When people fear the government,there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

The following was written by another reader of mine who prefers to remain anonymous. It summarizes precisely how many of us think and feel:

At least two car accidents have happened when morons were overcome by CO2 because they wore their masks while driving. Alone. In a car. Unfortunately neither of them took themselves out of the gene pool when they crashed. Masks are becoming a symbol of how much you care about other people: “Look how good I am because I care about you. Now care about me in return. I SAID CARE ABOUT ME, DAMNIT, OR I’LL PUNCH YOUR FACE!”

The refusal to wear a mask is the refusal to submit to ignorance and irrationality. It’s the refusal to allow someone else’s panicky fear to direct your choices. I will not help people pretend that there is a reason to be afraid of a germ with a 99.97% survival rate and I will not help them feel better about their own inability to assess risk. I will not make their self-victimizing into a virtue. That is the fight I’m going to pick, because Nathan Hale didn’t die so a bunch of pansies frightened of germs could make me wear a symbol of their cowardice.

Masks are a “minimal imposition”? You, buster, don’t get to define “imposition” for anyone but yourself. Masks are a symbol of idiocy and ovine docility. They’re a symbol of an utter failure to think critically. Pointing to politicians who wear them doesn’t help your case. It’s proof that masks are about optics, not reality. The only thing masks achieve is to give the wearer a fraudulent sense of moral superiority he can’t get legitimately through independent thinking. They’re about appearance and intentions, just as every disastrous government program and every economy-wrecking politician are judged by their intentions, no matter how ruinous their actual results. Intentions matter, not reality. Reality gives these people a sad, and masks give them a happy.

Masks are to the general public what the TSA is to airports: security theater. They miss 95% of everything that goes by them. N95 masks are “up to” 95% effective when donned, worn, and removed correctly, but their efficacy varies by manufacturer and can be anywhere from 50-95% and is also dependent on the concurrent use of other PPE types. Even N95 masks don’t filter tuberculosis bacteria, which is much larger than any coronavirus at .2-.5 microns wide. Properly fitted and worn masks can filter out particles as small as .3 microns. Human coronaviruses are between .1 and .2 microns. So now you have the added spectacle of alleged medical professionals, who should be educating people, instead telling patients that if they don’t have a real mask to wear to an appointment, they can use a handkerchief or scarf. Any doctor who says that stamps himself as a quack. That’s the definition of security theater: Doing something 100% pointless and telling yourself that it’s a virtue because your intentions are good.

Medical-grade masks are intended to be worn in conjunction with other protective gear, including full face shields, gloves, and gowns, and they’re made to protect medical personnel from pathogens in blood, feces, and other body fluids. That’s why doctors suit up in trauma bays and operating rooms, but don’t put masks on their patients. That’s why medical examiners wear masks: to protect themselves. They don’t wear masks during autopsies to protect the stiff on the slab. In any case, you’re taking advice from the same clods who wear their scrubs and street shoes outdoors and then clomp back into the hospital to treat patients. How much do you think they really care about introducing bacteria and viruses into patient settings?

You know what it means when 50-90% of people with Wuhan flu are asymptomatic? It means those people don’t get sick. That’s how scary this germ is: It doesn’t make most people sick. What are you having a meltdown over, exactly? Corona is 99.97% survivable. 99% of the fatalities are in elderly people with co-morbidities who can just as easily be killed by the common cold. If you are in close, extended contact with an elderly person with comorbidities then you should already be taking precautions to prevent spreading *any* bacteria and viruses to that person. But putting masks on healthy people when they’re confronted with something that’s less lethal than seasonal flu is ignorance, not virtue. I will not help you pretend otherwise.

We shall concentrate on the capitalist-entrepreneurs, economically the more important type of entrepreneur. These are the men who invest in “capital” (land and/or capital goods) used in the productive process….

