Tag Archives: Educational Freedom

What Tunisia and Wisconsin do NOT have in common

Many socialists, including Wisconsin’s Noddlez revolutionary are rejoicing that the people’s revolutionary masses are now on the march from Tunisia to Wisconsin.

One easily overlooked difference is the fact that the North African uprising AGAINST the government, while the Wisconsin protests are FOR continued government spending.

From mises.org:

In Tunisia, “free” university education is guaranteed to anyone who passes the government’s exams at the end of high school. Largely as a result of this, the number of Tunisians who graduated college more than tripled in the last ten years. This may sound like a good thing, but it has produced a glut of graduates.

Fifty-Seven percent of young Tunisians entering the labor market are college educated. This is while only 30 percent of Americans earn a college degree by the time they are 27. Recent Tunisian college grads have an unemployment rate approximately three times higher than the national average of 15 percent. This is up ninefold from 1994.

. . . .

In fact, the Tunisian protests began after a recent graduate killed himself because government authorities confiscated his fruit stand when they discovered he did not have an “official” permit. The BBC reported that most of the early protesters were unemployed recent graduates.

From the Daily Bell:

originally published in The Times/N.I. Syndication:

“[Mohamed Bouazizi, the] young [street] trader had been in trouble with the authorities before….Under the dictatorship of President Ben Ali, permits were required for every form of business activity, often accompanied by a bribe. Bouazizi’s family would later claim that he had refused to pay the bribe demanded by the officials….According to other fruit and vegetable pedlars, vendors have a choice when faced with a municipal inspector: they can flee, and leave behind both borrow and merchandise; pay a fine equivalent to several days’ earnings, or fork out a bribe. Bouazizi, it seems, was not inclined to do any of these. When [a 45 year old female inspector] Hamdi began seizing his applies, he tried to grab them back, and she slapped him in the face….”

After this event all hell broke loose and escalated and ended, eventually, in the ouster of President Ben Ali’s government. So, by any reasonable account what brought about the Tunisian upheaval is the government’s intervention with freedom of trade, exactly the kind of conduct by government officials that a good many American jurists, political thinkers and politicians claim is constitutional and certainly not dictatorial.

The case against coersive taxation

From a correspondence with friends:

I hold the very radical belief that taking someone’s property by force or threat of force is stealing, regardless of whether it’s done by an individual or institution or government, regardless of whether you call it taxation, and regardless of what virtues are invoked to justify the violence.

***

My apologies for the long-winded reply, but this stuff is my passion. I’m happy to make my case, even if we agree to disagree afterward:

> “Is it wrong to keep a standing army?”

Yes. The United States did not keep a large standing army during peacetime until 1948. Since then, we’ve had a foreign, undeclared war every decade, and never mind the fact that our Constitution requires congress to declare war. The psychopaths in government are having too much fun sending suckers like me off to war and their friends are making too much money.

How you like them apples? You’re a citizen of a country that can’t go a single decade without invading another.

How about the fact that we spend more than the rest of world COMBINED on “defense” which to me looks more like “offense”?

> “With all that you own and all that was given to you just by virtue of being born in the US, don’t you think that is worth protecting?”

I feel tremendous admiration and gratitude to all the entrepreneurs who risk their personal wealth to produce goods and services they hope I will VOLUNTARILY buy.

These are the people we should revere. These are the people to whom we should build monuments, not the power hungry politicians and bureaucrats who are too stupid, lazy, and cowardly to provide us with things we want. They cannot serve society, so they seek to rule it. Entrepreneurs build civilization. They are the ones who need protection, primarily from their government.

> “You use the services of the country, therefore, you have to pay your share.”

1- There are many that don’t use, which I’m also required to pay for.

2- I’d hardly categorize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bank bailouts, the nationalization of General Motors, the TSA’s pornographic body scanners, the NSA’s eavesdropping on my telephone calls, the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment, and the BULLSHIT speeding ticket I got as “services.”

3- I’d absolutely *love* to stop using ALL public “services” in exchange for keeping all the money which people VOLUNTARILY give me for my work.

But regardless, I’m glad you at least used the words “have to.” You acknowledge then that government-provided services are coercive.

Violence will be used against me if I attempt to do without the benefit of infecting unsuspecting Guatemalans with Syphilis, for example. Initially, my refusal to pay for this public “service” will only inspire increasingly menacing letters from the tax collector, but ongoing refusal to pay will be met with physical violence, including lethal force should I attempt to defend my property. (btw, I pay all my taxes — out of fear.)

Please acknowledge the violence.

It can be justified only if you believe that a peaceful system of voluntary exchanges cannot provide education, security, food for the hungry, housing the poor, transportation, culture, etc.

Then you are faced with a dilemma: Should we leave the poor to their fate or should we violently separate people from their wealth? Should remain ignorant about the advanced stages of Syphilis or should we use the threat of violence to force people to pay for government experiments?

