…at least on the issue of "Children and Rights":

"Certainly the parents have the right to set down rules for the use of their home and property for all persons (whether children or not) living in that home." – Murray N. Rothbard

BUT

"The absolute right to run away is the child's ultimate expression of his right of self-ownership, regardless of age." – Ibid.

My 2yo son Benjamin announced that he was done with his grilled-cheese sandwich.

I said, "Then your father will eat it."

His mother leaned over and cut a small piece of the sandwich off and popped it into her mouth.

I said, "Hey! I homesteaded that abandoned property!"

She replied, "Oh? Did you mix your labor with it by cutting a piece, the way I did?"

George Reisman's whole article today is excellent, but I especially appreciate what he has to say about Marx's influence on the popular understanding of ... well, everything:

The Laissez-Faire Myth and the Marxism of the Media

The myth that laissez faire exists in the present-day United States and is responsible for our current economic crisis is promulgated by people who know practically nothing whatever of sound, rational economic theory or the actual nature of laissez-faire capitalism. They espouse it despite, or rather because of, their education at the leading colleges and universities of the country. When it comes to matters of economics, their education has steeped them entirely in the thoroughly wrong and pernicious doctrines of Marx and Keynes. In claiming to see the existence of laissez faire in the midst of such massive government interference as to constitute the very opposite of laissez faire, they are attempting to rewrite reality in order to make it conform with their Marxist preconceptions and view of the world.

They absorb the doctrines of Marx more in history, philosophy, sociology, and literature classes than in economics classes. The economics classes, while usually not Marxist themselves, offer only highly insufficient rebuttal of the Marxist doctrines and devote almost all of their time to espousing Keynesianism and other, less-well-known anticapitalistic doctrines, such as the doctrine of pure and perfect competition.

Very few of the professors and their students have read so much as a single page of the writings of Ludwig von Mises, who is the preeminent theorist of capitalism and knowledge of whose writings is essential to its understanding. Almost all of them are thus essentially ignorant of sound economics.

When I refer to the educational system and the media as Marxist, I do not intend to imply that its members favor any kind of forcible overthrow of the United States government or are necessarily even advocates of socialism. What I mean is that they are Marxists insofar as they accept Marx's views concerning the nature and operation of laissez-faire capitalism.

[Read the rest »]

I've written various versions of this same email and/or blog post many times. Here's the latest version, in the context of a note to a recently homeschooled student who wanted to join MisesAcademy under the misimpression that it was a place to learn Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy:

Charlie,

You're welcome to participate as a former homeschool student yourself, but (1) you won't really learn about economics or libertarianism from this group, and (2) we're going to build slowly, which means it's quiet at the moment. Your mother is welcome to join, too, with the same caveats.

As for learning about Austrian economics, there are books recommended for beginners in the Mises Store, but I think I had my most grounding education, believe it or not, from Mises: The Last Knight of Liberty, which I edited.

I also read The Concise Guide to Economics (which you can read for free at www.ConciseGuideToEconomics.com), Economics for Real People, and What Has Government Done to Our Money? in that order. (All of these are also available in free etext versions, PDF and/or HTML. You just have to poke around Mises.org. And WHGDtOM? is available as an audiobook if you're an iPod person, as I am.)

There's a ton of history material on Mises.org as well: audio lectures, articles, books. Look for Rothbard, Raico, Stromberg, and Woods. Also check out Tom DiLorenzo's books on Lincoln, Hamilton, and the history of American capitalism.

For philosophy, definitely start with For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, by Rothbard. That one is available as an audiobook, too.

If you'd still like to join MisesAcademy, please let me know. If you do join, I'll just ask you to start by introducing yourself in the forum, describing your own homeschooling, and giving us a sense of what did and didn't work in your education.

Good luck in your continuing self-education. It's a lifelong pursuit, as you know.

BK

I guess "Mises Academy" sounds too much like "Mises University." I meant it as a tribute, not as a source of confusion. And speaking of Mises U., I forgot to mention that as a great place to start!

Update: Tom Woods addresses this question much more seriously:

"How Do I Get Started with Austrian Economics?"

(If you'd like to put this on your own blog, see the instructions here.)

I guess this is supposed to be ironic, but I appreciate someone saying something sane about the math, even if the civil religion overwhelms her brief moment of rationality.

And, needless to say, corruption is two edged: it can cut in our favor or against us. (Thank God for corruption in the Soviet Union!) What we really have to fear is honest politicians — the ones who think we need to be coerced for our own good, the ones who earnestly and candidly want to make ever more laws, ever more taxes, ever more regulation, and ever more enforcement…

I love Audible.com. I listen to audiobooks and lecture courses every day, and it's much more convenient (and cheaper with a platinum membership) to download from Audible.com than it is to buy CDs and rip them to MP3.

But however much I love Audible, I certainly never expect them to stray too far from the mainstream. They are a commercial enterprise, after all. For the first half of last week, for example, their front page featured The Conscience of a Liberal by recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman.

(Hint: he doesn't really mean "liberal"; he means menshevik. See David Gordon's review, "The Conscience of Paul Krugman.")

Imagine my delight, then, to see these books featured on Friday:

Murray Rothbard's name on the front page. Go figure. I don't think I've ever seen that on a nonlibertarian website.

(The first book was on the front page, its copy linking to books 2 and 3.)

