Radio Interview -- Sam, George, and Julius talk governance styles and the philosophical shift to "rule by executive pen"

Below is the link to my latest conversation on Alberta’s CRTR The Rogue radio, where I’ve been doing semi-regular appearances on their segment called Sam the Farmyard Philosopher.

In this episode, Sam, Steve, George Zeigner (special guest and former chief superintendent of Catholic Schools in Alberta), and I dig into the disappointing lack of lasting reforms happening in the United States where the shift to arbitrary and temporary “rule by executive pen” reflects a profound philosophical shift in how government conducts its business.

We discussed why institutional systems fall apart and why governments lose their ability to solve problems and instead become the problem once they grow beyond a certain size.

One example that came up is the question of why public schools have so many more administrators (by orders of magnitude) than their private school counterparts. I recited some Ontario numbers during our conversation, but couldn’t find the link again in my overflowing collection of web bookmarks. However, in searching for it after the interview I stumbled upon another article by economist Mark J. Perry, from the American Enterprise Institute, where he points out that:

1. “The New York City public schools system has 250 times as many administrators as the New York Catholic school system (6,000 administrators in the public school system versus 24 in the Catholic school system), even though New York public schools have only four times as many students as the Catholic schools.”

2. “The Chicago Board of Education, which has 3,300 employees, is larger than the entire Japanese Ministry of Education.”

Anyway, here’s the link in case you’d like to listen in to the replay of our conversation.

https://www.mixcloud.com/theRogue/sam-talks-with-george-and-julius-about-governance-styles/

Enjoy!

Link to CFTR The Rogue on Mixcloud