Business is not your enemy
Wisconsin blogger Michael Mathias is someone I don’t understand at all.
That’s not to say he’s a bad human being.
We just share hardly any mental common ground.
For example, best viagra sovaldi this morning he had a post that postulated that Milwaukee-area businesses would be thrilled by the failure of Milwaukee Public Schools:
Well Milwaukee’s business community should be delighted:
The Milwaukee School Board voted Thursday night to begin looking into dissolving the Milwaukee Public Schools system.
The completely unexpected 6-to-3 vote followed a gloomy assessment of the short- and long-term financial situation of MPS from Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and several board members.
The resolution called for the administration to examine state and federal guidelines for dissolving the school district and who would be responsible for educating children in Milwaukee if that happened.
Voting for the resolution were board members Danny Goldberg, sildenafil purchase Jennifer Morales, Jeff Spence, Bruce Thompson, Terry Falk and Tim Petersons. Voting against were Peter Blewett, Michael Bonds and Charlene Hardin.
We should be hearing nothing but praise for the move from the usual suspects, right? Isn’t this what Tim Sheehy and the members of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce have been hoping for all these years?
Wasn’t this the desired outcome when we introduced “competition” into the education system by awarding taxpayer dollars to “schools” (i.e. the Little Beating Heart of Academic Excellence Academy) that didn’t have to follows the same standards MPS operates under in either teacher compensation or benefits, or testing or reporting, or educating special education students or students who were disciplinary problems?
To me, this post illustrates two misunderstandings:
- Michael doesn’t seem to understand that nothing is more important to a business than educated workers and consumers. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a business owner express dismay that they had to retrain a new hire to do the simplest things. Businesses WANT education to work and businesses are the entities that suffer second most when it does not. (The people who suffer the most are the ones who fail to get/achieve a decent education.)
- The second misunderstanding is that business is somehow plotting against the rest of us. That’s just silly. Business is what keeps all of us employed and productive. Government’s depend on business for revenue. Non-profits depend on business for donations. Without business, there would be no goods or services to buy and no salaries to buy them with. Is business perfect? Nope. Are some businesses evil? Yep, because some people are evil and businesses are run by people. But the mere existence of business does incalculably more good in a capitalistic society like ours than it does harm.
4 comments September 19th, 2008