related question: Do you think, as I do, that the races have become more polarized over the intervening years?

DH: Yes indeed. You see it on campus. Blacks have their own clubs and dorms. Hispanics have theirs. There doesn’t seem to be much mingling of races. That’s why the Institute is so important.

CC: Do you ever think that you’re at fault for the polarization?

DH: What do you mean?

CC: I mean that the diversity movement’s obsession with race has resulted in people being obsessed with race. I mean that putting people into categories makes them behave and think like they are in a category an aggrieved category at that. The government and institutions like yours have institutionalized the separation.

DH: You can’t ignore the fact that we’re all in categories. You’re Anglo, for example.

CC: Excuse me, but to the best of my knowledge, I’m an American of Italian ancestry. I don’t believe that I have any Anglo or Saxon blood. Since my forebears came from the Italian peninsula, which sits across from the African continent, and since a large number of citizens in the Roman empire were Africans, there is a better chance of me having African blood than Anglo blood.

DH: Okay. But the fact is that you are in other categories. You are a male, for example.

CC: You noticed.

DH: That’s the point. We can’t help but notice categories and respond differently to the category that we see.

CC: But my being male is not an artificial construct like you calling yourself ”Hispanic.” Nor do I petition the government to give me a group identity and group rights.

DH: What do you mean?

CC: Simple. There is no nation of Hispania. Nor is there only one ethnic group or nationality of Spanish-speaking or Spanish-surnamed people. The term ”Hispanic” is incorrectly used to cover many nationalities, with widely different cultures and history, ranging from Communist Cuba to aristocrats from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It shows a profound ignorance of history to lump all those people together into one category as if they are a monolith.

DH: I like to think of myself as a Chicano.

CC: From the country of Chicania?

DH: Cute. My family is from Mexico.

CC: So if you insist on putting labels on yourself, why don’t you use the label of Mexican-American? It’s much more precise.

DH: Okay, if it makes you happy.

CC: Delighted.

DH: Let me return to the issue of categories. Why is it if a black man moves into your neighborhood, you will treat him differently? Is there something about black skin that gives off vibes? Is black skin in itself bad? Or is it that you assign stereotypes to his category?

CC: Seems like you are the one dealing with stereotypes. You assume that at the end of the 20th Century, mainstream whites will treat a black neighbor differently. You’re right, though. If Colin Powell moved into the neighborhood, I’d treat him with awe and respect. I suggest that you separate issues of class from issues of race.

DH: Then why is it that when blacks moved into neighborhoods in so many American cities, the whites moved out?

CC: Because human beings are rational and look out first and foremost for their own security and safety. It’s the same rational thinking that Jesse Jackson used when he said that if he is walking down a dark street at night and hears footsteps behind him, he is relieved to see a white face instead of a black face. The fact of urban life in American cities in the 1950s and 1960s was that whites, primarily middle-class ethnic whites, saw block after block and neighborhood after neighborhood be destroyed after blacks moved in. Upper-class elites and university intellectuals have the luxury of intellectualizing about the causes of uncivilized behavior in the inner-city, about the horrible social consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, poverty and the welfare state.

But if you had been living in a Lithuanian neighborhood on the west side of Chicago in a two-flat that had been in your working-class family for two generations, a home that represented a lifetime of hard work in a mind-numbing factory it would have been unnatural for you to welcome people of any color, white or black, who had different values about property values and a demonstrated history of destroying everything that you had worked and saved for. To react differently would be irrational and foolish. To delete your memory bank of all personal experience and observations would reduce you to the intelligence and existence of a slug. To me, there is a difference between being discriminating and being discriminatory. The former is based on factors other than race; the latter is based solely and exclusively on race.

DH: Your negative stereotyping sounds like racism, not discrimination.

CC: Webster’s definition of racism is this: ”A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” I like that definition. And by that definition, I am clearly not a racist. I don’t think for a moment that when babies come out of the womb that there is any difference whatsoever, other than appearance, between one race and another in terms of innate intelligence and other human characteristics. Differences come later as a result of upbringing, social class, instilled values and that nebulous thing called culture.