The capitalist-entrepreneur buys factors or factor services in the present; his product must be sold in the future. He is always on the alert, then, for discrepancies, for areas where he can earn more than the going rate of interest. Suppose the interest rate is 5 percent; Jones can buy a certain combination of factors for 100 ounces; he believes that he can use this agglomeration to sell a product after two years for 120 ounces. His expected future return is 10 percent per annum. If his expectations are fulfilled, then he will obtain a 10 percent annual return instead of 5 percent. The difference between the general interest rate and his actual return is his money profit (from now on to be called simply “profit,” unless there is a specific distinction between money profit and psychic profit). In this case, his money profit is 10 ounces for two years, or an extra 5 percent per annum.

What gave rise to this realized profit, this ex post profit fulfilling the producer’s ex ante expectations? The fact that the factors of production in this process were underpriced and undercapitalized—underpriced in so far as their unit services were bought, undercapitalized in so far as the factors were bought as wholes. In either case, the general expectations of the market erred by underestimating the future rents (MVPs [marginal value products]) of the factors. This particular entrepreneur saw better than his fellows, however, and acted on this insight. He reaped the reward of his superior foresight in the form of a profit. His action, his recognition of the general undervaluation of productive factors, results in the eventual elimination of profits, or rather in the tendency toward their elimination. By extending production in this particular process, he increases the demand for these factors and raises their prices. This result will be accentuated by the entry of competitors into the same area, attracted by the 10 percent rate of return. Not only will the rise in demand raise the prices of the factors, but the increase in output will lower the price of the product. The result will be a tendency for a fall in the rate of return back to the pure interest rate.

What function has the entrepreneur performed? In his quest for profits he saw that certain factors were underpriced vis-à-vis their potential value products. By recognizing the discrepancy and doing something about it, he shifted factors of production (obviously nonspecific factors) from other productive processes to this one. He detected that the factors’ prices did not adequately reflect their potential DMVPs [discounted marginal value products]; by bidding for, and hiring, these factors, he was able to allocate them from production of lower DMVP to production of higher DMVP. He has served the consumers better by anticipating where the factors are more valuable. For the greater value of the factors is due solely to their being more highly demanded by the consumers, i.e., being better able to satisfy the desires of the consumers. That is the meaning of a greater discounted marginal value product.

It is clear that there is no sense whatever in talking of a going rate of profit. There is no such rate beyond the ephemeral and momentary. For any realized profit tends to disappear because of the entrepreneurial actions it generates. The basic rate, then, is the rate of interest, which does not disappear. If we start with a dynamic economy, and if we postulate given value scales and given original factors and technical knowledge throughout, the result will be a wiping out of profits to reach an ERE [Evenly Rotating Economy; for more see chapter 5] with a pure interest rate. Continual changes in tastes and resources, however, constantly shift the final equilibrium goal and establish a new goal toward which entrepreneurial action is directed—and again the final tendency in the ERE will be the disappearance of profits. For the ERE means the disappearance of uncertainty, and profit is the outgrowth of uncertainty.

A grave error is made by a host of writers and economists in considering only profits in the economy. Almost no account is taken of losses. The economy should not be characterized as a “profit economy,” but as a “profit and loss economy.”

A loss occurs when an entrepreneur has made a poor estimate of his future selling prices and revenues. He bought factors, say, for 1,000 ounces, developed them into a product, and then sold it for 900 ounces. He erred in not realizing that the factors were overpriced and overcapitalized on the market in relation to their discounted marginal value products, i.e., to the prices of his output.

Every entrepreneur, therefore, invests in a process because he expects to make a profit, i.e., because he believes that the market has underpriced and undercapitalized the factors in relation to their future rents. If his belief is justified, he makes a profit. If his belief is unjustified, and the market, for example, has really overpriced the factors, he will suffer losses.

