Power & Market

An Illinois politicians wants the state board of education to get rid of history classes until the curriculum can be made less racist. the local NBC affiliate reports:

Leaders in education, politics and other areas gathered in suburban Evanston Sunday to ask that the Illinois State Board of Education change the history curriculum at schools statewide, and temporarily halt instruction until an alternative is decided upon....

Before the event Sunday, Rep. Ford's office distributed a news release "Rep. Ford Today in Evanston to Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools," in which Ford asked the ISBOE and school districts to immediately remove history curriculum and books that "unfairly communicate" history "until a suitable alternative is developed."

There are both good ideas and bad ideas here.

First of all, it's unclear in what way exactly history as taught in Illinois — as critics put it — "overlook[s] the contributions of women and minorities"

In practice, history as taught in most schools overlooks the good deeds of a wide variety of good people—not just once who are women or members of certain ethnic groups. The usual history curriculum focuses overwhelmingly on politicians, military personnel and other government employees who are supposedly the people who make the most important contributions, and allegedly make life livable for the rest of us. The private sector is generally ignored including all the entrepreneurs, workers, business owners and managers who actually did the hard work of improving the lives and standards of living of countless human beings. Whenever business owners are mentioned, its usually as some sort of evil "robber baron" or similar caricature. If workers are mentioned, it is only a non-specific workers in a Marxian context.

So, given that the general focus in history courses is on "great men"—most of whom are actually despicable, craven politicians like LBJ or FDR or Woodrow Wilson—then yes, I'm sure women and non-whites get little mention. There's a bias in whose contributions are mentioned, all right. But that bias tends to be in favor of the government class, regardless of race and gender.

But if the answer is to abolish history class, then I am all for it.

Ever since its conception, history class in public school has never been anything other than lessons in government-approved historical narratives designed to push a certain ideology. As historian Ralph Raico has noted, people's ideological beliefs are largely determined "by what they think they know about history."  So as long as people think Americans invented slavery, or that capitalism means children must work until they get black lung disease in coal mines, then people will select their ideologies accordingly. What is taught in history will naturally shape a student's world view.

That said, there is no "correct" unbiased narrative, of course. All history is written by specific human beings with their own experiences, judgments, and biases. Each historian must make decisions as to what information is important, and which is not. Some historical events are mentioned, and other or not. This alone determines what people will learn and conclude about human history. As Ludwig von Mises noted:

Now, a real reproduction of the past would require a duplication not humanly possible. History is not an intellectual reproduction, but a condensed representation of the past in conceptual terms. The historian does not simply let the events speak for themselves. He arranges them from the aspect of the ideas underlying the formation of the general notions he uses in their presentation. He does not report facts as they happened, but only relevant facts.

Historians don't just re-create history. They make judgments about what historical narratives are told.   The result is a narrative that is influenced by ideology and the historian's context.

Thus, it would be madness to leave it up to public school bureaucrats to determine which history ought to be taught and to cede to government employees the power to teach to children — for 12 or 13 years, no less — the "correct" historical narrative.

Early proponents of public schooling were well aware of this, and they made sure history was taught in way that backed up their own prejudices. In the early years of public schools, in the late nineteenth century, "history" class was designed to communicate anti-Catholic pro-government propaganda as approved by the progressive New England intelligentsia

By mid-century—helped along by outright pro-government rituals like the socialist-authored Pledge of Allegiance—history class became a hotbed of center-left ideological studies designed to inculcate American children into the idea that men like Theodore Roosevet and Franklin Roosevelt was saintly harbingers of the American "progress" made possible by a strong US state. Also, central to the curriculum was the idea that all wars waged by the American state were virtuous crusades that made the world a better place.

Things have only gotten worse since then.

As a solution, Rep. Ford wants to get rid of history class. I say, "have at it." Let's just make sure history class is abolished permanently, and not temporarily, as Ford wants. Ford believes a "suitable alternative" can be developed, but I most certainly don't want anyone learning whatever version of history meets Ford's requirements.

I know that some old fashioned readers will think it's still a good idea to teach children history in public school.  These people are still in the thrall of the never-true notion that there's some sort of "objective" history out there that everyone can agree one. This notion is wrong of course, and because of this, we'd all be better off if public-school history class were replaced by reruns of old Saturday morning cartoons.  That would be better than the 12 years of anti-capitalist propaganda students are getting now. Moreover, students could concentrate on more ideologically neutral topics like math and reading, and leave the teaching of history up to parents. In truth, though, given that public schooling is for most people little more than government daycare, most parents wouldn't even notice if history class is abolished forever.

In response to my article last week opposing the use of federal soldiers and federal agents on the streets of American cities, my inbox and the article's comment section filled up with readers claiming that it most certainly is the job of the US federal government to step in and take control of US cities against the will of the state and local governments.

These interventionists have lots of reasons for their federalization of local law enforcement:

• "The author is not realising the seriousness of the communist insurgency under way."
• Federal intervention is unjustified "except in cases where the local elected officials refuse to do what they had taken an oath to do."
• "The people are under the protection of the Constitution, thus during insurrections the president has the duty to mobilize to restore order."
• "Oregon state and Portland city governments either or both can't or don't want to stop violent protests with destruction of public and private properties. Therefore federal government needs to intervene to restore the order, normal functioning of city businesses and government offices."

Many of these readers attempt to make claims about constitutional authority, such as the meaningless claim that "the people are under the protection of the Constitution"—whatever that means—and that therefore the feds can do whatever they want to "restore order." Other claims are just vague legal assertions about how the president can send in troops wherever local officials aren't doing what "we" want them to do.

To this I would only restate that the entire historical and legal context of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the American Revolution is one of preventing distant national powers from sending in their agents, bureaucrats, and troops to carry out federal prerogatives.

But even if the current US Constitution did authorize federal takeovers of local police—which it doesn't—then the Constitution ought to be ignored, because constitutional authority is inferior to the larger moral principle of subsidiary, self-determination, and local control.

As with all things, the Constitution is only useful and worthy of being quoted when it limits federal power. When it doesn't do so, it should be ignored. The Constitution is not some holy writ. It's useful when it attempts to limit federal power, and worthless when it doesn't.

In this case, the Constitution is on the right side: it limits federal intervention in these cases. But if it weren't on our side, then it would be wrong. Stated simply, here is the basic principle at hand: as an American taxpayer who lives many hundreds of miles from Portland, it's not my job to solve Portland's problems.

To business owners and others who live in Oregon and Portland and who are being negatively affected by the riots there, I'm sorry you continue to choose to live in a poorly run state where the political leaders are craven socialists who kowtow to the mob. I highly recommend you consider moving away or expending your own time and energy to do something about it. I'm sorry you didn't see the writing on the wall years ago as the voters put into power—again and again—left-wing demagogues. You decided to stick around. But it's not now the job of Americans in other places to bail you out.

I fully encourage you to organize a local militia, a local political movement, recall effort, or some other strategy to deal with it. But Americans have plenty of their own problems in their own cities. We have our own crime problems and our own problems with corrupt politicians to deal with it. I'm sorry that residents of Portland and Oregon appear to be especially inept in this regard, but neither the Constitution nor common sense dictates that it's our job to swoop in and save Portland from itself, especially when the local majority is apparently fine with the situation.

There are a lot of poorly run cities in America. Like Baltimore, for instance, where the homicide rate is ten times the national rate. It’s not the job of the American taxpayer to solve Baltimore's problems either.

I know that some readers fancy themselves the only ones who truly appreciate the fullness of the "communist insurgency under way." In their minds, the federal government cannot possibly be given too much power, so long as that power is used to crush the commies. Anyone who insists on limiting federal power is thus "naïve." Yet it is these nonnaïve people who want to grant even greater power to a federal establishment that clearly views the American people as the enemy. These federal agencies are the ones who have relentlessly conspired to remove the current democratically elected president because he was not to their liking. These are the bureaucrats who let 9/11 happen, and then got raises afterward. These are the federal hacks who massacred women and children at Waco and at Ruby Ridge. These are the people who wanted the Patriot Act so they could spy on every American.

Back in the 1990s, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre referred to federal agents as "armed terrorists dressed in Ninja black…jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens."

While I’m no particular fan of LaPierre or the NRA, he was right. Wanting to limit the power of these feds is hardly the naïve position.

There is severe confusion about the meaning of economic growth. Many seem to mistakenly think that it has to do with GDP or producing stuff. It does not. Economic growth means that an economy's ability to satisfy people's wants, whatever they are—that is, to produce well-being—increases.

GDP is a rather terrible way of capturing this using (public) statistics and is corrupted by those benefitting from corrupting such figures. GDP is not growth.

Likewise, having more stuff in stores isn't growth. Producing increasing quantities of stuff that nobody is willing to buy is the very opposite of economic growth: it is wasting our limited productive capacity. But note the word “willing.” Well-being is not about (objective) needs, but about being able to escape felt uneasiness. It can turn out to be right or wrong, but that’s beside the point.

Economic growth is the increased ability to satisfy whatever wants people have, for whatever reasons they may have. Examples of economic growth aren't the newest iPhone or plastic toy made in China as much as it’s the availability of quality housing, food and nourishment, and the ability to treat disease. One obvious example of economic growth since the days of Malthus is the enormous increase in our ability to produce food. The quantity and quality have increased immensely. We use less resources to satisfy more wants—that's the meaning of economic growth.

“Economic” means simply economizing or finding the better use of scarce resources (not only natural ones).  Economic growth is thus better economizing. It means that we have the ability, which means we can afford, to satisfy more wants than just the basic needs.

The beautiful thing with economic growth is that it applies to society overall as well as to all individuals: increased productive capacity means more ways of satisfying wants but also cheaper ways of doing so. But this does not, of course, imply that the distribution of access and ability to consume is equal and instantaneous. It spreads in stepwise fashion and will reach everyone.