DH: It seems to me that you whites…

CC: Excuse me, but you’re white.

DH: No, I’m Hispanic, er, Mexican-American.

CC: Not only do you look white, but the government classifies you as white; and we know how much you like government classifications. In fact, you are a member of the largest ethnic white group in America, far larger than Italian-Americans. Why you are classified as a minority is beyond me. It must be because universities are teaching diversity instead of math. Today’s graduates don’t seem to know that if you lump all white ethnic groups together, with the exception of one group, the lumped-together group will be a mathematical majority while the one exception will be a mathematical minority.

DH: You mean that you don’t see me as a minority?

CC: I know that you like to see yourself as a minority but, no, I don’t see you that way at all. In Arizona, Mexican-Americans comprise about 22 percent of the population, and Italian-Americans about five percent. I’m more of a minority than you.

DK: Let me finish what I was saying before you got us off on this tangent. I was saying that whites think in negative stereotypes.

CC: Didn’t you just state a negative stereotype? See, the government is correct in putting you in the white category. You think like a white person in stereotypes. I understand what your saying, though. You’re saying that Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan doesn’t think in terms of negative stereotypes. The New York Times Magazine must have been mistaken in a recent article. It said that blacks commit three times as many hate crimes as whites. Speaking of which, one time when I was riding the El train home from work in Chicago, three blacks got on the train and started slapping elderly white women, laughing as they made racist remarks about whites. Another time, a black man got on the train at the stop for Malcolm X College and sat next to me. On his briefcase were written the words, ”Whites eat shit!” in bold letters. And when I was a 16-year-old working as the only white on an otherwise all-black staff in an exclusive country club in St. Louis, my black supervisor told me to clean the employee rest room, which hadn’t been cleaned in years. Two hours later, as I was finishing the job, a burly black co-worker came in and urinated all over the walls, telling me to ”clean up this mess, white boy.”

DH: What does all that prove?

CC: It suggests that negative stereotypes and racism are not just a white phenomenon.

DH: Oh yeah, like you’ve suffered from negative stereotypes you who comes from white privilege.

CC: Wow, I’d suggest that you read the history of Italians in America. You don’t have to go back very far. Just go back to the 1938 issue of Life Magazine that featured baseball great Joe DiMaggio. It said that he was not a typical Italian who put ”bear grease” on his hair and reeked of garlic. And I guess that you’ve never seen the Godfather movie, which portrays Italians as Mafioso. You see, what’s different between you and me is that I don’t blame Godfather author Mario Puzo for perpetuating a negative stereotype about Italians by writing a novel based on facts. I blame the Italian mobsters for perpetuating the stereotype. I think the no-goods should be executed or imprisoned, and I support the government going after them with a vengeance. New York mayor Rudy Guiliani felt the same way when he was a prosecutor.

A couple of years ago I spoke at a diversity outreach conference of educators. As I sat at a table for lunch prior to my speech and introduced myself, the people of color at the table noticed the vowel at the end of my name and made the standard wisecracks about the Mob. I blame them for their appalling hypocrisy, but I don’t blame them at all for the stereotype. I blame depraved Italian mobsters like John Gotti for the stereotype. By the way, about your stereotypical statement about white privilege, let me say this: My impoverished and poorly educated grandfather immigrated to this country and took a job as a coal miner. Yes indeed, some privilege.

DH: But at least your grandfather was white, as were all the other workers, so he didn’t have to deal with feeling different. Diversity wasn’t an issue back then.

CC: Evidently you were not a history major. If you were, you would be aware of the huge differences between ethnic groups in the early Twentieth Century, the animosties, the tensions and the fights in the work place. Ethnic and religious slurs like dago, pollack, mic, papist, Jew-boy weren’t endearments back then. It wasn’t a loving gesture when an Irish cop bashed in your head because he didn’t like wops. People segregated themselves by ethnic and religious identity where they worked and where they lived.

DH: See, they needed diversity training.

CC: What, to make things worse? I take a different lesson from history. I take the lesson that assimilation worked its wonders without the help of social engineers and busybodies. Somehow industry was able to achieve historical highs of productivity and growth with a diverse work force, without sending managers to diversity training. Somehow the various groups gained political power, got an education and brought their families into the middle class on their own. Most of the problems went away after one generation, and almost all of them disappeared after two generations.

