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Government Education Chickens Return Again to the Roost
If you favor a government-controlled virtual monopoly in schooling, don’t be surprised when a school board removes Maus, the award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth-grade class that covers the Holocaust from a language-arts perspective. If you are appalled by this news from McMinn County, Tennessee, maybe you should favor placing schools in a truly free and competitive marketplace, where entrepreneurs would have no institutional barriers to offering innovative forms of education. (For details see my Separating School and State.)
Elites Are Smearing Truckers Because We’re Doing Their Job Representing the People
Gord, a great friend of Year Zero and the Institute, made his way to Ottawa to attend the Freedom Convoy. Here’s his breakdown of what is happening with the trucker protest in Canada.
Reason Has Limits, But What Doesn’t?
It is not a criticism of reason to acknowledge that no reasoning person or group can have a synoptic view of the world or of society that would enable him or it to rationally plan everything. The faculty of reason is packaged within individual human beings, and no mountaintop exists from which one could see and know all that it would take to plan a society or an economy in the interest of all its participants. The result of attempting to do so would inevitably be what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” This is what F. A. Hayek, Mises’s student, also worked so hard to explain.
But when individuals operate and cooperate in a free society and marketplace, their small portion of knowledge, articulated and tacit, becomes accessible to all, mostly through the price system. Mises and Hayek showed this in the great socialist-calculation debate of the ’20s and ’30s.
Reason is powerfully efficacious in that it enables us to perceive and understand the world that exists independently of us. It’s a time-consuming, effortful, and piecemeal pursuit that is subject to never-ending rebuttal, refutation, and revision. Does reason have limits? Of course. Everything has limits. A is A means that A is not non-A. But that is hardly a criticism of reason. It’s an invitation to understanding and a notice to avoid what Hayek called the “abuse of reason.” (See his The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason.)
Popular Sovereignty Convoy – The Rebellion Of The Working Class
https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1486981696658550785
As regimes across the west engage in an arms race to see how much power they can exercise over their citizenry in the name of Covid, it has become increasingly obvious that the freedom to assemble is a privilege handed to the loyal, not a right afforded to free citizens. The fact that a doctrine of individual rights, liberal democracy and constitutional government has in no way inhibited the dynamic expansion of government power in western countries should give pause to those who have assumed these as shared values. It is clear that these words have become shibboleths stripped of any real meaning. The phrases are used as hollowed-out relics of a civic religion that once animated our civilization but can now only be worn as a skinsuit by those hoping to use the last bit of shared cultural fabric to herd their populations into the new security state that has been fashioned for them.
Still, the caravan of Canadian truckers reveals a serious flaw in the plans our ruling elites have laid out for their brave new world. The professional-managerial class that rules over much of the west built their power on technology and propaganda. Their loyal followers make up the staff of the universities, newsrooms, corporate HR offices, and public schools. They are the party of the laptop class, ruling through the manipulation of procedure and information. Automating away the working class is their eventual goal, but for now, they are heavily reliant on exactly that class to keep the already fragile infrastructure of their regimes running. They have attempted to abandon the working class before they can make them obsolete, and that is a serious tactical error.
more here
Jim Bovard on C-SPAN Today, 9:30 EST
The Antiwar Comic: The Old Man in Charge
It’s so hard not to criticize this guy. Hurry 2022! Hurry!
More comics at the Webcomic Factory. And if you’re in New Jersey, visit me in person at a signing!
Boomerang Argument
Any argument against a totally free society that depends on the dark side of human nature inevitably circles around to hit the one making the argument smack in the back of the head. Hence, it is a boomerang argument. The reason is that if people are so bad that we can’t trust them with total freedom, then how can we possibly trust anyone with monopoly political power? The answer is we can’t. Statelessness is the ultimate in checks and balances, which liberal devotees of the limited state claim to value.
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