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This is something I've believed for a long time: for most people college is a waste of time.

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The CPA exam is one example used to illustrate how certification would serve much better than a degree. Anyone can take the CPA exam. Anyone passing it has proven they know what they're doing. Plenty of people with degrees in Accounting, even from prestigious institutions of higher learning, fail the CPA exam. The degree doesn't mean you know your supposed area of expertise. Certification does.

I've known plenty of people with engineering degrees incapable of designing or analyzing designs worth a darn, and plenty of people without engineering degrees that were the best damn engineers I've ever had the privilege of knowing or working with. Engineering has something similar to the CPA called PE, or Professional Engineer. Like the CPA exam, it is a standardized exam that certifies the engineer is indeed a master in their field. It is not an easy exam to pass. If you pass it, you've proven you know your subject and can add the coveted P.E. after their name. (In case you're wondering, I have not taken the PE. I'm pretty decent engineer and I make a good living from it, but I doubt I'd pass it the first ten or twenty times I take it.)

There are plenty of people out there with college degrees that, once they have them, end up working so far outside their field of study it seems the degrees they have aren't worth they paid to get them. It's like the old joke that goes something like this:

The scientist asks "What laws of nature define why this happens and can I recreate it?"

The engineer asks, "How can I make this work?"

The marketer asks, "How many of these can I sell and for what kind of profit margin?"

The person with the BA in English asks "Do you want fries with that?"

Yes, it's silly, overblown, and does not reflect reality...or at least it didn't only a few decades or so ago. So many people have degrees they spent four years and a lot of money to obtain, yet they haven't necessarily opened the doors to success that so many of us have been told will open once we have a degree. In reality, the degrees mean nothing. It's what you know. It doesn't matter how you came about that knowledge or experience, only that you have it. That should be the real criteria for so many of the so-called professional jobs out there. Certification is one way to prove that you do have that knowledge and/or experience.

Is it likely changing to certification rather than a degree will ever come to be? I doubt it. But it is something worth thinking about. And it might save a lot of people four years worth of time and money that could be better used to actually learn what it is they need to know.

Can anyone explain to me exactly when profits become "windfall profits"?

I didn't think so.

Former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas may have been impolitic when he called Americans a "nation of whiners", but he was actually pretty close to the mark. For a nation that has the kind of wealth across the board never before seen in history, too many of us bitch and moan about it not being enough.

When it comes to the meltdowns in the financial industry, those meltdowns caused by imprudent choices by investors and blindness to greed rather than fact by the financial institutions, the call for bailouts is heard first and foremost. As I've stated more than once, when the investment bankers gambled on the housing bubble and lost, it's their tough luck. There's no way the taxpayers should make good on their failures, their mistakes, their lack of foresight.

As Jen Rubin said during Saturday's Meet the New Press, channeling Larry Kudlow, "No one wants to believe that failure is an option anymore." It's one of the reasons we keep hearing about bailouts of Wall Street, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and coming soon, GM. It's a dangerous precedent being set, particularly one that removes risk from risky investments. There's no way they should be able to expect the taxpayers to "insure" their gambles. It sets us up for greater failures.

If one never knows the sting of failure, then how can one measure success? Some of the most successful people failed many times before. Their failures didn't lessen them. On the contrary, it made them more driven to succeed. But todays "whiners" seem to think failure makes them less than human, something to be avoided at all cost.

Whatever happened to the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, the great free-market economist and Nobel Prize winner, who said the great thing about capitalism is the freedom to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, but that there is also the freedom to fail? I believe Hayek once argued that if he had to choose between success and failure, failure is more important in terms of preserving the free-market system.

"Endless" success is an illusion. It is unsustainable, even with taxpayer funded bailouts. Eventually the taxpayers will no longer be able to afford it and the whole thing collapses, creating an ever greater crisis, both financial and psychological. It's something we can't afford. The madness must stop.

So I guess I was relieved to come across a passage from President Bush's press conference last Tuesday. A reporter asked him about bailing out banks and mortgage markets, and wondered about other entities in the economy that might be crucial, like General Motors. And President Bush said, "If your question is, 'Should the government bailout private enterprise?' the answer is no, it shouldn't." POTUS went on to say, in terms of private enterprise, that no, he doesn't think the government ought to be involved with bailing out companies.

We'll see if the President sticks to his guns, or whether the need to prevent failure of any kind will be stronger, spurred on by the "nation of whiners."

You know it's got to be a bad idea when even the French say so.

Apparently Democratic Presidential Candidate To Be Barack Obama's plans to hike taxes should he gain the Oval Office shocks even the French, knowing it will make Americans "fiscal prisoners" in their own country, burdening them with taxes surpassing those imposed in the French Republic.

...make no mistake, taxes under a President Obama could be truly à la française. The top marginal tax rate, including federal, state and local levies, could approach 60% for self-employed New Yorkers and Californians. Not even France's taxes are that high now that President Nicolas Sarkozy has capped the total that high-earning Frenchmen like Mr. Ducasse can pay in income, social and wealth taxes at 50% of earnings.

When taxes go that high, people find ways to get out of paying them usually moving someplace else where they will be able to keep more of their hard earned money. If Obama wants to see even more American jobs and industries to go overseas, all he has to do is raise taxes as he's outlined during his campaign. If you think that won't happen should he implement his tax hikes, all one need do is look at what French President Nicolas Sarkozy discovered when he visited London earlier this year.