Blacks were another matter. That’s why the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. That’s why I fought to give blacks equal opportunity in the work place and used affirmative action in its original meaning of outreach. It wasn’t until later that other groups petitioned the government to expand the Act to cover them. That was a slap in the face to blacks, because it implied that the other groups had endured the same government-sanctioned mistreatment. A black female editorial writer and acquaintance of mine still bristles over that. She won’t say so, though, in her newspaper’s editorial page. The newspaper wouldn’t want to upset its Mexican-American readers.

DH: Maybe we’d be better off if we didn’t use stereotypes at all.

CC: I think it would be better if we recognized that some negative stereotypes have their roots in reality. To get rid of the stereotypes, we have to eliminate the roots.

What I hear diversity leaders like you saying is that your particular group is a victim of white racism, that whites are evil and that you are helpless innocents. A little more introspection might be helpful, just as I went through introspection on my retreats with people of color. It might be helpful for you to be more self-critical and address the problems in your own group. For instance, instead of petitioning the government to teach Mexican-Americans in their native language, at the expense of other ethnic groups, you might be honest about the abysmal failure of bilingual education and the fact that about half of Mexican-American kids drop out of school, a fact that has nothing to do with any other ethnic group. To blame that failure on other ethnic groups and to ask for special privileges based on your ethnicity is intellectually dishonest and counter to the principles of your adopted country.

DH: If you destroy our language, you destroy our culture.

CC: Whew. Let me count to ten before answering: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. That was close. My Italian temper almost got the best of me on that one. But hey, it’s a cultural thing.

DH: Why would that make you angry? It’s the truth.

CC: I’ve read about this belief, but it’s the first time I’ve heard someone express it firsthand.

DH: As an Italian, you should understand what is is like to have your culture obliterated. The purpose of public schools has been to Americanize people, to take their culture away from them.

CC: Obliterated? God give me the strength to contol myself. My grandparents came to this country because they preferred it to the old country. Maybe yours came here because they are masochists who hate America. I can picture them talking back in Mexico: ”America is an evil, racist country, so let’s move there.”

In any event, my grandparents and parents ate Italian food, drank homemade Italian wine, listened to Italian opera, spoke Italian between themselves, and lived with other Italians in the Italian section of St. Louis known as Dago Hill, where it was so clean you couldn’t find a cigarette butt on the streets. I never remember the government Gestapo coming into our house and demanding that we stop celebrating our Italian heritage or stop using the Italian language. Oh yes, they also loved America and American values, customs, cuisine and sports, especially baseball. And they particularly appreciated religious freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of association, property rights, the rule of law, and legal contracts all the basic tenets of our liberal democracy, tenets that are hard to find outside of the Western world.

DH: But the government expected you to learn English in school, not Italian. That sounds like tyranny to me.

CC: I’m going to lose it. You might be right, but it was really my parents who expected me to learn English, just as their bilingual parents had expected them to learn English. Thank goodness. If they hadn’t, succeeding generations of Cantonis probably would have remained as poor as my grandparents. By the way, we do agree that public education has a tyrannical side, but for different reasons. That’s why my kid goes to parochial school.

As a purely practical matter, putting aside the issue of whether a nation can remain a nation if it doesn’t have a common culture and if it turns into a Tower of Babel, let me ask you this: How would teaching every ethnic student in his own language work? Are you suggesting that if there is one Iranian-American in a classroom, he should be taught in Farsi? What would happen to the cost of education?

DH: If we can send men to the Moon, we can figure that out. What’s important is that we don’t lose our cultural identities.

CC: And there it is in all its naked, ugly honesty. You don’t believe in all of us getting along and not being judged by the color of our skins. You want to be identified by your category. You relish it. You believe in multiculturalism. Or is it quadroculturalism for the Big Four groups of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native-Americans? Or is it monoculturalism for your own group?

DH: I guess we’re not going to agree.

CC: We can agree on that.

