Pictures of kids in caps and gowns kids are showing up on my Facebook these weeks. Family and friends are graduating. I'm delighted but also deeply saddened how the garb reflects but a veneer of learning covering a chasm of ignorance. It spans Harvard to Howard Community College. We are often spending hundreds of thousands of dollars leading to such ceremonies but the vast majority of these kids are clueless about the fundamentals of our American value system. The great libertarian legal scholar Richard Epstein wrote a superb essay, Our Obsolete Constitution, reminding me of all this. It examined the notion of factions discussed by Madison in #10 of the Federalist Papers. Mention that to any of these kids and it would be as if one were speaking Icelandic. Yet their lives are profoundly and daily affected by how we understand such ideas. How we work and play, live productive lives, build business and acquire property rely on a solid understanding of American values and why, for...(Read Full Post)