The Costs of Compulsory Education

by Aaron Smith

Education elites and their political cronies have implemented countless initiatives aimed at reforming education. From the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, every plan put forth has resulted in nothing but inefficient expenditures, new layers of bureaucracy, and continuing declines in student achievement.

Education will only be reformed once parents and entrepreneurs are free to create real alternatives to the broken systems that exist today. Repealing compulsory-education laws and allowing parents to spend their education dollars freely should be the first steps in this direction.

Curiously, compulsory-education laws, which conscript children into state-regulated programs of study, are rarely discussed in the context of education reform; these laws' ostensibly benevolent nature allows demagogues to marginalize detractors and quell any attempt at serious discourse. This results in far-reaching regulations that control how private actors educate, and thus prohibits students from getting the individualized education they need.

The origin of compulsory education was characterized by oppression and forced assimilation. The modern movement was initially led by Martin Luther and the early Protestants, who sought to inculcate the masses with their religious views. Despotic Prussia was the first to enact laws at the national level, and compulsory education quickly became a weapon of choice for states seeking to destroy troublesome cultures and languages. In the United States, Massachusetts began enforcing mandatory attendance in 1852, and by 1918 every state had enacted similar legislation. The primary impetus for policymakers was to assimilate poor immigrant children; labor unions were also ardent supporters, as they sought to decrease the supply of labor in the workforce.

Current laws vary by state in details, but they are quite homogeneous in spirit. All require a minimum amount of instructional time (ranging from 160 to 186 days annually) at approved institutions. The majority of Americans between the ages of 5 and 18 are compelled to meet this requirement, with several states enforcing slightly more lenient laws. Although parents are free to pursue private education for their children, such options are almost always regulated by state governments.

There is likely a minority of children who benefit from compulsory education. While these outliers are by no means insignificant, the benefits accrued to them do not justify the aggregate effects imposed. To objectively evaluate the merits of such laws, we must fully account for all of their costs. Evaluating the effects on private forms of education is a good starting point.

Private schools and homeschools are rarely truly free-market alternatives to government-regulated education. By mandating attendance, states have a virtual stranglehold on the nature of private education. After all, in order to become a state-approved program of study at which "official" attendance is recognized, private actors are forced to satisfy some combination of curricular, reporting, and testing requirements.

In New York, for instance, homeschools must submit a notice of intent, maintain attendance records, file quarterly reports, and submit Individualized Home Instruction Plans for state approval. 
Additionally, students must successfully complete an annual assessment, including mandatory yearly standardized testing for grades nine and above. Perhaps most problematic, however, is its mandate that instruction given to a child must be "at least substantially equivalent to minors of like age or attainments at public schools," an edict clearly susceptible to abuse by state officials. This forces parents to comply with the belief systems of distant regulators who are free to define "substantially equivalent" as they see fit.

In the event that a parent's personal values oppose those of the state, the state's interests will ultimately prevail. This conflict prompted Murray Rothbard to note that at the heart of the compulsory-education debate is "the idea that children belong to the State rather than to their parents." If you attempt to challenge this notion, your child may be labeled "truant," and you may be subjected to fines, imprisonment, and the forcible return of their child to his or her zoned public school. Compulsory education thus imposes the state's definition of "education" on all parties falling under its auspices — even those pursuing a "private" course of study.

The state's monopoly on what defines "education" inevitably suppresses alternative views, thereby eliminating the complexity and diversity that should be prevalent in the market. Instead, a homogeneous system is used to serve heterogeneous students — yet another cost of compulsory education. READ MORE

Rockefeller, Morgan, and War

"It's Why We Fight"...You didn't know?

by Murray N. Rothbard

This article is excerpted from Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, chapter 8, "Rockefeller, Morgan, and War" (1984; 2011).

During the 1930s, the Rockefellers pushed hard for war against Japan, which they saw as competing with them vigorously for oil and rubber resources in Southeast Asia and as endangering the Rockefellers' cherished dreams of a mass "China market" for petroleum products. On the other hand, the Rockefellers took a noninterventionist position in Europe, where they had close financial ties with German firms such as I.G. Farben and Co., and very few close relations with Britain and France.

The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr. (CIA) & his National Review magazine

By Charles Burris

November 26, 2014

CIA counterfeit conservative William F. Buckley Jr., after completing his snitch work as FBI shill/informant at Yale, was recruited by the Agency and did his CIA stint with E. Howard Hunt (future Watergate conspirator) in Mexico.

Buckley, with intelligence community colleagues James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William J. Casey, went on to found National Review magazine as the premier publication of the CIA’s synthetic “Conservative movement” replacing the non-interventionist Old Right coalition of Americans opposed to the corporate welfare-warfare state of Roosevelt and Truman.

What most Americans mistakenly regard today as the “Conservative movement” has undergone many convoluted and dramatic transformations over the past sixty years.

Perhaps the most keen observer has been the late Murray N. Rothbard, the internationally acclaimed economist and historian (and bête noir of Buckley).

How this disinformation process began is detailed in Rothbard’s engaging and insightful book, The Betrayal of the American Right.

It tells the full story of how this subversive movement at war with American liberties and the rule of law, came about.

This book is the definitive examination of how the CIA’s phony “Conservative movement” arose and deluded millions in the name of national security and state power.

“Conservatism,” since the days of Burke and Robespierre, has stood for the status quo and an apologia for tyranny.

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s entire career as a “public intellectual” was built upon one ignominious deception after another as a servitor of state power.

The synthetic “Conservative movement” he help spawn has continued unabated, growing like a cancer in the American body politic.

Buckley was a student at Yale University (Skull and Bones 1950) where he served as shill and informant for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. One of Buckley’s Yale professors, former Trotskyist communist Willmoore Kendall (formerly of the OSS and later consultant to the CIA) was a recruiter of talent for the newly created Agency. Kendall recruited Buckley in 1951.

