What is a "legislator?"

More about problems with legislators and legislation

This might be considered an earlier and more detailed version of my post of a few day ago.  This one dates from the last Session, January 5, 2011.  It also elaborates on what we need to do to fix the education system (NOT "privatization", but more like "re-publicazation"  - what we have, now, is anything but a public system, as anyone knows who has suffered under it and its absurd rules and policies).  

What, exactly, is a "legislator?"  

In Montana, it's someone who has been elected to represent a Senate or House "District" in the Montana Legislature.  


What does this require or imply?  The short answer is "virtually nothing."  And with term limits, even the "on the job training" which used to allow the "successful" ones to keep running and stay in office no longer applies.  I was heartened to see that a few hours of the opening sessions of the 2011 Legislature were devoted to briefings by legal scholars.  At least, they recognized the problem.  

Basically, these "legislators" could just as easily have been picked at random, or according to some sort of popularity contest determined by how many people they know, or how much money they have to buy psychologically manipulative TV ads or slick brochures - in other words, how good they are as liars and manipulators of public opinion.  

There are no qualifications whatsoever in terms of their understanding or experience in government, the law, or any particular area of public policy expertise like the environment, infrastructure planning and maintenance, public education, law enforcement/prisons, etc.  And practically speaking, the only skills that count are fund-raising and maintaining an efficient media (propaganda and "public relations") machine.  

Legislators are not required to have a college degree, or even a high school diploma.  They don't have to believe in God, economics, engineering, environmental science, or any other sort of higher learning.  Nor do they have to be "ethical" in any meaningful sense.  All they have to do is to obey the "laws" which they themselves or their predecessors have already passed - which are very often contradictory or simply absurd.  

And most importantly, they don't even have to know what government is, or believe in any sort of principles underlying a free society, a Republic, a Democracy, or anything of the kind.  In many state legislatures, they do have to swear or affirm their support for the existing Constitution of the United States as well as their State Constitution.  It is clear that in Montana, many people have been elected who don't support or understand either one.  But this is derivative from the fact that those who vote for them needn't do so, either.  

Indeed, one need not be literate, well-informed, a property owner, gainfully employed, or possess any other qualities which would be necessary, say, to get a driver's license, automobile or health insurance, or secure a loan from a bank.  Yet, in Montana, a homeless person may be restricted from voting even if he has a PhD or some other superior demonstration of intelligence and respectability.  (It isn't clear that a homeless person would be barred from running for the Legislature, since one needn't live in the District being represented, but one might have to prove citizenship and a period of residency in the state).  But being born in a different country may make one's very presence here "illegal" - regardless of any other qualifications or interest in the future of Montana and the USA.

What, then, should be the sort of preparation which a real "legislator" or "congressperson" needs to have?  

I am not one to admire or defend the legal profession as it presently exists - much less the "criminal justice system" (now recognized as being little more than corporate slavery).  But the traditional preparation for the bar is certainly much of what a real legislator should have mastered.  

Law schools, of course, are a fairly recent invention, although the philosophy of law ("jurisprudence") has been an academic study throughout history.  Practicing lawyers, after a standard "liberal arts" education, were basically apprenticed, and many, like Abraham Lincoln, had no college or university education whatsoever.  They merely "read law" while working for a practicing lawyer or judge, and after years of such study, passed the bar exam.  Until fairly recently, one didn't need to go to law school in order to take the bar exam.  Like so many other fields, the major universities changed this to increase their own attendance and revenues.  

Merely being a great lawyer, teacher, accountant, physician, etc. is not enough to get a license to practice.  One must have the degree and "credits" from an accredited college or university.  Is it any wonder, then, that the professional class has become synonymous with self-regulating state monopolies?  

This is totalitarianism of the worst kind, because it deprives us of our basic rights to take responsibility for our own lives, and those of our families and communities.  If one doesn't have the right to learn, to heal, to produce one's own food and medicines, and trade the products of one's labor with others, how can we possibly be considered "free", or living in a "free society?"    

