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: society
@YesYoureRacist Crowdsources Social Preferencing
The main objection to @YesYoureRacist doesn’t cut much ice with me. The project is not an “invasion of privacy” or a “violation of rights.” The Charlottesville marchers engaged in public action with the explicit purpose of attracting attention. Mission accomplished. They got noticed.
How an Airborne Ranger Became a Voluntaryist
Government directives to do evil (whether by commission or omission) do not override our conscience and our understanding of right and wrong. I favor agoristic obviation of government institutions. I support voluntary alternatives to government services as much as I can and continue to encourage government institutions to reduce and eliminate their restrictions on our freedoms.
The Free Market is Always Regulated
The free market is by definition regulated by the interactions of consumers and producers – producers regulate each other’s plans through the process of entrepreneurial competition, while consumers regulate the plans of producers through the exercise of their sovereign buying decisions.
State Intrusions into the Market
There is a tendency among certain libertarians (and among critics of libertarianism) to question how some problem they believe is currently being alleviated by the state would be dealt with in a free society. What they typically fail to comprehend is that the vast majority of problems which the state pretends to mitigate are actually caused primarily if not entirely by the state and its intrusions into the market.
Influences III
If I were a guest on a podcast or an interview broadcast, when asked about my major influences, I would stick close to the names repeated by voluntaryists — Spooner, Bastiat, Jefferson, Mencken, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Higgs, and Woods. But in this more expansive context, I can stretch out to discuss the influences who made me a voluntaryist before I knew I was one, before I knew to read the internal literature of the voluntaryist, libertarian, individualist mainstream. Three such influences are Alan Turing, Dan Carlin, and Ruth Rendell.
Abnormalities and Treating Others with Kindness
Abnormalities aren’t normal. We don’t need to normalize abnormalities in order to have the kind of society that treats people with respect. We don’t need body positivity, trans awareness, gay awareness or anything else. We only need to teach people to be polite and treat assholes like they are assholes.
Spanking is Hitting, Period
“Let people parent how they want to parent” is for things like what time your kids go to bed. You cannot say that when you are being violent to children. And I will say this one more time. Hitting anyone is violent. I will defend the right of children over your assumed “right” to hurt them. If someone starves their child of food, do you protest, “let people parent how they want to parent?!”
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.
Episode 074 – Russ’s Journey, Part One: Politics (51m)
Episode 074 welcomes Russ Fugal to the podcast in a two part conversation with Skyler and Morgan. The topics covered in this first part include smartphones, career moves, Russ’s childhood homeschooling, his unchanging degree of conservatism during the 9/11 crisis period, Ron Paul and the 2008 and 2012 elections, environmentalism, his evolution toward libertarianism and anarchism, “Who would Jesus incarcerate?”, voluntary prisons, and the country’s Wizard of Oz moment c/o of Donald Trump.