Kendall introduced him to former Trotskyist James Burnham (also formerly of the OSS). Burnham was consultant to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA’s covert action division. He was later to actively work on the CIA coup d’etat against Mossadegh in Iran.

Burnham first introduced Buckley to agent E. Howard Hunt in his Washington, D. C. apartment. Buckley then served with Hunt in Mexico where Hunt was chief of station and Buckley’s control officer. Hunt later figured as a principal in the Watergate Scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.

Hunt, in his memoirs, American Spy, (in which Buckley wrote the introduction) observes that prior to his stint in the CIA, Regnery published Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, an indictment of the supposed pervasive liberalism on that campus. The book launched Buckley’s career as spokesman for the emerging “Conservative movement” of the early 1950s. With what we now know about CIA covert recruiting on college campuses during this period, particularly Yale, Buckley’s initial book bears a new revisionist examination.

What is not widely known is that the whole enterprise was largely that of a “vanity press” arrangement, with the Buckley family operating covertly under the clandestine guise of the Catawba Corporation, commissioning and financing the book’s publication and publicity. The book’s ownership copyright secretly belonged to Catawba, not WFB.

Buckley was later approached by Regnery to serve on the board of directors of the publishing firm, along with that of William J. Casey. Casey was a prominent Wall Street attorney who had served in the OSS and later became CIA Director under Ronald Reagan.

Hunt pointed out that Regnery was subsidized by the CIA during its early years.

At this time James Burnham, who had maintained many of his former leftist connections, was active in the CIA sponsored front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funding left-wing, anti-Soviet scholars and publications networks. When later, at Burnham’s urging, Buckley created National Review magazine, the premier “Conservative” publication of the past fifty years, joining him in the endeavor as principal editors were Kendall, Burnham, and his sister Priscilla, all of whom had been employed by the CIA.

William J. Casey drew up the incorporation papers for National Review, and served as its long-time legal counsel.

The mysterious early funding of this “non-profit” publication has long been an enigma to researchers.

One hoped that Hunt (and Buckley) would finally shed light on this subject, for in one of the most fascinating, if incomplete, chapters in Hunt’s memoir, “The Great Propaganda Machine,” he describes some of his activities in the CIA’s on-going efforts to manipulate, subsidize, and influence the news media and, through it, American public opinion.

The great unanswered question remains: What was Hunt’s role in assisting his old colleague in creating the CIA’s synthetic “Conservative movement?” Buckley’s National Review editorial colleague Frank Meyer (and his good friend, National Review former contributor Murray Rothbard) believed that the magazine was a CIA operation run by Burnham as Buckley’s control. And Hunt does detail in the book how the CIA was engaged in many clandestine operations of covert front groups and foundations using media manipulation and propaganda to project American imperial power and hegemony throughout the world.

Buckley and Hunt are dead.

Why not come clean about National Review?

Buckley remained close to Hunt and, as he relates in the memoir, helping him through some trying post-Watergate legal difficulties after the mysterious airline death of his wife Dorothy.

Years later, Buckley was outted as a CIA operative by former CIA agent William Sloane Coffin (Skull and Bones 1949). Coffin was a long-time colleague of George H. W. Bush (Skull and Bones 1948) when they both attended Phillips Andover Academy and later Yale together.

Former CIA Director Bush later presented Buckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom, something Hunt never got for his years of clandestine service. Buckley subsequently created his famous fictional character of CIA agent Blackford Oakes, as Hunt had done earlier in his own series of eight spy novels (under the pseudonym of David St. John) featuring CIA agent ‘Peter Ward.’

But it is not Hunt with whom Buckley should be compared but author Mary Shelley.

Buckley’s entire life as America’s premier “conservative” public intellectual was sheer fiction based on lies and deception. And so has been the Frankenstein movement he created for his intelligence community masters.

The Best of Charles Burris

DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: RJ Rummel and the Destruction of Europe - *video*

Published on Nov 21, 2012

The Dr. Richard J. Kossmann lecture, presented at the 2012 Mises Institute Supporters Summit: "The Truth About War: A Revisionist Approach". Recorded at Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on 27 October 2012.

DEATH BY GOVERNMENT

By R.J. Rummel

 

How To Dismantle the American Empire - by Laurence M. Vance + Smedley Butler *vid*

Mises Daily: Tuesday, February 11, 2014 by Laurence M. Vance
 

Editors note: This selection is from chapter 7 of Laurence Vance’s War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy, now available in the Mises Store.

If You're Disgusted with Both Parties then You're a Jeffersonian, but don't know it

If you've been disenchanted with either political party for some time like lower echelon Americans, and have defaulted voting for the "lesser of two evils", then change. Retaining liberty is not a once every two year voting event. But, you know that.

True, you can't change anything by yourself, but you can tell others about the meaning and origin of our country's true historical endowment of freedom. You will feel better about yourself knowing that you're shaping new lumber to make a difference. 

There are good people out there who want to hear your message. They will be your fellow carpenters, masons, plumbers and electricians. Credit yourself for the groundswell of restored freedoms that is sure to come. Welcome home, you'll be a Jeffersonian.

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Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian?

Mises Daily: Friday, July 31, 2009 by Murray N. Rothbard

Every college student, indeed every literate person, is expected to choose up sides and pin a label on himself in the Great Debate. Most people today consider themselves as Jeffersonians. Groups as diverse as the States' Rights (or Dixiecrat) movement and the Communists consider themselves heirs to the Jeffersonian mantle. At one and the same time, conservative southerners refer to themselves as "Jeffersonian Democrats," while the leading revolutionary Marxist school in the country is called the "Jefferson School of Social Science." Amidst this welter of confusion, to find the true picture of Jefferson the man and political philosopher is an extraordinarily difficult task.

