individualism for the masses
June 30, 2007 Leave a comment
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Happy Birthday to Frédéric Bastiat, born June 30, 1801. (And note that the Mises Store is now carrying the original British translation of Bastiat’s great libertarian masterpiece The Law for only $6.) ((Or you can read it online for free.)) |
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June 29, 2007 Leave a comment
[This article is excerpted from the first two chapters of The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson.]
Anyone who would even question the “fact” that law and order are necessary functions of government is likely to be considered a ridiculous, uninformed radical by most observers.
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| “No one would voluntarily recognize a legal system that was not expected to treat him fairly.” | |
This study will use economic theory to compare institutions and incentives that influence public and private performance in the provision of law and its enforcement. Some critics may contend that law is not an appropriate subject for “economic analysis,” because it is not produced and allocated in exchange markets. To be certain, economics has a great deal to say about market institutions, but its relevance and scope are not so narrowly limited. Economic theory requires only that scarce resources be allocated among competing uses. Clearly, the enterprise of law — the use of police services, court time, and all other inputs in the process of making law and establishing order — requires scarce resources that must be allocated. Beyond that, economic theory explains human behavior by considering how individuals react to incentives and constraints.
Using economic theory, then, it can be convincingly demonstrated that private-sector (i.e., market or voluntary) institutions are capable of establishing strong incentives that lead to effective law making and law enforcement. The resulting legal constraints facilitate interaction and support social order by inducing cooperation and reducing violent confrontation. It can also be shown that public-sector institutions create incentives that can lead to substantial inefficiencies in the provision of these same functions. In fact, our modern reliance on government to make law and establish order is not the historical norm.
June 29, 2007 Leave a comment
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We are still, writes Murray Rothbard, suffering from the delusion of Woodrow Wilson: that “democracies” ipso facto will never embark on war, and that “dictatorships” are always prone to engage in war. Much as we may and do abhor the domestic programs of most dictators (and certainly of the Nazis and Communists), this has no necessary relation to their foreign policies: indeed, many dictatorships have been passive and static in history, and, contrariwise, many democracies have led in promoting and waging war. Revisionism may, once and for all, be able to destroy this Wilsonian myth. |
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| See also the discussion taking place in the blog comments. |  |
June 23, 2007 Leave a comment
Apropos the GI Bill post, here’s Gary North on Joseph Schumpeter on universities and socialism:
In 1942, America’s most distinguished academic economist, Joseph Schumpeter, offered a theory. He argued that America’s business elite had lost its will to resist the socialists. The key to this surrender was higher education. The anti-business socialists had been hired by America’s elite universities, he said, yet the business elite continued to send their children to these universities.
[…]
It is not socialists who control America’s prestige universities. It never was, because they never did. Socialists gained secure employment in American universities, but never control. Those in control today are socialism’s illegitimate ideological offspring, born out of wedlock by way of socialism’s Darwinist soulmates. Those in control of the universities today are the post-1965 moral drifters known as the hippies. They cut their hair and bought tweed jackets, but they remain hippies.
It is not capitalism that enrages them most, although they despise it. Rather, it is middle-class morality, which gives rise to the free market because the free market rests on the concept of inescapable personal responsibility in a world governed by the inescapable fact of scarcity. The hippies have always rejected any such morality. They also resent scarcity, except insofar as it can be used to justify increased state control over other people’s lives — a state controlled at the top by the elite universities’ graduates.
On this point, the professors share a deeply religious commitment with America’s business elite.
Schumpeter was entirely wrong. He completely misunderstood what the arrangement was in 1942 … and still is. It was not that the business elite had surrendered to socialism in 1942. It was that they hired socialists and others to educate their children in the joys of regulated markets — regulated so as to hamper the social enemies of both groups: consumers, who were mostly middle class in 1942, or else the parents of those who would be by 1950, the year of Schumpeter’s death.
