TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1006.

THE MOROZ FAMILY – FROM THE SOVIET UNION TO THE LIBERAL GULAG:

Michael Moroz is the son of Soviet immigrants. I interviewed Michael’s mother, who told me that they left there because they wanted their son to be able to grow up with freedom. Freedom to speak his mind without concern that saying the wrong thing would mean that the state would come down on him. She believed our marketing materials for “The American Way.”

She now believes that America did not come as advertised.

Michael is a high school student at Central High School in Philadelphia, and is also the managing editor of his high school newspaper, “The Centralizer.” He recently wrote an article called “A Case of Overreaction,” which criticized the Black Lives Matter movement.

I didn’t particularly agree with the article, but I found it to be well written and well presented. It was originally printed alongside an article that supported the BLM movement. Two opposing points of view, presented to the reader – who is left to decide which is more persuasive. This was the marketplace of ideas in action.

But, the Regressive Left does not want debate. The Regressive Left does not want, nor tolerate, a marketplace of ideas. The Regressive Left leaves no room for dissent. The Regressive Left does not want a free press, just public relations for them. You’re either with them, or you’re “a racist.”

Michael’s fellow students took to social media to try and convict him, all in one movement, of his treasonous thoughtcrimes. They posted that someone ought to shoot him. There were calls that he must be “dealt with.” One wrote that “[he thinks] his white privilege will keep him from getting ‘popped.’” Even an alumnus proudly wrote, “Black students at Central will handle their business.”

Michael’s fellow editors then censored his article, “If an article comes across as insensitive, and the Central community would rather have it taken down because of this, then the article will be taken down.” Remember, only Moroz’s article was censored for being “insensitive.” Meanwhile, the counterpoint – the “politically correct” perspective was not. Enter the state — administrators backed the decision. (source)

One would expect that the principal would clamp down on threats of violence against a student in his care. After all, if we condone censorship in the name of “sensitivity”, then certainly we would do the same when calling for the boy’s safety to be compromised. One would perhaps expect the Principal to even call for a “safe space” for a minority view like Michael’s to be able to flourish – even if only to be rejected.

Read the whole thing. In a school system where socialist “justice” prevails, it’s a safe bet that much of the dark history of socialism is forgotten. Just ask these young Philadelphia-area skulls full of mush, as a much more rigorous educator from a more civilized era might describe them:

IT WOULD BE EASIER TO OUTLINE WHAT THEY’VE GOTTEN RIGHT: The RNC’s 2012 Autopsy Was Wrong. “The RNC report’s advocacy for a path to citizenship was a slap in the face to those Republicans who had long been angry about illegal immigration. Businesses big and small made the decision to employ illegal immigrants in violation of the law. A generation of Washington politicians responded with a tacit shrug, even after 9/11. That same generation of politicians, running a government infrastructure capable of reading all of our e-mails and vacuuming up the metadata from all of our cell phones, didn’t seem to care that millions of visitors had overstayed their visas and disappeared from the system. Local governments that will nail you for an expired parking meter announced they were ‘sanctuary cities’ and would no longer cooperate with federal efforts to deport those here illegally. And Immigration and Customs Enforcement, charged with leading those efforts, botched its most basic duties.”

And that disregard for the rule of law, and poisonously obvious desire to dissolve the people and elect another, is what’s creating the anger.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Blue Model Blues: Adjuncts Rising, Rising, Rising.

Preston Cooper of Economics 21 points us to a new NBER paper that confirms and quantifies in detail what higher education watchers have been saying for some time: Colleges can’t afford to hire enough full-time faculty to educate their growing student populations, and are increasingly turning to low paid, disposable adjuncts to make up for it. . . .

Cooper suggests one reason for the adjunct explosion is the free-flowing federal student loan spigot, which is pushing more students into the university system and therefore incentivizing schools to increase their teaching capacity at the lowest possible cost. We would also add that the tenure-for-life model demanded by the professors’ guild probably limits the ability of universities to move resources around and slows down turnover among the professoriate. The federal monopoly on college accreditation props up this system by stifling competition, even as the proliferation of obscure fields of study (especially in the social sciences) creates a constant supply of newly minted PhD’s desperate for academic jobs.

