Comments by "Kim O\x27Brien" (@kimobrien.) on "How Schools Are Dumbing Down Young Students in America | Thomas Sowell Archives" video.

  1. What difference would he have made? Reagan was in power from 81 to 89. Bush from 89 to 93? His men were in power.
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  2. The ones who can tell the biggest lies work in the advertising department.
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  3.  @goldensun441  Sowell finds himself ignoring facts when it suits his purpose.
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  4.  @malachimatcho7583  Its a talk meant to push for school privatization and put education costs on to the backs of workers and make public education something you buy from a boss.
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  5.  @devinligtelyn404  Sowell seeks to privatize education for boss efficiency.
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  6.  @Nick-fg4dq  No? Why is it that nearly everything positive in the world history is attributed by him to markets and investors? Only something bad occurs when government or a monopoly gets involved and a business loss is what makes the whole thing worth while. When the bosses ordered a train crew though dark signal terrority a switch was left open and at 50 mph the engineer and conductor paid with their lives but the bosses only took a 25 million dollar insurance loss that's the kind of boss justice you see with capitalism. The bosses would have had to hire a crew for the switches or run the train at a slower speed at night so the crew could see the targets on the switches which the bosses didn't have on that one anyhow. Supposedly they were doing a safety upgrade at the time.
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  7. No for Sowell he would argue you git what you deserve which is nothing in his play book.
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  8.  @terrilove3300  The purpose of public education for the working class is turn out a new set of order takers who can pay attention to machines along with some basic literacy. Education is also the way to maintain social status and pass down privilege. Education for the ruling class starts with private schools and 5 to 1 student to teacher ratios.
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  9.  @terrilove3300  Education like healthcare is an overhead cost for the bosses industrial profits whether paid for with taxes, privately or with insurance. Capitalism always works to replace higher paid skilled labor with lower paid unskilled labor and machines. Simply put the bosses see no need for an educated workforce. All they see is the need to extract profits from sales and beat the Chineses Capitalist competition and other bosses in the world Market.
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  10.  @israelizzyyarrashamiaak766  He became fair game by making claims of having been a Marxist. The videos are NOT even posted by him but his followers who play a game of pretend. He a Republican Party capitalist think party fellow at the Stanford University Hoover Institution of War and Revolution. Just my kind of topic. He has a Republican cult following who post about him being a genius and a national treasure.
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  11.  @dominicj7977  Nothing of course. Buying a car is a skill where you need to make the sales manager panic to get the best deal. It a similar process where every you have a direct negotiation over the price.
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  12.  @sennaha  He begins his 915 page explanations of Basic Economics with the Garden of Eden from the bible and Genesis. Like the rest of his work it's meant to mystify though the use of notions and citations much like the work of a biblical scholar. He could have saved the reader a lot of time by recommending Marx and Engels basic works on economics Wage Labor and Capital or Value Price and Profit.
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  13.  @starspaceschool587  They all talk the same neoliberal Conservative Republican Party Line.
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  14.  @KibyNykraft  You sound like a post modernist yourself. Someone who has decided he can manufacture reality out of whatever ideas he has.
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  15. Shore blame the teachers instead of capitalists replacing higher paid skilled labor with machines and lower paid unskilled labor first. Since the end of the cold war you've come to the conclusion that raising the price of an education is good business along with bigger loans for the fewer positions needed at the big companies. All you want is a few order takers to run things while you sit back and collect your dividend checks and watch you property values rise.
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  16.  @jasonjohnson6344  What makes you think misspelling a single word gives you the right to go on RANT and act like the BOSS who needs to show what a superior assh*le he can be?
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  17.  @GRAFITTI000  Higher paid SKILLED labor with machines and UNSKILLED Labor. It means they don't need an educated workforce but one which can follow orders. The goal is to cut education expenses which is an overhead cost on capital not to improve education. They want vouchers and school choice so they can create a tiered and cheaper market driven educational system where those who can pay more get the better schools than they can get now. As far as they are concerned education is just a paper that entitles the bearer to privileges.
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  18.  @GRAFITTI000  Its not about choice it's about creating some kind of free for all fight. Everyone wants to choose the best school and then there aren't enough seats in that school so a free for all fight now develops over who can go their. .So then the wise free marketeers now propose extra payments for the school of your choice as the best way of distributing education.
