Government and Truth

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If you meet me at a party you will probably think I'm one of the strangest people you've ever met. I'm no good at small talk. I tend to wax verbose on a number of topics that the average twenty-something has never thought about; much less spent countless hours researching. To me a good conversation is one about politics, economics and money. I happen to have a set of views which almost no one shares. There's a reason for that. You've all been indoctrinated.

I essentially believe in anarcho-capitalism, which is a comprehensive set of economic and moral beliefs that center on the assertion that all people know what is best for them and that it is in the interest of every person when they are free to make ALL their decisions for themselves, with no coercion. To anarcho-capitalists any decision made without complete freedom is a theft, and so any time the government forces you to do something you don't want to, prevents you from doing something you do, forces you to buy a product or a service you don't want, or from someone from whom you don't want to purchase it, or prevents you from buying what you want, or from whom you want, a crime has been perpetrated against you by the state. We also realize that an economy can only function in the long term if it uses honest money, which can be anything from wampum to cattle to gold; but certainly not paper or computer digits created at the discretion of the government. We eschew any and all actions by the government because we believe the government is not, never has been, and never will be of the people, by the people, for the people, but is rather a self-sustaining entity that operates for the benefit of its own members.

Many people can be convinced of certain aspects of this worldview but will not ascribe to it in its entirety. The reason for that is the state has conducted a concerted effort to convince us of its own necessity and has been so successful in this endeavor that many people are incapable of even challenging the belief that government is inherently good.

The one thing that the least people will agree with me on is the provision of public schooling by the state. There is no denying that education is, alongside good health, one of the most important things for personal quality of life and the advancement of society, but people make the erroneous next step of deciding that if something is important the state must be the supplier of that good.

There are a number of arguments against such a position, one of the strongest being that public schools have, especially in the United States, shown themselves incapable of even approaching the level of education provided in private schools. When sixty five percent of Americans can't place Britain on a world map, you've got to question why we spend billions of dollars of tax money on a flawed system that essentially amounts to daycare at best; prison at worst.

One of the biggest flaws in reasoning shared by a majority of people is thinking that government "provides" services like education. The government does not produce anything on its own; it simply provides a re-distributive function; typically re-distributing future wealth to today, and from efficient uses, to inefficient ones. The fact that Catholic schools are easily able to provide far superior education at a fraction of the cost that public schools do reveals how nonsensical such beliefs are. The cost of providing education to our nation's youth is borne by society as a whole; and particularly education, since it is funded by local property taxes. If a private school can educate a child for three thousand dollars, why do we force all our citizens to dump ten thousand dollars a kid into a deeply flawed system controlled by Teacher's unions, book publishers and politicians? The reason most people don't send their kids to private school isn't because they choose not to, but rather because they have no other choice; so much of their wealth, i.e., their time, is expropriated by the government through innumerable taxes that they have no other option but to send their children to a "free" public school. Can anyone argue that this is a "free" system, one that is built around personal liberty and free economic decision-making?

And herein lies the deepest, most abhorrent part of the tale. The system MUST have it so to continue to work. By providing a good, the government obviously gets to control what the good is and how it is delivered. The evil, private free-market educational system of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world produced millions who were able to read Classical Greek and Latin, scholars who were knowledgeable of authors from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Rimbaud. These were people who could THINK. Men like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Lysander Spooner, men who immersed themselves in ideas, and were able to create their own. This is the product of an education that is provided by the market. These are the kind of men who brought governments to their knees, who created the seminal ideas and spearheaded the great movements that have helped man progress out of the cave.

The current educational system teaches you when to sit down, when to stand up, not to talk unless called upon by an authority figure, line up, go outside, come inside, salute the flag, listen to OUR history. Something isn't discovered until a white person "discovers" it. Civilizations matter as they come under European influence. Cortez, Columbus and their ilk were great people. Government programs can "fix" the problems of the market. Society has improved every time the government decided to "regulate" something new for "the good of the people." These lies have been taught to generations by a public education system which is the central pillar in the continuing interference of the state into the lives of men.

When I ask people who is paying for the goods the state "provides" most people say "the people." My next question is how government bureaucrats know better than individuals what they want, when they want it and how much they want to pay for it. At this point most people's arguments start to break down and become circular because they've never thought about a world without a nanny government; but really what people mean, but don't want to say, is that they are relying on what they believe is a "progressive" tax system that will allow them to take a free ride on the backs of the rich, whom everyone feels they have somehow been wronged by. The truth of the matter, however, is that the world is a big place and if too heavy a burden is placed on the rich the incentives for them to move, or hide their assets, increases.

People tell me all the time that a well-educated populace is the greatest defense against tyranny. What has the American public, after decades of publicly provided education and skyrocketing education costs, done to stop the suspension of habeas corpus, domestic wiretapping, torture, the expansion of American law and law enforcement to the entire globe, illegal warmongering, gross and systemic corruption, perjury, and a host of other crimes perpetrated by the Bush and other administrations? The answer is nothing. All the puppet masters had to do was flood the economy with pretend money created by the Federal Reserve, create and artificial economic boom, and sit back while we were all preoccupied with the newest consumer electronics coming out of China, and they were free to do their dirty work.

Try asking the Biafrans, the victims of China's Cultural Revolution, Europe's Jewish middle class, the Bosnians and a host of other groups who have been eliminated by their governments if education saved them from the depredations of the state (around two hundred million people were killed by their own governments in the twentieth century; more than by war between countries). The truth is that a well-ARMED and well-educated populace is the greatest defense against tyranny. This is why the writers of the Constitution made freedom of speech the first amendment in the Bill of Rights, and the right to bear arms the second. It is the existence of a couple hundred million privately held firearms in the U.S. that has prevented outright tyranny. It is the mind-numbing effect of a century of compulsory public education that has brought us to the point where we need to be thinking about our guns. Right now the U.S. stands at the door where Germany stood in the late 1930s. All of the laws are in place and the government has been reorganized to allow a total consolidation of power in the executive, but the difference is that we can fight back. The question is how much independent thought remains behind the trigger and how bad will things have to get before people finally decide their own government is the biggest threat to their liberty.