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and management consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

So, you’re relieved that the Supreme Court finally ”clarified” the University of Michigan’s admissions policy. You think it’s all settled. Leave it to Craig Cantoni to show just how stupid this ruling is, and how it will keep on giving!

An Italian cheers and boos the Supreme Court decision

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

As expected, the political institution of the U.S. Supreme Court played politics and split the baby with its Michigan affirmative action decision. It created an intellectual mishmash by saying that racial quotas are bad but that it is good to consider race in admissions because diversity is good. The decision will result in universities setting aside a number of slots for applicants of selected races who would not otherwise qualify for the slots. Only a sharp political, er, judicial, mind can understand the difference between setting aside slots and a quota system.

Mishmash or not, this Italian is cheering the decision. Why? Because Italians comprise about six percent of the U.S. population but only about three percent of the student body of Ivy League universities. Thus, the decision will mean that Italians will finally get racial parity and be able to bring their unique experiences and perspectives to elite campuses.

In particular, the decision will mean that my 12-year-old son will have a better chance of getting into an Ivy League school, even if his academic record and test scores do not warrant it. Chances are, he will be the first Cantoni to attend an Ivy League school since my poor, uneducated grandparents immigrated to this country. I can picture him sitting in math class at Princeton, sharing his views about spaghetti with Bolognese sauce, the Godfather movies and the Sopranos television series.

What’s that? You say that it won’t work that way? You say that diversity does not include Italians or Greeks or Bosnians or Poles or Iranians or Tongans or scores of other racial and ethnic groups that are in the minority in America? You say that it also does not include Asians and Jews, because they get into prestigious universities on their own merit?

You say that diversity is really code talk for giving blacks and Hispanics preferences over my son, solely because of the color of their skin and their surname, even if they come from a wealthier, more advantaged family? You say that three generations of getting a Cantoni to the point where he might be able to attend an Ivy League school could be thwarted by a first-generation Mexican jumping the line?

Now I’m really confused. My lack of an Ivy League education is showing. I can understand that blacks are a distinct race—what used to be called the Negro race before the word ”Negro” became politically incorrect—and that they still suffer from the horrible legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, misguided welfare programs and government paternalism. But Hispanics are not a distinct race and have not suffered any more discrimination than other ethnic immigrant groups. I also thought that the label ”Hispanic” incorrectly lumps together over 30 nationalities, races and ethinic groups that have nothing in common but language.

Does the Supreme Court decision mean that universities are going make sure that they have the right proportion of Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians, Hondurans, Haitians, Spaniards and others? Will they make a distinction in the interest of diversity between a Mexican who has 100 percent Chiapa Indian blood and a Mexican who is a descendant of Spanish aristocracy? Or will they lump all of these diverse groups together in the name of diversity and pretend that they all think alike and have identical life experiences? After all, that is what the racial bean counters do with the more than 100 diverse ethnic groups and nationalities that make up what is clumsily called the ”non-Hispanic white” category.

Hey, wait a minute. Why are you calling me a racist for asking these questions? I’m not the one who believes in the government putting people into classifications so that politicians can pander to them and race mongers can monger over them. When I was a leader in equal rights in the 1970s and spearheaded affirmative action programs, affirmative action meant reaching out to blacks who had been denied opportunites in the past due to the color of their skin. It did not mean creating a false distinction between different white groups and arbitrarily reaching out to some members of the white race but not to others.

The Supreme Court decision is not about diversity. It is about reverse diversity. It is about arbitrarily lumping together widely diverse nationalities, ethnic groups and races for the purpose of favoring some and disfavoring others. This Italian says boo to that.
___

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com

What a conservative president would say about Medicare

By Craig J. Cantoni
(For Internet publication)

President Bush tarnished his conservative credentials when he increased the budget of the Department of Education by 11 percent and violated the Constitution by usurping states’ rights with his federal education standards. He threw the credentials away with recent his Medicare prescription drug program.

The program will cost at least $400 billion over the next 10 years and will create a long-term government obligation of $2.3 trillion, most of which will be passed to future generations.