But getting back to what sort of preparation should be required of a Legislator, we can point to the "Greats" curriculum at Oxford centered on the study of the history of ideas - principally philosophy, politics, and economics.  One begins with a knowledge of Latin and Greek, or at least a thorough study of the classics in translation.  Nowadays, one might substitute one Asian language (Mandarin or Japanese, Hindu or Arabic) and one Romance language (French or Spanish) for the study of Greek and Latin.  But a knowledge of other languages (and cultures) is absolutely essential.

In most countries of the world, students complete their secondary education being able to fluently speak and understand at least two other languages besides their own.  There is no doubt in my mind that the decline of America's position in the larger world is due mainly to the fact that such requirements don't exist, here.  Indeed, such real education is actively discouraged in every field that promotes corporate interests and the economic/military power of the state.  

In "The Education of Henry Adams," the son and grandson of two Presidents, claimed that all one really needed to learn in school was German, French, Spanish, and mathematics.  All the rest could better be learned from life experience, from independent or guided reading, and the development and self-realization consistent with an ethical, free society.  He might have added "learning how to learn" and "becoming a life-long learner" - but that is implicit in what he wrote in the rest of the book.  

Most "progressive" or "humanistic" education theories support or emphasize those things, too, as well as having mentors and exemplars from whom one can learn directly.  Rows of students listening to a teacher lecture and completing reading and writing assignments is virtually worthless as a learning experience, yet that is what we spend most of our money on in "public education" - at the same time starving libraries and educational broadcasting, museums, music education, and all sorts of community programs which don't require massive spending and a whole professional class to maintain them.  No wonder so many opt for home schooling, unschooling, community schooling, or whatever.  

The seven medieval "liberal arts" were somewhat different than what we think of, today, and included grammar, logic, rhetoric (epistemology - the theory of knowledge as presented in speech as well as written composition/exposition), and the four branches of mathematics - arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.  With that foundation, one proceeded to study theology, ethics (moral science, including history and politics), medicine, and the natural sciences (primarily cosmology, biology, and other aspects of "natural philosophy.")

Paradoxically, the "liberal arts" today are considered irrelevant and useless - to be distinguished from "practical" studies like business, accounting, medicine, engineering, or scientific research, as well as the "fine arts".  Yet, it is obvious that the real Liberal Arts are the foundation for all other learning and practice.  In some respects, math and science are much better taught and understood than they were 50 or 100 years ago - even in American public schools, which rank near the bottom in achievement in these (and all other) subjects, relative to other "developed" prosperous nations. 

"Computer literacy" could go a long way towards enabling our society to function at a higher level.  However, simply being able to do e-mail or Facebook, or even spread sheets, CAD graphics, or other workplace skills seems to have little value in helping students (or future legislators) to think more clearly and critically.  

Artistic creativity is also much advanced in today's quality high schools, but such schools, instead of being the norm, are ever rarer and more exclusionary in their enrollments.  Most "education reform" now consists of closing down "failing schools", but few of those displaced can get into better ones.  In many cases, they literally have to "win the lottery."  Mostly, they are shunted into already overcrowded regular schools, thus forcing them to move from poor to totally failing.  

And the corporate "charter schools" have most of the same problems, with a much greater cost to the taxpayers and/or other sources of funding.  Still, they are so much superior to the failed state bureaucracy schools that virtually all public school students would attend an independent, self-governing charter school, magnet school, or other "reformed" institution if they had the means or were permitted to do so.  

In Montana, the public education system is very nearly as bad as it is in the inner cities.  Test scores (now a practically worthless measure of anything) are marginally better, but the numbers of students mastering calculus in the K-12 systems, for example, is still less than 10%.  I recently read that only 8% of college students are enrolled in a foreign language course - and this is NOT because they are already fluent in 2 foreign languages, as nearly all European, Japanese, Korean, or Russian students are.  

