Do we really need the State to educate? Most people believe this to be the case, especially for the poorest among us. But E.G. West and James Tooley – and several others – have looked at the actual history of education, and found something startling: mass education existed before heavy state involvement.
Tag: evidence
Don’t Let Prosecutors Intimidate You – Overcoming Their Flawed Opposition
When people defend against bureaucratic attacks, they tend to be intimidated by prosecutors. After all, they are professionals, they have advanced degrees and much more experience in the courts than most. Don’t let that intimidate you, most times they have no evidence and rely on fear and logical fallacies. I’ll cover another in this article, the common strawman.
How Econ Textbooks Sanitize the Horrors of Communism
When I was first learning economics, I was surprised by how pro-communist many economics textbooks were. I don’t mean, of course, that any economics textbook ever said, “Communism is good.” What I mean, rather, is that textbooks were very positive relative to communism’s historical record. Indeed, many seemed deeply ignorant of actual communism, basing their assessment on second-hand information about communists’ stated intentions, plus a few anecdotes about inefficiencies. Many textbook authors were, in a phrase, communist dupes: Non-communists who believe and spread a radically overoptimistic image of communism.
The Many Benefits, for Kids, of Playing Video Games
Video games have been under attack by the fear-mongers ever since they first appeared, and the attacks have not diminished. If you Google around the Internet using harmful effects of video games as a search phrase, you will find all sorts of frightening claims. If you look into the actual research literature, you find very little if any evidence supporting the fear-mongers claims, and considerable evidence against those claims.
Anarchism as Constitutionalism
Trying to refute anarchism by pointing to undesirable instances of anarchy is about as bad an argument as trying to refute Bidinotto’s advocacy of government by pointing to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Whether a state is horrendous or decent depends in large part on its constitutional structure; whether an anarchic society is horrendous or decent likewise depends on its constitutional structure.
Do Two Wrong Taxes Make a Right?
Imposing tariffs in order to protect domestic producers who are unjustly harmed by taxes or regulations, as Bastiat noted, simply shifts the harm done by these taxes and regulations from producers to consumers. But why should consumers rather than producers suffer this harm? Some people must suffer it, and it’ll be either the unjustly taxed and regulated producers (in the case of no protective tariff) or their consumers (in the case of a protective tariff).
Ticket Dismissed in Australia – No Evidence to Offer
It’s been a while, but we’ve got another ticket dismissed in Ipswich, Australia. Thanks to George for acting as a McKenzie friend for Lee and getting this ticket dismissed. Congrats to Lee for taking a principled stand against the criminals called “government.”
Pseudo-Skeptics Fail Basic Skepticism
Criticism of my work seems to be immune from the skeptic process. The mental conditioning of statism appears to be so strong that those who claim to be skeptics forget these principles and rely on logical fallacies to support their preconceived conclusions. I thought it would be instructive to demonstrate how some pseudo-skeptics have criticized my work.
If Men Were Angels
Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state.
The Broken Infant Fallacy
The period between birth and roughly the age of five is troublesome for central planners. As long as children remain dependent on their parents — and not “society,” as controlled by the state — there’s a risk of them developing habits that will become impossible to break once they enter a state-sanctioned institution, i.e. Kindergarten.