Aristippus:Speaking of Gary North....http://www.garynorth.com/public/9403.cfm
Bingo. Thanks for sharing that. And as anyone can see, I never proposed anything like Cato, despite how some might like to pretend so. (Indeed I never said anything remotely resembling any kind of think tank.)
Also, did you happen to catch this statement:
"Only activist lobbying organizations get anything stopped."
Sounds pretty in line with:
"Perhaps we could use an End the Fed PAC toward this end, a group whose sole purpose is to raise money, get anti-Fed people elected and twist the arms of the remaining members of Congress to end the legal tender status of FRNs (and any other regulatory favors given to FRNs) and free gold and silver of capital gains taxes."
And it gets even better:
"if you are really serious about saving the country, you will get involved in local politics. Almost nobody does this, but that is why you can have some influence. The leverage of just a handful of people who pay attention to what the good old boys are doing with the public's money is sufficient to call a halt to the worst of the nonsense. Anything that you can do to defeat a local bond issue is highly productive. It gives you practice in politics, and it does not take a whole lot of votes to bring out enough voters to the polls to defeat the issue, because not many people show up at the polls to vote on bonds."
And continues:
"The number-one thing that we can do in preparation for that day is to survive financially locally, and to be in a position to warn other voters in our communities or in our circle of contacts that the government at the federal level must not be allowed to impose an income tax, just as it was under the Constitution until 1913. We have to shrink the federal government. If it is possible, we have to get rid of the Federal Reserve System. This will be easier after a collapse, or after the Great Default, than it is today."
Sounds to me like some people here (Clayton, gotlucky ) agree with me (and North, evidently) more than they seem to realize.
John James:Bingo. Thanks for sharing that. And as anyone can see [sic], I never proposed anything like Cato, despite how some might like to pretend so. (Indeed I never said anything remotely resembling any kind of think tank.)
Quite the strawman you've set up and knocked down, John. I was not referring to Cato per se - I was referring to its strategy of trying to change the GOP from the inside. Even at the local level, this requires participating in the Republican political machine, with all of its dirty tricks.
Keep in mind that Gary North is not an anarcho-capitalist. In fact, I wouldn't even say that he's a libertarian.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
I thought you guys were referring to Cato the younger.
ahah, nope. Think tanks. hahahah
Yeah, sorry - we're referring to the Cato Institute.
@JJ: On a positive note, I was just listening to a Lew Rockwell podcast with Joel Salatin and got reminded of the Home School Legal Defense Association. I was home-schooled so I was pretty aware of the legal stuff swirling around home-schooling. The HSLDA took a ground-breaking approach to securing education rights by providing legal defense in specific cases of truancy "violations" in exchange for a very modest membership fee. It's kind of like Hoppe's "aggression insurance" except the aggressor being defended against is the State.
This legal activism model is perfectly consistent with libertarianism and could definitely be extended to other areas, such as the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund that Salatin mentions in the podcast. The NRA is supposed to provide some this kind of thing for gun owners but it is my view that the NRA has been long ago infiltrated so I don't exactly see it as a model.
Extending and deepening our alliances with the libertarian left (Code Pink, anti-war.com, select conservationist organizations, etc.) can also be a form of "positive political action" that is consistent with libertarian principles.
One other idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while: Developing an Austrian-methodology-based, social science curriculum for home-schoolers. Could you imagine a home-school social studies textbook series published by the LvMI with the Mises crest across the front? With all those PhDs under their belt, surely there is a way that the LvMI and associated scholars could be leveraged by an entrepreur to bring that raw material together and turn a profit on this. I'm posting this because I don't have the time or capacity to do this right now but if someone else does, I would love to see them take the idea and run with it.
Clayton -
Clayton:@JJ: On a positive note, I was just listening to a Lew Rockwell podcast with Joel Salatin and got reminded of the Home School Legal Defense Association. I was home-schooled so I was pretty aware of the legal stuff swirling around home-schooling.
That's great, but it doesn't seem like you've read anything I said. Relatively few parents have the option of homeschooling their children. This is simply not a viable solution to the education problem. And I'm kind surprised you keep presenting it as if it were.
Extending and deepening our alliances with the libertarian left...
I still am not exactly sure what that is.
You mean something like this? And this?
In terms of content, exactly that. However, people who homeschool generally follow some kind of year-by-year curriculum which is graduated to the aptitude of their kids, so a home-school curriculum would be in form more like this.
