It's a strange era. So many people get so many pieces of the puzzle, but somehow continue to believe that we need the government to fix things. Even self-satisfied cynics still support greater regulation, all the while carping about who's going to figure out a way to use the new regs to scam the rest of us.

I've added this strip to my definition page for fascism, right under this:

definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses

Murray N. Rothbard, "Nixonian Socialism"

When things began to get serious between Nathalie and me, we allowed our conversations to wander in and out of if-we-were-married scenarios, bringing up questions like, Where would we live? Who would be the breadwinner? (I did a 2–3 year stint as a househusband and I highly recommend it.) Do you want kids? How many? What are your thoughts on children and religion? What are your thoughts on education?

I was clear up front that if we had children, I would want to homeschool them. Nathalie accepted this condition, somewhat reluctantly at first, but by the time we were married, she was an ardent convert, saying, "There's no way I'm going to let those people get their hands on my children." Music to my ears.

When Nathalie was pregnant, I began to research different methods and approaches to homeschooling.

Unschooling is simple, if not easy. There's not a whole lot of research to do on the topic. I wanted to look into other approaches. Gary North pushes Art Robinson's self-teaching program, which very much appealed to me for its combination of structure, freedom, and focus on inexpensive, time-tested texts. The Robinson Curriculum even has Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money? on the reading list — Gary North's influence, no doubt. But all of his history texts displayed a clear Hamiltonian bias, which surprised me. I wrote to Gary North about it and he replied,

"There is no such thing as a curriculum without this bias.  There never has been.  The winners write the textbooks."

I shared that exchange with Tom Woods, who wrote,

"One thing I know for sure is that no matter how good a homeschool program is, I'm not making my kids waste their time and warp their brains by reading volume after volume of TR/Churchill ideology."

That began my quest for an Austrolibertarian approach to homeschooling. It's not enough to encourage economic literacy, logical rigor, and a critical approach to history. We need to avoid warping our children's brains with Establishment propaganda about "What history teaches us."

I was a libertarian for years and years before I learned to reject what I'd been taught about the Constitution, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and especially the Great Depression. I discovered the Austrian school about 5 years ago and I've spent that entire time unlearning some pretty heavy indoctrination from my own schooling. I don't want my son to have to go through that.

That's why I'm interested in sharing ideas, resources, reviews, and advice with some like-minded individualists.

As I wrote in the call for membership, I don't think it matters who teaches the Trivium and who unschools, or whether or not you plan to teach the theory of the evolution of species. We can keep those issues within our families or we can debate them elsewhere. What matters, I think, is that those of us who are suspicious of the state, those of us who are drawn to the approaches of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard to economics and to history, those of us who want to give our children a classical-liberal foundation and let them skip the years and decades of deprogramming can have a private forum to exchange resources and support.

Please tell us your own story, what your goals are for homeschooling, and what you hope to get out of an Austrolibertarian homeschooling support network.

BK Marcus

PS: I named this group "Mises Academy" in reference to the wonderful Mises University and because the Mises Institute is giving us the tools and resources to host it. But that name isn't set in stone; neither is the logo I threw together this morning; neither is this location. It's all negotiable. I'm starting the group, but its form and spirit belong to you. If you're an Austrolibertarian homeschooler, have at it. With that in mind, I suggest we grow the group cautiously and think long term. My son is only 2 years old. I'm really hoping that this group is active and useful 3–16 years from now, and beyond. The first step is probably to invite spouses to join. My impression from elsewhere is that one parent ends up bearing the brunt of homeschooling labor in any particular year (and it's usually the mother), but that both parents decide approach, curriculum, etc. Maybe we should even invite our kids to join — those who are already mature enough. Homeschooling is a family approach to education, so maybe we need to have families talking to families. Let me know what you think.

Thanks.

The events taking place in the financial market offer an illustration of the soundness of the Austrian theory of money, banking, and credit cycles, and Mises.org is your source not only for analysis of these events but also the economic theory that helps explain what is happening and what to do about it. There are many thousands of articles available, and also the full text of thousands of books as well as journal articles. It is impossible to draw attention to the full range of literature one can use to understand the crisis.

However, below we offer a brief look into the topics most discussed in these times, with extended treatments of each in the sidebar. Mises.org also offers both a blog and a community forum for reading and discussing them all.

It's never been more important to spread a sound view of money and banking, not only as a protection against the fallacies of "stabilization" and "reflation" but also as way to see what kind of reforms are essential now.

