Lessons

Lessons:

Strange things are being taught in school...

Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said the action taken by the school on Wednesday was warranted if their objective was to maintain the security and safety of the other students.

"Was there a danger of a fight between the students celebrating Cinco de Mayo and the students wearing the American T-shirts? If there was a threat, then their action was ethical," Hanson said.

"The decisions regarding student dress are always difficult for school authorities and it is possible that any particular dress, including the American flag, could under circumstances be threatening," Hanson said. "But when the students' rights are at stake, the school authorities clearly should try to find some way to protect those rights and at the same time defuse the situation."

Got it? If freedom of expression is faced with the threat of illegal violence, freedom should be curtailed.

Note also that this guy is supposedly an expert on ethics. So now it's ethical to give into violent mobs.

The Tea Party has gotten beaten up for the past year for embodying a threat of violence that doesn't actually exist.

The lesson we are getting is that maybe it should.

That is true only if you mean by "should" that the market is structured to provide incentives for that kind of behavior. Ethics goes well beyond market oriented behavior; though it is a truism to say that 'incentives work.'

The Tea Party movement isn't going to resort to violence, purely and only because of the ethics of its members. If they ever capture power and leadership, however, they'll have a lot of problems to solve that are coming from these failures of leadership we see so often today. From local school boards to the Federal government in the face of Iran and others: cowardice rules, bullies are bowed down before, and the wicked dance. This is their hour.