Over the past few weeks, thousands of Americans, including 1,500 here in St. Louis, have gathered to protest Obama's socialist economic policies: the $819 billion stimulus, the nationalization of banks and other businesses, and the planned second stimulus.  Conservatives and libertarians recognize that these policies will only serve to hurt our already ailing economy--and so far, the market has borne out these concerns.

Yet, if Obama's most recently articulated plan comes to fruition, such demonstrations will be less and less in the coming years.  Not because Obama plans to embrace a free-market system of economics.  Not even because conservatives are disinclined to spend their working hours in protests against government policy.  Instead, because Obama supports "cradle to career" education.

Public education from pre-K to high school has experienced huge problems.  The stereotype of rich parents sending their children to high-achieving private institutions is there for a reason: because no one who can afford private school wants their kids to suffer through a public education.  Children in U.S. schools start out in the top 90% of children worldwide, and then take a dive somewhere in middle school.  Only when our students graduate high school and attend college (which, interestingly, they or their parents are paying for), does the quality of schooling suddenly shoot up again.  You'll notice that budding young international scholars don't flock to government-sponsored French universities--where students think nothing of protesting a harsh grade curve by going on strike.

While Obama claims that "merit bonuses" will encourage teacher performance and commentators maintain that such incentives will inflame teachers' unions, in truth, Obama offers no solution to the crisis building in our public schools.  "Merit" is an awfully subjective criterion, which will likely be measured using tests that are incredibly easy to pass--or incredibly easy to cheat.  In essence, Obama is giving teachers and their unions a gift: bonuses, and the chance to show "objective improvement" that will justify these bonuses.

Meanwhile, the taxpayers will be forced into paying not only for the mortgages of people who choose not to take responsibility for their debts, and the business expenses of companies that have become effectively nationalized--but also for yet more of the educational expenses of children that we have not chosen to bring into the world.

The larger concern, however, is that we are letting people stay on the public dole for four extra years.  Importantly, kids turn eighteen during those four critical years.  Thus, they become able to vote when they are still the recipients of public largesse.  This fact is far more likely to make college students vote in what they perceive to be their own self-interest: in favor of yet more government spending to further the "public good."  As if liberal education weren't sufficiently in favor of progressive economic and property ideals, keeping almost every single child in the U.S. on the public dole throughout college will firmly entrench these notions.

Thus, with these "modest" notions for educational reform, Obama will achieve three goals: convince the media that he's really not a thoroughgoing union man, give a wonderful gift to the unions he supports, and, most importantly, keep multiple generations of progressives panting for tax dollars and voting Democrat.