A Bewildering Mosaic

Analysis of Jefferson is made far more difficult by the complex nature of Jefferson's personality and career. A man of brilliant intellect; keenly interested in the whole range of human thought, from economics to architecture to scientific farming; active, dynamic, and spirited in an amazing multitude of enterprises, and moreover a political leader the greater part of his life, necessarily presents to posterity a bewildering mosaic. Politics itself is a day-to-day affair, imposing by its very nature on the politician a series of shifts and compromises. Thus, Jefferson combined within himself the qualities of a soaring intellectual spirit, searching for political principle, busy man of affairs, and political boss. When it is further remembered that Jefferson dominated the stage during the most vital years of the Republic (Revolution, Independence, Constitution, Growth, War, etc.), it becomes more understandable that so many contrasting groups can pick out of his immense record of writings and actions support for their own ideologies.

A Mere Scribbler?

But to an unbiased observer who explores Thomas Jefferson, his principles stand out indelible and crystal clear. His political philosophy has been imbedded deep into the very soul of America, and has imprinted itself on the minds of innumerable Americans of later generations. His achievement has been sneered at by Hamiltonians of our day as well as his. 

Hamilton, they claim, was a constructive and practical man of action. He funded the national debt, reformed the administration of government, established a national bank, etc. Jefferson was a mere phrase-maker and scribbler. These "practical men" fail to grasp that the forces which generate the actions of men, and therefore human history, are, for good or bad, the ideas of men. It is ideas, political, economic, ethical, esthetic, religious, that have prime significance for human action in the present and over the centuries. It is ludicrous to claim that Hamilton's financial measures were of comparable importance to the Declaration of Independence or the Kentucky Resolutions.
 
The battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, however, is of very great significance, and precisely because it represented a clash between two fundamentally contrasting systems of political principle. Jefferson's political philosophy is summed up in the phrase: ''That government is best which governs least." It received its finest expression in our own Declaration of Independence: man is endowed by God with certain natural rights; "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and when government becomes destructive of that end, the people have the right to change the form of government accordingly. Thus Jefferson, as John Locke had done a century before, drastically shifted the moral emphasis from the State to the individual. In the absolutist and feudal era from which the world was beginning to emerge, divine right settled only on the kings, the nobility; in short, the State and its rulers. To Jefferson, the divine rights were conferred on each and every individual, not on rulers of government.

The Great Jeffersonian Lesson

What were these natural rights? The fundamental right, from which all others are deduced, is the right to life. Each individual has the moral right to live without coercive interference by others. To live, he must be free to work and acquire property, to "pursue happiness." In political terms, the one important natural right is self-defense; defense of one's life, liberty, and property from invasive attack. Government's function, then, is to use its power of force to prevent and combat attempts to use force in the society. If the Government extends its powers beyond this "cop-on-the-corner" function, it in itself becomes the greatest tyrant and plunderer of them all. 

Since the Government has virtual monopoly of force, its potentialities for evil are far greater than that of any other institution. The people must constantly keep their Government small and local, and even then must watch it with great vigilance lest it run amok. That is the great Jeffersonian lesson, and it is one that all Americans must begin to learn again.
 
From this basic cornerstone, the rest of the Jeffersonian edifice is easily deduced. It explains his passionate, lifelong adherence to States' Rights, his determined opposition to John Marshall in the latter's successful campaign to make the Constitution more elastic so as to permit wider extension of federal power, his very distrust of the Constitution itself and insistence upon incorporating a Bill of Rights.
 
Jefferson's position on foreign policy stemmed from the same source. He did not believe that our government, or any government, is equipped to remake the world by force to our own liking. He was frankly a whole-hearted patriot, whose natural love of the soil and his country was reinforced by the fact that America constituted the Great Experiment in Liberty. 

His foreign policy was expressed in this classic phrase: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none." Particularly marked was his perceptive distrust of the wily imperialism of Great Britain.

The Fundamental Cleavage

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Our Enemy-Maker, the State

By Contributing Author <![if !vml]><![endif]>The state is the archenemy of the individual, as has been demonstrated by libertarian state analysts from Herbert Spencer (Man Vs. State) to Albert Jay Nock (Our Enemy, the State) to Murray Rothbard (Anatomy of the State). However, it is not only our chief enemy, it is also our chief maker of enemies. The parasitic state is not only perpetually at odds with us, but it is constantly setting us at odds with others. It is not only a millstone around our necks, but a target. States make enemies on behalf of its subjects, primarily because threats make it easier to marshall support from the frightened and indignant public for expansions of its power, both home and abroad. This is agreed upon both by opponents and practitioners of this policy. Rothbard wrote that: …the State has for centuries used the "foreign threat" to aggrandize its power over its deluded subjects. and that… "…war and a phony "external threat" have long been the chief means by which the state wins back the loyalty of its subjects." And the leading Nazi Hermann Göring stated at the Nuremburg Trials that: "…it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.(…) …voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked…" This aspect of the state has been especially important in recent news. The bourgeoning Islamic State, or ISIS, seems straight out of super villain central casting. And when the political class isn't panicking over ISIS, it is scaremongering over the "imperial designs" of Vladimir Putin. There are real dangers to Americans involved with both ISIS and Putin, but it is absolutely vital to realize that the ultimate wellspring of both of these dangers is our own state: the very one supposedly tasked with defending us from them. It is primarily the most powerful state in the world — the global hegemon headquartered in Washington, D.C.—that is putting our families and communities in danger of Islamic terrorism and Russian nukes. Radical Islam Tyranny and war both breed fanaticism; of course arming and training fanaticsdoes too. The U.S. and its regional allies have been the biggest supporters of fanaticism in the Muslim world in all three regards. ISIS could not even operate in, much less conquer from, the Sunni triangle of Iraq without at least some degree of acquiescence from the local population. The shell-shocked Sunni population only tolerates such madmen because they consider them useful in throwing off and keeping off the yoke of the U.S.-sponsored sectarian Shia government in Baghdad, which is even more horrendous to them (it has been known to apply power drills to the heads of its Sunni victims) than theocratic terrorists. If the U.S. government cared Visit Site

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Relationship of Politics to Morality

July 31, 2014

​Editorial By Wendy McElroy, Daily Bell​

A manufactured conflict is flashing through libertarianism: self-described "humanitarians" versus insultingly-labeled "brutalists." In a much circulated article entitled "Against Libertarian Brutalism," the libertarian luminary Jeffrey Tucker defines the "humanitarians" (of whom he is one) as people who love liberty because it "allows peaceful human cooperation... creative service... keeps violence at bay... allows for capital formation and prosperity... leads to a world in which people are valued as ends in themselves." In short, "humanitarian libertarians" value liberty because of the sheer beauty of the society it creates. (Note: The article was published in a March issue of FEE but the faux conflict is still active.)