The business elite wanted government regulation of the free market to protect them from the shifting and ruthless authority of consumers, who have money to spend as they please. This commitment to regulated markets increased exponentially, beginning in 1942: the wartime planning boards.
The socialists and their academic colleagues also wanted protection from the free market: government-accredited colleges and academic tenure. They received both, as well as the money to fund this insulated system — insulated from the free market’s open entry and price competition.
Both sides worked out a deal. They imported the system of higher education that had been working in Prussia since about 1820. Expensive universities would train the children of the elite to administer the regulatory agencies and the corporations protected by these agencies. Low-tuition, tax-funded state universities would train future mid-level administrators and corporate employees, as well as a few bright graduates who could be recruited by the elite. The high-tuition elite private universities would train future senior officials, corporate executives, and the senior lawyers who would work out the terms of the alliance. This arrangement is still working just fine. It is business — and anti-business — as usual.
“What I Learned From Duke University”
North’s article is about Duke University. It’s a great read. I love North the most when he’s writing about education. Second best: history. I used to love his stuff on gold and banking and money in general, but since I deal with Austrian economics all day every day, I don’t learn as much from his economic writings as I used to. On education and history, I still learn plenty.
His slogan — “Moses and Mises” — is so good I almost wish I were religious.
June 23, 2007 1 Comment
Stephen Carson posts on Garrison Keilor’s worship of the GI Bill. It’s worth reading Carson’s whole post, and following his link to Tom DiLorenzo’s article on the GI Bill’s role in the politicization of American higher education, but where my mind is these days has my focused on this issue:
Keilor:
The cost to taxpayers for the GI Bill was about $5.5 billion, but the result was 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, 17,000 writers and editors, and thousands of other professionals. It helped spur one of the greatest economic booms in American history.
Carson:
He seems to implicitly assumes that because the GI Bill produced more professionals of various sorts that it was obviously a great thing. Besides the unconscious self-congratulation that one expects from the intelligentsia (“more of us is clearly what the world needs”), there is the matter of how many college degrees is optimal. Should every man, woman and child have a PhD? If not, what is the right number? How does Keillor know that 450,000 engineers was exactly what society needed at that time?
What I’ll add is this: How is it, with the quality of education dropping over the course of the 20th century (grade school, high school, university, post-grad), that so few people see the connection between that decline and the subsidizing and universalizing of formal schooling?
This is a glaring example of the post-hoc fallacy: because it seems that many smart and successful people went to university, therefore we conclude that the university must have made them smart and successful. So if we just send everyone to college, the entire population will become smarter and more successful.
But again, if we’re willing to entertain A-before-B-means-A-caused-B, why do so few people look at the possibility that the tax-funded tuitions have caused ever-lower standards for what counts as being educated?
My cynical hypothesis is that most people do recognize the connection between universalization and mediocritization but are so religiously devoted to the egalitarian creed that they assume the equality gains somehow outweigh the quality losses. They believe this, but only implicitly. Out loud, no one wants to talk about trade-offs. Better to list impressive numbers and titles, as Keilor does.
June 23, 2007 Leave a comment
This is from a friend’s blog, quoted in full, with permission:
Thursday, June 21, 2007
And Now … A Geek Moment
I warn you all, I am a geek.
YOU ARE BEING WARNED.
Yes, me … geek. I was the guy who was teased mercilessly in middle school … and elementary school … and Montesori school … and high school … for being interested in … well in just about anything I was interested in. All that teasing served to do was to irrevocably kill a small part in my moral center and make me vow to some day enact my revenge on all my tormentors. (You ever wonder why I’m approaching 40 and am so much poorer than my peers? The last of the hits should be going down just about … now. No, wait … and, now. Ahhhhhh. A dish best served cold.)
