The government's K-12 schools--aka "public schools--are once again a battleground on which a bitter dispute is playing out. Wait!--once again? The government's schools have been a battleground since their inception in the 19th century. Since that's where the children are, how could it have been otherwise? For an institution that was supposed to produce social unity, it's done the exact opposite. Today's battle is over Critical Race Theory (CRT), which in one form or another is being pushed by a lobby that has a stake in having us believe that all of American history, up to the present,...
Results for "Priestley"
TGIF: Liberty as a Problem-Solving Process
Strictly speaking, liberty isn't the solution to problems. It's what creates the framework in which solutions can be discovered. That is an important distinction because it reminds us that advocates of full-blown liberty do not offer the world a problem-free society but "only" a society in which problems are discovered and problem-solvers are mobilized as quickly, fairly, and efficiently as impossible. To get this point across to students in lectures, I used to quote the the title of a 1970 hit record: "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden." Social troubles will not...
Do You Hate the State?
I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don't really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us. Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman's Machinery of...