The results of the demolition of our public school system would be a much-better-informed populace and a citizenry capable of thinking for itself, two things the state fears above all.

One of the other biggest achievements made by American universities in the war of the state versus the individual has been the destruction of the search for objective truth. There was a time in mankind's history when great minds sought deeply to understand the world around them in as much truth and detail as possible. These men, fighting against the prejudices of the day and lacking the scientific tools and understanding we have at our disposal, were able to ask the questions, and seek the answers, that have produced this very world where we have access to such tools and understanding. But paradoxically enough in this time when we have such great understanding for the species as a whole and the ability to spread it to almost everyone within our species, this exact search for truth that could liberate mankind from the shackles of the past is being eaten away by liberal professors paid for by the taxes of the people, many of whom have no access to these "centers of learning" or who end up deeply indebted to the system for the pleasure of attending these places.

A modern professor considers themself a success if they convince their students that all opinions and viewpoints not only have value, but are equal in value and must be given equal credence and respect. This is fine if one teaches an art or literature course, but these same attitudes are taught in nearly all the social sciences. While scientists around the world are unlocking the deepest secrets of our DNA, our philosophy classes are teaching that there is no objective reality, our religion classes assure us that all religions have absolutely equal objective value to world "culture" and global studies classes teach us that preserving the languages spoken by fourteen Indians in Brazil is worth tens of thousands of dollars. What is worth that much to us, really preserving an extinct language or assuring ourselves collectively that it makes sense to subsidize millions of degrees in linguistics, philosophy, art history and all of the other things people study on the back of taxpayers and only because they can do it on the backs of others? If some people think such causes are worthwhile let them pool their money for such a cause; I'm sure it would be much better directed by a private group than by government anyway and that way you're not taking money out of a single mother's pocket to subsidize an adventure for a rich white kid from the suburbs who didn't really care about studying hard enough to go into business, biology or engineering. But all things have equal value. Nothing can be said to be "more important" than anything else in the world our state-sponsored professors have created.

Any subsidization to the educational system, including government issued loans, is distortionary. The market sets a price for borrowing money. By artificially lowering the price of borrowing money, you blur the true cost of an education, transferring the cost of the education from the student to other borrowers, people trying to start businesses, people hit with unexpected costs, and people moving into homes.

If the true price for an education were always borne by the student, those who aren't qualified would not spend four years on the government's dime cheating in class, smoking pot and playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater for eight hours a day. As we all know, there are PLENTY of people exactly like this. Instead they would seek out vocational training and become productive members of society, or else. Those who are smart enough would still go, no matter how poor they are, because a thriving private market for college loans would always find and fund the talent, just like good ideas are found and funded today. People are either qualified or unqualified for college and making school artificially cheaper for some people does not change this fact; it only causes them to misallocate four years of their lives acquiring worthless skills and using taxpayer money instead of finding a job they are qualified for.

The core function of economics is to determine which option amongst a group of choices provides the highest "utility" for the economic actor and to then allocate resources to that choice until, due to the law of diminishing marginal return, there is a higher utility choice which should attract available resources. By funding a public school system, capital is mistakenly allocated to investment in human capital when other uses would actually return a higher-utility to the owner of the capital, say a factory, a restaurant, a farm, research, business loans, etc. So now the situation is an overextended educated class, and an investment-starved production base.

This is exactly the situation that we today have in the United States. It takes two college-educated adults working together to raise a family with the same standard of living that a single man could do in the 1950s. All of our manufacturing jobs, pressured by rising tax rates, the most highly regulated business environment in the world, lower cost options in the third world, staid, corrupt leadership, and overwhelming medical costs have left our shores. We continue living the highest standard of living in the world, but without producing any of the things the rest of the world needs. This situation would be much less severe if we had issued more degrees to factory managers, engineers, mathematicians and geologists instead of folklore, psychology, political science and gender relations studies majors. Many people claim that it is somehow "necessary" to have a college degree in today's world, that is precisely the effect one would expect of a subsidized product. A college degree once provided a meaningful differentiation from the rest of society, now it is nothing more than the required social badge to prove one is not from the lower class.

If you think being a lawyer will pay well, why do you need someone living in a trailer, or who is ninety-two years old, to pay for it for you? Because it's your "right" as a member of a first-world country? I believe it is the right of everyone else not to be stolen from.

Regardless, thanks to the GI Bill the U.S. and the world went on a tangent throwing money into educational systems that inexplicably provide a continually less valuable product. This brings us full circle to why the professors have destroyed objectivity.

There are tens of thousands of professors and hundreds of thousands of support staff who have very well-paying, very secure jobs with great benefits that are all predicated on the existence of a constant army of new college students. Most of these people teach all of the same worthless things that most of our students graduate with on their diplomas, often something easier than they had planned on when they enrolled. They must continue to convince society that we need them, that all knowledge is of equal utility for society as a whole, that it is just as important to have theatre and outdoors studies majors as geothermal scientists, welders and petroleum crackers. To do this, to protect all those cushie jobs in the old, ivory-covered houses behind campus, it is necessary to destroy the value of objectivity. In the meantime the state receives the added benefit of a populace who are unable to decide on a firm course to follow. The future is discounted entirely, the political process stalls, people can't tell the difference between important news, important changes to the political sphere and meaningless celebrity gossip. Our world no longer knows how to evaluate truth.

June 28, 2007