[keep reading]

If you are a past, present, or future homeschooler, a libertarian, and a fan of the Austrian school of economics and economic history, please get in touch with me. A handful of us are trying to decide how organized to be, and that decision will depend, in part, on our numbers.

It doesn't matter if you are secular or religious, a creationist or an evolutionist, a practitioner of the Trivium or a diehard unschooler; what matters is that you are antistate and pro-Austrian (and I'll even take "suspicious of statism" and "Austrian friendly"). If you are, you'll probably care about teaching the subjects of history and economics, which I'm guessing will be the primary focus of whatever group we form.

Thanks.

Thanks Gary North:

As early as mid-July, Hoover returned to a favorite theme: attacking short-selling, this time the wheat market. The short-selling speculators were denounced for depressing prices and destroying confidence; their unpatriotic "intent is to take a profit from the losses of other people"--a curious charge, since for every short seller there is necessarily a long buyer speculating on a rise. When the crisis came in the fall, the Stock Exchange authorities, undoubtedly influenced by Hoover's long-standing campaign against such sales, restricted short selling. These restrictions helped drive stock prices lower than they would have been otherwise, since the short-seller's profit-taking is one of the main supports for stock prices during a decline. As soon as the crisis struck in the fall, Hoover reverted to his favorite technique of holding conferences. On September 15, he laid plans for a Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership to be held in December, to promote the widening of home ownership and to lower interest rates on second mortgages. The resolutions of the December conference originated many of the key features of later New Deal housing policy, including heavy long-term credit at low rates of interest and government aid to blighted, low-income housing.

– Murray Rothbard
"1931: The Tragic Year,"
America's Great Depression

Commenting on blog.Mises.org, ChrisR makes a concise and excellent point:

You can't have the biggest government on the planet and "unfettered competition."

It's either one or the other.

Evidently, many people seem to think we have both.

When the Caliph recruited Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakaria Al-Razi to direct a new hospital in Baghdad, Al-Razi secured permission to choose the location where the hospital would be built. In order to choose the best site, Al-Razi had fresh meat hung at several locations around the city. After some time, he had the meat brought back to him and he chose for the hospital the location of the meat that had rotted the least.

In his commentary today, "In Praise of Educational Pluralism," Danny Shahar of FEE identifies as a significant argument for government schooling (and government oversight of schooling) the idea that "every child deserves a proper education and that, although government education has its share of problems, at least we can keep an eye on who is being allowed to teach and what they are teaching."

Shahar says the argument is misguided for two reasons:

1. It misunderstands the market.
2. "But there is another reason to question the idea that governments must be involved to ensure that our children receive a proper education. That reason is that there is no such thing as a proper education."

Yes, excellent.

Shahar also quotes philosopher David Schmidtz:

In effect, there are two ways to agree: We agree on what is correct, or on who has jurisdiction -- who gets to decide. Freedom of religion took the latter form; we learned to be liberals in matters of religion, reaching consensus not on what to believe but on who gets to decide. So too with freedom of speech. Isn’t it odd that our greatest successes in learning to live together stem not from agreeing on what is correct but from agreeing to let people decide for themselves?

Read the article. It's short.

These wonderful Lego ads remind me of one of my favorite series in Mad magazine from the 1970s: Sergio Aragones's "The Shadow Knows" …

"The Love of Paris and Helen," 1788 Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825)

Last night, my wife and I briefly discussed a currently popular slogan, apparently coined by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

I'm glad to learn that the "meaning" of her accidental slogan isn't clear to its creator. I think the way it's commonly used, however, is pretty clear: "making history" is a good thing, therefore behaving badly is also a good thing.

Libertarians are likely to have a particular spin on this. One of our complaints is that history is very much taught as if "making history" is a good thing.

For example, the most famous American presidents tend to be the biggest war hawks and economic interventionists. This doesn't just make them popular; according to several polls, including polls of American history professors, it makes them "the best" presidents. I'm with Bob Higgs in his call for "No More Great Presidents."

So those of us who are suspicious of mainstream, academic-left, and knee-jerk feminism might be tempted to reply to the popular Ulrich slogan,

Having said that, however, I will note that women get a bum rap in ancient history and myth, and the almost universal mysogyny in Homer (expressed even by Athena!) is obvious and unapologetic. It's only one of the many illiberal cultural assumptions that will make a modern reader uncomfortable.

