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" I often mention to people how much I miss the old conservatives. Sure, they were all as solid and inflexible as those iron giants that the late Ray Harryhausen dreamed up for Jason And The Argonauts, but they at least had substance to them. One of them, old Bill Buckley, founded the National Review, which once stood athwart history crying stop, but which now stands astride common fking sanity and cries, &amp;quot;Roogedy-roogedy!&amp;quot; And fourth, the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people&amp;#039;s character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably - even understandably - assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming - as do Europeans, who give far less to charity than Americans for this very reason - that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children.  Yeah, that must account for all those failing schools in, say, Finland. Let me tell you about my father, who was a public school teacher and administrator for 35 years, and who was so conservative that he made the above mentioned dope sound like Henry Wallace. He worked in what was then called an &amp;quot;inner city&amp;quot; high school in Worcester, Mass., and he was forever feuding with this one gym teacher because the latter, whose class fell during the first period of the day, kept sending kids down to the office to be punished for dozing in class. Invariably, my father would discover that the kid had had no breakfast. Invariably, he would send the kid down the block to a coffee shop with a couple of bucks and a stern warning to come right back by second period. (Woe betide \u2014 as the nuns used to say \u2014 the kid who used the opportunity to skip out for the day. Some of them may still be in detention, and the school&amp;#039;s been a condo development for more than 20 years.) He would then fight with the gym teacher. &amp;quot;You cannot teach a hungry child,&amp;quot; my father once explained to me. And, before the inevitable &amp;quot;But, see, that&amp;#039;s private charity&amp;quot; rejoinder comes back at me, my father thought the school department should provide breakfast, because it was even more important than providing lunch. He and I fought about politics all the time, and he would think Dennis Prager was off his trolley. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18423/dennis-prager-free-school-breakfasts-050813/>