By contrast, "brutal libertarians" are said to find "what's impressive about liberty is that it allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on 'politically incorrect' standards, to hate to their heart's content so long as no violence is used... to be openly racist and sexist." In short, "brutal libertarians" value liberty because it allows them to hate and to discriminate.

Unfortunately, the article also defines "brutal libertarians" as being "rooted in the pure theory of the rights of individuals to live their values whatever they may be." In other words, we (I am a brutalist by the preceding definition) believe in living peacefully without imposing our moral values on others; we view the non-aggression principle as the non-aggression principle. Politically-speaking, I adhere to nonviolence and for this I am considered hate-filled.

Tucker offers the example of "a town that is taken over by a fundamentalist sect that excludes all peoples not of the faith, forces women into burka-like clothing, imposes a theocratic legal code, and ostracizes gays and lesbians." And, yet, everyone is there voluntarily. He continues, "The brutalists will... defend such a microtyranny on grounds of decentralization, rights of property, and the right to discriminate and exclude – completely dismissing the larger picture here that, after all, people's core aspirations to live a full and free life are being denied on a daily basis."

Ignore errors such as presuming that decentralization or property ownership are used by libertarians to defend a violation of rights. Forget how difficult (or impossible) it is to find someone who advocates and lives nonviolence because he is hate-filled. Or the strong tendency for such a person to also adopt a moral code of civil behavior toward others. I do not know any voluntaryist who does not also have a strong personal ethics that includes tolerance, if not kindness toward others. But also, they believe their moral sentiments must not be imposed; what cannot be accomplished by peaceful means should not be accomplished at all.

Consider instead how easily the article skips over the "voluntary" aspect of the town. Or how a voluntary town could "force" women into burka-like clothing. Or how the article presumes that accommodating the aspirations of others is the responsibility of strangers.

I've tried to extract something positive from the article's "humanitarian" argument, and there is an interesting question raised, albeit obliquely. The question: What is the relationship between politics and morality?

Politics and Morality

In his article "Myth and Truth About Libertarianism," Murray Rothbard addresses the lie that "[l]ibertarians are libertines: they are hedonists who hanker after 'alternative lifestyles'. His response applies with equal force to the accusation of brutalism. "The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life."

One of my favorite authors on the distinction between politics and morality is Adam Smith (1723–1790). Smith is most celebrated as an economist and the author of Wealth of Nations, a central theme of which is a rejection of mercantilism – the crony capitalism of its day. But Smith saw himself primarily as a moral philosopher and much preferred his earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a central theme of which is that morality rests upon the natural sympathy individuals feel toward each other.

Smith has been cast as a cold-fish economist who argues on the basis of individual and private self-interest. The impression is rendered by short passages that are selectively lifted out of the massive Wealth of Nations. An example is the famous quotation: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

Certainly, the positive aspects of self-interest is part of Smith's argument but the overall picture he presents has been badly distorted. Smith argues for the free market primarily on moral grounds. That is, on the basis of the general good (prosperity), justice, freedom, liberty from domination and moral autonomy. These moral benefits accrue especially to the working class and to the poor. Smith examines economics in the explicit context of morality and human progress.

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Corporatist Lobbying Replaced a Free Market