I disagree that homeschooling is as inaccessible as you're making it. It's legal in most states and even a family on a modest income can afford the curriculum. While I don't think that homeschooling (self-production of education services) is the long-term answer, I think that it's one of the stepping-stones to ending the current system of de facto state monopolization of mid- and low-end primary and secondary education. I think it's difficult to overstate the impact of getting Austrian ideas into kids' heads from an early age. As I said, the fact that I was homeschooled is definitely one of the critical factors in my having been able to make the transition to libertarianism and Austrian economics.
Sorry, if this changes the topic a bit, but this approach to school always sounded pretty cool to me. I wished I could have had this kind of educational oppurtunity growing up.
Clayton:I disagree that homeschooling is as inaccessible as you're making it. It's legal in most states and even a family on a modest income can afford the curriculum.
I have to assume by "afford the curriculum" you mean pay for books and teaching material. My concern is "who is going to administer the lessons"? Certainly you're not suggesting the child stay at home by himself all day every day and be expected to teach himself to read. Or are you suggesting average families can afford tutors too?
While I don't think that homeschooling (self-production of education services) is the long-term answer, I think that it's one of the stepping-stones to ending the current system of de facto state monopolization of mid- and low-end primary and secondary education.
It may be a piece of the puzzle—by being an option for the relatively few people who can manage it—but it is certainly not a stepping stone anywhere. It's not like a majority of people will end up pulling their kids from public schools to teach them at home, and then that will lead to public schools no longer having enough students, and that will end up changing the system. I can pretty much guarantee that would never happen. Plenty of other scenarios will play out before any relatively large number of kids are homeschooled.
I think it's difficult to overstate the impact of getting Austrian ideas into kids' heads from an early age. As I said, the fact that I was homeschooled is definitely one of the critical factors in my having been able to make the transition to libertarianism and Austrian economics.
Are you fricking kidding me? Now I have no doubts you've barely read anything I've said (if at all). No wonder your responses have barely made sense in the context of the conversation. There hasn't been a conversation going on here at all. You've essentially been talking at me. If I would have known you didn't care for a response I probably would have written them differently.
You've essentially been talking at me.
*sigh - You asked about what I think are the fastest, most effective routes to liberty. In my opinion, trying to pack school boards is an extremely low return-on-investment strategy with a very long timeframe to effectiveness, if ever. There are over one million homeschool students in the US - I don't know about you, but I consider a market with a million potential customers to be a decent-sized market. If someone took Tom Woods+Bob Murphy content and worked with them to turn that into a curriculum marketable to homeschoolers and just 10% of them bought that curriculum, that's 100,000 kids that would be learning Austrian social science. That could all conceivably happen in a matter of just two or three years. Compare that to trying to pack school boards and fighting deep-pocketed teacher's unions who can fritter away years on process minutiae to protected their vested interests. 100,000 is better than 0, if you ask me.
Most homeschool families have one stay-at-home parent who is the children's tutor, using the curriculum's teacher's manual as a guide. You don't exactly need a PhD to teach your kids the alphabet.
Clayton:You've essentially been talking at me.*sigh
I said that because you essentially keep repeating back to me things I've already said...as if they offered some kind of opposition, when in effect, and sometimes literally they are exactly what I said to you. For example, I'm the one who told you "it’s much more difficult to reverse years of indoctrination than it is to simply raise a child with the truth to begin with." And in the very next sentence I brought up the fact that "you yourself alleged that your being homeschooled was a large part of the reason you were able to make the journey to liberty…and what’s more, that you can see that most of your public-schooled friends “will never make it out of the Matrix, so to speak.”
And what do you come back with? "I think it's difficult to overstate the impact of getting Austrian ideas into kids' heads from an early age. As I said, the fact that I was homeschooled is definitely one of the critical factors in my having been able to make the transition to libertarianism and Austrian economics."
It's unlikely you have Alzheimer's or some other cognitive impairment that severe. So I can only assume you simply haven't read my posts, or at least the majority of the content.
