The deterioration of our public education provides strong empirical evidence of the failure of government-run and government-regulated systems in providing good education. Unfortunately, it also provides strong evidence of the success of our bureaucrats in avoiding responsibility for their failures.
The bureaucrats claim to pursue noble goals, and regulations keep growing, regardless of the harm they are causing. The last major regulation we received at public universities and other state institutions is about “helping” blind people and people with other disabilities. Who can complain about helping blind people?
On the surface, some of these regulations sound good. For example, the regulators want internet postings by government institutions to be short and clear. However, there is no clear way to distinguish what is clear and what is not. What is clear to one person is not clear to another.
The most corrupt university administrators love such unclear regulations as they can be used to reward their supporters by not imposing the regulations on them. Moreover, as university administrators spend more time on complying with meaningless and harmful regulations, these jobs become less attractive to honest people, reducing competition and making more administrative jobs available to the corrupt.
Unfortunately, the regulators do not apply the requirements for clarity to themselves. University administration does not even understand to whom the new regulations apply. At the end of last year at Illinois State University—where I work—faculty were informed that all course materials posted on the internet must comply with the new regulations. When I questioned the reasonableness of the regulations and their applicability to university course materials, the administration admitted that they are not sure if these regulations even apply to university course materials and promised to clarify later.
The new regulations also require specific formatting of text, supposedly to help computers read the text. Given the past record of our regulators, it would be naive to believe that these regulations were very good even at the time they were written. However, as technology changes very quickly these days, even if these regulations were good at the time they were written, they are not likely to be so now.
With Republicans coming to power, some people hoped for fewer regulations. However, bureaucrats have centuries of experience to build on, and regulations have continued. Modern regulators follow the Prussian traditions. Unfortunately, by the end of the 19th century, we adopted the Prussian academic system and imported their “experts.” The Prussian academic system turned education into indoctrination.
Prussia was a state created on principles of fraud and force. It was created by committing a full genocide of ethnic Prussians. Killing and robbing people continued throughout the history of Prussia. These new Prussians claimed to act in the name of Jesus Christ, seemingly forgetting that Jesus Christ did not rob people, did not kill people, and did not order killings of people.
(For more information on the Prussian academic system, see “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”, and “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?” For examples of other current problems in our education system, see “Grading by Administrators or How to Pass Failing Students When Pressuring Faculty Fails” and the articles you can access from there.)
Because of the separation of church and state, our regulators cannot misuse the Bible to justify their actions like the Prussians did. To justify their actions, our regulators misuse the United States Constitution like the Prussians misused the Bible. Our bureaucrats proclaim their version of equality to justify their regulations.
Of course, the regulators have provided no reliable evidence that the new regulations will do more good than harm. Our regulators seem to believe that the word of their “experts” should be good enough for us. When talking about equality, the regulators exclude themselves. They seem to believe that they have a God-given right to tell us what to do, and the rest of us should obey.
Equality as meant in the United States Constitution is an important principle. We should remember equality against the law and treat our bureaucrats like the rest of the people. They should be held responsible for the harm they are causing.
Unfortunately, with the forgiveness of all sins for many bureaucrats by former President Joe Biden at the end of his administration, we continue with Prussian traditions. People who committed the full genocide of ethnic Prussians also were promised forgiveness of all sins.
Instead of following the Prussian traditions, we need to remember the principles on which the United States was founded. It was not founded on the principles of force and fraud, but on the principles of limited government where the government’s job is to protect people from force and fraud. Those are the principles of the Roman Republic—not Prussia.
As historian Cristopher Clark recounts in his book Iron Kingdom, Frederick the Great of Prussia described his people as “fanatics,” “intriguers,” and “imbeciles” when writing about their beliefs to his heir. These are not the people we want to follow.
Private companies developed technologies to make internet more accessible to disabled people before regulators started telling everybody how to do this. Why does anyone believe that a government-protected monopoly (our regulators) will do a better job than private companies? Is it just because our Prussian “experts” keep telling us so? As the statement credited to Adolf Hitler suggests, “Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and people will believe it.” Is this the principle our regulators rely on?
One great harm that government-approved and government-financed regulating institutions do is to take the place of the private sector. When private institutions that do not have any special support from government write rules and recommendations, people have a choice to either adopt them or to avoid dealing with those institutions. When government interferes, people do not have a choice whether to finance these institutions and whether to do business with them. Government takes people’s money by force and punishes them if they do not comply.
We can start reforming the current system by requiring that the names of the regulators and politicians who approved government regulations be made public and that these people be held accountable at least to the extent that people in corporations and private companies are held accountable.
As the underlying cause of all these and many other problems is our Prussian academic system, which trains our bureaucrats and makes people believe that we need them, we also need to remove all its privileges, therefore stopping government interference in education and science that goes beyond enforcing voluntary contracts and punishing criminals. There are too many parallels between the crimes committed by the new Prussians and the behavior of our Prussian “experts.” Prussian schooling is not education. People need to learn history without the distortions offered by the Prussian system, so we can stop repeating the mistakes of the past.
Dr. Dalia Marciukaityte is an associate professor of finance at Illinois State University. She is also a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute.