C O R P O R A T O C R A C Y

The practice of a pure free market is so rare that a plausible argument can be made that a free market economy never existed. However, as the saying goes, Once Upon A Time, economic commerce did reflect a voluntary basis for business transactions. The fortunes of trade rested upon the mutual benefit of all parties, since repeated satisfaction built sustaining economies. Competition was the norm and the quality of goods and services developed that propelled expanding growth and prosperity for the largest numbers of participating producers and consumers. In the corporatist economic model, the goal is to create and protect monopolies, while stamping out any enterprises that challenge the Plutocrat system. Corporate economies are dependent upon connection and favoritism by government policy. The essay, Corporatism Is Not the Free Market states a fundamental point. "Too many people are willing to accept government-set goals (such as energy independence) so long as the "private sector" is induced to achieve them. Regardless of how the goals are achieved, if government sets them, that's statism." The way corporate lobbying works in America, best described as legalized bribery, has become the normal course of a corrupt political system. This overt example illustrates the problem. "The drug industry has spent more on lobbying under Obama than any other industry. Top lobbyists at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in 2009 met behind closed doors with the White House and Senate Democrats, promising political support for Democrats in exchange for friendly provisions in Obamacare." Concisely, money pays for influence. Yet, proponent of the corporate/state would have you accept that this kind of lobbying has protection under the First Amendment. The First Amendment Center presents the following: "Lobbyists try to persuade government officials either to support or oppose various policy issues. Therefore, lobbying can be considered a form of petitioning the government for redress of grievances, subject to protection under the First Amendment's petition clause. Although there has not been a great deal of judicial analysis on First Amendment protections afforded to lobbying, the courts have carved out several parameters. First, the petition clause does not grant a lobbyist the absolute right to speak to a government official nor does it grant a lobbyist the right to a hearing based on his or her grievances. In addition, the clause does not create an obligation for a government official to take action in response to a grievance. Finally, any statement made while a lobbyist petitions a government official does not receive greater protection than any other expression protected by the First Amendment." Let us get down to the nub of the legal definition. Does a corporation have constitutional standing based upon intrinsic natural rights? Or else are ALL constitutional rights vested in the personhood of a human being and not in the artificial construct of a corporation? Forget the tainted rulings of the courts, the best that money can buy. The economic outcome of political favoritism guarantees that corporate lobbyists has not only the ear of legislators, but often are the inside information conveyers that facilitate the financial worth of previously poor legislators. Crony Capitalism destroys what few vestiges remain of a free market. Outsourcing produced the global corporate economy. While Wall Street Capitalism: A Love Affair is no friend of 'Merchant Class' business, only a decentralized and independent trading system achieves real wealth creation, which is the nature of authentic commerce. The corporate lobbyist is dedicated to see that legislation and regulations, drafted by the companies seeking an advantage in a marketplace, have so many hurdles and obstacles to transverse that only the client company could overcome.  Essentially, the game is stacked and special privileges conferred, in order to stamp out competition. Roderick T. Long, in the essay, Corporations versus the Market, makes a significant point. "In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice." Therefore, the corporate lobbyist becomes the vehicle that drives the engine of the business-government partnership. Without achieving the desired objective through personal access and deal making skills, the CEO of international globalism would need to dirty their own hands and risk accusations of bribery. The Libertarian position of Murray Rothbard might shock you. In Man, Economy and State with Power and Market, he writes: "We have seen above that "bribery" of a private firm is not actually bribery at all, but simply payment of the market price for the product. Bribery of government officials is also a price for the payment of a service. What is this service? It is the failure to enforce the government edict as it applies to the particular person paying the bribe. In short, the acceptance of a bribe is equivalent to the sale of permission to engage in a certain line of business. Acceptance of a bribe is therefore praxeologically identical with the sale of a government license to engage in a business or occupation. And the economic effects are similar to those of a license. There is no economic difference between the purchase of a government permission to operate by buying a license or by paying government officials informally. What the briber receives, therefore, is an informal, oral license to operate. The fact that different government officials receive the money in the two cases is irrelevant to our discussion." Well, Rothbard's distinction does not hold correct. The difference between a voluntary private business transaction and dealing with a coercive government authority is as different from night and day. The entire corporate lobbying culture, based upon an immoral acceptance, as the cost of doing business, destroys public prosperity since the nature of the arrangement shifts rewards to the culprits, while imparting added cost to the consumers. Redress of grievances relate to assaults on individual liberty, not corporate and cartel oligopolies. James Hall – July 16, 2014

via batr.org

The Progressive Era and the Family - Murray N. Rothbard

From this post we get snapshots from Rothbard explaining how we got to where we are by knowing where we've been. These summary briefs tell us what we didn't learn in 'public' schools and certainly not in college which promised us a 'broad-minded' education which as it turned out was their view, not a truthful one.

You'll discover you're not sexist afterall, but are you a pietist? 

Just knowing these few elements will fortify your literary armor for the uninformed or scornful remarks from leftists who must fall back on derogatory remarks because your knowledge flattens their argument into nonsense.

Maybe you're an Independent or libertarian Republican and didn't know it. Once apparent, you can then get the streaming vitriol from both Parties!

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Mises Daily: Monday, June 30, 2003 by Murray N. Rothbard

[Originally from Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe (eds.), The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).]

While the "Progressive Era" used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an era in which the entire American polity—from economics to urban planning to medicine to social work to the licensing of professions to the ideology of intellectuals—was transformed from a roughly laissez-faire system based on individual rights to one of state planning and control. In the sphere of public policy issues closely related to the life of the family, most of the change took place, or at least began, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. In this paper we shall use the analytic insights of the "new political history" to examine the ways in which the so-called progressives sought to shape and control selected aspects of American family life.

ETHNORELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

In the last two decades, the advent of the "new political history" has transformed our understanding of the political party system and the basis of political conflict in nineteenth century America. In contrast to the party systems of the twentieth century (the "fourth" party system, 1896–1932, of Republican supremacy; the "fifth" party system, 1932–? of Democratic supremacy), the nineteenth century political parties were not bland coalitions of interests with virtually the same amorphous ideology, with each party blurring what is left of its image during campaigns to appeal to the large independent center. In the nineteenth century, each party offered a fiercely contrasting ideology, and political parties performed the function of imposing a common ideology on diverse sectional and economic interests. During campaigns, the ideology and the partisanship became fiercer and even more clearly demarcated, since the object was not to appeal to independent moderates—there were virtually none—but to bring out the vote of one's own partisans. Such partisanship and sharp alternatives marked the "second" American party system (Whig versus Democrat, approximately 1830 to the mid-1850s) and the "third" party system (closely fought Republican versus Democrat, mid-1850s to 1896).

Another important insight of the new political history is that the partisan passion devoted by rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans to national economic issues, stemmed from a similar passion devoted at the local and state level to what would now be called "social" issues. Furthermore, that political conflict, from the 1830s on, stemmed from a radical transformation that took place in American Protestantism as a result of the revival movement of the 1830s.

The new revival movement swept the Protestant churches, particularly in the North, like wildfire. In contrast to the old creedal Calvinist churches that stressed the importance of obeying God's law as expressed in the church creed, the new "pietism" was very different. The pietist doctrine was essentially as follows: Specific creeds of various churches or sects do not matter. Neither does obedience to the rituals or liturgies of the particular church. What counts for salvation is only each individual being "born again"—a direct confrontation between the individual and God, a mystical and emotional conversion in which the individual achieves salvation. The rite of baptism, to the pietist, therefore becomes secondary; of primary importance is his or her personal moment of conversion.