The nature of loss has to be carefully defined. Suppose an entrepreneur, the market rate of interest being 5 percent, buys factors at 1,000 and sells their product for 1,020 one year later. Has he suffered a “loss” or made a “profit”? At first, it might seem that he has not taken a loss. After all, he gained back the principal plus an extra 20 ounces, for a 2 percent net return or gain. However, closer inspection reveals that he could have made a 5 percent net return anywhere on his capital, since this is the going interest return. He could have made it, say, investing in any other enterprise or in lending money to consumer-borrowers. In this venture he did not even earn the interest gain. The “cost” of his investment, therefore, was not simply his expenses on factors—1,000—but also his forgone opportunity of earning interest at 5 percent, i.e., an additional 50. He therefore suffered a loss of 30 ounces.

The absurdity of the concept of “rate of profit” is even more evident if we attempt to postulate a rate of loss. Obviously, no meaningful use can be made of “rate of loss”; entrepreneurs will be very quick to leave the losing investment and take their capital elsewhere. With entrepreneurs leaving the line of production, the prices of the factors there will drop and the price of the product will rise (with reduced supply), until the net return in that branch of production will be the same as in every branch, and this return will be the uniform interest rate of the ERE. It is clear, therefore, that the process of equalization of rate of return throughout the economy, one that results in a uniform rate of interest, is the very same process that brings about the abolition of profits and losses in the ERE.

A real economy, in other words, where line A yields a net return of 10 percent to some entrepreneur, and line B yields 2 percent, while other lines yield 5 percent, is one in which the rate of interest is 5 percent, A makes a pure profit of 5 percent, and B suffers a pure loss of 3 percent. A correctly estimated that the market had underpriced his factors in relation to their true DMVPs; B had incorrectly guessed that the market had underpriced (or, at the very least, correctly priced) his factors, but found to his sorrow that they had been overpriced in relation to the uses that he made of the factors. In the ERE, where all future values are known and there is therefore no underpricing or overpricing, there are no entrepreneurial profits or losses; there is only a pure interest rate.

In the real world, profits and losses are almost always intertwined with interest returns. Our separation of them is conceptually valid and very important, but cannot be made easily and quantitatively in practice….Do profits have a social function? Many critics point to the ERE, where there are no profits (or losses) and then attack entrepreneurs earning profits in the real world as if they were doing something mischievous or at best unnecessary. Are not profits an index of something wrong, of some maladjustment in the economy? The answer is: Yes, profits are an index of maladjustment, but in a sense precisely opposed to that usually meant.

As we have seen above, profits are an index that maladjustments are being met and combated by the profit-making entrepreneurs. These maladjustments are the inevitable concomitants of the real world of change. A man earns profits only if he has, by superior foresight and judgment, uncovered a maladjustment—specifically an undervaluation of certain factors by the market. By stepping into this situation and gaining the profit, he calls everyone’s attention to that maladjustment and sets forces into motion that eventually eliminate it. If we must condemn anyone, it should not be the profit-making entrepreneur, but the one that has suffered losses. For losses are a sign that he has added further to a maladjustment, through allocating factors where they were overvalued as compared to the consumers’ desire for their product. On the other hand, the profit-maker is allocating factors where they had been undervalued as compared to the consumers’ desires. The greater a man’s profit has been, the more praiseworthy his role, for then the greater is the maladjustment that he alone has uncovered and is combating. The greater a man’s losses, the more blameworthy he is, for the greater has been his contribution to maladjustment.

Of course, we should not be too hard on the bumbling loser. He receives his penalty in the form of losses. These losses drive him from his poor role in production. If he is a consistent loser wherever he enters the production process, he is driven out of the entrepreneurial role altogether. He returns to the job of wage earner. In fact, the market tends to reward its efficient entrepreneurs and penalize its inefficient ones proportionately. In this way, consistently provident entrepreneurs see their capital and resources growing, while consistently imprudent ones find their resources dwindling. The former play a larger and larger role in the production process; the latter are forced to abandon entrepreneurship altogether.

