TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 786.

JOHN FUND: Practice Free Speech for July 4th: Fight PC Censors.

While the current topic of debate is the Confederate flag, a much broader battle is being waged against American history itself. Increasingly, courses involving any patriotic content or history are being dumped in favor of leftist “diversity studies” or “environmental studies.” Most American agree that the struggle against racism is vital, but so too is the context that the study of American history provides.

In his farewell address before he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan presciently warned: “We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important — why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. . . . I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.” In the more than quarter century since Reagan issued his warning, the situation in schools has only gotten worse. Luckily, popular books, films, and the Internet offer an alternative way of reaching young people and passing on a fuller appreciation of America. We’re no longer fighting just to get history into classrooms; we’re now fighting for the right to teach history in all its complexity, not merely the PC versions of it that please sanctimonious leftists. Free speech remains a reality only if its practice is allowed, and increasingly, more and more people are letting the censors and bullies have the only say.

Punch back twice as hard.

ANDREW MORRISS LOOKS AT TAXATION through the lens of James Scott’s excellent Seeing Like A State.

Scott offers four big ideas that shape his analytical framework. First, he argues that a fundamental need of a state is to make its population “legible.” In essence, a legible population is one in which the relevant characteristics for state purposes are defined and known. Second, he contends that by doing so, the state changes the nature of the activities the population carries on, the culture, and the society as a whole. In other words, you get more of what you measure. Third, he attributes social engineering projects in part to what he terms “high modernist ideology,” in which scientific and technical models are uncritically applied to societies, encouraging government actors to believe they can significantly change societies through administrative fiat. Fourth, when this ideology is married to a state with significant coercive power and civil society lacks the capacity to resist, the state does considerable harm by forcing an agenda on society without considering all the costs. Let’s consider each.

To the ruling class, the “considerable harm” is offset by even-more-considerable opportunities for graft.

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IT’S INDEPENDENCE DAY.

Quincy, Illinois, September 12, 2009. Taken with the Panasonic Lumix LX-3.

TALK TO YOUR FAMILY THIS HOLIDAY: Happy Fourth – ObamaCare Premiums Set To Soar.

IT’S ALWAYS NICE to make Twitchy.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Fewer ‘extremely proud’ to be American. “The older you are, the more likely you are to be extremely proud to be American, according to the data. People in the South also tend to be the most proud to be American.”

“SHIT ACADEMICS SAY,” A Social-Media Experiment.

I am not an intellectual, leading expert, or public scholar. I am a rank-and-file academic with the job of balancing respectable research with acceptable teaching evaluations and sitting on enough committees to not be asked to sit on more committees. And in my spare time, I run what is arguably one of the most influential academic accounts on social media: Shit Academics Say.

Since starting the account in September of 2013, it has grown to over 122,000 followers, gaining 250 to 300 new followers daily and ranking in the top 0.1 percent across social media influence metrics such as Klout, Kred, and Followerwonk. To unpack this a bit, tweets sent from my phone while recalibrating dopamine levels on the treadmill, or waiting outside my 3-year-old’s ballet class, are showing up in about 10 million Twitter streams and generating 200,000 to 300,000 profile visits a month, effectively making @AcademicsSay a bigger “social authority” on Twitter than nearly all colleges and academic publications. Not weird at all.

Although this might sound impressive, the popularity of the account is perhaps not surprising. First, academics use Twitter mainly for distraction, with tweets providing humorous details of academic content typically gaining the most exposure. Second, it is immediately apparent to new Twitter users that parody accounts like @kimkierkegaardashian, @NoToFeminism, or @SwiftOnSecurity tend to be more popular than traditional outlets — an observation that sparked an idea for how to personally connect with other academics in a not-boring way and on a scale large enough to have my procrastination count as research.

Hey, I’ve been making my procrastination count as research for years!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Is It Time To Start Shutting Down Law Schools?

This month, the American Bar Association provisionally accredited a new law school at Concordia University. More than 200 law schools are accredited in the U.S. An analysis of data from the ABA itself raises the question whether that list should be getting any longer.

Law schools exist for a lot of reasons, but a pretty important one is to prepare people to be lawyers. By that standard, a large handful of institutions seem to be failing. Last year, 10 law schools were unable to place more than 30 percent of their graduating class in permanent jobs that required passing the bar, according to ABA data. Those job numbers don’t include positions that schools fund for their graduates or people who say they are starting their own practice.