In America, we still hold on to the archaic "English system" of weights and measures, which even the English and Canadians no longer use.  This in itself costs us the equivalent of years of schooling in science, engineering, and international trade and other relations, since our high school and college graduates don't even think in the same terms as the rest of the world.  And we are arrogant and proud of the fact that other nations must adapt to our ignorance, rather than improving the quality of our own understanding!  

A knowledge of history is practically extinct in our secondary schools, and is certainly short-changed in the state colleges and universities - even for those who plan to teach history or broadfield social sciences.  Someone said that "All we learn from history is that we don't learn from history," and that is now taken to be a justification for ignoring our own history entirely - let alone that of other nations and peoples.  

The study of psychology is similarly reduced to psycho-babble, without history or context, and usually restricted to the ideas of "rehabilitation" or other counseling, rather than the development of the mind and spirit.  In my own field, economics, I have despaired of ever being able to communicate even the simplest concepts of value and cost, substitution, or the meaning of property, production, and trade.  I would venture to say that not one out of 10 Montana legislators understands the concept of "opportunity cost", or that more government spending and services requires more taxes on those most able to pay them.  It is as though the "laws" or principles of economics simply don't exist for government officials or legislators.  And even when they do, it's in the form of some sort of convoluted, special case idea like a Keynesian "stimulus" policy which is the equivalent of a shot of adrenalin (borrowed, costing 1/3 of one's annual income) for a body which is already in cardiac arrest.  

Instead of "future focus" and the 7th Generation Rule of Native Americans, our state and federal governments operate on the principle that "in the long run, we'll all be dead."  And even then, don't collect any taxes from the deceased.  Unlike the Federal government, Montana must have a "balanced budget," but there is no requirement that pension funds, Worker's Comp, or other future liabilities must be taken into account.  Meanwhile, the "conservative, free-market" (itself a contradiction in terms) advocates claim that any "surplus" must be "given back" to "those who earned it" - meaning, usually, millionaires or billionaire corporations who have stolen or expropriated their wealth at the expense of Nature, indigenous people, or the working poor - not to mention the less-wealthy and powerful taxpayers.  Military force, "the criminal justice system," and the printing press are the sources of all this "surplus" wealth - not the "discipline" and "entrepreneurial genius" of a few patent-holders and the highly-trained, privileged, and organized "professional class."

One needn't even go into foreign policy and our local global nuclear military strategies to realize that we are on a course which could easily end human civilization as we know it, at any time.  Yet, those are issues which you will never see discussed in the Montana legislature, except to lobby for more budget-busting "missions" of the same kind. 

Continuing to burn coal and other carbon-based fossil fuels, alone, will mean the end of the world as we have known it during the past 10,000 years.   Yet, our governor and a majority of the cabinet (all Democrats, at this point) see nothing wrong with accelerating this process.  Thus, it is especially important to recognize Superintendent Juneau and Attorney General Bullock for their votes against leasing more state land to the coal monopolies.  One wonders if they would have voted the same way if "their side" was in the majority.  Many such votes are only possible because they are meaningless - i.e., the other three Democrats were able to take the heat, while a Native American and an Attorney General really interested in justice obviously couldn't do so.  In any case, they are to be commended - especially Juneau, whose own budget would have been reduced, under existing funding formulas, by the failure to lease the School Trust lands for coal development.  

But to add insult to injury, the price at which these irreplaceable coal resources were leased, was only a small fraction of its market value.  One can only marvel at the other 3 Democrats on the Land Board - all of them supported by the Montana Conservation Voters and other environmental groups - and their flagrant disregard for the most basic environmental (and fiscal) responsibility.   And yet, "liberal, progressive" pundits claim to be totally mystified why those who voted Democrat in 2008 largely stayed home in the mid-term elections, and why the Republicans won by a landslide.