But if the specific church or creed becomes submerged in a vague Christian interdenominationalism, then the individual Christian is left on his own to grapple with the problems of salvation. Pietism, as it swept American Protestantism in the 1830s, took two very different forms in North and South, with very different political implications. The Southerners, at least until the 1890s, became "salvationist pietists," that is, they believed that the emotional experience of individual regeneration, of being born again, was enough to ensure salvation. Religion was a separate compartment of life, a vertical individual-God relation carrying no imperative to transform man-made culture and interhuman relations.

In contrast, the Northerners, particularly in the areas inhabited by "Yankees," adopted a far different form of pietism, "evangelical pietism." The evangelical pietists believed that man could achieve salvation by an act of free will. More particularly, they also believed that it was necessary to a person's own salvation—and not just a good idea—to try his best to ensure the salvation of everyone else in society:

"To spread holiness," to create that Christian commonwealth by bringing all men to Christ, was the divinely ordered duty of the "saved." Their mandate was "to transform the world into the image of Christ."1

Since each individual is alone to wrestle with problems of sin and salvation, without creed or ritual of the church to sustain him, the evangelical duty must therefore be to use the state, the social arm of the integrated Christian community, to stamp out temptation and occasions for sin. Only in this way could one perform one's divinely mandated duty to maximize the salvation of others. 2   And to the evangelical pietist, sin took on an extremely broad definition, placing the requirements for holiness far beyond that of other Christian groups. As one antipietist Christian put it, "They saw sin where God did not." In particular, sin was any and all forms of contact with liquor, and doing anything except praying and going to church on Sunday. Any forms of gambling, dancing, theater, reading of novels—in short, secular enjoyment of any kind—were considered sinful.

The forms of sin that particularly agitated the evangelicals were those they held to interfere with the theological free will of individuals, making them unable to achieve salvation. Liquor was sinful because, they alleged, it crippled the free will of the imbibers. Another particular source of sin was Roman Catholicism, in which priests and bishops, arms of the Pope (whom they identified as the Antichrist), ruled the minds and therefore crippled the theological freedom of will of members of the church.

Evangelical pietism particularly appealed to, and therefore took root among, the "Yankees," i.e., that cultural group that originated in (especially rural) New England and emigrated widely to populate northern and western New York, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois. The Yankees were natural "cultural imperialists," people who were wont to impose their values and morality on other groups; as such, they took quite naturally to imposing their form of pietism through whatever means were available, including the use of the coercive power of the state.

In contrast to evangelical pietists were, in addition to small groups of old-fashioned Calvinists, two great Christian groups, the Catholics and the Lutherans (or at least, the high-church variety of Lutheran), who were "liturgicals" (or "ritualists") rather than pietists. The liturgicals saw the road to salvation in joining the particular church, obeying its rituals, and making use of its sacraments; the individual was not alone with only his emotions and the state to protect him. There was no particular need, then, for the state to take on the functions of the church. Furthermore, the liturgicals had a much more relaxed and rational view of what sin really was; for instance, excessive drinking might be sinful, but liquor per se surely was not.

The evangelical pietists, from the 1830s on, were the northern Protestants of British descent, as well as the Lutherans from Scandinavia and a minority of pietist German synods; the liturgicals were the Roman Catholics and the high-church Lutherans, largely German.

Very rapidly, the political parties reflected a virtually one-to-one correlation of this ethnoreligious division: the Whig, and later the Republican, party consisting chiefly of the pietists, and the Democratic party encompassing almost all the liturgicals. And for almost a century, on a state and local level, the Whig/Republican pietists tried desperately and determinedly to stamp out liquor and all Sunday activities except church (of course, drinking liquor on Sunday was a heinous double sin). As to the Catholic church, the pietists tried to restrict or abolish immigration, since people coming from Germany and Ireland, liturgicals, were outnumbering people from Britain and Scandinavia. Failing that and despairing of doing anything about adult Catholics poisoned by agents of the Vatican, the evangelical pietists decided to concentrate on saving Catholic and Lutheran youth by trying to eliminate the parochial schools, through which both religious groups transmitted their precious religious and social values to the young. The object, as many pietists put it, was to "Christianize the Catholics," to force Catholic and Lutheran children into public schools, which could then be used as an instrument of pietist Protestantization. Since the Yankees had early taken to the idea of imposing communal civic virtue and obedience through the public schools, they were particularly receptive to this new reason for aggrandizing public education.

To all of these continuing aggressions by what they termed "those fanatics," the liturgicals fought back with equal fervor. Particularly bewildered were the Germans who, Lutheran and Catholic alike, were accustomed to the entire family happily attending beer gardens together on Sundays after church and who now found the "fanatic" pietists trying desperately to outlaw this pleasurable and seemingly innocent activity. The pietist Protestant attacks on private and parochial schools fatally threatened the preservation and maintenance of the liturgicals' cultural and religious values; and since large numbers of the Catholics and Lutherans were immigrants, parochial schools also served to maintain group affinities in a new and often hostile world—especially the world of Anglo-Saxon pietism. In the case of the Germans, it also meant, for several decades, preserving parochial teaching in the beloved German language, as against fierce pressures for Anglicization.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, as Catholic immigration grew and the Democratic party moved slowly but surely toward a majority status, the Republican, and—more broadly—pietist pressures became more intense. The purpose of the public school, to the pietists, was "to unify and make homogeneous the society." There was no twentieth century concern for separating religion and the public school system. To the contrary, in most northern jurisdictions only pietist-Protestant church members were allowed to be teachers in the public schools. Daily reading of the Protestant Bible, daily Protestant prayers and Protestant hymns were common in the public schools, and school textbooks were rife with anti-Catholic propaganda. Thus, New York City school textbooks spoke broadly of "the deceitful Catholics," and pounded into their children, Catholic and Protestant alike, the message that "Catholics are necessarily, morally, intellectually, infallibly, a stupid race."3

Teachers delivered homilies on the evils of Popery, and also on deeply felt pietist theological values: the wickedness of alcohol (the "demon rum") and the importance of keeping the Sabbath. In the 1880s and 1890s, zealous pietists began working ardently for antialcohol instruction as a required part of the public-school curriculum; by 1901, every state in the Union required instruction in temperance.

