1978:

"To save the idea of private property, it must be completely severed from impostor forms."

In his interview with the New York Times on May 3, 2009, President Obama said,

I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, you know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.

Jeffrey Tucker on “the whole trickle-down thing”:

For years, free market theory of one sort or another has been caricatured as “trickle down economics.” The idea is that we believe that if society protects the wealth of the rich, and let’s them keep more of their money, the blessings will eventually trickle down to the poor and middle class. In some ways, it is not an entirely indefensible view, but of course the phrasing is designed to somehow elucidate the elitist absurdity even before arguments are heard. One thing I’ve learned is that when anyone says your position amounts to trickle-down economics, there’s not much else they are willing to discuss.

But it occurs to me that there might be a way to turn this phrase back on those who push for government intervention…

Read the rest.

… to arguing with libertarians:

If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they personally benefit, call them hypocrites.

If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they don’t personally benefit, call them selfish.

– austro-athenian empire

This is my favorite blog post on Mises.org in a while:

It’s Keynes v. Hayek again

February 4, 2009 7:52 AM by Jeffrey Tucker

So says Richard Armey, who is among the many Republicans who are suddenly making sense after years of kowtowing to Republican-style Keynesian policy. It seems like a universal principle: those who are out of power favor free markets more than those in power. So the agenda seems clear: keep everyone out of power.

Amen.

Welcome to Libertarian Papers!

To Authors, Readers, and Potential Libertarians:

A new libertarian journal—a new type of libertarian journal—is born today. Libertarian Papers is an exclusively online peer-reviewed journal. Its home is this elegant, fast, easy-to-use website. Please feel free to browse around.

[...]

[read more]

… to Raise Your Editor’s Blood Pressure

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.

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.

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]

One of the books that is still on sale at Audible.com is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Some Austrian scholars are discussing it on one of the mailing lists, and I decided to move it from my wishlist to my shopping cart.

I can’t really review or recommend it, since I’ve only listened to about a quarter of it, so far, but I suspect I’ll be giving it a thumbs up.

Meanwhile, I mention it here because I’m overwhelmed by how much of it already vindicates

1. Murray Rothbard’s foreign-policy analysis from the 1950s onward, and

2. Robert Anton Wilson’s information-theory analysis from "Celine’s Laws," which you can read here on my website.

On blog.Mises, as a late comment to Hans Hoppe’s “On the Impossibility of Limited Government,” Joe Stoutenburg makes an important point that I have yet to hear any of the better-known ancaps address:

Having an actuarial background and working for a large insurance company, I have long been intrigued with the idea of insurance companies providing security. I believe that the arrangements could work. There are two main factors (in addition to throwing off the yoke of oppressive government) that must be worked out:

1. The public greatly mistrusts insurance companies. How would they be convinced to accept insurance company services for government? [Though I have to wonder why they trust government more than insurance companies...]

2. Sadly, much of the mistrust is well-placed. Insurance companies enjoy many advantages through regulations, barriers to entry, tax laws and so forth. While the institutions of insurance require massive assets, I’m not convinced that individual companies must be so gigantic. There are markets for sharing risk, and insurance industries fight their development for fear of losing dominance. While insurance companies do compete among each, the level of innovation in a free market would drastically change the industry.

In short, the marketplace could provide the services outlined in this article. But the current insurance industry would probably drastically change if it was to adapt to an unfettered market.