At the University of Massachusetts School of Law, the American school with the worst job outcomes by this measure, just 22 percent of people who graduated in 2014 got those types of law jobs.

Ben Barton has some thoughts on this.

SOME 4th OF JULY READING: Independence Day links.

THIS IS A MUST FOR MY FAMILY AND ME EVERY FOURTH: This Patriotic Film Honors Life, Liberty the Pursuit of Song and Dance.

OH, WHAT TANGLED WEBS THEY WEAVE: Weenies burn flag to protest cops, get attacked by bikers, need cops to save their asses.

ROGER SIMON: The Last Fourth.

FOR GOD’S SAKE, BARACK, SIT DOWN: How To Talk To Your Family About Obamacare On July 4.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student “Sugar Babies” Increase 1200%.

WELCOME TO Generation Hugbox.

I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE THIS: America Isn’t Getting More Liberal — It’s Getting More Libertarian.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! State of Oregon fines Christian bakers $135,000 over a wedding cake. “Not only did [Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian] levy a $135,000 judgment against the Kleins for ’emotional damages’ to the couple denied a wedding cake, he slapped a gag order on them that forbids the Kleins from explaining to potential customers of Sweet Cakes why they won’t bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.”

You will be made to care.

HOW TO TALK TO A NON-LEFTIST THE OTHER 364 DAYS A YEAR: Taking Mr. Obama’s advice and planning to pitch your relatives on the many wonderful benefits of Obamacare tomorrow? What happens the other 364 days? Robert Tracinski of the Federalist offers some advice for his friends on the other side of the aisle to try breaking the ice, including — and I know this will be very difficult for many leftists — “Talk to people beneath your station:”

At a university or in an urban hipsterville neighborhood, you may think that everyone around you is on the same page ideologically. But you are almost certainly wrong. Part of the problem is that a lot of the people who differ from you on politics are the people you don’t notice. They’re not the professors or administrators or graduate students, or the performance artists, and baristas, and artisanal vegan sriracha curators. They are receptionists and groundskeepers and especially small business owners who run some of the stores and shops and restaurants you go to.

Some university employees might be on the right, but I’m afraid they probably won’t talk to you about it. Why? Because they are afraid of losing their jobs. They are afraid that if word gets around about their retrograde views, people will show up with mattresses demanding that they be fired. At the very least, their bosses will quietly disapprove and their potential for advancement and new opportunities will shrink. Maybe they would open up if you talked to them nicely, but chances are that they just don’t trust you.

LEAKED DETAILS OF OBAMATRADE: Politico has a story, “Leaked: What’s in Obama’s Trade Deal” that suggests it contains goodies for U.S. pharmaceutical companies:

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.

POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public will get to see them once the twelve TPP nations reach a final agreement and President Obama seeks congressional approval. . . .

Some of the most contentious provisions involve “patent linkage,” which would prevent regulators in TPP nations from approving generic drugs whenever there are any unresolved patent issues. The TPP draft would make this linkage mandatory, which could help drug companies fend off generics just by claiming an infringement. . . .

The opponents are also worried about the treaty’s effect on the U.S. market, because its draft language would extend mandatory patent linkage to biologics, the next big thing in the pharmaceutical world. Biologics can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for patients with illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B and cancer, and the first knockoffs have not yet reached pharmacies. The critics say that extending linkage to biologics—which can have hundreds of patents—would help insulate them from competition forever.

“It would be a dramatic departure from U.S. law, and it would put a real crimp in the ability of less expensive drugs to get to market,” said K.J. Hertz, a lobbyist for AARP. “People are going to look at this very closely in Congress.”

Well, it’s good to know President Obama is making good on his goal of prioritizing the concerns of the middle class. No wonder establishment GOP types supported Obamatrade.

TAMARA KEEL REVIEWS the Walther CCP 9 mm. “The people who griped about the trigger were friends who were at the range shooting their $2,000+ custom 1911s, and they’re not necessarily the target demographic for this gun. Of the regular shooters I handed the CCP to, most handed it back asking how much it cost and when and where could they buy one?”

STEPHEN CARTER: When Law Students Distrust The Police. “And here a peculiarly ironic dissonance arises. My students, for the most part, are a liberal bunch. That makes them, among other things, enthusiasts of the regulatory state. But if they increasingly mistrust the police, it’s hard to know who’s supposed to enforce all the shiny new laws they hope to enact.”