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]

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.

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.

And they can't even claim it's "really about slavery" this time.

From blog.Mises.org:

She actually considered breaking up the union: thought crime

September 2, 2008 10:56 AM by Jeffrey Tucker | Other posts by Jeffrey Tucker | Comments (0)

Alaska only became a state in 1959, but somehow we are supposed to believe that it is part of the enternal natural law that it should always and everywhere be part of the union, and any thought to the contrary--the mere thought!--is grounds for permanent exclusion from public office.

Such is the implication behind the completely bizarre claim that Sarah Palin's involvement with the Alaskan secession movement amounts to a disastrous revelation for the McCain camp.

Why precisely this is such a horrid thought is never explained. Alaska would surely be better off, and does anyone in the other 49 states really believe that some calamity would befall the U.S. if Alaska became independent? It's nuts. Separating off territories from a mother country is at the very core of U.S. history and its founding, and we really saw many examples of peaceful secession in the old Soviet Union.

But somehow in the U.S., the very idea that the existing configuration of the nation state should ever be diminished by a single inch is a great taboo. And why? Because the media tell us so.

This book on secession clearly needs broader circulation.

Mises on schooling:

It is often asserted that the poor man's failure in the competition of the market is caused by his lack of education. Equality of opportunity, it is said, could be provided only by making education at every level accessible to all. There prevails today the tendency to reduce all differences among various peoples to their education and to deny the existence of inborn inequalities in intellect, will power, and character. It is not generally realized that education can never be more than indoctrination with theories and ideas already developed. Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them. (Human Action, c15, s11)

This paragraph from Human Action forces me to check my vulgar antimilitary reflexes and seek a subtler understanding of the nature of demand and the fallacy of manufactured demand:

The moralists' and sermonizers' critique of profits misses the point. It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers — the people, the common man — prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling "bad" things than in selling "good" things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely. People do not drink intoxicating beverages in order to make the "alcohol capital" happy, and they do not go to war in order to increase the profits of the "merchants of death." The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause. (c15, s9)

What did Mises make of President Eisenhower's warning of a growing "military-industrial complex"? Did he dismiss the MIC as a left-wing bogey man? And what did Rothbard make of the statement, "The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause"?

We Rothbardians tend to reject the standard left-wing claims about "manufactured demand" when they are hurled at private enterprise; do we fall into a similar fallacy when we imply a manufactured demand for military spending?

In one sense, no, it's not parallel: you can get people to "support" all sorts of things when they're not free to volunteer or withhold payment. Political polls on spending priorities falsely imply that how people choose to spend their dollars and how they want the government to spend "its" dollars is somehow the same thing.

Of course it's not. My real-life expressed preferences, complete with internalized opportunity costs and the direct benefit of my spending decisions, are very concrete. They reveal my values based on what trade-offs I've actually made. My vocalized "preferences" for how tax dollars are spent is always abstract, and produces very little practical consequence for me either way.

So when the voting public howls for Osama's head or Saddam's head or for the head of whoever is the current bad guy, there's definitely something manufactured about this "demand" — something orchestrated. People tend to lose their enthusiasm for war when they start to see the bill, so to speak. This suggests that their initial support for war would be similarly muted if they had to make the immediate choice of reaching into their wallets and paying for war or using that same money instead to buy beer or books, faster DSL or a bigger HDTV.

But there's another sense in which I think I've been sloppy in attributing power to the malevolent MIC. I sometimes unthinkingly blame the arms dealers for the knee-jerk hawks themselves. When, in fact, the hawks are just knee jerks.

I think there's a lot to be said for the political power of hiding the costs of policy. But this externalization of costs is really different from the manufacturing of demand. A more pacific people would not have fallen for the great neo-Con, no matter how much the books were cooked.

It is not the business of the entrepreneurs to make people substitute sound ideologies for unsound. It rests with the philosophers to change people's ideas and ideals. The entrepreneur serves the consumers as they are today, however wicked and ignorant. (Ibid.)

I think I'll use Jeffrey Tucker's blog post about Batman: The Dark Knight as an excuse to repost my review of Batman Begins from 3 years ago:

der Fledermaus Mann fängt an

Joe Salerno must be feeling a void after his great summer seminar, June 6-10 [2005] at LvMI.

(I've listened to 9 of the 10 lectures, so far. I'd better finish #10 tonight so I can focus on Tom Woods's summer seminar starting tomorrow.)

Salerno seems to have turned to film reviews, starting with this critique of Batman Begins.

I've just returned from a sold-out matinee.

Salerno says, "This is the best Batman movie yet." I agree.

He says, "Bale's Batman is dark, dangerous, disturbed, dehumanized and vengeful — as he was meant to be." Right on.

He says, "The new menacing-looking, tank-like, car-crunching, building-smashing Batmobile is a better reflection of Batman's spiritual being than the sleek Batmobile of earlier movies." I agree enthusiastically, and I add that it's clearly based on Frank Miller's vision of the revamped Batmobile in the great 1985 graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns. (My impression is that this movie began as a film adaptation of Miller's follow-up series, Batman: Year One. If so, little of the original remains, but I certainly think Batman Begins is the most "Milleresque" of Hollywood's attempts to tell Bruce Wayne's story. To whatever extent modern audiences can imagine Batman as "dark, dangerous, disturbed, dehumanized and vengeful" instead of the high-camp grinning idiocy of Adam West, we have Frank Miller to thank for it.)