If Bush were a true conservative, he would have made the following speech on Medicare and on Social Security.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

The nation is facing a moral dilemma. I am here tonight to ask your help in solving the dilemma, for I know that Americans can be trusted to do what is fair and right.

The moral dilemma is this: On the one hand, your government made promises to seniors about Social Security and Medicare. A moral nation keeps those promises.

On the other hand, to keep those promises under the current Social Security and Medicare systems, your government has to send the bill to your children and grandchildren. A moral nation does not do that.

We are trapped in this moral dilemma because politicians of both parties have been lying to you about Social Security and Medicare for decades. I am going to tell you the truth tonight, regardless of the political consequences.

The truth is, we cannot add new benefits to either Medicare or Social Security, or even pay promised benefits, without stealing the money from future generations. Like you, I was taught that it is wrong to steal, especially from children.

The root of the problem is that the nation had a lot more workers per retiree when Social Security and Medicare were enacted. Over the years, the number of workers per retiree has plummeted as the amount of benefits per retiree has skyrocketed.

Every two kids born today will be supporting one retiree between them when they reach working age. Based on present trends, an estimated 60 percent of their earnings will be taken by the government in taxes over their working lives, much of it for the Social Security and Medicare benefits of retirees. Even serfs in medieval times did not have to give that much to the lord of the manor.

Most retirees do not feel wealthy, and an unfortunate number of them are destitute and in need of help from their fellow Americans. But as a group, seniors are wealthier than most other Americans. For example, they own 60 percent of the nation’s private wealth.

Something is not right when a wealthy retiree pulls up to a gas station in his motor home and is waited on by a clerk with two kids who earns $64 a day and who sees 15 percent of his meager pay, or $9.60, taken by the government to pay the Social Security and Medicare of the retiree. This kind of generational income transfer has to stop. With your help, I will stop it.

To stop it, and to solve our moral dilemma, I propose the following:

1. That promised Social Security and Medicare benefits be paid to current retirees.

2. That no new benefits be added to either program unless beneficiaries pay the total cost themselves and not transfer any of the cost to future generations.

3. That non-retirees be given the option to transfer their Social Security contributions to private retirement accounts and to establish private medical savings accounts for their health care needs when they retire.

4. That all limits be removed on what Americans can earn on a tax-free basis on their savings.

Details on these proposals are being given to Congress and to the media. Suffice it to say for now that the proposals are the only way to make Social Security and Medicare solvent and to stop passing an ever-larger bill from one generation to the next, in a gigantic Ponzi scheme.

I have nothing to gain and everything to lose politically by making these proposals. But I have everything to gain and nothing to lose morally by making them. And you have everything to gain and nothing to lose financially by embracing them. I ask you to do the right thing for your kids and grandkids, as I know you will.

God bless you and good night.

******

Of course, President Bush will never make the above speech. He will not make it because he is not a conservative. He is, simply and sadly, a tax-and-spend Republican who has more in common with liberals on entitlements and other economic matters than with conservatives.
__

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist, consultant and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Here’s another excellent piece by Craig Cantoni. Enjoy!

According to conventional wisdom, education is the best way for the United States to compete in the New Economy of knowledge-based work, instantaneous information and the free flow of capital and products across national boundaries. The conventional wisdom is wrong and has led to the wrong national priorities.

The great education fallacy
By Craig J. Cantoni
(For Internet publication)

According to conventional wisdom, education is the best way for the United States to compete in the New Economy of knowledge-based work, instantaneous information and the free flow of capital and products across national boundaries. The conventional wisdom is wrong and has led to the wrong national priorities.

The best way for the nation to compete today is no different from what it was a century ago in the industrial-based economy. The best way is entrepreneurialism, coupled with the conditions that allow entrepreneurialism to thrive, including free markets, property rights, the rule of law, low taxes and a national culture that values risk-taking over risk-aversion.

If a nation’s competitive advantage comes from education, then the former Soviet Union would have had a thriving economy, since it had a well-educated populace. Likewise, today’s Germany, with its well-educated, highly skilled work force, would have a booming economy. Instead, it has stagnation, high unemployment, and a loss of industry and jobs to other countries.