The ultimate result of all of this is inequality and exploitation: Administrator salaries go up, adjuncts face increasingly alarming economic insecurity, and the quality of education at lower-tier schools continues to be undermined even as the top colleges have access to almost unlimited resources. In other words, even the most leftwing institutions in the country can’t afford to put egalitarian, blue-model ideals into practice. Like all decaying blue institutions, the university still serves insiders (college presidents, professors with tenure, students at Yale) quite well, even as outsiders (adjunct faculty, students who took out loans to go to lower-tiered schools) struggle.

What’s causing this higher education crisis is not evil conservatives. It’s the fact that the blue model of higher education, complete with regulation, subsidies, and professional guilds, is simply no longer workable or affordable.

But don’t expect the insiders to change until they’re forced.

THE RIOT IN THE ACADEMY: “It’s really scary that values other than truth have become sacred.  And what I keep trying to say – this comes right out of my book The Righteous Mind – is that you can’t have two sacred values.  Because what do you do when they conflict?  And in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.”

At least until the grownups return to clean up the mess.

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: (Incrementally) Toward a More Libertarian Bureaucracy.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: “The Left Has Two Huge Advantages, and I Have No Idea How We Overcome Them“

WHAT ARE NEW YORK OFFICIALS HIDING ABOUT THE FAILURE OF THE BIGGEST OBAMACARE CO-OP? Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has been all over the 23 Obamacare co-ops established in 2011 at a cost of $2 billion since their inception. Health Republic, the largest of the tax-funded health insurance co-ops intended to compete with for-profit commercial health insurers, has been a particular Pollock focus because founder Sara Horowitz is a long-time political ally of President Obama. Horowitz got $355 million for Health Republic, plus $109 million for the New Jersey operation and $60.6 million for the Oregon co-op.

When Health Republic failed last Fall, it left 210,000 New Yorkers scrambling for new coverage during the holiday season. Pollock has been after documents explaining why the co-op failed but has run into brick walls. The latest one is a rejection by the New York Department of Financial Services. Doctors and hospitals in the Empire State could lose nearly $300 million in unpaid bills for services rendered to Health Republic policyholders. The DFS was established in 2011 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. One of his political proteges ran DFS until last May when he abruptly resigned. The stench here is getting stronger.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does America Need More Hitler Humor?

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN, OCCASIONED BY THE 1000th DAY OF THE IRS SCANDAL: Washington’s culture of corruption rots on: When bureaucrats are above the law, ordinary Americans may want to follow suit.

DON’T ALL YOUNG PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY IN THE HUNGER GAMES? 13 Reasons Millennials Should Vote FOR Bernie Sanders.

Related: “Where the girls aren’t.”

WE’VE NOTICED, BILL: Bill Stumping for Hillary Clinton: ‘Sometimes … I Wish We Weren’t Married.’

JUSTICE: The Hill: Loretta Lynch’s Camapaign Donations Raise Concerns.

1970’S SCRANTON REPORT — THE BEGINNING OF THE END IN HIGHER EDUCATION:

In 1970, Richard Nixon established the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, which came to be known by the last name of its chairman, former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton. In the wake of the killings of four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio and two at Jackson State University in Mississippi, the administration thought it necessary to investigate campus unrest and offer guidance to universities and the public on what to do about it… Despite the seriousness of the problems back then — or perhaps because of it — the Scranton Report exudes a calm confidence, the sense that level-headed people from different sides of an issue can get together to investigate a problem and arrive at a solution.

Of course, that argues that the left seeks solutions to problems, when in reality, keeping issues (and voters) inflamed helps them to consolidate and grow their power.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Meanwhile back in 2016, “Inside the academic guilt machine” — “The Gestalt of Guilt.”

