Lew, thanks once again for conducting a great interview. Here is my LRC Podcast update: That eagerly-awaited book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, finally arrived from Amazon. It is everything I anticipated and more. It now ranks as my undisputed choice for the single best volume to explain how that despicable November 22, 1963 coup d’etat in Dallas changed America forever. Anthony Summers’ classic investigation, Not In Your Lifetime (originally published as Conspiracy), L. Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot To Assassinate John F. Kennedy, and the works of researcher Peter Dale Scott (especially his The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War), should supplement this outstanding book.
Deceptive presidents and their mainstream media echo chamber have repeatedly lied the American people into wars. This did not begin with George W. Bush, weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq. I recommend LRC readers begin their preliminary investigation of this on-going campaign of deceit and disinformation with Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Iraq; Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944; Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, 1890-1920; John Denson, A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt; John Denson, The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories; and Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor.
And finally, here is my Amazon list of books on the history of compulsory government schooling in the United States for concerned students, parents, educators, and the taxpayers who make it all possible.
But if the citizen/reader really wants to know what lies at the core of what plagues our modern educational system (and much of American urban society in general) I highly recommend Edward C. Banfield’s prophetic The Unheavenly City.
Murray Rothbard loved this book. It featured significantly in his analysis in For A New Liberty.
While Banfield had many brilliant observations on race, crime, and other hot button topics in his book, it was his innovative redefinition of the concept of social class that is most memorable and which has drawn the most controversy.
Banfield carefully defined class membership, not in terms of income status, such as government statistical poverty levels, but in terms of orientation toward the future, or time preference.
The more pronounced one’s “future orientation,” the higher one’s social class. Multicultural critics of this idea now claim it is “cultural racism” to value or promote “future time orientation.”
Known to economists and other social scientists as “low time-preference,” this is what is called setting goals or encouraging purposeful “middle class values” such as punctuality, thrift, foresight, deferred self-gratification of needs or wants, and self-discipline as opposed to “underclass values” or “high time-preference” behaviors such as improvidence, hedonism, purposelessness, immediate self-gratification of needs or wants, and capricious spontaneity or irresponsibility.
Government schooling has always been about the compulsory “middle-classification” of American youth by the governing elites.
Destructive “underclass” values held by an increasing number of students, regardless of race or ethnocultural background, is the number one crisis in education today. The progression of this infiltration must be seriously addressed, along with the tax-funded, compulsory nature of schooling.
Banfield (and Rothbard) took up this challenge long ago. It is time for the rest of society to catch up with them.
10:01 pm on August 28, 2009