There is no inevitably self-reinforcing tendency about this process, however. If a formerly good entrepreneur should suddenly made a bad mistake, he will suffer losses proportionately; if a formerly poor entrepreneur makes a good forecast, he will make proportionate gains. The market is no respecter of past laurels, however large. Moreover, the size of a man’s investment is no guarantee whatever of a large profit or against grievous losses. Capital does not “beget” profit. Only wise entrepreneurial decisions do that. A man investing in an unsound venture can lose 10,000 ounces of gold as surely as a man engaging in a sound venture can profit on an investment of 50 ounces.

Beyond the market process of penalization, we cannot condemn the unfortunate capitalist who suffers losses. He was a man who voluntarily assumed the risks of entrepreneurship and suffered from his poor judgment by incurring losses proportionate to his error. Outside critics have no right to condemn him further. As Mises says:

Nobody has the right to take offense at the errors made by the entrepreneurs in the conduct of affairs and to stress the point that people would have been better supplied if the entrepreneurs had been more skillful and prescient. If the grumbler knew better, why did he not himself fill the gap and seize the opportunity to earn profits? It is easy indeed to display foresight after the event.

Author:
Murray Rothbard

People often ask me, “How are the Austrians different from the Chicago School economists? Aren’t you all free market guys who oppose big-government Keynesians?”

In the present article I’ll outline some of the main differences. Although it’s true that Austrians agree with Chicago economists on many policy issues, nevertheless their approach to economic science can be quite different. It’s important to occasionally explain these differences, if only to rebut the common complaint that Austrian economics is simply a religion serving to justify libertarian policy conclusions.

Before jumping in, let me give a few obvious disclaimers: I do not speak for all Austrian economists, and in this article I will be discussing modern Austrian followers in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. (On methodology in particular, the Austrians in the Rothbardian camp differ somewhat from those who look more to Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner for inspiration.) It’s also important to note that not all Chicago school economists think alike. Even so, I hope the following generalizations are representative.

Methodology
The Austrians are oddballs among professional economists for their focus on methodological issues in the first place. Indeed, Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action, devotes the entire second chapter (forty-one pages) to “The Epistemological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action.” There was no such treatment in the last Freakonomics book.

Although most economists in the twentieth century and our time would disagree strongly, Mises insisted that economic theory itself was an a priori discipline. What he meant is that economists shouldn’t ape the methods of physicists by coming up with hypotheses and subjecting them to empirical tests. On the contrary, Mises thought that the core body of economic theory could be logically deduced from the axiom of “human action,” i.e., the insight or viewpoint that there are other conscious beings using their reason to achieve subjective goals. (For more on Mises’s methodological views, see this and this.)

In contrast, the seminal Chicago school article on methodology is Milton Friedman’s 1953 “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” Far from deriving economic principles or laws that are necessarily true (as Mises suggests), Friedman instead advocates the development of models with false assumptions. These false premises are no strike against a good theory, however:

The relevant question to ask about the “assumptions” of a theory is not whether they are descriptively “realistic,” for they never are, but whether they are sufficiently good approximations for the purpose in hand. And this question can be answered only by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions.

Although Friedman’s analysis sounds perfectly reasonable, and the epitome of “scientific,” Mises thought it was a seductive trap for economists. For a quick illustration of the difference in perspectives, let me relay an example from my teaching experience.

It was a principles of microeconomics class, and we were using the (excellent) textbook by Gwartney, Stroup, et al. In the first chapter they have a list of several guideposts or principles of the economic way of thinking. As I recall, these are items such as “People respond to incentives” and “There are always tradeoffs.” These were noncontroversial things that every economist would agree were important for getting undergrads to “think like an economist.”

However, the one guidepost that stuck out like a sore thumb announced, “To be scientific, an economic theory must make testable predictions.” I explained to the class that even though this was a popular view among professional economists, it was not one that I shared. I explained that everything we would learn the entire semester from the Gwartney et al. textbook would not yield testable predictions. On the contrary, I would simply teach them a framework with which they could interpret the world. The students would have to decide whether the framework was useful, but ultimately their decision wouldn’t boil down to “Did these tools of supply and demand make good predictions?”