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  19. Notice that Sowell himself has never done anything since entering academia except write books and a newspaper column. That he resides in the same bubble and echo chamber he so bitterly companies about. .He is totally infatuated with markets and cost benefit analysis. In Sowell's world of idealism everything needs an owner so it can be properly controlled or disposed of and everything needs a price so it can be properly valued. Anything that goes wrong can be attributed to either the wrong owner or the wrong price. The worst of the worst of course those who interfere with the owners pricing decisions Since a price will be paid later on accord to beliefs of this genius. . .
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  20.  @israelizzyyarrashamiaak766  Sowell wants to claim he was a marxist which makes him fair game for political criticism. If their is one national group that has been subjected to the horrors that a capitalist crisis can dish out its been the Jews. It's the Jews who are courageously fighting the NAZI Hamas. The other place where people are fighting to maintain their national identity is in Ukraine. Do you think was an accident that Jews played a major role in the Russian Revolution? The head of the Red Army was Leon Trotsky (Bernstein) a Ukrainian Jew? Marx taught me about capitalism, Lenin about Imperialism and Trotsky about the Soviet Union how it had a contradictory nature.
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  21.  @MelissaR784  Sorry the Socialist Workers Party is not the CP USA.
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  22. Ya that's real nice of those Professors to recognize the janitor. In real life most of them could care less.
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  23. Hes just another corp boob for capitalism.
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  24.  @enterpassword3313  That it's class justice they lose their money are we lose our lives. Sowell says, "Big Risk Big Reward" Well Big Risk Big Loss also. There was no need to run Amtck Train at 50 mph at night though an area where the signals were down for maintenance (dark signal territory.) Just like running these extra long trains with hazardous materials and no caboose like in East Palestine, Ohio. They save on labor time because they decided it's now cheaper to take the insurance loss.
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  25.  @enterpassword3313  For him safety is merely a cost issue. All his work is based upon his foolish neoliberalism. You look at the very beginning of his book "Basic Economics" and he has this basic problem of defining an economy so he starts with The Garden of Eden because everything is provided in abundance he says and then goes on to about how that is not an economy because every is provided in abundance and now goes on about scarcity which he says characterises a real economy. Well you can't have abundance if you don't have scarcity or vica versa. So he can't even define what will be a basic contention of his throughout his lifetime. Once he's got you mystified and convinced you don't live in the garden of Eden it's off to the races. The truth is we live in the natural world are limited or confined only by it and we create culture. As human beings we are social animals who labor with our hands that are shaped by the need to labor as much as the use of labor. Our voice box is made for communication. Economy is about fulfilling our basic needs and the use of culture to do so. Those small groups of hunter gatherers had to fulfill their basic needs of eating, drinking, clothing and shelter first before they could produce culture. The change to agriculture with its surpluses of food production is what began the explosive growth of culture. (science art and even religion.) This idea of scarcity is one every ruling class has used to defend itself.
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  26.  @enterpassword3313  When the bosses roll the dice in their wall street casino while others die for profits. The workers are the ones who take the risk and they should be the ones who decide NOT some profit hungry boss doing a cost benefit analysis. You do insane things like world war one and we end up with the results. You decided profits weren't good enough here so you decided to de industrialized here and move elsewhere. Its because the profit system itself is a mathematical failure.
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  27.  @enterpassword3313  You can't "own" a risk the risk is always either social or individual and very often both. You like to privatise the gain and socialise the losses. Take in big flood insurance premiums and have the government declare an emergency or act of God to escape the payment. It's your not in my backyard but fine in someone else's mentality.
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  28.  @Triumph2024. Japan was already defeated and seeking surrender terms when Truman ordered the use of nuclear weapons. Sowell insiste the bombing was necessary. Sowell still insists on the fiction of South Vietnam as a seperate nation and not an Imperialist puppet state created by the Western Imperialist powers at the Geneva peace conference with the agreement of China and the Soviet Union. His purpose is to paint the Actions of the American Imperialist government as one that engages in just actions to defend itself and not one motivated by defense of Greedy investors seeking to maximized the profits for foreign investment by use of military force as USMC Major General Smedley Butler explained in his essay "War is a Racket." . .
