Redneck Review
No. 13 RED NECK REVIEW! 7/20/15
Hey! Last Wednesday's Chronicle included a letter from a former student concerning statements taken from a Davy Crockett article involving money that was NOT YOURS TO GIVE! The Crockett article involved a lecture given by Horatio Bunce, a Crockett constituent who complained about a government grant to local burned out families.
The letter asks how the "...Jake Wren's Red Neck Review" could "justify ranting about the Federal Government's out of control national debt while he continues to rake in USDA Farm Subsidies ($89,485) that contribute to the debt he is talking about!"
The letter goes on to quote the Crockett article and mine that "Taxes reach every man in the country no matter how poor he may be. So you see, while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing from others who are possibly worse off than he." And… 
"If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all... and you will very easily perceive what a wide door that would open for fraud, corruption, and favoritism on the one hand and robbing the people on the other!" Hey! I do agree!
Jim, I thank you for making this point now a third time! Its an old saying that an idea does not stick until repeated several times! And I do agree with you, and with the gist of the Crockett article printed now for the third time! But a couple of quick comments!
First, the USDA payment is correct, but the total is incorrect, as my tax records over the years prove! Second, the payments came from the sale of land to another person who normally would receive them, but for legitimate reasons came to me instead!
But regardless, the whole issue strengthens my argument, helped by the Crockett article, that governments SHOULD NOT BE GIVING AWAY FUNDS OF THIS TYPE!
I continue to stand uncompromisingly on this issue! If you read earlier articles, you noted my concern about "grants" that somehow give money to one entity while taken from others, and used for projects the grantees are not willing to pay for themselves!
And you will remember that I agreed that such "grants" are very helpful, and in some cases, seem drastically needed! And, Jim, the RNR article dated 5/27/15 includes the sentence and I quote "I will even admit that I have been the recipient of such largess!"
So, in response to your request that I "come clean and explain yourself to your readers"
I claim that I have already done so! And I repeat again... "That only begs the question!"
I admit also that I attended four years of summer school at Reed College, and a school year at San Jose State College as a recipient of a NSF (National Science Foundation) grant that provided me not only with a master's degree in math, but a monthly stipend which at the time was more than my teacher salary at the time!! And I guess that many other teachers at the time, with lower pay, helped pay my way by their taxes! Maybe you, Jim, might even have paid some tax to help pay for my education!!
But this brings us right back to the issue at hand! Is that money YOURS TO GIVE.... If you are a government official? And can a nation long survive that adopts a policy of giving away money to some that somehow, must be obtained from others? That is the question that will be taken up next time with a review of Bastiat's book, THE LAW!!
Jake Wren

Dear Editor:
I realize that what more I'm about to say here regarding the ongoing school funding debate isn't going to change a thing, but I'd like to say it, nonetheless. 
Would that worry over money were our only concern, grave and real as financial problems can be.  
Personally, however, the reservations I hold, educationally, are more ideological and go way beyond the matter of funding.
Further, the problems I see have little or nothing to do with Kamiah or any other educational district, specifically.  Just by virtue of being smaller, more rurally situated and closer to home, our district (and the many others surrounding it), numbers probably among very the best in the land, and therefore most worthy of our support.  Still, I'll tell you why it is that, even for here, my reservations persist.
It is our being tied, per force, to the whole federal and state-run bureaucratic system that bothers me.  I don't think that the very expensive, complicated, megalithic structure we have - - let alone mention of some of the pretty questionable moral and philosophical principles it now inculcates - - was ever in the picture back in America's earlier days.  How and why, then, did our present "educational" conglomeration ever come about?
Setting sports, the arts, music, student community involvements, special needs programs, etc. aside, I ask:  What (exactly?!) was really wrong with family home schooling as practiced in the past, or with independent neighborhood, one-room schoolhouses - - church affiliated schools, too, for that matter?  As a teacher myself of many years past, I ask further:  Didn't all of these long serve our people and nation quite well, in keeping with the original, indomitable spirit of America?   So, what changed?
Surprise, surprise, though, I guess, because whether today's school superin-tendents, board members, teachers, parents, taxpayers alike realize it or not, there's a 10th plank in Karl Marx and Frederich Engels' Communist Manifesto (on how to take over and control a nation.)  Listed as their final mandate is, Free education for all children in government schools.  Now, doesn't that sort of tell us all something?
Thank You.
Carol Asher
Kamiah

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