MORE INFORMATION NEEDED*: DOES JANE FONDA THINK THIS IS A GOOD OR BAD THING?

* For the first — and very likely last — time ever, the person I’d really like to hear discuss Fonda’s comments is Naomi Wolf.

WELL, THE DEMOCRATS SEEM TO WANT TO MAKE THIS ELECTION ABOUT GUN CONTROL: NRA to spend ‘significantly more’ fighting Clinton/Sanders, over $20M.

Supporters of the Second Amendment are declaring the 2016 the most critical to their rights because it is likely that the next president will appoint four new U.S. Supreme Court justices, warned the president of the National Rifle Association.

“In my view, all the chips are on the table in this election because the impact is who gets the Supreme Court,” said the NRA’s chief, Allan D. Cors.

Cors, in an interview with Secrets on the opening day of the annual Great American Outdoor Show here, the nation’s biggest, described Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton as passionately anti-gun and ready to change the makeup of the court and unleash the Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on gun owners and limit imports through State Department rules.

“All of these things fall with whoever is president,” said Cors.

Indeed they do.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: St. Louis usurps Detroit to become most violent city in the US: Gateway City is worst for rape, robbery aggravated assault and murder according to FBI data.

Say, what’s missing from this story? Oh yeah!

A COMPETENT POLITICAL CLASS COULD HAVE AVOIDED THIS, INSTEAD OF POURING GASOLINE ON THE FLAMES, AND RICHARD COHEN, AS USUAL, HAS IT EXACTLY BACKWARD: The rising storm of ethnic fear in Europe and the United States.

The problem in both Europe and the United States is not just a huge influx of migrants, but a lack of political leadership. The exceptions are Barack Obama here and Angela Merkel in Germany. Merkel showed extraordinary leadership in allowing about 1 million Syrian migrants to settle in Germany. Obama has been stingy in his welcome — about 2,500 migrants had arrived in the United States as of late last year — but he has been generous in his embrace of the Muslim community. Trump, characteristically, mischaracterized the president’s recent visit to a mosque, saying he had gone to apologize. For Trump, no lie is too low.

What both the United States and Europe need now are more leaders who know how to say, “Hold on a minute. Let’s work this out.” Instead, we get calls for mass deportations, closing borders, confiscation of wealth. In Europe, Hungary has veered right and turned ugly. Poland is leaning that way. France is showing a little Vichy, and Germany is shivering with second thoughts.

More Obama and more Merkel = more gasoline.

THIS IS CNN: Under Sanders, income and jobs would soar, economist says.

Well, CNN got the headline it wanted; buried in the article are the minor details that “Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor…believes in democratic socialism like the candidate.” Friedman’s “analysis” wasn’t “commissioned by the candidate, though Sanders’ policy director called it ‘outstanding work.'”

I’m sure Sanders, like Obama before him, appreciates the ability for CNN to run what is essentially a campaign press release; Friedman routinely cranks out fanboy-style articles in support of Bernie. Though unspoken in this article is the question: why didn’t Obama, whom CNN wrecked whatever was left of its reputation to champion, implement this model, particularly in his first two years, when his party controlled both houses of Congress?

Related: CNN’s Anderson Cooper “Jokes Clinton Campaign Like Struggling Cable TV News Show.”

Well, he certainly has plenty of experience with that issue.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Christie Reminds Stephanopoulos of His History as Dem ‘Operative.’

Why doesn’t every Republican Stephanopoulos interviews work into the on-air conversation that he’s a Democrat operative with a byline?

DON’T WORRY, BRIAN WILLIAMS CAN HELP HIM SURVIVE UNDER HEAVY FIRE: Video: Chris Matthews Goes to War!

Related: Chris Matthews’ ‘kiss up session’ with Donald Trump rates 3 lipstick emoji.

PROM DRESSES FOR DESERVING GIRLS WHO CAN’T AFFORD THEM: The Cinderella Project of Tennessee.

GLASS CEILING: “Bernie Sanders Suddenly Looking and Sounding Like a Front-Runner“