With hypocrisy so pungent only a politician would try it, Jim Pitts wrote an article decrying transparency abuse, aiming his stinky cannon at an emerging champion of good government, UT Regent Wallace Hall Jr. The Austin American-Statesman published this gem.
First things first – in principle, the quest for transparency can most definitely be abused.
A great example is the transparency abuse Pitts’ legislative clique attempted on non-connected Texans in SB 346 in the 83rd Legislative session. The bill would have forced small donors to non-profit organizations to have their names published so establishment thugs would know whom to pressure.
Governor Perry vetoed the bill after it passed both chambers.
It was legislation the Democrats in Washington DC have been salivating over for some time but haven’t been able to get. The reason they like it so much is that they thrive on intimidation – legal, cultural – you name it. After all, they want people to vote against common sense on every single issue and you need intimidation for that.
There was only ever one purpose for this legislation – to discourage general interest (non-special interest) Texans from funding Texas politics.
The Texas ruling class wants to intimidate people who give money to groups who hold government accountable. The ruling class sees robbing taxpayers as their right. From their perspective, they won the privilege to legally rob fair and square when they won their elections. As a result, they resent sunlight.
Enter UT Regent Wallace Hall Jr.
His job description is to oversee the people who run the University of Texas, namely the President.
In recent years those who run UT have allowed tuition to skyrocket – outpacing price inflation in virtually every sector of American society – and without even pretending to offer a different product from the one they offered when it was much cheaper. Their best line of defense is the old “the other kids are doing it” excuse.
This excuse doesn’t work in Texas. If Texans wanted to be useless lemmings they’d move somewhere else. And Texans aren’t terribly interested in the government-executed cultural suicide pact that so much of Western civilization is currently engaged in. Texans aren’t cultural “cutters”, as so many Westerners currently are.
Texas grows many things, and one of them is solutions to all of this silliness.
Still, UT is marching right along with the trend of universities fleecing taxpayers and tuition payers, relying on the fact that the US News and World Report won’t like them anymore if they don’t.
Really, this fleecing should surprise no one, since UT is pretty much a black box. What are they spending money on? Who knows? Quit asking.
See, they are academics – our modern priestly class – harboring no political proclivities or selfishness, and since they nobly lead all of us forward into the great beyond, even the concept of oversight is hateful.
Yeah, Texans aren’t buying.
Pitts starts the article by informing us that he does, after all, like some kinds of transparency, though not all.
He doesn’t explain that it is transparency on people who would check government power that he likes and transparency on government power that he dislikes.
The ruling class in Texas is making much of “mob rule” right now, after an angry mob allegedly made passage of the abortion bill impossible in the first special session. They are keen to emphasize the “republic” (connoting representation) part of our democratic republic, and de-emphasize the “democratic” part. This is a narrative they would like eventually to turn on conservative activists.
The problem with their reasoning is that the framers of our system intended the “democratic” part of our “democratic republican” system to keep officials from robbing and tyrannizing us, as they intended the “republic” to keep mobs from robbing and tyrannizing us.
In the case of the liberal activists who tried to shout down the abortion bill – sure enough – they were a mob protecting sexual license at the cost of murderous tyranny on the most innocent Texans – the unborn.
In the case of our ever-worsening government/academia education racket, it is regents like Wallace Hall Jr that are trying to put a stop to rampant government abuse.
In this drama, Jim Pitts is a servant of the entity that is slowly drowning our culture, and Hall is part of the solution, if there is to be one.
The rest of the ruling class – establishment media, legislators, and activists, and others – will try to swirl up a big enough windstorm to make average Texans go against their gut instincts by pretending academia isn’t broken, but the good thing about Texans is they go against the crowd when we need to.
In this case, Texans will be going against a perception, generated by the ruling class, that most are fully confident that higher education is operating in good faith and horrified by attempts to end their long standing abuse of average citizens.
Virtually everybody thinks Higher Ed is out of control and price inflation is only the start of it.
–Pitts article