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  29.  @jasonjohnson6344  Like on how the bourgeois advances the division of labor to cut the cost of skilled labor with machines and unskilled labor until the laborer becomes a universal machine operators and tender acting like the machines he works with. Capitalism has no need for more skilled labor when a machine and unskilled labor will advance the cause of profits.
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  30.  @jasonjohnson6344  Lets see now he wants school choice were parents all get vouchers so the can send their children to the best schools so what happens then is the parents all choose the best schools which now don't have enough seats. Now parents are fighting over who gets to go tp which school and in comes the free marketeer with a solution either tests to send all the best students to the best schools or money for those wishing to pay more for better education. The best schools continue getting the most money and tests can be circumvented by private tutoring. Basically no matter what you do the higher your income with capitalism the better chance you can give your offspring. That's why education under capitalism reproduces the relations of production. The only solutions proposed by Sowell and others like him is to cut costs and increase competition as the solution to every problem. This is because they believe that accumulation which they like to avoid talking about is fine as long as it's going into private hands which they see as those best able to decide what to do with it. They mock John L Lewis as the greatest oil salesman because he only had a tenth grade education but was someone Presidents had to listen too. His leadership of the CIO industrial union movement costs the bosses dearly in profits in basic industries like automobile, steel, rubber and electrical. FDR also had his Lewis phone tapped.
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  31.  @SireJaxs  So now what? Your a skin nationalist? Malcolm X told the truth about both parties. It would be one thing IF he was talking about giving Black parents in majority white school districts choice but it is quite another when everyone gets it. It depend on how you want to deal the effects of past discrimination. If you want to improve schools as a whole school choice is not going to work for the reasons I gave. If you want to deal with the past effects of discrimination you can either have your own better funded schools or change the access for Blacks to the schools or some combination of the two. If you just want to have a "free for all" in public education with a capitalist system then give everyone vouchers. Now if you can't understand that and want to insist I don't understand what genius Sowell is and how I''m putting "a homie" down okay some have to learn the hard way.
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  32.  @richardcranium3579  Malcolm X is an example of the kind of uncompromising leader the Black American working class will produce for the coming Socialist Revolution. The communist movement is voluntary the goal is to create a cadre who can explain the affairs of state and how every injustice is related to the capitalist system of trade and production. Not a party of trade union secretaries but one of worker bolsheviks who understand how every argument that is made about politics is an economic one with implications for the workers and small farmers.
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  33.  @naejimba  He goes about disproving Marx and many critics by never actually debating the critic or theory but instead by taking generalizations some may have gleaned from their general understanding of the critic or Marx to then go on and counter the theory or idea by picking a special case. It's like saying gravity makes things fall to the earth and then pointing to the ability to throw a ball go up in the air as disprove of gravity. So he points to two things happening at the same time and then insists they must be connected. Like the decline of the two parent Black family and the rise of the welfare state. So he says this has gotten worse since the end of slavery and then concludes its the welfare states fault since both occurred and are increasing at roughly the same time. What he leaves out is that Blacks were subjected to all kinds of restrictions on getting hold of property after the civil war. That becoming industrial workers and the change from rural family life of a sharecropper's family where the whole family shares in the labor and the results of the sale of a crop at harvest time was not the same as being paid a weekly wage that only paid for you to reproduce your labor for another pay period along with the ups and downs of the market affecting employment. After Clinton's welfare reform even more families of all colors were broken up. So was it the welfare state or the natural workings of capitalism where the bosses seeking to make the biggest profits seek to pay the lowest wages and work the production workers the longest hours in a pay period. Obviously a worker with a family has more expenses in a city than one who lives on the land in the countryside where the whole family can easily work together. So is it the liberal rejection of religious values and a deliberate policy of helping that was doing the opposite? Or is it just the underlying way in which capitalism works for the creation of profits?
