Fox/hedgehog, open-minded/ideologue, and tolerant/intolerant of ambiguity are really three quite different (if sometimes overlapping) dichotomies.
I loved that song!
Not to derail this thread, and not to justify the sanity of the thought, but there is at least a thread of logic to that idea, though more likely applied to Libertarians that Republicans. Libertarians are small government types that if you look at stated party platform goals, are for the abolishment of public funded schools. Hell, one of Gov. Perry’s three departments at the Federal level he would get rid of was “um…” I mean the Department of Education. This kind of conservative wants education to be handled by private interests, and people free to choose whatever schooling they wish for their children. Church schools? How about schools funded by megacorporations. The Exxon-Mobil elementary school, where kids are taught all about the science of finding peteroleum underground and extracting it, but nothing about what happens when carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere. Or the BP school, where kids are taught that job safety is a luxury, and having the plant explode every once in a while is a good way to keep the job market sharp.
Is that the one Granny Ogg is always singing?
Are you OK with not knowing?
Yeah, I had an exchange on this matter with a Libertarian…
Marx’s “Capital” actually has very handy illustrations of the arguments used to support child labour around a century and a half ago, which tended to focus on how the only alternative to child labour was delinquency (which sometimes surfaces in arguments such as these). The only issue is that relying on Marx automatically identifies one as being part of a lunatic fringe of opinions: Michael Gove used a similar accusation with some success (I used to enjoy reading his column in the Times before I learnt about News Corporation). Still, the Libertarian individual I was conducting the discussion with was willing to consider my arguments at any rate… Perhaps Mises provides a coherent rebuttal to the claims within?
Anyway, conventional thought also laid the blame on the parents rather than the employers. There is still a line of reasoning where any form of restriction on an employer is viewed as inherently harmful. I do find it slightly inequitable that corporate persons are treated differently under the law in some scenarios from corporeal persons. For example, while there are some trains of thought that hold that the social contract is a legal fiction (but wage contracts are a paradigm of freedom), I’m familiar with far more arguments in support for corporate tax avoidance than for individual tax avoidance. Likewise, there is a law I heard about recently that places extended restrictions on criminal tourism, making it illegal to plan to travel to a country to perform an action legal in that country, but illegal in the US. Of course, it would be a heinous restriction on enterprise if that law were used to shut down the logistics department of Niké on the basis of child employment laws.
On topic, literacy rates were between a third (among women) and half (among men) of the adult population, judging by the proportion of couples that signed their name on a marriage certificate as opposed to those that signed with a cross. Education is decried in America at the moment, with abstinence only education proving to be highly ineffectual, resulting in a national teen pregnancy rate much higher than even the UK (which has something like the highest prevalence in Europe) and staggeringly higher than Scandinavian countries (that operate under the tax and spend model and all come out higher in independent scores of mathematical and scientific knowledge than the US). While rates are highest among recent immigrants, white American teens still have a higher rate of teen pregnancy than the average rate in the UK, which has the highest rate in Western Europe. Without public education, there are two likely scenarios. The first is reinstitution of child labour (already proposed by Newt Gingrich to compete with illegal immigrants), the second is ecclesiastic control of schools (funnily enough, even the Catholic Church has a more democratic structure than corporations, the judiciary and the armed forces - since Bishops vote in the Pope).
Anyway, that’s my sickeningly liberal take on things.
The first thing to understand is that “liberal” and “conservative” are not lexical opposites.