After I went through my spiel, one of the students made the excellent observation that not a single one of the other guideposts was a testable prediction. He was right! For example, how could someone test the claim that “People respond to incentives”? I could say to a person “I’ll give you $20 if you cut off your big toe.” Regardless of what happens, my claim is safe and secure. If the person doesn’t cut off his big toe, it just shows that I didn’t offer him a big enough incentive.

This is not mere philosophical grandstanding. Mises stressed that the important heritage of sound economic thought is not a collection of empirically tested claims about the behavior of economic variables. Rather, economic theory is an internally coherent framework for interpreting “the data” in the first place.

It’s true that certain applications of economics involve historical evidence—such as investigating whether the Federal Reserve played an important role in the housing bubble—but this is a far cry from the typical mainstream economist’s justification for mathematical model building.

Booms and Busts
Another major divergence between the Austrian and Chicago schools is their explanation for booms and their policy prescriptions for busts. The readers of this article are likely familiar with the Austrian view, so I will omit another discussion.

Chicago school economists obviously have nuanced views, but generally speaking they subscribe to the “efficient markets hypothesis.” In its strongest form, the EMH denies that there could even be such a thing as the housing bubble (see here and here). Given their assumptions of rational actors and markets that quickly clear, and given that they lack a sophisticated theory of the capital structure of the economy, the Chicago school economists are forced to explain recessions as an “equilibrium” outcome due to sudden “shocks.”

Historically they didn’t consider the distortions caused by below-market interest rates (which of course are the key ingredient in the Austrian theory of the business cycle). However, recently more and more Chicago school critics of the Fed have been pointing out the dangers of Ben Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy.

Ironically, the policy area where the Austrians and the Chicago school differ most is in regard to money, the issue in which Milton Friedman specialized. Friedman (and coauthor Anna Schwartz) famously faulted the Federal Reserve for not printing enough new money in the early 1930s to offset the decline fueled by bank runs. In our time, some Chicago-trained economists—who justifiably point to Milton Friedman himself for vindication—blame the crisis in the fall of 2008 on Bernanke’s “tight money” policies. Naturally, these views are anathema to modern Austrians in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, who think that the central bank should be abolished.

Law and Economics
Finally, most modern members of the Austrian and Chicago schools have vastly different ideas when it comes to the field known as “law and economics.” Whether based in natural law or the traditional inheritance from the common law, Austrians tend to think that people objectively have property rights, full stop, and that once we specify these rights the economic analysis can begin. In contrast, some of the more extreme applications of what could be called “the Chicago approach” would say that the assignment of property rights themselves should be determined on the grounds of economic efficiency. (In Walter Block’s reductio ad absurdum, a judge decides if a man has stolen a woman’s purse by asking how much each party would be willing to pay for it.)

Mises Academy: Robert Murphy teaches Keynes, Krugman, and the Crisis
This is a particularly subtle area that I cannot adequately summarize in this article. Suffice it to say that Austrians and Chicago school economists alike can appreciate the amazing insights—and challenge to the standard Pigovian critique of the market—contained in Ronald Coase’s famous article. However, the Chicago school tradition has taken Coase’s work to conclusions that many (perhaps most) modern Austrians find repellant.

Conclusion
On typical issues such as the minimum wage, tariffs, or government stimulus spending, Austrian and Chicago school economists can safely be lumped together as “free market.” However, in many other areas—particularly issues of pure economic theory—the two schools are entirely different. As a self-described Austrian economist, I would encourage free market fans who only know Friedman to add Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard to their reading lists.

You don’t live in a free country if your rights can be turned on and off at any time by a dictator.

“Reopening”? It’s a joke. Everything is now state-run. That’s not freedom. You can kid yourself that your freedoms have been restored, when and if they ever are. But your freedoms are not a light switch. Your rights are inalienable. That’s the term our founders used. Rights are inherent to your nature. A government may be hired to protect those rights. But no government (state or federal) may turn those rights on and off. Rights are part of you; and always were.