Of course, I believe there is overwhelming evidence that all these things are better provided in a free market (all the ones which are worth doing that is, and none of the ones which aren’t) . Therefore, the dilemma you might feel between violent taxation and some societal need doesn’t even exist.

Because your statist approach is the violent approach, I think the burden of proof lies with you; you must to demonstrate the government’s superiority to the free market. Nevertheless, I’ll make the case that the free market is the better provider, just because it’s so easy to do:

> 1) Security.

If you search for “mall cop tasers” on youtube, you don’t find anything (I didn’t), because privately hired security, unlike security hired by the greedy, lazy, cowardly, power-hungry sociopaths in government is accountable.

You might also be interested in the not-so-wild west where private security flourished, and the murder rate was lower than that of most modern-day U.S. cities:
www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=552

Also, gun town USA — where crime nearly vanished, and not a single person has been murdered in the 25 years since a renegade mayor required every household to purchase a gun:
www.wnd.com/?pageId=41196
(I’m philosophically against the requirement, because it’s coercive, but I think this demonstrates the ability of people to protect themselves peacefully.)

> 2) Transportation

The railroad was build on private initiative in pursuit of private profits. It worked great until government strangled it with regulation, then killed it by FORCING everyone to subsidize an interstate highway system.

The obvious failure of the free market then precipitated the nationalization of Amtrak, a government monopoly, which, if I remember correctly, has lost 32 billion dollars to date.

Despite the best efforts of the statist ideologues, Indiana, Chicago and California are considering selling roads to entrepreneurs who are willing to risk their private wealth in the providing of transportation services.

> 3) need a structured state government to implement changes

Like a hole in the head.

Local governments have either outlawed or required people to kiss the ring of governance, beg permission and pay a hefty licensing fee for the following privileges:
-arranging flowers in Louisiana
-selling coffins in Louisiana, even for monks
-interior designing in DC or Florida
-showing tourists around in Boston
-labeling GMO-free foods “GMO-free”
-selling raw milk
-running lemonade stands in Portland ($120 health department fee)
-selling pumpkins and Christmas trees into Lake Elmo MN
-delivering your neighbors garbage to the dump in San Francisco
-putting signs in your store windows in Dallas
-eyebrow threading in Texas
-training Yoga instructors in Virginia

You risk the violence of government for committing these “crimes.”

4) civil services

How about the fact that poverty in the US fell by 1% a year from 1950 until 1968 when the government’s “war on poverty” began? Since the government’s “war on poverty,” the poverty rate stagnated and remained so despite a quadrupling of the government’s anti-poverty budget.

Source:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=064YTtSxVSo#t=46m10s

Consider this next time you hear someone say the free market punishes the poor.

5) (I’ll cover education, though you didn’t list it.)

As I said, I believe the burden of proof lies with the advocates of violence. I challenge you to find any evidence that public education has been anything but a pathetic, disastrous failure despite a tripling of the federal education budget, and a doubling of the number bureaucrats per student:
www.lostrepublic.com/archives/4630

There’s also the fact that before America’s first public schools appeared in Massachusetts, there was near 100% literacy.

I think all the evidence of the superiority of the free market in providing services generally provided by government is irrefutable. You may find ways spin, question and undermine it, but instead of doing that, can you find evidence that the government approach is superior? Can you find any evidence whatsoever to justify the coercive funding of public “services”?

A parable reflecting the common, unimaginative objections to privatizing education

People in the Soviet Union were standing in line for butter. After several hours, one of them said:

“This sucks. Why does government control food distribution?”

There were some nods of agreement, but the young man behind him, a Phd student, said “the free market is great for the rich, but what about the poor? Who would feed the poor?”

“Can you imagine a system in which food is only grown and sold for profit??? A system in which everything was about MONEY!” said another man. “How barbaric!”

“I can speak to this personally,” said a fourth man, a drunk who wobbled on his legs. “Every day of my life I eat from my government quota of food. If it wasn’t for the government, I would starve!”

“Yes, you’re right, the original dissenter agreed. Perhaps food is too important to be left to the free market.”

Lew Rockwell interviews John Gatto — On Public Education

This is an absolutely fascinating interview. Mr. Gatto was the New York State 2009 public school teacher of the year.

Mr. Gatto quit as a public school teacher in order to stop harming kids. He had discovered that institutional schooling is designed to prevent the natural genius of children from emerging. Public schools impose a state of permanent incompletion to our kids, by teaching habit-training, not intellectual development. The power elite deliberately suppresses independent and critical thinking, to make us obedient citizens and consumers. Gatto, author of the best-selling Weapons of Mass Instruction, Dumbing Us Down, and The Underground History of American Education, discusses how the twenty elite boarding schools teach their students according to ancient principles, and homeschoolers and unschoolers are doing the same.