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  34.  @naejimba  Sowell claims to have read Das Kapital. So if you read that you would understand that it was Marx's and Engels attempt to explain the where and why capitalism does the things it does assuming that the goal of the capitalist is to make profits and because they are competition with each other than the goal becomes to make the biggest profits to win the battle of the marketplace. That each industry is in competition with each other for an overall rate of profit. Of course if you think the goal of the capitalists as a group and most of those individual capitalists is something elses then you would come to different conclusions. Sowell has spent most of his life trying to disprove the conclusions of Marx and even when he claims to have been a Marxists his own conclusions show he never had anything but a crude understanding. Mao's policy of killing pests only shows that Mao had poor understanding of the relationship between life in the food chain most likely due to the simple understanding that sparrows eat grain. Mao and others made other mistakes like setting up small scale iron production because Lenin had said modern industry depends on coal steel and electricity. Now had his followers been not so eager to please him they might have stopped the killing of the sparrows when the realised that it was causing the problem. The first scientist to synthesize insulin were Chinese. Places in Africa still suffer from locust plagues. They are of course written off since there is no political hay to be made by capitalist politicians in the developed world talking about what is happening in their former colonies unless it can be blamed upon a rival like China, Russia, or Iran. In the case of the use of fuel in an engine to power the automobile it could be powered by diesel or gasoline. The manufacturing of gasoline engines would be cheaper but the fuel required more careful preparation with the biggest problem being pre detonation. It was discovered that a tetraethylene lead would raise the octane level of gasoline. Now despite the dangers in lead it was promoted and lied about from the very beginning. It is estimated to have caused more premature deaths than any other pollutant in human history. Today the same effect is created by using ethyl alcohol with a solvent in gasoline.
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  35.  @naejimba  I haven't shown causation? Well If capitalism worked like the neoliberals claim they wouldn't get into these un winable wars. The neoliberals are smart enough to understand they need to say out of trade wars because they lead to real wars but are unable to understand that the motives of the capitalist are the same as the warriors of one group who want what the other group of humans have.
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  36.  @rroadmap  The capitalist realise they don't need workers who can think but only those who can take orders. That's why they let the school system go into decline. The need for order takers only accelerator with capitalism because higher paid skilled labor is allways being replaced with unskilled labor and machines.
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  37. You don't want them having Black Schools with equal funding, You don't want them in your schools, You don't want to have Black teachers in your schools. You don't want them talking Black. Is there anything you're willing to let them have for a Black identity or do you think you have some God given right to just grind them into the dust as if they never existed.
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  38.  @Hexadeci  The sole purpose of a bourgeois education is to educate the children of the bourgeois in the theories of bourgeois society. To reproduce a class of order givers whose goal is profit maximization.and acquisition of more private property.
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  39.  @jerrybell1766  Sowell wants to privatize education for boss efficiency.
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  40.  @gussampson5029  Capitalism replaces skilled labor with unskilled labor and machines first the bosses don't see need for educated workers. Most of their education isn't worth a damn. Its training to act like a machine. to take orders and hand out the privileged jobs to a few who can pay and have the connections at the admissions office. Cuba has no problem creating educated people they can do it because theve had a revolution where the working people are in charge of the wealth and resources of their country. They discus how to solve their problems not who gets the money.
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  41.  @gussampson5029  You only interested in cutting your tax rrate so you can buy more government bonds.
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  42. His idea of being on the left was to read Karl Marx and then get a degree in economics and go to grad school. He was convinced that Communists were taking over the US Labor dept and when his professors got him a job there they had played the young student for a fool.
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  43.  @matthewbyrd398  Another Corp Republican Rino who belongs to the uniparty.
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  44.  @matthewbyrd398  You didn't see his interview where he favored Trump's election because he thought Trump would be easier to Impeach?
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  45.  @matthewbyrd398  So your a Corp uniparty supporter also?
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  46.  @sennaha  His supporters prefer their own indoctrination into his own love of the capitalist system with its prices and markets seen in his 500 page diatribe Basic Economics.
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  47.  @richardcranium3579  Do we have a choice? If you don't understand how capitalism works and what is contradictions are and why it must be replaced and who will do that than you will never be able to understand the hows and whys of 19th and 20th Century history. Their are reasons the workers can't just take over capitalism and run it with the methods of profit and loss they way the capitalist have done. That's why the Chinese are having the same kind of problems that the United States does.
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  48. I agree the man is insane  @joeldeleon6107 
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  49. Teacher wanting to get paid is such a crime. He can always make some donations to the school of his choice.
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  50. Sowell said, "Reagan should break the NEA like the air traffic controllers union".
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  51.  @enterpassword3313  Reagan couldn't get away with everything he or Sowell want because they are limited by the results of the past class struggle and the workings of capitalism and its government. The president may make the final decision but he doesn't do so without advice and in some cases it requires the Senate or new legislation or the courts. They are both capitalist parties so it's more like factional differences. .
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