I don't know if there ever really was a Trojan War, but I'm pretty sure that if there was, it wasn't fought over Helen. And even if it was, it's never been clear to me exactly how much she is supposed to have cooperated with her abduction and therefore never clear to me how much blame she deserves.

Ah, but for the ancients, women were responsible for what was done to them, so nevermind.

Here's an example of how great shifts in history really can be inspired by man's love and lust for woman, quoted from Susan Wise Bauer's blog:

MICHAEL III, EMPEROR IN CONSTANTINOPLE, 842-867

Michael III's troubles were almost entirely self-inflicted. Since the age of fifteen, he had been sleeping with the same woman, his favorite mistress Eudokia Ingerina. However, his mother announced that Ingerina was not an acceptable wife, and instead ordered him to marry a woman she had hand-picked for him, Eudokia Dekapolitissa. Michael seems to have had trouble defying his mother; he agreed to marry Dekapolitissa, and then after the wedding ignored her and went right on sleeping with Ingerina.

The patriarch disapproved of this crowded marriage, and to preserve appearances, Michael married his mistress Ingerina off to his best friend, a horse-trainer from Macedonia named Basil. He continued sleeping with her, however, and so that Basil would not be deprived, he brought one of his sisters back out her nunnery and installed her at court as Basil's mistress.

What with climbing in and out of each others' beds, Michael III and Basil became closer, and Basil began to get a glimpse of what real power could be like. He began to suggest to Michael III that Michael's uncle and heir had a little too much influence around the court, and finally convinced Michael to give him permission to murder the unfortunate man. In his uncle's place, Michael made Basil his co-emperor and heir. In 867, he also legally adopted Basil as his son; he was twenty-seven, Basil was fifty-six.

This weird adoption made a twisted kind of sense. The year before, Ingerina had given birth to a son. Technically, the child was Basil's. In all likelihood, he was actually Michael's. So by adopting Basil, Michael became his illegitimate son's legitimate grandfather, and the little boy, Leo, had a path to legitimately claim the throne.

Unfortunately, the path led through Basil. Now that he was adopted, co-emperor, and heir, Basil had no more use for Michael. After a drunken banquet one night later in 867, Michael III staggered off to bed; Basil's men murdered the emperor in his sleep, and Basil claimed the crown for himself as Basil I, founder of the new Macedonian Dynasty.

I'm going to quote both Jeffrey Tucker's blog post and the comment added by "the blob" because the blob and I had exactly the same reaction (which was to quote Ludwig von Mises, of course).

Socialists say: take it all!

September 10, 2008 12:58 PM by Jeffrey Tucker | Other posts by Jeffrey Tucker

Check it out: "Fannie and Freddie nationalised - let's take over the rest." No, it's not the Onion. It's Socialist.net, which is at least more honest than the Wall Street Journal in admitting what this is about.

Comments

theblob

Don't they pause for a second why they are so in agreement with their supposed class-enemies? Why are they so happy and encourage socialisation by a right-wing facist government?

"The critics of the capitalistic order always seem to believe that the socialistic system of their dreams will do precisely what they think correct."

– Ludwig von Mises [Critique of Interventionism, pp. 156–57]

In my recent reading (and listening), whether the topic is Gilgamesh, the Trojan War, or the Crusades (or surveys such as Worlds at War), I keep coming across the clash-of-civilizations thesis of Samuel Huntington.

I haven't read Huntington's own account of his thesis, neither in his Foreign Affairs article nor in his (in)famous book, but I believe I get the gist: whereas Fukuyama and others contend that the end of the Cold War marked the "end of history" in a Hegelian sense (no more thesis or antithesis, just the synthesis of Western neoliberalism and social democracy),

Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future would be along cultural and religious lines. (Wikipedia)

The clash everyone is focused on, of course, is East versus West, where "East" means what we now call the Middle East, what we used to call the Near East, what the ancients called "Asia" back when Asia meant the eastern coast of the Mediterranean — although much of North Africa also counts as the East when we're focused, as Samuel Huntington apparently is, on the Islamic world.

What I find interesting in both the Huntington thesis and the Fukuyama thesis is the agreement that the "age of ideology" is over. They would apparently agree with the definition that Ludwig von Mises gives for ideology in chapter 9 of Human Action, "The Role of Ideas":

The concept of an ideology is narrower than that of a worldview. In speaking of ideology, we have in view only human action and social cooperation and disregard the problems of metaphysics, religious dogma, the natural sciences, and the technologies derived from them. Ideology is the totality of our doctrines concerning individual conduct and social relations. Both worldview and ideology go beyond the limits imposed upon a purely neutral and academic study of things as they are. They are not only scientific theories, but also doctrines about the ought, i.e., about the ultimate ends which man should aim at in his earthly concerns.