But I continue to be the geek that I was though I try to be polite and sensitive about how I inflict it on people. This is why I’m warning you that this blog entry is all about geeking out. Specifically, I’m going to be the Word Geek here. So if you’re not up for that you can stop reading now, move along, nothing to see, and take comfort that at least you were warned … which is more than I can say for those assholes I knew in school. I can assure you, they never saw it coming. Fuckers.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
You remember how last year I directed the summer Shakespeare play for Four County Players? Well, this year I’m in the summer Shakespeare play for Four County Players. So the other day I’m working on my lines when I start to stumble over whether or not my character says “will” or “shall” at a particular point. And I stumble over it because sometimes Shakespeare has me saying, “will” and sometimes he has me saying, “shall”. So I wondered, what the Hell was the difference between “will” and “shall”? Seeing as I try to spend as many of my waking hours as possible sitting at the end of a high-speed Internet connection, I looked it up, and the answer that I found is so rediculously arbitrary and complex that I, of course, think it’s fascinating!
First of all, of course, practically speaking, there isn’t any difference as “shall” has pretty much fallen out of common usage. But when “shall” was used, a couple of sources suggest the following difference in usage between “will” and “shall”.
When used with the first person (I, We), “shall” indicates the informal future, whereas “will” indicates the emphatic future. When used with the second and third persons (Get this!) that distinction is reversed! (Isn’t that just wacky!?! I love English!)
So you can say, “I suppose I shall keep my appointment with Roger tomorrow. And should he show, we will have this issue out once and for all.” I make a simple statement about my future appointment keeping but am emphatic about my intention to settle things between Roger and me.
I could also say, “I will confront him. And when we meet, he will die.” Ooo! I really being a sneaky badass here. Because I am resolved to encounter my unnamed object, but when we meet the result is a foregone conclusion. That’s of course different from “I will confront him. And when we meet, he shall die!” Emphasis on both ends. Both to confront and to prevail will take an act of will (stricly speaking, of course).
On the other end, I could chill things down and say, “You will find the Professor in the Study. I shall be in the Drawing Room.” – matter of fact statements about future events, as opposed to, “It’s too late to back out now! You shall find the Professor in the Study! You can be sure that I will be in the Drawing Room!” Here you best be finding El Professor in the Study because I’m obviously waiting on your trifling ass in the Drawing Room so I can play my part in whatever little adventure we have going. Pretty cool, huh?
This, of course, is why “shall” has fallen from modern usage. B-Boys in hip hop culture are always speaking in the emphatic and always talking about themselves. Thus they never have need for “shall”. “I will step up to the nigger, and when I do, I will put a cap in his punk ass!” See? Nothing informal about that future.
I think that’s so cool!! Now I know why Shakespeare has me saying “will” sometimes and “shall” other times. Now if I can only find a difference between “Set your legs to motion” and “Put your legs to motion.”
Hey, don’t make that face. You were warned. You’re lucky I didn’t share my recent thoughts about Star Trek with you.
June 20, 2007 Leave a comment
“Oh no!” she protested, “John Dewey was an individualist!”
I was at a neighborhood party a few years ago, talking to a student from the local university education school. She had told me that her hero was John Dewey, and I had said I’d heard Dewey was an anti-individualist. When she contradicted me, I didn’t argue the point. But although she was the graduate student and I was just a townie, I didn’t really trust her to know her own subject. She didn’t exactly radiate intelligence. I assume she’s teaching somewhere now.
This is from John Taylor Gatto, via Po Moyemu:
In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future.
It is absolutely worth reading the rest of the excerpt, if not the entire speech, but I think I’ll only quote one more section:
Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. You keep the games and songs and pretty colors in balance with the soberer purpose. That’s if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.
June 20, 2007 1 Comment
Kilmer Middle School in Vienna, Virginia (a Washington, D.C. suburb) has instituted a prohibition against any and all physical contact “so strict that students can be sent to the principal’s office for hugging, holding hands or even high-fiving.”
Father of Benjamin, husband of Nathalie, BK Marcus works from Charlottesville, Virginia, as a publishing consultant.
He is the former managing editor of Mises.org and the founder of Invisible Order.
