Don’t Bite the Hand: Why Public Schools Can’t Afford to Teach Economics

Tate Fegley South Carolina Mises Circle 2026

09/12/2026 Tate Fegley

Tate Fegley argues that government schools fail to teach sound economics not necessarily out of malice, but because they have no incentive to teach the very ideas that would undermine them. Drawing on Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard, he examines competition, teacher pay, and bureaucracy to explain why.

Recorded in Greenville, South Carolina, on September 12, 2026.

Special thanks to Bryan Lee Briggs for sponsoring this event.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.