And at first glance, it looks like Mises might agree with Huntington:

Linguistic terms are unable to communicate what is said about the transcendent; one can never establish whether the hearer conceives them in the same way as the speaker. With regard to things beyond there can be no agreement. Religious wars are the most terrible wars because they are waged without any prospect of conciliation. (Human Action, c9 s2)

Or, as Robert Murphy puts it in his study guide to Human Action,

In contrast to truly religious wars, when it comes to secular (i.e., ideological) conflict there is hope for cooperation, because human society is the great means by which all people can better achieve their differing objectives.

But the clash-of-civilizations thesis (at least in its popular form) seems to be a case of enormous question begging: if you contend that the current conflict between Islam and the West (a) is real, i.e., is more than just a (neo)conservative contrivance, and (b) is a religious war, rather than a political conflict, then the conclusion does seem to follow almost inexorably: there is a fundamental and irreconcilable clash of civilizations to be "waged without any prospect of conciliation"; long-term peace is impossible because the conflict is in "regard to things beyond" and therefore "there can be no agreement."

Yes, but are the premises correct? Do the terms "the West" and "Islam" describe anything useful in the world of foreign affairs? If they do, and if they are in conflict, is that conflict a religious war or is it over the more temporal, mundane issues of invasion, oppression, exploitation, and the cycle of resentment and vengeance that results from the belief in collective guilt?

Those who want to claim that the clash is religious can point to what the Islamists themselves say about the clash. But so can those who want to claim that US foreign policy is to blame. The whole question is complicated by the fact that the distinction between religion and ideology is one that Islamists (and Christian theonomists and many Orthodox Jews) would reject. The distinction itself is a largely secular one.

(Some Christians think they can find it in the famous "Render unto Caesar" passage in the New Testament (Matthew 22:21), while others contend that that's a gross misreading. I can't really address that, but I take seriously Ralph Raico's point that Matthew 22:21 wasn't enough to separate Church and State in the Byzantine Empire. Classical liberalism isn't Christian in its origins so much as it's Western Christian.)

I accept the Western distinction between ideology and religion, and I find Mises's presentation of it especially helpful. But the distinction itself isn't enough to answer the question as to whether or not there is a fundamental clash of civilizations more akin to ancient religious wars than to modern ideological conflicts. The claim that we're in the middle of a new type of religious war would have to mean (it seems to me) either that Islam is hell bent on destroying the West, or vice versa. The Islam-as-aggressor thesis is probably easier for most Westerners to swallow. But the mission to spread freedom and democracy — if it's more than a neocon cover for a naked power grab — is an attack on Islam, as many Muslims perceive it. Let's not lose track, however, of a different distinction: between Wilsonian foreign policy and Western civilization. Some of us would argue, in fact, that aggressive foreign policy, no matter what the stated goals or intentions, is utterly decivilizing.

What about the idea that Islam is out to destroy the West? I don't deny that it's possible, but it seems to be the old Cold War thesis dressed up in head scarves. Yes, Communist theory demanded worldwide revolution. Yes, Islamic scripture demands the equivalent. But so does Catholicism, and yet the Church has settled into an antiwar position after all these centuries. Why not Islam? And just as the Soviet political class paid lip service to the universalist rhetoric of Marxism while pursuing its own self-interest (and just as the American political class does the same with talk of liberty and the public welfare), so, I'm guessing, must the Muslims in power (or those seeking power) speak to one standard while pursuing a different one. A quick perusal of the Islamic empires of history would seem to confirm this suspicion.

I'm not trying to argue for a vulgar-materialist analysis of history and foreign policy. I do understand, as Mises emphasized, that ideas drive history.

So how do we reconcile a belief in power politics with a belief in the historical and political importance of religion and ideology?

One answer lies in classical-liberal class-conflict theory. It's not workers versus capitalists; it's not East versus West; it's always a question of us against our masters, the productive class versus the political class. War is not a conflict between nations or religions; it is a conflict between the people and their governments, with nationalism and religion used by the political class to cover its tracks. The relevance of ideas is precisely in the role they play in either obscuring or revealing this orthogonal clash between the powers of civilization and the powers of decivilization.