We’re told it’s all for the sake of our health. But “health” can be used to justify anything. People die on highways every day. Should your car be taken away, until the curve of automobile deaths is “flattened”? People die of cancer and obesity. Should your diet be run by the government, and fast food chains closed, until the curve is “flattened”? Many more die of cancer, obesity and automobiles than will ever die from coronavirus. So the health motivation is B.S. They know it. And they have noted the fact that most of us won’t say it.

The instant these lockdowns were ordered, and the moment our rulers realized we would tolerate those lockdowns — even indefinitely, months later — is the moment our freedom ended. The only way to get our freedom back is to fight the idea that it was ever theirs to take away in the first place.

I am sick and saddened. Many agree with me, but will never say so publicly. They might make someone angry. Heaven forbid! Most of the country seems to be under sedation. Most don’t want to face that their freedom is lost. They wait patiently for their state governments to restore their right to do simple things that have always been part of the American way — things like getting a haircut or going to the local pub or restaurant. Even most unfree countries have permitted these things. Stalin let you get a drink, and Hitler let you get your hair cut.

We are staring into the awful reality of a totalitarian regime, one that may turn rights on and off for any reason whatsoever. Coronavirus will be the excuse to take your guns, curb your speech and abolish your few remaining rights. If you doubt this, you’re truly a fool. You’re also not listening. When they tell you “it’s the new normal”, they really mean it. As millions put on their masks, elite officials know they will get uncritical compliance with anything.

Your rights are yours. The career politicians in our governments are the least morally and intellectually qualified to do anything. Is this what our veterans died for in all those wars — the right to be controlled by petty imbeciles and worthless twits who never could have made it outside of a career in politics?

Say it isn’t so. Especially on Memorial Day.

“You cannot just stop and start a business. It just doesn’t work that way.” (A resident of Michigan.)

Career politicians do not understand this, and do not care. They are irrational, parasitical authoritarians. America started as a rebellion against such tyrants in defense of individual rights. It’s time to teach these Governors the same lesson. At some point, the legitimacy of their power has to be challenged. If not, they will destroy the economy, liberty and civilization as we have known it.

I hold everyone who continues to vote for or support these inexcusably heavy-handed officials personally responsible for everything that will result from this fiasco. These pretentious alarmists keep saying, “We are not playing games”. Neither are we.

Michael J. Hurd

There are about 2.5 million homeschooling children in the United States today, but what if 8 million more kids start homeschooling in the fall? There is reason to believe this could happen.

An EdChoice public opinion poll suggests that more than half of parents with school-age kids have a more favorable view of homeschooling after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. An unofficial Reason Foundation Facebook poll conducted by Corey DeAngelis suggests that about 15 percent of children could be making the switch to homeschooling in the fall. A May 14, 2020 Real Clear Opinion poll of more than 2,000 registered voters found that as many as 41 percent of parents are more likely to homeschool this fall.

It seems certain that parents and students will consider many different “new” options this year. Parents are thinking twice about sending kids back to schools that may be forced by the government to administer temperature checks, hand sanitizer, face masks, social isolation, and staggered classes upon reopening.

In France, some children are being told to draw six-foot by six-foot chalk squares where they can “enjoy” recess. In England, some teachers have suggested “spraying pupils with disinfectant.” All of this suggests the coming school year will be anything but “back to school” as usual.

Will There Be a School Exodus?
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are about 57 million school-aged children in the United States. Of these kids, about 50 million were enrolled in public schools, and seven million were enrolled in private schools. In 2017, Education Week estimated that the number of children enrolled in public charter schools was 3 million.

Even using the percentage of possible “switchers” from the unofficial Reason poll, which is considerably lower than the more reliable RealClear Opinion poll, results in a whopping 8.5 million more homeschooled students. Adding the 2.5 million current homeschoolers gives us more than 10 million students homeschooling this fall.

Ten million kids homeschooling in the United States would be a jump of about 500 percent. If these polls are even remotely close, we are looking at major shifts that will have effects rippling all over in interesting and hard-to-predict ways.