In the case of the Soviet Union, of course, the preconditions for entrepreneurialism did not exist under communism. In fact, entrepreneurial activity was outlawed by the communists. In the case of Germany, entrepreneurialism is being strangled by the regulatory state, inflexible labor laws and skyrocketing social welfare costs. Similarly, the Japanese economy has been dead in the water for a decade, in spite of Japan’s well-educated populace, due to a reliance on the orderliness of industrial planning instead of the messiness of market forces.

Education is very important, but in the absence of an entrepreneurial economy and culture, it does not magically lead to a higher standard of living and economic growth. Granted, education does lead to breakthroughs in science and technology, but the breakthroughs would remain dormant without entrepreneurs risking capital to transform them into marketable products and services.

A case can be made that entrepreneurialism drives education as much, if not more, than education drives entrepreneurialism. It takes only a relatively small number of well-educated scientists to create scientific and technological breakthroughs that entrepreneurs can bring to the market, but it takes entrepreneurs to create a need for universal education for the masses.

This was seen in the early 20th century, when entrepreneurial industrialists like Henry Ford built new industries that created a demand for not only unskilled labor but also for tool and die makers, machinists, electricians, mechanical engineers, metallurgists, bookkeepers, secretaries, managers, and myriad other skilled and educated workers.

In 1910, only 13 percent of Americans had graduated from high school, but the percentage grew over the century in lockstep with the industrialization of the nation. At mid-century, as with China today, there began a massive exodus of workers from farms, due to huge gains in farm productivity, resulting from the mechanization of farming, which in turn was due to industrialization. Released from the plow, farmers could gravitate to higher-paid occupations and find the time to improve their education.

After World War II, the demand for educated workers accelerated as America’s entrepreneurial economy accelerated, during a period in which much of Europe and Asia lay in ruin. The GI Bill helped to meet the demand by subsidizing the college education of returning veterans.

It is important to remember that although the United States had developed its own educated work force over the century to meet demand, it also had benefited from a steady stream of well-educated immigrants, thanks to the opportunities produced by its entrepreneurial culture and political and economic freedom. For example, immigrant scientists played a key role on the Manhattan Project during W.W.II. And after the war, immigrant scientists from Germany played a key role in America’s rocket program. Today, the high-tech industry is dependent to a large extent on immigrant scientists and engineers.

The United States still has a net brain gain instead of a brain drain. But due to the Internet and other communications technology, American companies are now hiring well-educated foreigners and having them work from their home countries at a fraction of what they would be paid in the United States. For example, companies are establishing research and development campuses, technical call centers and software development facilities in India. If you call the AOL help line, chances are that the technician at the other end with the impeccable English is sitting at a desk in India and earning four dollars an hour.

This latest trend suggests that education is becoming an abundant global commodity and will not, by itself, create a competitive advantage for the United States in the world economy and differentiate the nation from other developed and developing countries.

America’s competitive advantage has to come from something that is in shorter supply in the world than education and is not such a readily transferable commodity. It has to come from entrepreneurialism, along with the conditions that allow entrepreneurialism to thrive, including free markets, property rights, the rule of law, low taxes and a national culture that values risk-taking over risk-aversion. Many Indian entrepreneurs start businesses in the United States instead of India, not because the U.S. has a better educated work force, but because it has a more favorable political and regulatory environment in which to conduct business.

Alarmingly, the U.S. may be losing its competitive advantage. While it still ranks high in political and economic freedom, there are danger signs that it is becoming a risk-averse nation, one that values the regulatory state, dependency and income redistribution over entrepreneurialism, independence and wealth creation. Some of the danger signs are as follows:

– Taxes and regulations are estimated to cost the average American household $19,000 per year, or about three times more in constant dollars than in the early 1900s. – Government employment is at an all-time high of 21 million workers at the federal, state and local levels. This astonishing number is about 7 million more than the number of workers in manufacturing. – Entitlements and other mandatory spending are at a record high and increasing, They now comprise two-thirds of the federal budget. – An increasing number of America’s growth occupations are those that are dependent on the regulatory state and that redistribute wealth instead of create it. For example, the number of lawyers per thousand population remained flat until 1970. Then, because of the growth in government and litigation, the number tripled between 1970 and 2000. Similar increases were seen in the number of tax accountants, human resources managers, safety specialists, benefits consultants, lobbyists, congressional staff and scores of other occupations to numerous to list here.

