What a return on our ‘investment’!

One of our local collectivists wrote in recently, claiming to have had "a rip-roaring good laugh over the comments" of a reader who "thinks that because parents chose to have children they should be responsible for paying for the education of their kids. ...

"What he needs to realize is that when he pays his share for education ... one of the children we are all educating might be the guy operating on us in 10 years, or the judge handing out a sentence to the guy who murdered your neighbor," asserts our cheerful would-be Young Pioneer.

"Education has a trickle-down effect. Paying for a child's education now brings greater rewards for our society as a whole later. We can choose to educate them and give them a chance for a bright, productive future -- or we can use your tax dollars to build bigger prisons and more homeless shelters."

Look at that word "choose." Kind of makes it sound like we're being encouraged to voluntarily "choose" to contribute to the scholarship fund for poor kids at the local academy, doesn't it?

In fact, school taxes are no more voluntary than meeting a holdup man in a dark alley, and such "investment" rhetoric is completely bogus.

There's no "return on investment" -- that doctor isn't going to send you a share of his earnings (or even give you free or reduced-price care) because you "contributed" to his education by paying your property taxes years ago, any more than a Russian doctor today feels obliged to pay back the neighbors who were forced to finance his care and feeding after Comrade Stalin shot his parents.

That Russian doctor is now practicing in Miami, thank you very much, and quite rightly declares the "greater welfare of Soviet society" can go stuff itself. Russian collectivism meant medical students and their families didn't invest directly in their own educations, and weren't allowed to profit from their own educations, so the health care system worked about as well as our DMV. If you want to see the kind of wonderful care our current government schooling regime has in store for you in 40 years, go to Moscow, where male life expectancy is 59 and falling.

Compared with the illiterate young thugs with whom the letter-writer threatens us if we don't pay up (and there doesn't seem to be a current shortage of recruits for such duty), Alexis de Tocqueville found ours to be the most literate working class in the world in 1831 -- and crime was so rare that an un-escorted woman could travel the length of the Mississippi without locking her stateroom door.

Before we had these collectivist, compulsion schools.

Care to try that now, after a century and a half of imposed pacifist enlightenment and busy kindling of the light of learning in the most profligate government youth camps in the history of the world?

And why should this doctrine stop with schooling?

Isn't it equally true that "feeding children has a trickle-down effect; paying for a child's food now brings greater rewards for our society as a whole later"? Why don't the collectivists require that I feed other people's children, too?

Oh, wait, they do. I'm also made to fund "food stamps" and free hot breakfasts and lunches for school kids, too, whether I like it or not.

But once the complete care of offspring becomes a collective responsibility, doesn't the Great Collective have a right to step in and limit costs by restricting families to one child apiece, requiring the abortion of any further children -- the same way it can ban helmet-less motorcycle riding because it costs "us" too much in hospital bills?

Of course it can. The Chinese communists do this, already. Anyone who objects is just being "selfish and greedy."

This returns us to our suggested experiment from last week.

Let's poll a representative sampling of current high school upperclassmen or recent graduates, seeking to determine whether the government youth camps are surreptitiously propagandizing our kids on issues far afield from grammar and algebra:

Ask our sample group whether marrying young -- at 19, say -- and starting a large family is a wise and admirable undertaking, or whether "teenage pregnancy is a dead-end behavior likely to trap you in permanent poverty" -- and please note the consistent absence of the important qualifier "unwed" before "teenage pregnancy."

I'm not saying either answer is necessarily right for every young person. But as the fertility rate of Americans descended from persons who came here legally before the Second World War falls toward the replacement rate, this country faces a demographic and cultural shift reminiscent of that now confronting large sections of Western Europe, where reproduction rates below 2.1 among the older racial and cultural group facilitates a de facto takeover by immigrants of massively different race, language and culture -- a nonviolent version of the intended conquest which Charles Martel so famously halted at Tours in 732.

(Whoops, delete that "nonviolent" part. As I write this, "disenfranchised" black and Muslim immigrant youth are burning libraries and day care centers -- noted wellsprings of racial oppression -- in the suburbs of Paris.)

Because religions with substantial followings still advise their followers to "be fruitful and multiply," you'd expect the answer to our fertility question to be hotly debated. Instead, I suspect more than 90 percent of our test group will drone out the answer "dead-end behavior," almost as though it's memorized.

How could this be, unless the schools have been actively propagandizing their charges on this issue?

If foreign enemy agents were sneaking into America and poisoning our water supplies with sterilizing agents, we'd consider that important. So why shouldn't there be a wide-ranging public debate about any doctrines concerning marriage, reproduction and family size, taught surreptitiously to our young by government agents, that have the same long-term effect?

The purpose of such surreptitious indoctrination of the young is to foreclose debate on these issues, with anyone who raises such questions being jeered as a racist, homophobe, child-hater or promoter of mass illiteracy before he or she can finish a sentence.

But as Mark Twain warned us -- or was it Josh Billings? -- it's not the things we don't know that hurt us; it's the things we think we know that just ain't so.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow."