Category: Culture

In a review of Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools (Hoover Press, 362 pages, $15) for the Chicago Sun-Times, Jonathan Hoenig writes:

[Authors Herbert Walberg and Joseph Bast] present a compelling and thoroughly researched argument for introducing market-based reforms into public schools.
The vast majority of children in the United States attend public schools, and in a methodic and disciplined fashion, the authors make a comprehensive case why the free market can better educate more students at a lower cost.
The authors begin by describing the horrible condition of public education, which, make no mistake, is a complete mess nationwide. Although government schools maintain a monopoly on public funds, they’ve failed miserably by almost every conceivable benchmark.
Even more depressing is that even as results have dropped, the size and cost of the government school bureaucracy has soared.

The solution?

The solution is capitalism, the same incredible force of productive change that brought civilization out of the Dark Ages and propelled this country to the highest standard of living, for rich and poor alike, in all of human history.
The authors’ thesis, built on the groundwork laid by the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman, is that just as the free market has created unparalleled innovation in medicine, agriculture and communication, so could it vastly improve education. The ability for parents to choose their schools, and for schools to compete for their attendance, would raise standards and lower cost, just as it has in every other area of our lives.

Walberg and Bast devote a good deal of space to refuting common misconceptions and criticisms of capitalism, and describe how a free market in education might work. But they go beyond that:

[I]n the tradition of economist Ludwig von Mises and philosopher Ayn Rand, they ground their arguments in moral as well as practical terms. Capitalism isn’t simply the most efficient social system ever devised, but the most just as well.

Read the full article for more details!

In an article for Australia’s The Age, Sixties environmental activist Patrick Moore discusses the changes that have come over the environmental movement in the past forty years. He begins:

I was raised in the tiny fishing and logging village of Winter Harbour on the north-west tip of Vancouver Island, where salmon spawned in the streams of the adjoining Pacific rainforest.
In school, I discovered ecology, and realised that through science I could gain insight into the natural beauties I had known as a child. In the late 1960s I was transformed into a radical environmental activist.
A ragtag group of activists and I sailed a leaky old halibut boat across the North Pacific to block the last US hydrogen bomb tests under President Richard Nixon. In the process I co-founded Greenpeace.

Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz make a cameo:

At the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Ayn Rand published Return of the Primitive, which contained an essay by Peter Schwartz “The Anti-Industrial Revolution.” In it, he warned that the new movement’s agenda was anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-human.
At the time, he didn’t get a lot of attention from the mainstream media or the public.
Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner.
But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists’ campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
By adopting a zero-tolerance policy towards a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they have lived up to Schwartz’s predictions.
They have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals and internationalists.
It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.

Read the whole article for more interesting stories from a former environmental activist.
UPDATE: Michelle Fram-Cohen points out an historical inaccuracy in Moore’s account of Rand’s book:

The facts are that in 1971 Rand published a collection of her essays under the title The New Left: The Anti Industrial Revolution. This was also the title of one essay in the book. Return of the Primitive was published in 1999, and is an expanded edition of The New Left, edited with an introduction by Peter Schwartz. It includes Schwartz?s essay “The Return of the Primitive,” which he used for the title of the new edition.