Lew Rockwell writes of the dominant illiberal “tradition of law that sees all rules in society as rising from the state, rules that always and everywhere must amount to a restriction on the liberty of individuals.”

So far so good. This is the view of the law that I (and most of us, I assume) grew up with. The classical liberal tradition of law was completely absent from my schooling. When I finally encountered it in my 30s, it turned my world upside down. Now, of course, it’s at the center of my thinking.

Here’s the part of Lew’s essay that still caught me off guard: “The exponents of this view include the tyrants and despots of the ancient world, and, in modern times, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx. The writings of the latter two are the preeminent influence over what we today call the Right and the Left.”

Right. Of course. Obvious once I’ve read it, so why did it throw me?

Because my introduction to Hobbes came from the Left — came from self-identified leftists who were also self-identified Hobbesians. Once again, the lines between Left and Right blur and mix. Of course neoconservatives are informed by a revised Marxist worldview. That’s no longer news. But I think we need to remind ourselves that Anglo-American social democracy (aka left-liberalism) is as much an attempt to reform Hobbes as it is to reform Marx.

Lew is really wonderful in his summary of what’s wrong with the Hobbesians:

Let’s look more carefully at their crude form of Hobbesianism. Thomas Hobbes’s book Leviathan was published in 1651 during the English Civil War in order to justify a tyrannical central government as the price of peace. The natural state of society, he said, was war of all against all. In this world, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Conflict was the way of human engagement. Society is rife with it, and it cannot be otherwise.

What is striking here is the context of this book. Conflict was indeed ubiquitous. But what was the conflict over? It was over who would control the state and how that state would operate. This was not a state of nature but a society under Leviathan’s control. It was precisely the Leviathan that bred that very conflict that Hobbes was addressing, and he proposed a cure that was essentially identical to the disease.

In fact, the result of the Civil War was the brutal and ghastly dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans. This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of the 20th century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in which life did indeed become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Leviathan didn’t fix the problem; it bred it, and fastened it on society.

What is striking about Hobbes is that he thought not at all about economic problems. The problem of human material well-being was not part of his intellectual apparatus. He could not have imagined what England would become a century to a century and a half later: a bastion of freedom and rising prosperity for everyone.

He wrote at the tail end of an epoch before the rise of old-style liberalism. At the time that Hobbes was writing, the liberal idea had not yet become part of public consciousness in England. In this respect, England was behind the Continent, where intellectuals in Spain and France had already come to understand the core insights of the liberal idea. But in England, John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government would not be written for another thirty years, a book that would supply the essential framework of the Declaration of Independence and lead to the formation of the freest and most prosperous society in the history of the world.

Because Hobbes didn’t think about economic issues, the essential liberal insight was not part of his thinking. And what is that insight? It is summed up in Frederic Bastiat’s claim that “the great social tendencies are harmonious.”

By an interesting coincidence, David Gordon gave a 90-minute lecture on Hobbes just yesterday. You can get the MP3 here.

The second half of my last post had me looking through some older posts on the same topic.

Here’s something I’ve pulled from the middle of an old post on the state’s indoctrination of children:

As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian, and despite the far superior academic results of an at-home education, the primary motive for teaching the kids at home is still sociological: they don’t want the Enemy’s message infecting their children.

I find I don’t have to be religious to sympathize. All it takes is a strong belief contrary to the mainstream ideology. Their enemy is Satan; mine is the State.

I was schooled in statism. If you think the idea is paranoid, I can only imagine that statism is still your unquestioned foundational assumption.

The Foundation for Economic Education makes 2 critically important points against public schooling — points I’ve never heard addressed by schooling advocates, because (I suspect) they’ve never confronted them.

Point #1: Comparison

FEE’s email newsletter has a nice format, I think. They give a current newspaper headline, quote a paragraph from that newspaper, give a one-line comment from the libertarian perspective, then link to a longer Freeman article on the general issue. In today’s treatment of the headline “Success Claimed for No Child Left Behind,” FEE comments:

Compared to what?

I think this is the hardest point to explain, not just with the issue of schooling but also with economics. People tend to compare one thing they’re familiar with to another thing they’re also familiar with. They don’t tend to make comparisons in longer historical terms (and not just because they weren’t schooled in the history) and almost never think counterfactually.

Since factual history is less abstract than counterfactual theory, it’s usually more useful to address history.

I haven’t read John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, but I’m sure most of the details are covered there. The main thing to know is that the school system keeps adjusting the scoring standards to hide the fact that test results have been consistently declining for as long as such tests have been standardized. So if you and one of your parents got the same SAT score, it actually means (inasmuch as such a thing can be linearly measured) that your parent got a better education than you did. I’ve heard it claimed by Art Robinson and others that the average 12th grader at the end of the 20th century knew only as much as the average 10th grader 50 years earlier — and only as much as the average 8th grader 100 years earlier!

Remember: even the basic literacy rate has dropped since the advent of compulsory schooling.

My guess is that the schooling advocates who have some inkling of these comparisons just assume that the quality of everything is deteriorating, so there’s no point in blaming the school system in particular.

Meanwhile, too many homeschoolers teach their children with materials designed by or for the government school system. I’m sure there’s still the advantage of individual attention, and many homeschoolers keep their kids out of the school system for sociological or religious reasons, rather than educational ones, but still, while you’ve got them home, why not educate them by an older and higher standard?

In fact, this is exactly what a minority of dedicated homeschoolers are doing, and the results are phenomenal … by today’s standards. They’re only average or below average by end-of-the-19th-century standards….

Next time you hear someone praising their local school system, or saying that their own public education served them well, ask them: Compared to what?

Point #2: Indoctrination

This point is easier to communicate but usually less interesting to those schooling advocates who accept their own statist indoctrination. Here’s the opening of the article FEE points to today:

The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling

By Daniel Hager

When World War II ended, Congress authorized a tax cut to take effect January 1, 1946. Young America, a publication distributed through public schools, ran an article in its December 13, 1945, issue discussing the measure and presenting a brief history of American taxation. The article concluded with a section titled “Then & Now: Taxes Serve Us.”

“One hundred years ago,” the writer stated, “our government helped the citizens by maintaining order. It did little else. Its expenses were low, and so taxes were low.” He then quoted Benjamin Franklin’s observation in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1758: “It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income.” The Young America writer continued, “In 1940, our Federal, State and local governments taxed us one-fifth of our incomes. But Franklin could not have guessed the tremendous growth of this country.” (Emphasis in original.)

The writer then offered justification for such high taxes: “As students, our young citizens are given school buildings. Our government does hundreds of things for us in our everyday life.” He finished with a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: “I like to pay taxes. It is purchasing civilization.”

The article vividly illustrates the overriding intent of public schooling, which has always been indoctrination of the young.

Read the rest of the article.

What does the Bush presidency look like to black people?