The primary difference between public education and public schooling is that the former is openly accessible and self-directed, while the latter is compulsory and coercive. Both are community-based and taxpayer-funded; both can lead to an educated citizenry. But public education–like public libraries, public museums, public parks, community centers, and so on—can support the education efforts of individuals, families, and local organizations with potentially better outcomes than the static system of mass schooling.
Tag: entrepreneurship
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 7
If your market includes everyone, it includes no one. I knew I’d do better with a tighter market. Ideally, as Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One, a tiny niche I could monopolize. But even this was broad enough for me to lose focus. The real break-through for choosing actions to get traction came when I got down to the smallest unit possible.
What the Left Should Like about Public Choice
Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan, et al.
Worse Than Fake News
What’s worse than fake news? The news that you don’t see. Remember the “memory hole” in the novel 1984? We suffer from a kind of “news blackout” which heavily influences what we think we know. Many of us also, because of our own choices, see a very limited slice of the news which is available.
Optimistic about the Future of Liberty
This morning, after a little reflection, I’m more optimistic than ever about the future of liberty. There are so many great companies, organizations, and technologies that enable us to throw off the shackles of the state and its allied institutions.
The Driving Force behind Civilization’s Emergence
The earliest use of writing was strictly commercial and economic, not political or bureaucratic. It was trade, entrepreneurship, and stewardship of private property, not politics, “public education” or the creation of national mythology that allowed humankind to transition from prehistory to history.
Change the World for Fun & Profit
Doing things like starting a business or pursuing a career in the arts is usually regarded as selfish and greedy. And even when we do support the people who pursue these things, we’re still hesitant to think of them as revolutionaries and freedom-fighters in the same way that we’d think of politicians and philanthropist.
Episode 069 – Thomas’ Journey, Free Market Educators, Praxis (1h29m)
Episode 068 welcomes Thomas Bogle (and his son Cullen) to the podcast to talk about his journey toward voluntaryism, and his involvement with Free Market Educators and Praxis. Topics include teaching, homeschooling/unschooling, entrepreneurship, the Praxis program, internship, and more.
What is Fascism?
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
In Praise of Immigrants
Three new technologies of the last 20 years made America’s economy great again: the iPhone, Google search, and horizontal drilling and fracturing. All came from first-generation immigrants.