And when you haven't been doing that you've been completely ignoring the responses I've made to any points you actually did originate...such as the issue of the practicality of homeschooling even close to a majority of children. I've brought that up twice now, and your response is:
There are over one million homeschool students in the US [...] Most homeschool families have one stay-at-home parent who is the children's tutor
Right. "Most homeschool families." Which accounts for 2.9% of all school-age children. 2.9%. And among families with children, nearly half (44.8%) have two working parents...and another one in four (26.1%) are headed by a single parent. That means that fewer than one in three (28.7%) children have a stay-at-home parent at all.
And I don't care if you don't need a PhD to teach a child reading and arithmetic...plenty of those stay-at-home parents aren't capable of giving a child a decent education past perhaps 3rd grad.
So simply claiming that "most homeschool families have a stay-at-home parent" is a ridiculous way of trying to make the case that homeschooling is a viable option for educating the youth of America. It's like saying most people who play professional basketball are at least 6'0" tall. That does nothing to support the notion that "most people" are that tall...because relatively few people play pro basketball at all. Just because "most" of the families that already homeschool have a stay at home parent performing the instruction, that doesn't automatically imply that any significant percentage of households that aren't already doing that have that ability/option.
So again, I really don't see how you can keep resting on this idea that homeschooling is somehow the answer to the education issue.
hehe...whattya know...
There is always a conflict between pure theory and practical application. This is true in every field, in all locations, and in every time period. Timeless principles must be translated into policies. Policies are under the influence of time. Time brings changes. It forces compromises with timeless principles. The defenders of timeless principles face the criticism of "irrelevance!" from activists. The defenders of timeless principles respond with "sellouts!" Such is life.
I think the key is to realize that there is a natural symbiosis between the theoreticians and the tacticians. I think that Hoppe's description of this symbiosis near the end of the lecture I linked to above is the most accurate description of the roles that each play. The trouble with Cato is that it is focused on "results". You don't want your theoreticians worrying about producing results. Maybe they might think about how a tactician might best go about producing results that are consistent with theory but that's entirely different than actually trying to directly self-produce results (political changes).
The young people who attend the Mises Institutes summer fellowship program or the frequenters of this board and others in the Ron Paul movement of the same caliber are positioned to be the "lieutenants" that Hoppe mentions who translate the theoretical ideas of the "generals" - such as Hoppe himself - into a form suitable for consumption by the general public, both the sympathetic (reinforcement, encouragement) and unsympathetic (persuasive).
In all of this, integrity must be kept forefront because it is the one commodity that is more valuable than anything else precisely because it is so scarce. The minute you switch from seeking the truth - regardless of its conformability to your preconceived notions - the minute you lose your respect for the infinite worth and dignity of your fellow man - worth he has by virtue of his humanity alone - you no longer have integrity. You're just another used car salesman, or just another "true believer" carrying the gospel of some other used car salesman.
That's why I think we (meaning "libertarians") don't need to worry about the long-run success of libertarianism. It really is inevitable. The unstoppable power of liberal philosophy comes from the fact that it is:
a) Easily seen to be true to at least some extent by just about everyone. Rightists believe in the freedom to do business without government regulation, leftists believe in the freedom to smoke pot without government regulation. All the libertarian needs to do is arrange for them each to let the other have their way.
b) Consistent with human nature. Libertarianism doesn't ask its adherents to "make sacrifices" for some greater cause. While religious and civic conditioning has created a mental block that makes many people apprehensive about simply acting in their own interests without apology to its connection to "the greater good", the fact is that we all do it every day when we go to work or go shopping or whatever. The social conditioning is fighting gravity and gravity is on our side.
c) Consistent with people's moral intuitions to one degree or another. The left is abhorred by the State's wars, the right is abhorred by its perverse remapping of the consequences of decision-making through the redistribution of wealth and liability. All that libertarians need to do is help each see the other's point.
In the long-run, we win no matter what so long as we keep our eyes on the ball and maintain integrity. Ron Paul is the shining, jaw-dropping example of the spectacular possibilities for sweeping political changes in the face of sound principles and plain truth accompanied by simple virtue and integrity. I will make a passing note that there is a dark side to this. Part of maintaining the integrity of the movement is identifying and calling out impostors, charlatans, cheats, frauds, ideologues, agents provocateur and infiltrators of every stripe without resorting to internecine wars. Easier said than done, though.
As people become more incensed by the outrages of the Establishment, the less willing they are to "turn State's evidence", that is, report cash transactions, and so on.
It's funny that despite nothing in the Income Tax Act saying that you have to send personal information to CRA people do it anyway.