Since most Catholic children went to public rather than parochial schools, the Catholic authorities were understandably anxious to purge the schools of Protestant requirements and ceremonies, and of anti-Catholic textbooks. To the pietists, these attempts to de-Protestantize the public schools were intolerable "Romish aggression." The whole point of the public schools was moral and religious homogenization, and here the Catholics were disrupting the attempt to make American society holy—to produce, through the public school and the Protestant gospel, "a morally and politically homogeneous people." As Kleppner writes:

When they [the pietists] spoke of "moral education," they had in mind principles of morality shared in common by the adherents of gospel religion, for in the public school all children, even those whose parents were enslaved by "Lutheran formalism or Romish supersitition," would be exposed to the Bible. That alone was cause for righteous optimism, for they believed the Bible to be "the agent in converting the soul," "the volume that makes human beings men."4

In this way, "America [would] be Saved Through the Children."5
The pietists were therefore incensed that the Catholics were attempting to block the salvation of America's children—and eventually of America itself—all at the orders of a "foreign potentate." Thus, the New Jersey Methodist Conference of 1870 lashed out with their deepest feelings against this Romish obstructionism:

Resolved, That we greatly deprecate the effort which is being made by "Haters of Light," and especially by an arrogant priesthood, to exclude the Bible from the Public Schools of our land; and that we will do all in our power to defeat the well-defined and wicked design of this "Mother of Harlots."6

Throughout the nineteenth century, "nativist" attacks on "foreigners" and the foreign-born were really attacks on liturgical immigrants. Immigrants from Britain or Scandinavia, pietists all, were "good Americans" as soon as they got off the boat. It was the diverse culture of the other immigrants that had to be homogenized and molded into that of pietist America. Thus, the New England Methodist Conference of 1889 declared:

We are a nation of remnants, ravellings from the Old World. . . . The public school is one of the remedial agencies which work in our society to diminish this . . . and to hasten the compacting of these heterogeneous materials into a solid nature. 7

Or, as a leading citizen of Boston declared, "the only way to elevate the foreign population was to make Protestants of their children."8

Since the cities of the North, in the late nineteenth century, were becoming increasingly filled with Catholic immigrants, pietist attacks on sinful cities and on immigrants both became aspects of the anti-liturgical struggle for a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon pietist culture. The Irish were particular butts of pietist scorn; a New York City textbook bitterly warned that continued immigration could make America "the common sewer of Ireland," filled with drunken and depraved Irishmen.9

The growing influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century seemed to pose even greater problems for the pietist progressives, but they did not shrink from the task. As Elwood P. Cubberley of Stanford University, the nation's outstanding progressive historian of education, declared, southern and eastern Europeans have served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civil life. . . . Everywhere these people tend to settle in groups or settlements, and to set up here their national manners, customs, and observances. Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race and to implant in their children. . . the Anglo-Saxon conception of rightousness, law and order, and popular government. . . . 10

PROGRESSIVES, PUBLIC EDUCATION, AND THE FAMILY: THE CASE OF SAN FRANCISCO

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▶ Against the War Machine: Justin Raimondo - YouTube

 

Published on Jul 2, 2014

Jeff Deist and Justin Raimondo discuss the early history of the modern libertarian movement, Justin's time working with Murray Rothbard on libertarian strategy, and the chances for developing a broad new anti-war coalition.

Justin Raimondo: http://original.antiwar.com/justin
'An Enemy of the State': http://www.amazon.com/An-Enemy-State-...

  "Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person." - Socialism

The Rebirth of Austrian Economics

Happy birthday to Ron Paul, Distinguished Counselor of the Mises Institute and longtime supporter of Austrian economics. Here’s Dr. Paul with Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell, from a 1987 dinner in honor of Hazlitt.

June 24, 2014

Editorial By Richard Ebeling

Forty years ago, during the week of June 15-22, 1974, the Austrian School of Economics was reborn during a conference in the small New England town of South Royalton, Vermont. Why was this important? Because the economists of the Austrian School have developed the most persuasive understanding of why only economic freedom can give mankind both liberty and prosperity.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many economists and political policy-makers argued that capitalism was a "failure" and only wisely guided government intervention and regulation of the market place could bring stability and fairness to society.

The Domination of Big Government Ideas

For the next thirty years following the Second World War, Keynesian Economics dominated economic policy decision-making. Government, it was said, had to have the discretionary authority to manipulate spending and taxing as well as the monetary system to assure full employment and stable economic growth.

This was matched by a rarified mathematical formalism in the higher levels of economic theory in which the everyday individual was reduced to a mere passive variable in a series of equations, with the assistance of which it was presumed government could successfully micro-manage the market. Unless regulated and guided by the superior hands of the government policy-makers, society would fall into waste and inefficiencies due to people's wrong choices and misplaced actions when left on their own.

The Beginning of Austrian Economics

Almost 145 years ago, Carl Menger founded the Austrian School of Economics. One of the pathfinders to break asunder the myth of the labor theory of value, which had dominated economics from the time of Adam Smith to that of Karl Marx, Menger developed the subjective theory of value. The value of a good, Menger explained, was not determined by the amount of labor devoted to making a product, but rather the labor was given value by the intensity felt for the product by the individual who would finally use or consume it. Since individuals valued things differently and by different scales of importance, there was no way to objectively determine the value any market-traded good might have other than relating it back to the personal ("subjective") judgments of the individual valuator.

Menger was soon followed by two disciples who refined Austrian theory to such a point that it became a major force in the world of ideas. Friedrich von Wieser formulated the concept of opportunity cost, by which is meant that nothing is free. The fact that most of the means that we use to achieve our various ends are scarce (too limited in supply to enable us to attain all the goals for which those means might be used) means we always have to make trade-offs.