Salerno says, "The slow-paced and meandering build-up in the first half hour or so ultimately pays off handsomely in the movie's climactic scenes, with plenty of action and suspense along the way." While we both enjoyed the movie, my review is the opposite of his: my favorite part of the movie is the "slow-paced and meandering build-up" — the best superhero origin back story I've yet seen on film. Was it only half an hour? Felt more like an hour to me, and I was enjoying all of it. Felt like we didn't even get to see the hero costume for the first half of the film, and for my tastes, the story deteriorated from that point on. Not much. It would still have been the best Batman movie ever, even if they'd started at what I'm calling the downturn. But I definitely preferred the character of Bruce Wayne to the character of Batman.

So why is an Austrian School economist reviewing a superhero movie?

I'll say that before I read Salerno's review (which I saved for after the movie), I was already thinking that this was the most self-consciously economically minded comic book movie I've seen. Some of this economic mindedness is revealed in the standard myths and misunderstandings of economic illiteracy, but there were two points I thought Austrians could readily embrace.

Point #1:

The first one turns out to be something Salerno did not at all embrace, but put into the economically illiterate column of the tally:

The notion that a conspiracy of bad guys can "use economics as a weapon" to cause a depression in Gotham City is ridiculous — unless they have somehow infiltrated the Federal Reserve System.

Well, yes, exactly. Why shouldn't we believe that this is precisely what the bad guys have done?

No, it's not specifically explained that way, but what is both explained and demonstrated is that the bad guys have infiltrated every level of every aspect of Gotham City government. How much sense would it make for them to have kept their hands out of the federal government's mechanisms?

Do I assume that the screenwriters understand that government monetary inflation is responsible for the business cycle? No, I don't assume that. (But if they did understand, they'd be wise to keep the details of their insight out of the script. After all, they're trying to turn a tidy profit, and therefore want the overwhelming population of young Marxoids to buy film tickets and recommend the movie to their young Marxoid friends.)

What I embrace in this detail is the perception that depressions are created! They are not natural, not just an inevitable symptom of market economies. They are artifacts of intervention, and this is what I take to be the point.

The film posits a criminal conspiracy behind a devastating economic depression. That's only half the story — Austrians know that the criminal intervention is a conspiracy of bankers and politicians — but that's already more than I ever expected to get from Hollywood film writers. As Murray Rothbard would say: their suspicions are right, even if they don't have all the details (although when Rothbard said it, he was referring to people's suspicions of bankers — not of criminal secret societies).

Point #2:

"Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

When I was a smart-alec kid, watching James Bond marathons, my smart-alec friends and I would question the logistics of the bad guys' lairs. How did Dr. No arrange for the construction of a secret volcano fortress? Fine, the bad guys had plenty of money from past bad-guy activities, but how did they turn it into so much advanced infrastructure and technology.

What we never questioned was how MI6 managed to do the same. We grew up in an era when most people took for granted that governments had technology more advanced than we had on the private market — and feared that the Soviets' infrastructure and technology were just that much better than MI6 and the CIA's. That was the Cold War mentality, and even those of us who opposed the Cold War often failed to question its most basic assumptions — like the idea that command economies could out-compete free economies.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the discovery that we'd been lied to for decades by both Left and Right (each for their own reasons) about the strength of the Soviet economy and military, and after finally learning some of the economics behind the reality behind the lies, I now find every adventure movie to come out of the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s to be based in the economic misunderstandings of Cold-War thinking. (Even the supposedly somewhat libertarian The Incredibles suffers from this ignorance — though I suppose we can forgive a movie that is consciously playing with an already established superhero tradition. PoMo, donchaknow.)

But how can Batman have such an elaborately constructed Batcave? Well, in this movie, he doesn't. The cave looks like a cave, not like an underground military installation. There are no hydraulic lifts, no supercomputer, absolutely nothing it would take negotiations with teamsters to construct. We even see Bruce Wayne himself rappelling down from the cave ceiling where he's been putting in the lighting. Faithful butler Alfred stands by the small gas-powered generator that provides the electricity.

And how can Batman have such high-tech crime-fighting gadgetry unavailable on the market?

The old answer was the Bruce Wayne is a billionaire — same answer for James Bond's supervillains.

But Batman Begins offers no such pretense. We see Alfred and Bruce Wayne planning how to buy which parts of the costume from which foreign manufacturers, without attracting attention. We learn that the department of the Wayne Corporation originally funded to develop defense technology has been all but shut down, as the new WayneCorp management focuses on government weapons contracts.

Of course Bruce Wayne didn't build the Batmobile! What were you thinking?

Batman's high-tech costume, vehicles, gadgetry — they are products of the market, abandoned with changes in demand. (Though the demand comes from government, not consumers.)

Batman's gadgets are what economists call "sunk costs". They already exist and have already been paid for, whether or not anyone wants or can afford to buy them. They're too expensive to mass-produce, given the lack of demand, but they've already been produced as prototypes.

Batman Begins is not Austrian, not even as much as "The Berlin Batman" (1, 2, 3), but it is by far the most market-oriented superhero movie I'm aware of. Many libertarians celebrated The Incredibles for its Randian individualism and bourgeois family values, and I can join them in much of that, but The Incredibles also showed the private insurance corporation as criminally malicious while giving a complete pass to the secret government agency that enforces the ban on private security (a.k.a. superheroes). I guess libertarians have to take what we can get. But for my money, the more interesting questions are asked by Batman Begins — even if the answers it hints at are sometimes less than satisfactory.