For example, with fewer students in public school, these schools might have fewer teacher positions, leading to possible staff reductions. Furloughed teachers might find work tutoring out-of-school kids or land jobs with the new spate of start-ups taking advantage of increased demand for out-of-school learning opportunities. Entrepreneurial start-up Outschool is looking to hire 5,000 teachers to meet the new demand.

States seeing decreased revenue from taxes due to the economic effects of shutdowns might be glad to see fewer students showing up in the hallways so their government budgets might be spared some per-pupil funding. Families will bear most of these costs, which might lead them to put some pressure on policymakers. Tax credits would be one way to recognize this financial burden. Ten million homeschoolers equals a total “savings” of about $160 billion at the average per-pupil funding rate of approximately $16,000.

What Might Homeschooling Mean for Children?
The 1kids who would be learning outside traditional schools might find a lot more freedom and a lot less pressure. They and their parents could choose their own curriculum and flexible schedules, accomplishing education in a more life-integrated way. Kids would have more time to play, read, explore their interests, learn at their own pace, and socialize in healthy ways, with less negative peer pressure and school-related issues such as bullying.

Some have lamented this possible increase, worrying that more homeschooling will be bad for children. But the numbers show that the opposite is more likely true.

The comprehensive literature from Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Joseph Murphy shows that homeschooling produces individuals who are at least as well-educated and well-socialized as their public or private school counterparts. A lot of research shows even better results. Homeschooling grads are more politically tolerant than their public or private school counterparts, says Dr. Albert Cheng’s empirical study. Dr. Lindsey Burke found a majority of research pointing to superior academic outcomes for homeschooling. Contrary to the assertions of others that homeschooling is done only by “white conservative Christians,” the demographics of homeschooling families are also changing.

Harvard Law School alum, author, Supreme Court clerk, and homeschool graduate Alex Harris says, “Education was woven into everything we did in my family. There was always something to read and talk about around the dinner table. My parents never seemed to miss an opportunity for instruction. They were particularly adept at identifying what I was most passionate about, and then using that as a tool for teaching. … They wanted us to love learning.” What’s not to like about that?

Who could have ever imagined we would experience a global pandemic that would put 1.5 billion children in 190 countries out of school? Who would have imagined entire countries and states would virtually shut down their economies? If that can happen, why couldn’t 10 million kids be happily homeschooling this fall?

Even if some or many of the new homeschoolers transition to regular schools when things return to normalcy, 10 million homeschooled children would have a significant positive, long-term effect on how America does school. Based on how homeschooling has stacked up so far, that would be just fine for kids, their families, and the country.

Michael P. Donnelly, The Federalist

I’m not covering my face for reasons of safety, I’m doing the world a favor.

Let’s review. “Reopening” is a sham. Shops, restaurants and small businesses, under “reopening”, are being micromanaged by the government–Communist-style. There’s no way they can make a profit and stay open this way. Hair salons can’t survive on two customers at a time, with everyone wearing a gas mask. Retail stores don’t survive on curbside service. You’ve got the Internet for that! Restaurants have the thinnest of profit margins to begin with, and can’t afford restrictions like one-third or one-half capacity. And they’ve already been closed for two months. Plus, we’re told that if someone so much as sneezes, everything will shut down totally again. The message from our tyrants: “You’re lucky we even let you stay open this much. And don’t get used to it.”

Originally, the lockdown was temporary–just to “flatten the curve.” That has long since happened. Now the lockdown is until we get a vaccine. When will we get a vaccine? Will there ever be one? And here’s another question nobody (yet) is asking: Let’s say we have a vaccine tomorrow. How do we ensure that every single person will get the vaccine? Let’s assume that everyone submits and agrees to a vaccine. That won’t happen. Vaccines are (to some) controversial and risky. Even people OK with vaccines will be shaky about this one, because it will clearly be a rush job managed by a government desperate to say “we did something”. But even if every single person submits to a vaccine, how can the government guarantee nobody was left out?

