Very witty. It would be even wittier if it had more than the vaguest connection to what Mark wrote.

Shift from education to housing. Over the last several decades, for various reasons, the federal government has encouraged people to put more and more social value upon home ownership, and provided the incentives to buy the most house you possibly can.

Shockingly, a whole bunch of people ended up buying a whole bunch of houses when they couldn't handle it (whether income or character or what-have-you). People started losing their precious houses, and again, Washington steps in, trying to fix it, instead of letting the housing market simply run its course.

Higher education should be an option for as many high school graduates as want it. That is not, and has not been, the problem. The problem is how much 'public' money is spent on higher education, compared to the results.

If you were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money, to send your neighbor's pot-smoking twenty-something through five years of 'Minority Ethics', might you want to see proof that Minority Ethics is worth the money?

To paraphrase Peter Schiff, "We don't need more spending on education, we need better education."

In the "old days," with just a high-school education, you could get a decent job that paid enough to support your family.

Those days are gone. Those types of jobs have largely been superseded by automation and outsourcing. Robots do the work that blue-collar workers used to. Other menial jobs have been outsourced to foreign countries where the cost of living is low enough that workers are quite satisfied to work for much less pay than U.S. workers.

Just look at the unemployment rates in the current U.S. economic slump. They're lower than average for college graduates and higher than average for those without a college degree.

What Rook just did pretty much defines liberalism: completely ignore what the conservative said, substitute a hallucination, and then attack the hallucination.

And I continue to be amazed at how much insight Steyn can pack into such a short piece.

Mark derides a college degree as amounting to nothing more than getting a degree in Complacency Studies. He says everything was wonderful in 1940, when many fewer people had college educations and rather had eighth grade educations. His contempt for higher education is sweeping. If this hymn against education is conservatism I happily part company with it.

If the only thing you can bring is strawmen arguments and evasions of the point, then we're even happier to part company with you.

Signed, a Ph.D who most heartily endorsed the comment a couple above yours.

Truth be told, that eighth-grade education from the fortys is superior to todays' college education. All we truly get for the bloated education budgets is more bureaucracy.

This. ^^^^

I'm disappointed in Mark's post. Not so much his takedown of Christian Schneider's remarks, but of his dismissal of him as a conservative. Mr. Schneider has done a superb job in giving us the play-by-play of all the events in Wisconsin this year, and has shown a clear preference towards the Scott Walker side of things. To blow him off as not conservative because of one argument in favor of in-state tuition for illegal aliens is beneath Mark. Conservatives should be able to hold, and argue for, the occasional non-conservative position if that's what they believe. To dismiss their conservativism like Mark does at the end of his post will do much more harm to the movement than it will help.

Tom Sowell thought Boehner's Debt Ceiling Bill was "Good Enough" too. Sowell has been taking the easy going route these days. Meanwhile, Obama is getting his army ready for battle.