With the 2004 presidential campaign heating up, the permanent debate over how to improve a failing public education system comes to the forefront again. As usual, the proposed solution from both parties is to throw more money at the problem, says Dr. Andrew Bernstein, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.

Dr. Bernstein, a public school teacher, notes that concerned parents are trying to improve their children's education by sending them to private schools. But this forces them to pay twice for education—they're taxed to support government schools and they must still pay tuition to the private school. The solution to this unjust financial burden, Bernstein observes, was proposed thirty years ago by Ayn Rand: tax credits for private education.

Dr. Bernstein notes that though Ayn Rand properly opposed both government-controlled education and a confiscatory tax system, she proposed tax credits as one small step toward freeing and therefore improving education.
       
Such tax credits would require the government to reduce an individual's tax burden to the extent that he spends money on education (his children's or his own). Parents must still pay for education—but this gives them a choice: send their children to failing government schools and pay taxes in full—or pay tuition for a private school, with funds saved from their taxes.

Heavily-armed terrorists wearing masks descended on Middle School No. 1 shortly after 9 a.m. on the opening day of the new school year Wednesday. About a dozen people managed to escape by hiding in a boiler room, but hundreds of others were herded into the school gymnasium and some were placed at windows as human shields.[...] Casualty reports in the raid varied widely, but an official in the joint-command operation for the crisis said on condition of anonymity early Thursday that 16 people were killed — 12 inside the school, two who died in hospital and two others whose bodies still lay outside the school and could not be removed because of gunfire. Thirteen others were wounded.

However, an aide to North Ossetian President Lev Dzugayev said that seven were killed. He also gave the number of hostages at 354. The children were mostly under 14.[...]

From inside the school, the militants sent out a list of demands and threatened that if police intervened, they would kill 50 children for every hostage-taker killed and 20 children for every hostage-taker injured, Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region's Interior Ministry, was quoted as telling the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Around 9 am, an old truck pulled up and about 20 heavily armed terrorists dressed in black and wear black masks and 4 women with bomb belts came out. Children started to run. Those who were standing closest to the street were able to make it out. Terrorists starting pushing others towards the building, and throwing some children through windows (inside the building)(!!!). And elderly woman was shot, and a girl who looked like an 11th grader was shot in the back. She died on the spot. Kazik's sister is still a hostage.

A suspect in the bloody school siege that left more than 330 people dead, nearly half of them children, said Monday the hostage-takers were ordered to seize the school to "start a war across the Caucasus." [Emphasis added]

Rebels linked to the school hostage-taking seek independence from Russia and most want to make Chechnya (news - web sites) a sovereign Muslim nation.

[T]he particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities. [...] I wonder if, as they killed those schoolchildren, they chanted "Allahu Akbar!" -- as they did when they hacked the head of Nick Berg, and killed those 12 Nepalese workers, and blew up those Israeli diners in the Passover massacre.

The good news is that the carnage in Beslan was so shocking it prompted a brief appearance by that rare bird, the moderate Muslim. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, "The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!" "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. This is true. But, as with Nicolson's prettified prose in London, the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it? If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand.

President Lyndon Johnson and his administration had not wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam into a direct confrontation with China, as had happened in Korea. China had the atomic bomb, and Mao was in the midst of a totalitarian killing spree he called "The Cultural Revolution." So the Johnson Administration attempted to fight the Vietcong insurgents and the North Vietnamese Army only where they operated south of the DMZ--making a sanctuary of the North and of neighboring Cambodia and Laos. The Johnson Administration soon found that the scale of the limited war they had planned wasn't very limited after all. American forces fought in a heavily vegetated country of 60 million people against an enemy who dispersed its forces and tunneled to escape American firepower, did not observe any laws of war, and was supplied with a never-ending stream of Soviet and Chinese material....

...Americans fought and died, while their leaders carefully avoided actions that would end the enemy's capacity to continue the fight. American bodies were being shipped back to the United States at a rates approaching 600 per week. Nixon played out Johnson's no-win scenario, week after bloody week. Did John Kerry and the New Left's Vietnam Veterans Against the War choose to denounce, as the moral corruption of America's war effort, a defeated White House and a never-ending stream of body bags? No. They chose to denounce a package deal. From 1971 forward, resistance to Communist aggression was equated with the senseless sacrifice of American lives. This conformed to the New Left's idea that it was morally wrong to impose America's "colonial" designs for a capitalist world on "indigenous" peoples who actually wanted Communism, the true moral social system. And if it was wrong to oppose popular aspirations for Communism in the Third World, any such effort had to also be impractical, futile, doomed to failure...

...John Kerry was the public face of a movement that converted broad based, rational public support for ending what had become the purposeless loss of American life--into a campaign to undermine the defense of liberty against Communism throughout the world.

Kerry's record as a Vietnam War protester is not history; it is consistent with his record and policies in the more than three decades since. As commander-in-chief of the US in its war against militant Islam, President Kerry would exert himself fully against what he has always believed is the greatest evil threatening the world--a self-confident United States, triumphant in its freedom and prosperity, reaching out to aggressively engage and strike down its mortal enemies. [Kerry's Real Vietnam Record: Kerry Has Spread False Fears of American Military Assertiveness, TIA Daily]