Is it possible that the New Deal dogma is losing its grip?

Might people suspect they've been given indoctrination by way of grade-school history?

One can hope…

PS if you happen to join Audible.com, you can help me get some free credits:

Username: knatz

No new customers have entered your username as their "recruiter." If you have recruited friends since October 1, 2003, and they forgot to enter your username, they can do so in this section of their own "Account Details" page.

Speaking of Gorbachev, the current weekend edition at Mises.org is fascinating: "The Decline and Fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet State," written in 1992 by Yuri N. Maltsev, who worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before defecting in 1989.

If you don't read the whole thing, you should at least read the section on Gorby's campaign against proletarian alcohol:

Gorbachev's original theory was that the socialist system was in good working order, but the people, the cogs in the communist machine, had taken to laziness, drunkenness, and were accumulating "dishonest income" in violation of socialist ethics. His first reform was to call for "a restructuring of people's thinking."

The anti-alcohol campaign began right away. Party bosses sternly announced that they didn't want any "drunks" in their country. Their enforcers began a concerted effort to discover anyone with the smell of alcohol on their breath and haul them into the police station. When the police stations became overcrowded, it became routine practice to drive thousands of people about fifteen miles out of town and drop them in the cold and dark. Nearly every night, you could see armies of so-called drunks walking miles back to town in the middle of winter.

Over 90 percent of liquor stores were closed. The Party bosses did not anticipate what happened next: sugar, flour, aftershave, and window cleaner immediately disappeared from the shelves. Using these products, the production of moonshine increased by about 300 percent in one year.

The predictable result was a heavy loss of life. From 13,000 to 25,000 people died from drinking poisonous homemade alcohol. Many more died standing in lines for five hours to get the little bit of official liquor that was left. Meanwhile, Gorbachev and loyal Party bureaucrats — who said the dead deserved their fate — would get expensive liquor from the West delivered to their homes and offices. Many families would spend up to 75 percent of their official income on alcohol. But with Gorbachev's campaign, every other household began moonshining.

Revenues from alcohol sales (taxed up to 6,000 percent) were a major source of funding for the central government, generating enough to fund the entire medical budget. The campaign ended when the government realized it was costing too much. The government's budget began to lose 25–30 billion rubles per year. Moreover, Gorbachev learned what previous regimes had understood: it is easier to govern people who are drunk because they withstand humiliation and abuse better. When people are sober they begin to care about politics and are not nearly as passive. So Gorbachev did an about-face and ordered a massive increase in alcohol production. And he had the government make it available to be sold everywhere, even toyshops and bakeries.

The anti-alcohol campaign did irreparable damage to the economy.…

[keep reading]

This is the image I'd like to see with Walter Block's most recent blog post:

In the last sentence of Charles Murray's article here, he writes: "Our public schools should be places where good teachers want to teach and are permitted to teach."

Suppose pizza parlors had been nationalized, and there were (no surprise) all sorts of problems with pizza. Would he have written this?: "Our pizza parlors should be places where good chefs want to bake and are permitted to bake."

Somehow, I doubt it. Knowing his other writings, he might say something to the effect that pizza parlors should be privatized, and analyze the pizza problems as emanating from pizza socialism: poor incentives, no bankruptcy for lousy restaurants, etc. He would give the back of his hand to the objection that if pizza was privatized, the poor wouldn't be able to get any pizza.

Ditto to Milton Friedman's external economies argument: that people wouldn't buy enough pizza, because they are not able to capture all the benefits of pizza; some it spills over to other people since they will be nicer if they have just eaten pizza and are now more content.

What's the difference between pizza and schooling, such that people like Murray are socialists in the latter case but not the former?

The Mises Institute just announced a new PDF version of Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money?

This book is clear, entertaining, eye opening, and short. I usually recommend it as the second must-read title of Rothbard's. These days, I should probably make it #1.

Has there ever been a more important time to spread the word? You can buy the book, buy the audiobook, download the new PDF for free, read the HTML for free, even download the audiobook chapters for free!

No excuse not to get the message out there.

I remind you that I keep link pages for books, including this one:

Jeffrey Tucker spends most of his review describing why William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World is so wonderful, and I agree with his praise for a book I very much enjoyed and learned from.

Tucker is more forgiving than I am of the book's pervasive flaws:

My only complaints are minor ones: Bernstein doesn't seem to have a solid theory of trade that goes beyond neoclassical economic conventions. Had he put one up front, he would have been able to go beyond the very good chronicle here to actually forge a solid theory of the social order itself. It is another example of how Smith's "propensity to truck and barter" has misled: instead of seeing trade as an extension of human rationality, a mutually beneficial exchange that extends from the desire to better one's lot in life, he treats the entire subject as if it were an instinct of some sort. But that is a regrettable oversight that in no way diminishes the contribution here.

My second complaint concerns the final chapter, which conforms to a rule often cited by the late Murray Rothbard — that all final chapters of books should just be removed. Bernstein spends the entire book showing how trade can take place without any government management, and then uses the last chapter to argue for government-managed trade in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.

You just want to shout, Read your own book, Mr. Bernstein!

In general I would have appreciated a less tentative conclusion, something along the lines of pointing out that trade is what makes it possible for all great and glorious things to take shape in this world, and without which only a few people would be alive, living in caves and eating whatever they could hunt or gather.

The book is even more important than the author knows.