The problem is that we spent so long subsidizing the demand side that the supply for housing is hopelessly outpaced. The prices have skyrocketed over the past 15 years to the point where first-time buyers are largely priced out of the market. Want to drive home ownership in a sustainable way? Drive it at the supply side. That means subsidizing the whole supply chain, from land to materials to labor. Drive a massive swell of building to bring supply well above demand and watch as homeownership rates rise quickly but sustainably even as market speculators (who really just drive up prices further) get crushed under the weight of falling home prices.

Handing everyone a blank check to buy whatever they like (regardless of whether they can afford it) is the same thing we've done in the education market. The results are the same: prices soar and anyone who isn't willing to mortgage their immortal soul has little chance of getting what they're after (but on the bright side, we've made the immortal soul mortgaging a quick and simple process!) Having a higher supply than demand ensures prices drop to the point where someone other than the top 10% of the country can actually afford to live here. Steady or slightly falling prices encourages people who actually want to own a home (rather than simply investing in real estate for the sake of cashing in on a boom) to take that next step to do so. We need house prices to drop by 50 - 75% in most major markets. It'll create a much healthier, robust framework in the long run, regardless of how much hand-wringing takes place in the short to mid term.

Don't tease me.

Seriously though, it doesn't need to be aimed at just pervy teachers. It needs to be aimed at all teachers who shouldn't be in a classroom either because they're incompetent, apathetic, or downright dangerous to students. I understand that the politics involved is not at all pure in any state or school district, but the sooner we can get around to real accountability for bad and mediocre teachers, the better. And honestly, I think for-profit schools are a part of that solution.

I'm a big proponent of the way a lot of Europeans do early education (and you cannot imagine how much it pains me to say that) wherein the funding for schools is attached to each student and their parents are free to send them wherever they choose. Want lots of funding? Attract lots of students. How? Just as any business would attract customers: provide the best product available. No more free rides and extra bonus cash for failing schools; rather, failing schools fail and get replaced by better ones. Creating those better schools invariably must require shifting a good chunk of the funding away from administrators, bureaucrats, and unions and into the pockets of teachers. After all, how will you attract the best and the brightest except by providing them a highly competitive salary and great working conditions?

And who loses out in all of that? Bad teachers. Teachers who are just terrible at their jobs (either because they don't know any better or just plain don't care) will be tossed aside. Unions will also lose quite a lot of power, but not at the expense of good teachers (somewhat at the expense of mediocre teachers). Suddenly schools will be able to reward excellence, punish incompetence, and push toward student success. The worst thing we've ever done to our education system is remove all incentive to teach students well. Many motivated individuals need no such incentive, but their minority voices die on the vine as the administrative bureaucracy grows into a strangling weed gripping funding and control so tightly and completely that little light finds its way through.

The politics of how we get there don't need to be pure; they just need to get us to a point where bad schools fail (and actually go away) and good schools succeed. Once that's in place, the rest of the problems start to unravel.

Well no, most teachers in public schools still have absurdly strong union protection. Take New York City, for example, where teachers who were negligent, physically abusive, even sexually harassing students were placed in what came to be known as "rubber rooms" for months or years on end where they were paid their full salaries to literally do nothing. They couldn't be disciplined, let alone fired, because the contracts negotiated by the unions called for an impossibly long process to take any action against any teacher. The unions' response? "There are no bad teachers." Yeah...

May be true in Wisconsin, but in most of the country, that process has been extended and amended to the point where it's all but impossible to get rid of someone who isn't a convicted felon sent to prison. In NYC, you can confess to sexually harassing young girls and then spend the next decade collecting $85,000 a year (with automatic timed raises) all while sitting around doing literally nothing. And it isn't just NYC (though they've gotten the most press coverage). Places like California, New Jersey, and others have similar issues. The pendulum swung too far in the unions' direction and it's started swinging back the other way. And not a moment too soon!

In New York (City), you had teachers sitting in office rooms ("rubber rooms") for years on end because the paperwork and process to actually fire a teacher was so long and arduous that they couldn't bother even trying to rid themselves of physically abusive, sexually harassing, threatening, or otherwise unsafe-to-have-around-kids teachers. They had teachers perving out on young girls in their classrooms that they couldn't fire because the union wouldn't allow it. This is to say nothing of teachers who just did a terrible job. The unions' response? "There are no bad teachers."

You want to know why teacher protections have been under attack? Because the pendulum swung so far in one direction that we're protecting the jobs of perverts and the incompetent. So yeah, it's coming back the other way.

I don't think the nuclear weapon is covered for the simple fact that it isn't a weapon used to win a revolutionary war. Rather, it's a weapon designed to ensure everyone loses.

