If someone pushed you into a wall, would you turn around — after you regained consciousness, of course — and say, “it’s fine. I totally smashed my face voluntarily”? No, you wouldn’t, but it seems Chester Finn, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, would. After all, he just wrote the following about how state adoption of Common Core national curriculum standards has been “totally voluntary”:

This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Doesn’t sound truly voluntary at all, does it? And let’s not forget, taxpayers — who live in states — had no choice about sending their dollars to Washington in the first place.

Wait. I take that back. It was totally voluntary. They’d just go to jail if they refused to pay up.