Clearly, that’s impossible. So that will be the next excuse. People like the Michigan governor (who will be in office literally forever, since her permanent emergency order will permit the suspension of elections) will say, “So long as there are holdouts on the vaccine, we clearly can’t reopen.” You can expect that attitude in all Democratic states and probably most Republican ones too, eventually. Why the latter? Because Republicans usually cave, in the end. At least, they always have. And red states can turn blue, and once they do, it’s all over.

And remember: All of this happens in the context of an ever-declining GDP and 25 percent unemployment (as of now). What happens when we get to 50 percent unemployment? Or a negative GDP? On our present course, we will. At what point do we wake up one day and realize we’re … Venezuela? The government cannot print money forever. As much as the sheep would like to believe that everyone can be guaranteed a $50,000/year national salary for sitting at home merely because the government wills it, that salary doesn’t do you much good if (1) there’s little to spend it on, because everything is closed; and (2) the currency becomes worthless, which is what happens when the government hyperinflates the money supply (as it must, to keep sending out stimulus checks). Google “fiat currency” and read what economists have to say about this.

I don’t mean to be negative. But the facts are all negative. Everything the government is doing is WRONG. Virtually all of the gullible assumptions most of us hold right now are WRONG. And the premise that nothing can change until we have a vaccine that there’s no way every single person will inject is fatally WRONG.

The only way out of this mess? To concede that everything we did in the last few months was incredibly, stupidly and savagely WRONG. Like “the greatest mistake in all of human history” wrong.

It’s hard to admit such a big mistake. The arrogant SOBs who inhabit political office will NEVER admit it. They are hopeless, and should be punished, although you can never get back all the lives, wealth and hopes they have already destroyed.

But we the people had better admit our errors, and fast. Because there will be a point of no return, on our present course. I hope we’re not already there.

—Michael J. Hurd

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.

Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good. This catallactic notion of ownership and property rights is not to be confused with the legal definition of ownership and property rights as stated in the laws of various countries. It was the idea of legislators and courts to define the legal concept of property in such a way as to give to the proprietor full protection by the governmental apparatus of coercion and compulsion, and to prevent anybody from encroaching upon his rights. As far as this purpose was adequately realized, the legal concept of property rights corresponded to the catallactic concept.

However, nowadays there are tendencies to abolish the institution of private property by a change in the laws determining the scope of the actions that the proprietor is entitled to undertake with regard to the things that are his property. While retaining the term private property, these reforms aim at the substitution of public ownership for private ownership. This tendency is the characteristic mark of the plans of various schools of Christian socialism and of nationalist socialism. But few of the champions of these schools have been as keen as the Nazi philosopher Othmar Spann, who explicitly declared that the realization of his plans would bring about a state of affairs in which the institution of private property will be preserved only in a “formal sense, while in fact there will be only public ownership.”

There is need to mention these things in order to avoid popular fallacies and confusion. In dealing with private property, catallactics deals with control, not with legal terms, concepts, and definitions. Private ownership means that the proprietors determine the employment of the factors of production, while public ownership means that the government controls their employment.

Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again, proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts that were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoliation of their predecessor.

However, the fact that legal formalism can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of a market society. Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society, the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. The consumers allot control of the means of production to those who know how to use them best for the satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers. Only in a legal and formalistic sense can the owners be considered the successors of appropriators and expropriators. In fact, they are mandataries of the consumers, bound by the operation of the market to serve the consumers best. Capitalism is the consummation of the self-determination of the consumers.

The meaning of private property in the market society is radically different from what it is under a system of each household’s autarky. Where each household is economically self-sufficient, the privately owned means of production exclusively serve the proprietor. He alone reaps all the benefits derived from their employment.

In the market society, the proprietors of capital and land can enjoy their property only by employing it for the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage from what is their own. The very fact that they own means of production forces them to submit to the wishes of the public.

Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 24 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.]

Author:
Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that is called praxeology.