VH-1’s “Save the Music” campaign is one of the latest in the series of pointless celebrity causes. The idea seems to be that celebrities should raise money and convince individuals to donate old band instruments to defunct or financially troubled public school music programs in order to save them in spite of the ignorance and shortsightedness of
One way to prove that someone’s idea makes no sense is to show that it entails something absurd. So you say none of us can know anything. Doesn’t this mean you cannot either? So how then do you know none of us knows anything? You know the rest. This is called the “reductio ad absurdum” argument and it is used all the time to discredit flawed
The Washington Post Sunday, March 28, 1999; Page B02 Hard to Swallow:The Scandal in the School Lunch Program Isn’t About Pizza At first glance, the facts seem to tell the story: Last week, the principal of Alice Deal Junior High School in Northwest Washington was placed on administrative leave with pay for the unauthorized selling of pizzas to his
Richard Vedder ranks among the most prolific Austrian economists writing and teaching today. In this interview with the Austrian Economics Newsletter , Professor Vedder discusses his education, his scholarly research, and current economic conditions. Read the interview with Richard Vedder in the Spring 1999 Austrian Economics Newsletter
What is it about today’s school system that so many find unsatisfactory? Why have so many generations of reformers failed to improve the educational system, and, indeed, caused it to degenerate further and further into an ever declining level of mediocrity? In this radical and scholarly monograph, out of print for two decades and restored
The Free Market 17, no. 2 (February 1999) To hear educators and activists talk, one might actually believe that apathy threatens to become the defining existential feature of American youth. One hardly need recite the litany of the numerous civic shortcomings regularly imputed by youth organizers eager to demonstrate the self-absorption of
Investors Business Daily February 19, 1999 It goes by many names: national service, selective service, conscription, the draft. All four have been heard in recent discussions in Washington about the military’s staffing problems. The All Volunteer Force is facing its toughest trial in its 26-year history. The Navy is 22,000 sailors short of its
Bill Clinton used to enjoy a reputation as a policy wonk, a person who puts political pragmatism and detail ahead of conviction and dogma. But with his State-of-the-Union education proposal, he plunges headlong into hardcore statist ideology. His idea comes down to this: let the federal government have more control over local schools and their
For years, the Right has promoted educational vouchers as an alternative to public schools. This has always been a delusion. The schools that take vouchers become the province of government regulators, while the money for the vouchers is taken out of the hide of taxpayers already being looted for public schools. Vouchers increase, not reduce,
The big conundrum after the collapse of the Soviet Union was how to move from socialism to capitalism. The US faces the same problem now with the public-school system. Everyone knows that the status quo has got to go. With the newest report that most high-school graduates can’t even write a coherent sentence, what else are we to conclude? The
What is the Mises Institute?
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.