When it comes to education reform, there are generally two camps: those who want to improve the existing mass compulsory schooling system through tweaking and tuning and those who want to build something entirely new and different. Not surprisingly, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was in the “think different” camp, advocating for school choice and vouchers, while Microsoft’s Bill Gates backed the Common Core State Standards and other incremental reforms within the conventional mass schooling model.
Tag: america
Shutdown Theater: Blame? Why Not Credit?
Radical libertarians like me are, unfortunately, a tiny part of the “yay, shutdown!” demographic. We prefer, on principle, to see the government doing as little as it can be made to do. Shut down as much of it as possible for as long as possible!
But-cept
It must be a fiction that the colonial man in the streets had any cohesive thought on the matter. The American Revolutionary War was promulgated by the landed gentry to protect their already-claimed advantages. They got the peasantry to fight and die, to freeze to death, to starve for the pretty abstraction of freedom. This war, like all others, was fought for the status quo. But-cept, how do I know?
Tucker Carlson Needs Love from His Leaders
Timothy Sandefur has exposed Carlson’s failure to grasp that individual freedom and its spontaneously emergent arena for peaceful voluntary exchange — the marketplace — make possible what Carlson insists he values most: “Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence,” which Carlson correctly identifies as “ingredients in being happy.”
Rainwater’s Motivated Reasoning
If a brilliant, eminent, and mainstream scholar of the 1960s could be right for such wrong reasons, the brilliant, eminent, and mainstream scholars of today could easily be mired in their own brand of motivated reasoning. Indeed, so could you. Or me. There’s no easy remedy, but the first step is being hyper-aware that we have a problem.
On Conquest
Something that I’ve always found very peculiar is when the descendants of a conquered people adopt their conquerors’ religious and political sensibilities. Like how Catholicism is rampant in Central and South America and how Christianity and American Patriotism is rampant among black Americans.
A Tip of the Hat to the Forgotten Defenders of 1939-40
War is an evil, but it takes some virtue to put up resistance to tyranny. So there is some virtue to remembering the people who resisted Germany on April 9th, 1940, and on all of the ill-fated defensive fronts of 1939-40.
On Voluntaryists III
A popular ethical thought experiment is the question of given the ability to time travel, would you kill baby Hitler? Allow me to nip this supposed quandary in the bud. The voluntaryist approaches this differently than a coercivist. Killing baby Hitler would prevent Hitler’s involvement with the Third Reich, but so would many other actions toward baby Hitler.
Trump’s Holiday Gift to America: Hope for a Little More Peace on Earth?
Nothing’s written in stone, and both US foreign policy and Donald Trump are prone to sudden and unexpected turns. But the holiday season is a time of hope. Maybe, just maybe, nearly three decades of US war in the Middle East are coming to the beginning of their end.
The Changes in Culture
I think we recognize “renegades” because they are the ones who often seem to trigger the changes in society. However, I think this is only the visible representation of something deeper.