From Barbara Frank Online:

Ok, class, time for a quick current events pop quiz:

Which country just approved a $6 billion initiative that includes the following, directing its legislative body to determine:

“….whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

FULL BLOG POST

Another Modern Superstition Identified & Destroyed

Posted by Stephen Carson at March 27, 2009 11:33 AM

When I was in gov’t school as a child I absorbed some kind of hyper-Whig theory of history… We live now at the pinnacle and culmination of civilization. The only reason to learn about the past is to learn about those hopeless neanderthals who believed the earth was flat, believed flies came from old rags, thought slavery was great, were racists and sexists and listened to Glenn Miller.

Of course, there was never any hint that our own age might have superstitions and unreasoned prejudices of its own.

Eventually putting away childish things, I learned that the view of the past I absorbed wasn’t very charitable to say the least. For example, it is a myth that the earth being flat was generally accepted in the Middle Ages.

But more relevantly, I have learned that our own age has superstitions as well. Hayek usefully defined superstition as thinking you understand something that you really don’t. He held up Keynesianism and Marxism as chief superstitions of the 20th century. In the case of Marxism and its appalling body count we have a modern superstition as terrible or worse than the ones of our forebears.

In a delightful lecture at the recent Austrian Scholars Conference, Gerard Casey from Dublin put his finger on another modern superstition. FULL BLOG POST