Written by Robert Higgs. A contest is under way in the world between the forces of creation, improvement, and progress and the forces of destruction, spoliation, and retrogression. This contest has been going on for thousands of years, and except during brief interludes the negative forces always kept the positive forces firmly in check. Roughly…
Tag: health
The Five Institutions of the Market Economy
Let us see what the basic institutions of the market economy are. We may subdivide them for convenience of discussion into (1) private property, (2) free markets, (3) competition, (4) division and combination of labor, and (5) social cooperation. As we shall see, these are not separate institutions. They are mutually dependent: each implies the other, and makes it possible.
Are Leftists Just Opposed to Work?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care for work either, other than writing the occasional obscure blog post, but with a preferred property rule centered on the idea that they may take what belongs to others, that would seem to suggest a major opposition to working themselves for the resources they need.
Leftist’s Preferred Property Rule
For some it’s ethical, for others it’s consequential, but the preferred property rule of all leftists, from the government-loving social democrats and progressives to the anti-state anarcho-communists (et al), seems to me (and I could be wrong) to be that if you need something that someone else has (and doesn’t need), you should get it, by any means necessary.
Democracy Is War by Other Means
Democracy is war by other means. Superficially, it is waged with ballots instead of bullets. At the end of the day, those ballots become bullets. Elections load real guns and aim them at real people. If you disobey the commandments handed down by elected officials, beefy men with shaved heads and Ray-Ban sunglasses will come to take you away. If you resist them, hot lead will fly. Elections are scrambles for control over the service weapons that propel those rounds. In such contests, every faction is trying to point the gun barrels at someone else.
Let the Kids Work
The Washington Post ran a beautiful photo montage of children at work from 100 years ago. I get it. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be horrifying. I’m looking at these kids. They are scruffy, dirty, and tired. No question. But I also think about their inner lives. They are working in the adult world, surrounded by cool bustling things and new technology. They are on the streets, in the factories, in the mines, with adults and with peers, learning and doing. They are being valued for what they do, which is to say being valued as people. They are earning money.
We Have Almost Destroyed Childhood
To me it boils down to this: A lack of unsupervised free time is a mental and physical HEALTH CRISIS — and also a potential democratic crisis. If kids never learn that they are safe when they’re unsupervised, they will always expect and even demand supervision. With that, they’re abdicating their own role in shaping their lives and society, and trusting authority to tell them what to do, how to act, what to believe.
Learning: It’s Not About Education
For the very youngest children, learning is constant. Their wondrous progress from helpless newborn to sophisticated five-year-old happens without explicit teaching. They explore, challenge themselves, make mistakes, and try again with an insatiable eagerness to learn. Young children seem to recognize that knowledge is an essential shared resource, like air or water. They demand a fair share. They actively espouse the right to gain skills and understanding in a way that’s useful to them at the time.
The Freedom Hive – Truth, Freedom, Prosperity.
I’ve perceived a need for an action oriented community in my local area. One in which people can come to find solutions that can be incorporated into their lives, and they can then participate in the learning, integrating, and teaching processes that we all have to offer depending at what stage we are at in moving toward more personal freedom in our lives and the lives of our friends and family.
Kids for Kash, Dictator Fallacy, Combinatorics
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. I will…