The tank and the helo? Absolutely it means that. How in the world could it not?

To claim otherwise is to claim that the First Amendment's freedom of speech doesn't cover speech on the Internet or that the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure doesn't extent to computers. The Bill of Rights isn't a listing of specific freedoms so much as it is a statement of principles.

The principle of the First Amendment's speech protection is not that you can literally vocalize ideas, but rather that you can communicate anything you want so long as it doesn't harm another person (fraud, liable) or create a major risk of serious bodily harm (inciting a riot, shouting fire in a crowded theater). The principle of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure is not that the government can't arbitrarily decide to come take products made from trees from you or look through those things; it's that the government must have a sound, rational, basis before it can search you or anything of yours whether it's a diary or a laptop. .

Likewise, the principle of the Second Amendment is not that citizens may own muskets, but rather that if a fight breaks out between the people and the government, everyone's on equal footing. Why? Because the guys who wrote the Bill of Rights had just gotten done warring with their own government and so they understood the value of being able to go toe-to-toe with a tyrant's military might.

So yes, if the military has those things and they're considered legitimate weapons for fighting and winning, then the people have the right to own those things as well. Restrictions to the contrary of that principle undermine the spirit of the Second Amendment by monopolizing force in the hands of the government at the expense of the people. Nothing would have frightened the Founding Fathers more considering what they'd just experienced.

Really? Are you certain about that? Because we've put a whole lot of money, time, and technology to use against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc and they all seem to be doing just fine against that Apache helicopter and its 30mm shells. And those Apaches have places they can safely land and be maintained and they aren't at risk for mass defecting soldier, mechanics, etc. (see how much of that happens if you turn the American military on its own people). And they're up against people who are poor, uneducated, and starving. If the War on Terrorism has proven anything, it's that this logic about "oh well you can't stand up to your own military in modern times because ... uh technology and air power and stuff" holds about as much water as a fishing net.

The Bundy Ranch standoff demonstrated that at least some people are fed up enough to start taking a stand, but are not fed up enough to start taking potshots from water towers en masse. I think if you were to ask a whole bunch of people who would ever consider open rebellion given sufficiently dire circumstances (understanding that some people never would no matter what because of cowardice or because they're benefiting from the power structure while others would happily open fire the moment they thought they could get away with it because they have an irrational hatred of all government - but that the vast majority of people fall somewhere in between there), you would find that they'd much prefer to fight in the courts, at the polls, and at political protests until every other option is exhausted.

And this is where anti-gun folks get confused: they look at the situation in the US today and they can't imagine why anyone would take up arms against the government, let alone be successful in doing so. What they're not understanding is that (almost) nobody is saying otherwise. You have to mentally fast-forward to a future situation where things have become so intolerably awful, so entrenched, so soul-crushingly bad that your average person has reached a point where they'd rather put their life on the line to try and force a major change for the better than continue even at the status quo. If things ever reach that point - where even average everyday people can no longer tolerate the situation - then open rebellion becomes a real possibility. It's at that point (and I sincerely hope I don't ever see anything close to that in my lifetime) that the Second Amendment's value becomes clear to all but the most willfully obtuse.

And it won't be a handful of private citizens with howitzers and tanks that make successful revolution possible (even likely). Rather, it'll be millions upon millions with semi-auto rifles and handguns who present constant, relentless, inescapable, unavoidable pressure from all sides. You cannot end a force like that. You cannot control a force like that. You cannot manage a force like that. All you can do is kill everyone and then you've nothing left to rule.

Much more importantly, my rights are not subject to revocation due to other peoples' fear.

We do care about social consequences. For example, we care about the social consequences of granting our government so much power that it can rule or end our lives with impunity.

The people hold the power, but only so long as they decide to keep it. Once it's surrendered, it's a long, bloody struggle to get it back.

And what about those of us who are intelligent, say that sort of thing, and actually mean it?

Look, I get that it frightens you that we have that right here in the US, but we've had that right forever. We still have that right. Want some artillery? NICS check, tax stamp, and some paperwork to file. (same process for the ammunition, actually) And yet you don't hear about people robbing banks with them or going after the ex-wife with them. Gee, I wonder why that is...

The fact is, most people are simply surprised/shocked to learn that Americans can own the big stuff privately. Most get over that pretty quickly when they do even a little research into the communities around buying and keeping that sort of thing, to say nothing of the history of private ownership of those items (and lack of problems created). Some people maintain the same position they do about all guns: "why does anyone really need that?!" The truth is, they don't. Just like nobody really needs a copy of the US Constitution, or a flag, or a right to vote, or a Bible, or privacy, or an abortion, or running water, or the right to trial by jury. Those are all just trappings of a decent, modern society.