[Sarkozy] observed that the British capital is now home to so many French bankers and other professionals seeking tax relief that it's the seventh-largest French city. Those expatriates choose not to use their creativity and investment capital to benefit France and its economy.

So because French taxes were so high, the people needed to help the French economy to grow left France and put their talents to use in a place where they'd be able to keep more of their hard earned money. And why shouldn't they? Why stay in a place that punishes success? This also shows Obama's ignorance when it comes to easily foreseen consequences of confiscatory tax policies.

Senator Obama's plans to raise income, Social Security and capital-gains taxes amount to a belief that people don't react to punitive tax rates. If so, he needn't worry about people leaving the country and could let them pay taxes in whichever part of the globe they choose to live in.

A President Barack Obama will become all too familiar with the Laffer Curve, seeing tax rates go ever higher and tax revenues going lower and lower. He'll also oversee the once vibrant American economy looking more like the one experienced during the Carter Administration: in deep recession with little hope of recovering. The recession back then didn't end until Ronald Reagan took office and he did away with the taxes that were strangling the economy. You'd think an intelligent man like Barack Obama would understand the cause and effect of tax policy. But it's become evident with time he must have skipped more than one economics course during his time in college.
 
His tax plans will do far more harm to the American people than just about anything else I can think of short of a nuclear terrorist strike.

A couple of days ago I wrote about the consequences hiking the minimum wage, with the first stage taking place last year, the second next month, and the third stage next year. Many argued against it, saying it would have a negative effect on those seeking their first jobs, most of those being teens. Those arguing for it claimed it would help those trying to support their families to make ends meet.

The first group was right. The second group was wrong.

Even with the need for more teens to fill some seasonal jobs, many employers aren't listing them because it makes no sense economically for them to do so. They'll try to make do with the employees they already have or will hire fewer teens and try to juggle the schedules (usually meaning longer work hours) in order to stay in business.

A guest post at Patterico illustrates the point about how some businesses just won't hire teens they might have otherwise because it's a losing proposition for them to do so.

Talk about yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

When Congress decided to raise the minimum wage, many of the Democrats claimed it would help those heads of household trying to support a family making only minimum wage. That claim is a long used and many-times debunked canard. Very few, if any, heads of household are making minimum wage. And if they did their jobs well enough, they wouldn't be making minimum wage for long.

All raising minimum wage has ever done is make entry level jobs for teens go away. With the increase of the minimum wage last year, a second increase coming next month, and yet another following next year, is it any wonder many teens are finding that their prospects for summer jobs are evaporating?

While this problem isn't universal, it is widespread. Here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire a number of summer jobs are going unfilled. Part of the cause is the US government's tightening of visas for foreign seasonal workers, upon which much of the tourist and farm industry depends. The rest is many of the teens either already have jobs or are uninterested in working this summer. And some jobs will go unfilled because the prospective employers aren't willing to pay the new minimum wage for someone with little or no experience.

Finals week is over; summer is here. And thanks to misguided politicians, your teenager is more likely to be sitting in front of the television than waiting tables or scooping ice cream.

This year, it's harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University described summer 2007 as "the worst in post-World War II history" for teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is poised to be "even worse."

According to their data, only about one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer, and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even worse.

So rather than easing poverty the increased minimum wage may have made it worse, closing the door to the low-income and minority teens looking for their first jobs. That's no way to help these kids get out of poverty. So the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again...or was it unintended? That's something better asked of the Democrats in Congress.

Leland Teschler reminds us it's deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. In this case our struggle with rising energy prices, or more specifically, rising oil and gas prices is not new. As he writes, it's Back To The Future Of The 1970's It starts off with an old joke that's new again.

For our anniversary my wife wanted to go someplace expensive, so we went to a gas station.

There are a lot of things about the 1970's besides jokes that would have a familiar ring. For instance, take the well-known straits of the US automakers. It's nothing new.

During the Arab Oil Embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, oil prices spiked and supplies became tight. Many gas stations ran out of gas, partly because of hoarding and partly because there wasn't enough gas to go around. Gas lines were long and an impromptu gas rationing system sprang up in many states to help alleviate the shortages and the gas lines. The price of regular gas back then was as high, if not higher, than it is now, taking into account 35 years of inflation.

A lot of the proposed solutions to the problems back then never came to fruition, either due to fear, shortsightedness, or plain stupidity on the part of our leaders and the interference of special interests. If we had taken action back then many of our energy problems wouldn't exist today. We wouldn't have to scramble in order to squeeze every bit of useful energy out of our existing supply. Our vehicles would be more fuel efficient, and many of them wouldn't be running on fossil fuels. Few, if any, of our power plants would use oil, natural gas, or coal.

My question: Will we learn the lessons of the 1970's or will we make the same mistakes again and miss yet another opportunity to move past fossil fuels that presently power our civilization? If history is any indicator, the answer is probably not. Never mind the still unproven and ever more questioned theories of anthropogenic global warming. It's not the environment that will drive the change over to less carbon intensive means of generating power. It will be the economic forces that will do so. That is, of course, unless the cost of oil plummets and those forces slacken, weakening the incentives to do so.

Frankly, oil has much better uses than burning it to make electricity or to use as a fuel for our cars, trucks, boats, planes, etc. It's time to move away from the fossil fuel era, regardless of how much oil there is still out there waiting to be discovered.