Gatto’s website

NASA doesn’t matter, and public education is pathetic

Great essay from 1994 (the year I graduated from the NYC public school system).

What Really Matters

by John Taylor Gatto

This originally appeared in Natural Life Magazine, November/December, 1994.

Going to the moon didn’t really matter, it turned out.

I say that from the vantage point of my six decades living on Planet Earth, but also because of something I saw not so long ago. It was at Booker T. Washington High School where I watched an official astronaut – a handsome, well-built man in his prime, dressed in a silver space suit with an air of authentic command – try to get the attention of an auditorium full of Harlem teenagers. It was the Board of Education’s perfect template for dramatic success – a distinguished black man leading ignorant black kids to wisdom. He came with every tricky device and visual aid NASA could muster, yet the young audience ignored him completely. I heard some teachers say, “What do you expect from ghetto kids?”, but I don’t think that explained his failure at all. The kids instinctively perceived this astronaut had less control over his rocket vehicle than a bus driver has over his bus. I think they had also wordlessly deduced that any experiments he performed were someone else’s idea. The space agency’s hype was lost on them.

. . . .

After 12,000 hours of compulsory training at the hands of nearly 100 government-certified men and women, many high school graduates have no skills to trade for an income or even any skills with which to talk to each other. They can’t change a flat, read a book, repair a faucet, install a light, follow directions for the use of a word processor, build a wall, make change reliably, be alone with themselves or keep their marriages together. The situation is considerably worse than journalists have discerned. I know, because I lived in it for 30 years as a teacher. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

Texas Textbook Troubles

In my own field of work, university education, there are a great many who scoff at the idea of privatization, something that is exactly how a free society should handle all education from primary to post graduate schools. There is no excuse for government to be responsible for educating young people or anyone else for that matter. Not only is it destructive of educational impartiality to entrust schools to governments – only if there is variety can impartiality be at least approximated – but the threat of out and out indoctrination is most real when one monolithic agency, with the power to coercively collect funds for its operations and conscript its students, runs “education.”

Yes, thousands of professor and teachers want the government to be in charge but after this has been accomplished, as it has for a couple of centuries throughout America and elsewhere, there is no escaping the turf fight that takes over educational policy, especially when it comes to such courses as history, civics, and even biology and the textbooks teachers are required to use in them. (Read more from thedailybell.com)

How Government Drives Up College Tuitions

This is several months old, but it is fantastic. How can anyone possibly oppose college tuition subsidies? Please listen and learn. Like most government programs, government tuition subsidies punish exactly the people they presume to help.

Yale University

1810-1852 tuition = $33/year or 1.65 ounces of gold
1918 tuition = $160/year (dollars were inflated during WWI) = 8.4 ounces of gold = 32 days of manual labor
2009 tuition = $36,500/year or about 33 ounces of gold = 550 days of manual labor

This was caused not by freedom or greed. It was caused by reckless government subsidies.

The College Industrial Complex

I’m a big fan of Lew Rockwell podcasts. I often listen to them while preparing breakfast. These two interviews both touch on what’s a new idea to me: college as government intervention – guaranteeing loans, subsidizing student lending, eliminating free market disciplines on Universities. Suddenly I see in a new light the extravagant cost of tuition, the legions of people devoting thousands of hours to subject which they themselves do not care about.

Peter Schiff: You’re Better Off as a Renter. March 23, 2009.
Peter Schiff talks about the college in the last quarter of the interview, from 11:30 onward.

Gerald Celente: The Fed Has Wounded You. April 26, 2009.
Gerald Celente only touches on it briefly in this great interview, from 9:45 to 12:30.

Hillsdale College vs. The U.S.S.A.

This is an inspirational story about one College’s defiance of invasive, misguided federal policies.

“Hillsdale’s modern rise to prominence occurred in the 1970s. On the pretext that some of its students were receiving federal loans, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare attempted to interfere with the College’s internal affairs, including a demand that Hillsdale begin counting its students by race [emphasis added].”

Hillsdale College didn’t need race-related “help” from the feds because “it was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery. It was also only the second college in the nation to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women.”

“Hillsdale’s trustees responded with two toughly worded resolutions: One, the College would continue its policy of non-discrimination. Two, ‘with the help of God,’ it would ‘resist, by all legal means, any encroachments on its independence.’

Following almost a decade of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against Hillsdale in 1984. By this time, the College had announced that rather than complying with unconstitutional federal regulation, it would instruct its students that they could no longer bring federal taxpayer money to Hillsdale. Instead, the College would replace that aid with private contributions.” (Read more from hillsdale.edu)

Stossel on Universal Pre-K

“We need to enroll more children and we need to start at an even earlier age.” ~ Emperor Obama

67% of Americans agree, which is what I’m trying to change here on LostRepublic . Please watch:

Government: We screwed up Headstart and we screwed up K-12, but give us your money and give us control of your four-year-olds, because this time we’ll get it right. We promise.