What if NFL Played by Unionized Teachers' Rules?

Spending per public school pupil almost tripled since 1970, while standardized test scores have remained flat.

"Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay.  And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct. Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?

No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money. Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers' salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn't rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they've been teaching. That's it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you're demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation's children.  

Perhaps no other sector of American society so demonstrates the failure of government spending and interference. We've destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out. As one of my coaches used to say, "You don't get vast results with half-vast efforts!"

Our rigid, top-down, union-dictated system isn't working. If results are the objective, then we need to loosen the reins, giving teachers the ability to fulfill their responsibilities to students to the best of their abilities, not to the letter of the union contract and federal standards." 

~Former Minnesota Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton writing in Monday's Wall Street Journal

Yo, For Real - Ali G Interviews Andy Rooney in 2004

Ali G's 2004 interview with Andy Rooney didn't go so well.  Watch Andy Rooney end the interview, leading Ali G to accuse the crabby, cantankerous, crotchety, CBS curmudgeon of being a "racialist."  

The Shale-Gas Boom Comes to the U.K. and How The Multiplier Impact Can Revive Manufacturing

THE ECONOMIST --"On September 21 Cuadrilla Resources, the first firm to drill for shale gas in Britain, estimated that 200 trillion cubic feet of gas lie in an area near the seaside town in northwest England—nearly 40 times previous projections of all of Britain’s shale resources and, in theory, four times as much gas as is still recoverable from the North Sea. Cuadrilla hopes to drill 400 wells in Lancashire in the next decade."

WALL STREET JOURNAL --  "With Cuadrilla's announcement, shale gas goes from something ignored by policy elites on the grounds that it can only be developed in America, to something that is happening in real time in Europe."

And here's a key point made by Alan Riley in the WSJ article:

"One of the overlooked consequences of the U.S. shale-gas revolution has been the multiplier impact that access to large quantities of cheap gas can have on the broader U.S. economy. Shale gas could lead to a revival of the American steel and chemicals industry, and of energy-intensive manufacturing. It may also push food prices lower, since natural gas provides 80% of the constituent of most modern fertilizer."

MP: In addition to the shrinking manufacturing wage gap with countries like China, the "multiplier impact" from abundant, cheap natural gas could be another major factor in the pending renaissance of American manufacturing. 

Happy 60th Birthday, Color TV: 1951 -2011

Color TV: "The fabric of the rainbow riding piggyback on an invisible stream of electrons."

According to this website, this week marks the 60th birthday of color TV, although other sources report that color broadcasts actually started on June 25, 1951 on CBS. 

In 1956, RCA prepared the video above titled "The Story of Color Television," with this commentary:

"The world of color - color captivates attention and brings the beauty of creation close to home. Color transforms the commonplace into the beautiful, it makes the humdrum memorable. Color, the fabric of the rainbow riding piggyback on an invisible stream of electrons."

How N. Dakota Became Saudi Arabia: Interview with Harold Hamm, Discoverer of Bakken Oil

In today's WSJ, Steve Moore interviews Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources (America's 14th-largest oil company), and the original discoverer of the gigantic Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota.  There are lots of gems from Mr. Hamm, here are a few:

1. Hamm came to Washington to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century."

2. "President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy." We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar. It has to come from oil and gas. 

3. Since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector (see chart above showing oil production in North Dakota increasing more than four-fold since 2005).

4. How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."

5. Mr. Hamm believes that if Mr. Obama truly wants more job creation, he should study North Dakota, the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3.5%. He swears that number is overstated: "We can't find any unemployed people up there. The state has 18,000 unfilled jobs. And these are jobs that pay $60,000 to $80,000 a year." The economy is expanding so fast that North Dakota has a housing shortage. Thanks to the oil boom—Continental pays more than $50 million in state taxes a year—the state has a budget surplus and is considering ending income and property taxes.

6. Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, "I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties." That's more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.

America's Latest Crime Wave: "Educational Theft"

From today's WSJ editorial by Michael Flaherty, president and cofounder of Walden Media, which coproduced the 2010 documentary Waiting for "Superman":

"In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents in jail this year. 

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.

Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children."

HT: Sean Bellamy McNulty

Markets in Everything: Mobile Booty Lounge

Mobile food trucks are becoming popular in The Motor City, here are some recent CD posts here and here.  And now Detroit Lions' fans have been enjoying another form of controversial mobile commerce operating near Ford Field during Lions home game - a mobile strip club known as the "Booty Lounge" (see photo above).  

For a $10 donation, tailgating Lions fans can enter the Booty Lounge bus that features two stages, steel dancing poles, and a smoke machine.  Now the Detroit Police Department is investigating and may try to stop the Booty Lounge from operating at the next home game versus the Chicago Bears on October 10, here are some news reports here and here. 

HT: Brad Parkes