The cost of anything is the alternative goal, purpose or end for which some scarce means might have been used if we had not instead valued more highly some other use for which we ended up applying those limited means. The idea that government can give people a "free lunch" is fundamentally wrong; what the government gives to someone with one hand it must take from someone else by the other hand, because the available means are not enough to fully satisfy both uses at the same time.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, developed Menger's theory of subjective value and applied it to the problem of savings, investment and the creation of capital. Everything we do involves time. Whether we are boiling an egg or constructing a tunnel through a mountain, or planting a crop for food, all of our production activities take time.

This requires that individuals must save enough to free up the resources needed to build the capital goods and cover people's living expenses until the production processes are completed at some point in the future when more and better goods and services will be forthcoming as the benefit from having waited for them.

Government taxation and regulation can undermine if not destroy the ability and motive of people to do the savings and investing that is essential if we are all to benefit from rising standards of living in the future.

Ludwig von Mises and the Case for the Free Market

In the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises extended the Austrian approach. Mises applied Menger's subjective value theory to the area of money and developed the "Austrian" theory of the business cycle. 

Government manipulation of money and credit in the banking system throws savings and investment out of balance, resulting in misdirected investment projects that are eventually found to be unsustainable, at which point the economy has to rebalance itself through a period of a corrective recession.

The only wise policy for government is to leave money and the banking system to the competitive forces of a free market to eliminate the inflationary booms and recessionary busts of the business cycle, so markets can effectively keep people's saving and investing decisions in balance for well-coordinated economic stability and growth.

Mises also demonstrated in the early 1920s why the new experiment with socialist central planning in communist Russia would eventually fail. Rational and efficient economic decision-making requires market-generated money prices to determine and calculate the relative values of the finished goods that consumers might wish to buy in comparison with the costs of using the means of production – land, labor and capital – in one alternative production activity instead of another, on the basis of which entrepreneurs can estimate likely profits or losses from producing one product rather than some other.

Comprehensive socialism abolishes private property, bans market ownership and trading of goods and resources and places all economic decision-making in the hands of a government central planning agency.

But without private property, there is nothing to buy and sell. With nothing to buy and sell there is no bargaining to determine possible terms-of-trade. With no agreed-upon terms-of-trade, there are no market prices.

Without market prices to tell market decision-makers the value of what consumers might want and the actual value of scarce resources in competing uses for their employment, there is no rational way for the socialist planner to efficiently and effectively know what to produce and at the lowest costs to maximize total desired production. Socialist central planning creates a society of "planned chaos."

Based on his critique of the unworkability of socialist central planning Ludwig von Mises developed a theory of how the competitive market process works, and the important role of the entrepreneur for guiding production in the pursuit of profits and the avoidance of losses.

This also led Mises to a detailed critical analysis of how and why various forms of government regulation and intervention in the market economy can only distort and bring about imbalance in the market's own coordination of multitudes of supplies and demands in the service of consumer desires. The only viable economic system for freedom and prosperity, Mises concluded, is laissez-faire capitalism.

F. A. Hayek and the Use of Knowledge in Society

Further developments in Austrian theory were the product of the versatile mind of Friedrich von Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 a few months after this Austrian Economics conference in South Royalton, Vermont.

In the 1930s, Hayek refined Mises's theory of money and the business cycle, and became the leading free-market critic of John Maynard Keynes at the time when "Keynesian Economics" was just being developed. He insisted that government deficit spending and manipulation of spending in the economy would only slow down the normal market-generated recovery from a recession, and ran the danger of creating a future inflation that would be followed by another economic downturn.

Hayek, like Mises, was a leading critic of socialism. His core argument centered on the impossibility of even the wisest and most intelligent central planners ever having the ability to master, integrate and effectively use all the needed knowledge to successfully guide an entire economy from the offices of a government planning bureau.

The division of labor in society is matched by a division of knowledge in which each of us possesses only a limited and small amount of all the knowledge of the world in our individual minds. We all must admit and accept how ignorant any one of us is about all the forms of knowledge that exist in the world, and which must somehow be successfully brought to bear if all of us are to benefit from what one or a few people may know that we do not.

Hayek's answer to this problem was to explain that market-generated prices serve as the communications device through which we can inform each other about our desires as consumers and our abilities as producers, while leaving us free to use the knowledge that each of us individually possesses as we find it most advantageous. Thus, freedom and prosperity are combined through the market system of prices and competition to find out who can do better in satisfying the wants of others in the pursuit of self-interested profit.

Austrian Voices at the South Royalton Conference

The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) organized the South Royalton Austrian Economics conference, and brought to Vermont three of the leading Austrian economists of that time to deliver a series of unique and important lectures: Israel M. Kirzner, Ludwig M. Lachmann and Murray N. Rothbard.

Israel Kirzner had studied under Mises at New York University, and in 1973 had written Competition and Entrepreneurship, the first of many books explaining the importance of the alert and creative market-based entrepreneur who brings about the balance and coordination of supplies with our consumer demands through his pursuit of profit opportunities.

Murray Rothbard had already made an outstanding name for himself as an Austrian economist with his two-volume work, Man, Economy and State (1962), in which he developed the entire edifice of economic understanding following in the footsteps of Ludwig von Mises. His 1963 book, America's Great Depression, demonstrated that the economic depression of the 1930s had its origin in bad Federal Reserve monetary policy in the 1920s, and made far worse than it needed to be due to the wrong-headed interventionist policies of the Hoover Administration in the early 1930s.

Ludwig Lachmann had studied with F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, and went on to challenge the Keynesian misconception that the economy should be viewed and treated as one single aggregate lump of economic output. He subtly showed that the market is an intricate web of multitudes of individual supplies and demands interconnected in ways that could have no harmonious order to them other than through the free competitive actions of people, themselves, in a dynamic world of unexpected change.

Austrian Economics as Good Economics … FINISH READING