The above trends result in less capital in the hands of entrepreneurs and, hence, less capital that is invested in new businesses and productivity improvements.

Some danger signs are not as noticeable as the ones above but are more alarming, because they reflect the onset of a risk-averse, anti-capitalist mindset among the American people. For example, a law firm in Phoenix is running a TV commercial that solicits investors who have lost money in the stock market. It is an updated version of the McDonald’s coffee case, in which a patron sued the company when she scalded herself with hot coffee. Now investors who burn themselves in the stock market can blame someone else.

In another Phoenix example, a neighborhood fought the construction of a computer chip factory because of environmental hysteria. The residents preferred low-wage convenience stores and retail outlets in their neighborhood over a high-wage factory, not thinking through the long-term economic implications of such a preference, especially when it is multiplied by thousands of neighborhoods and millions of residents across the country.

The most troubling warning sign is the lack of knowledge about economics and history among today’s high school and college students. Illiterate in economics and ignorant of the moral and philosophical foundations of capitalism and our constitutional republic, they fall for every crackpot socialist scheme and think that ”capitalism” and ”free markets” are dirty words. In guest-lecturing to senior business students at Arizona State University, I have found that the attitude and ignorance exist even in business schools.

What are the odds that the nation will stop believing the great education fallacy and begin to establish a national priority of returning to our entrepreneurial roots? Considering that most members of Congress are lawyers instead of entrepreneurs, and considering that entrepreneurialism is foreign to government schools and unionized teachers, the odds are not very good.

I’ll close with a couple of paragraphs from one of the greatest economics books, Human Action, written by one of the greatest economists, Ludwig von Mises. It is telling that both the book and the man are virtually unknown in government schools and in Congress.

”It is not generally realized that education can never be more than indoctrination with theories and ideas already developed. Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur in seizing and opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy. The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand.”
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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and strategic planning consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Craig Cantoni helps you sort through the numerous books you might otherwise select for summer reading.

Books for the fire, firelight

It’s time to escape to the cool high country with books for the campfire – books for throwing on the fire and books for reading by the fire.

Any book about hound dog Bill Clinton and his phony, calculating wife is a great substitute for firewood. This is especially true for Hillary’s new book of revisionist history, Living History. It also is true for The Clinton Wars by Clinton lapdog Sidney Blumenthal.

Books about losing weight should be set on fire and used to barbecue hot dogs and toast marshmallows. The books blabber about blubber but fail to tell the following simple truth: If you constantly consume more calories than you burn off, your butt will grow to the size of a bus.

Books that give financial advice should join the blubber books on the fire, for they also fail to tell a simple truth: If you spend more than you earn, you won’t have any money. PBS star and author Suze Orman makes millions by complicating this truism with her five laws for financial security.

A book that tells the truth about wealth is The Millionaire Next Door. It is an antidote to the class warfare and redistribution schemes of such leftists as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ted Kennedy. The book shows that most millionaires became wealthy by starting neighborhood businesses, working long hours, saving money and living unpretentiously. Unlike Hillary, they do not become wealthy by making a killing in cattle futures and Arkansas land deals. And unlike Teddy, they do not inherit wealth and political connections from a philandering, bootlegging daddy.

Hillary and Teddy should sit by a campfire with Tom Daschle and read a wonderful book about government, The Law, by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850). Among other gems, the 75-page book makes the point that it is immoral theft when the government ”takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.” It can be ordered at www.laissezfairebooks.com.

Outside of politics, the best non-fiction book of the year is Seabiscuit: An American Legend. The meticulously researched book is about more than horse racing. It also is about perseverance, loyalty and Depression-era America.

And the best book ever written is my management book on ridding organizations of bureaucracy. Well, at least my mom thinks so.

Enjoy your campfire.

by Craig J. Cantoni, June 18, 2003, for the Arizona Republic