freedom — VOICES for REASON

Three years ago, in an op-ed called “Your Child Is Not State Property,” I wrote the following:

Education, like nutrition, should be recognized as the exclusive domain of a child’s parents, within legal limits objectively defining child abuse and neglect. Parents who starve their children may properly be ordered to fulfill their parental obligations, on pain of losing legal custody. But the fact that some parents may serve better food than others does not permit government to seize control of nutrition, outlaw home-cooked meals, and order all children to report for daily force-feeding at government-licensed cafeterias.

Last week, I came across an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, called “If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools.” There, Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, uses a similar analogy at much greater length, to make a point about the economic insanity of our public education regime. An edited excerpt:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. . . .

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. . . .

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn’t organize themselves efficiently to meet customers’ demands. . . .

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets’ monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers,” on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce. . . .

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions’ self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

I urge you to read the whole (short) article. The economic case for total separation of education and state is unanswerable. But the economic case is not enough—I’m convinced that only a moral challenge to public education can achieve fundamental change. Our children are not state property, and we shouldn’t let educational bureaucrats (and the politicians who protect them) get away with acting otherwise.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

This week ARI’s Yaron Brook was one of the speakers at The Economist’s “Ideas Economy: Human Potential” conference in New York. Today on CNN.com, Dr. Onkar Ghate and Dr. Brook have an opinion piece related to the theme of that conference. Noting how far the West has advanced thanks to scientific progress and political freedom, they argue that

… human progress demands implementation of a third idea to complete the scientific and political revolutions. We’re still beholden to the past in ethics.

Although few of us would turn to the Old Testament or the Quran to determine the age of the Earth, too many of us still turn obediently to these books (or their secular copies) as authorities about morality. We learn therein the moral superiority of faith to reason and collective sacrifice to personal profit.

But the more seriously we take these old ethical ideas, the more suspect become the modern ideas responsible for human progress.

CNN.com’s editors titled the piece “Our moral code is out of date.” Read the whole thing.

In honor of the news that Eliot Spitzer–the disgraced, power-lusting former governor of New York–will be coming to prime time TV, I thought I’d make note of a column he penned earlier this month. Invoking Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Spitzer writes:

The question confronting the United States today is whether the notion of sacrifice–personal and collective–still has enough traction in our society to enable us to overcome the range of problems we face.

He goes on to name some of the sacrifices he thinks will solve these problems:

• “[S]lightly higher marginal tax rates for the top 5 percent…in order to fund the necessary investment in social infrastructure”
• “[A] carbon tax”
• “[A] somewhat more rigorous regulatory structure”

There’s a reason that Spitzer couches his program in the terminology of “sacrifice.” If he simply said the government should solve our problems by taking more of our wealth and our freedom, he wouldn’t win many converts. “Sacrifice” adds a moral dimension to Spitzer’s call for government intervention. The purpose is to morally disarm anyone who wants to safeguard his wealth or his freedom by saying, “You, you’re just being selfish.”

It’s no accident that dictators throughout history have justified their demands for power by appealing to the duty to sacrifice: freedom is selfish. It is the freedom to do what you want with your wealth and your life, rather than what society, Eliot Spitzer, or Barack Obama wants you to do. As Ayn Rand noted nearly 70 years ago in her novel The Fountainhead:

[J]ust listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice–run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that’s it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself–that will be the man who’s not after your soul.

Spitzer speaks of sacrifices. The Founding Fathers spoke of the individual’s right to pursue his own happiness. The Founders sought to create a free society. What, then, is Spitzer after?

Image: flickr

He increased government spending to historic highs. He poured vast amounts of money into a half-baked scheme to “stimulate” the economy. He bailed out failed companies. He expanded government control over medicine. He denounced “corporate greed” and saddled businessmen with crippling regulations and controls.

No, I’m not talking about President Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall should remind us of, in addition to the sheer brutality of communism, is the economic devastation it caused–and the unequivocal economic superiority of freedom. “If you want a contemporary demonstration of the respective merits and performances of a free economy and of a controlled economy,” Ayn Rand wrote in 1961, “a demonstration that comes as close to an historical laboratory experiment as one could hope to see–take a look at the condition of West Germany and of East Germany.”

From the end of World War II until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany were separated, not only by bricks and mortar shells, but by economic doctrines. People who shared a common history, a language, an environment, demonstrated over the course of decades the superiority of markets over government planning.

While retaining various forms of welfare and interventionism, Western Germany’s economy was largely free after the war. Property was privately owned, and prices and wages were determined by market forces. East Germany, however, conformed to Soviet-style central planning. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany oversaw all production, most of the means of production were owned by the state, and prices and wages were placed under centralized control. In other words, the government dictated what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute what was produced.

The results? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great dangers today is that political concepts such as “freedom” and “liberty” have been virtually emptied of meaning, save for some positive emotional residue left over from this country’s founding. This allows them to be co-opted by those seeking to use their positive connotations to push an anti-freedom agenda.

Exhibit A: Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal opinion section’s token liberal, penned a column this week urging the left to reclaim the word “freedom” from the opponents of government intervention. This is no mere academic issue, Frank assures us: the unpopularity of Obama’s health care plan, he suggests, is at least partially the result of allowing critics to portray ObamaCare as an attack on freedom (which it is).

Curiously, in a column about the proper meaning of the word “freedom,” Frank never deigns to define it. Read the rest of this entry »