Increased productivity increases the purchasing power of all money, including (and most importantly) low wages, thus making it much more affordable to satisfy one's needs and wants. But the distribution of such prosperity cannot be equal or instantaneous: any new innovation, new good, new service, etc. will be created somewhere, by someone—it cannot be created for 7 billion plus people instantaneously.

So anything new, including new jobs and new productive abilities, has to spread, as ripples, across the economy. As new things are created all the time, this means that we'll never actually get to a point where everyone enjoys exactly the same standard of living. It cannot be any other way, because economic growth, and the well-being it generates through the ability to satisfy wants, is a process.

Perfect equality is possible only by not having growth: to pull the brakes, not increase well-being. In other words, to not increase convenience and living standards, not figure out how to treat diseases that we would otherwise soon be able to cure. Those are our options, not the fairytale of "equal access to the outcome of growth."

This doesn't mean, of course, that we should be satisfied with inequalities. It only means that we should recognize that some inequality is inescapable if we want everyone to enjoy higher living standards. But we should also recognize that much of the inequality we are seeing today is not of this “natural” kind: it's inequality of political rather than economic origin. This comes in two forms: inherited from privileges enjoyed by a few in the past, reinforced by contemporary political and social structures, and privileges created today through policies creating winners (cronyism, favoritism, rent seeking, etc.).

From the point of view of economic growth as an economic phenomenon, policy-originated inequality has effects on both the creation and distribution of prosperity. First, policy creates winners by (a) protecting some from the competition of new entrants and future winners and (b) restricting (monopolizing) the use of new technologies, thereby propping up incumbents. Second, policy creates losers by redistributing value and economic capabilities to those favored politically. This means that policy has two primary effects on economic growth: it limits the creation of value and distorts its distribution.

Needless to say, this inequality is not beneficial for society overall, but only for those who are favored. It is the creation of winners by creating losers. This is not economic growth, which is accomplished by better economizing—increased ability to satisfy wants.

In a sense, political favoritism and the inequality it causes are the opposite of economic growth, since it creates winners (rich) at the expense of others (generally spread out across a larger population). It's just a redistribution of value already created by introducing inefficiencies into the system: productive capabilities are not allocated based on the creation of well-being but based on political clout. Over time, the economy is actually worse off because of this, so the process of economic growth suffers.

It is important to keep these two “sides” of the inequality coin in mind when discussing the problem. Simply pushing the stop button on economic growth will only accomplish politics’ increased influence over economizing. That's hardly beneficial, at least not for those other than the political class and insiders of the corporatist system. Rather, a solution would be to get rid of politically created and reinforced privilege and allow economic processes to readjust to reality: to target production of well-being instead of favors and influence. This will not do away with inequality as such, but will significantly decrease it and will do away with most of its harmful effects. It would mean an economy where entrepreneurs and workers alike would benefit from producing value for others. In other words, economic growth and higher living standards.

The alternatives are rather easy to understand, yet what's commonly on the agenda of pundits and political commentators is made-up alternatives, often ignorant utopias, that distort the meaning of both privilege and economic growth. The alternatives we have are the ones stated above, nothing else. Make your pick. Striving to realize impossible fairy tales is a waste of time, effort, and resources. That's not how we increase well-being and raise the standard of living. To me, the solution is quite obvious. Most people seem to pick the fairy tale.

[This article is an adaptation of a Twitter thread.]

At the Libertarian Scholars Conference in 2018, our associated scholar Jo Ann Cavallo (Columbia University) presented new research on the literary figure Malaguerra and how he has been used to express "a critical attitude toward the State" in Italian puppet theater. This research has now been published in the journal Achilles Orlando Quixote Ulysses  (AOQU) as “Malaguerra: The Anti-state Super-Hero of Sicilian Puppet Theater,” AOQU 1 (July 2020): 259–94.

The abstract states:

Although this literary figure is little known today, Morbello/Malaguerra was famous in Sicily and elsewhere in Italy from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. This essay focuses on his vicissitudes in print (Storia dei paladini di Francia) and on the puppet theater stage, with some attention to the spread of his name and adaptation of his adventures outside Sicily, both in the epic Maggio tradition of northern Italy and in the scripts of a Catanese puppeteer active in New York City. Because Malaguerra repeatedly contests the injustices perpetrated by those in power, his story reminds us that l’opera dei pupi was not simply a chivalric soap opera for the masses before television, but could be a vehicle to express a critical attitude toward the State under the cover of dramatizing medieval and Renaissance epics. Indeed, it may be that puppet theater’s political undercurrent was a factor in its massive popularity both in southern Italy and among Italian immigrants in urban centers of the New World. More generally, the essay aims to contribute to the discussion of political ideologies in the chivalric epic genre, especially in the context of Italian popular culture.

The full article can be found here.