If we start defining what rights people have by what they "really need", we're going to have a mighty short list. What a bunch of old guys came up with hundreds of years ago in the American colonies is that it works a lot better if you ask a different question: what do we "really need" a government to do?

You mean the government? The government did the bailouts after the government drove up the price of housing by pushing for unsustainable loans. It's been HUD's policy since the early 90's that every man, woman, and child should own their own home and it's a fantasy turned nightmare. It began slowly under Clinton wherein the undermining of mortgage underwriting standards began, then rapidly picked up pace under Bush when a solution to the problem was found (getting the bad loans off the books and into the hands of VCs).

The original problem was created by the Federal government's absurd idea that everyone should own their own home (impossible, ridiculous to even consider otherwise). When the market found a way to solve that problem (as it invariably will), we were off to the races in prices as demand went through the roof and supply was left hopelessly far behind. When the whole thing crashed, the government bailed everybody out who mattered.

Why doesn't he deserve a bailout? Because at some point we should stop perpetuating the ridiculous policies that got us into this mess.

Are you suggesting that the art history professors should work for substantially less? That the classes should be taught in substantially cheaper (both to build and to maintain) classrooms? That heating, air conditioning, electricity, and possibly running water should be cut from those classrooms? That art history students not have access to other campus classes or facilities or resources?

Because if you aren't, then what you're suggesting is that students in other majors should pay extra to subsidize the art history students and others whose major isn't worth the cost of a university education.

On a fundamental level, I agree that higher education shouldn't cost so much, but you'll have to speak to the government about that. By pushing every single person toward getting a college degree and providing them what is essentially a blank check to make it happen, we've massively spiked the demand side of the equation. What happens when demand goes through the roof and supply is left hopelessly far behind? What's worse, normally the market for education could correct by pricing some people out of it, but in order to further the goal, the government has provided a means by which anyone can get virtually any level of funding for any sort of educational goal (whether or not it has any chance of ever paying for itself in the lifetime of the student). Thus, an art history major can get loans exceeding that of most home mortgages with no income and little income potential.

Want to fix the costs behind higher education? Pull all government subsidies for students and redirect that money to colleges and universities with a history of successfully educating students (e.g. job placement percentages, 5/10/20-year outcomes for alumni, etc). Further, erase the legal absurdity making student loans the hardest of all loans to kill. That's the other half of the problem. Finally (and this is the hard part for most people), accept that quite a number of low-income students will find some or all higher education out of their reach. This can be partially offset by directing some of the aforementioned subsidies toward apprenticeship based learning (e.g. pairing young adults up with electricians, plumbers, etc).

And what does that do? It spikes the supply side of the education/training equation. Suddenly there's more supply and it's cheaper to do it than it would be with no forces acting within the market. That brings down the prices while incentivizing higher performance for the institutions (who have zero incentive now beyond whatever sense of benevolence exists at each college or university among the staff). It doesn't bring down prices to the point where everyone can do anything they want, but that's a fantasy anyway (as some are starting to grasp). Sure, you can push everything through higher education and they can do whatever type of studies they want, but many if not most will end up in crushing debt for decades unless they've chosen something with extremely high earning potential. And if (as you state) the purpose of higher learning is not simply to make more money, then we're doing it wrong.

So I don't claim to be an expert on this, but unless the videos and various accounts of residents nearby significant fracking sites are outright fabricating their stories as part of a massive conspiracy, their fucking tap water can burn seemingly indefinitely once fracking has sufficiently fucked up the local environment. That's pretty messed up. At the very least, the fracking companies should be required to provide a constant supply of clean, drinkable, non-flammable water in place of any water supply they're ruining. Further, they should compensate the homeowners for the additional risk of being surrounded by enough flammable gases that water ignites. Finally, once this whole earthquakes thing is settled, they may owe a lot of people a whole lot more in compensation.

And with all that said, I have no problem with the practice so long as residents are properly informed of the practice, its approval process, the risks involved, and the path to a quick and simple compensation method whereby they can be made whole in the event of any ill effects from the practice.

Would a dose of common sense do?

Consider for a moment if LA were to increase the minimum wage to $1,000/hr for all workers. What do you suppose would be the impact of that on jobs and the local economy?

Yes, and the riots in the streets of Paris combined with debts so bad the EU is rejecting their budgets and forcing them to reduce their spending ought to tell us all we need to know about that brilliant example.

You're right, let's get ahead of the game now and make the minimum wage in LA $1,000/hr. Better yet, do it at the Federal level.

That should solve all the problems, right? Everyone will be rich!