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The Daily Reckoning | Tuesday, March 20, 2012
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Joel Bowman, checking the reader mail from Buenos Aires, Argentina...
One of the dubious marvels of modern travel is that one can be both a million miles away and still within very easy reach of very nearly everyone. 
Joel Bowman
Of course, it’s a double-edged sword. Yes, it allows us to follow our emails and messages from anywhere in the world. But it also allows our emails and messages to follow us anywhere in the world.
And so we found ourselves checking in on each of the stops along our Gold Coast — Sydney — Auckland — Sydney (don’t ask) — Buenos Aires return home. Not that we had enough time to actually do anything about the various calls to action that tend to populate an untended inbox...but we checked in enough to be able to worry about them all just the same.
Before we embark on the next leg of our little journey tomorrow — Buenos Aires — Sao Paulo — Miami — Managua — we thought we’d share some of the emails your Fellow Reckoners have recently share with us. Here goes:
First up, Reckoner D. Taylor wrote in from New Zealand to comment on yesterday’s issue...
Chris Mayer’s article hit it on the head. The current mess the US is in has a silver lining. The old inefficient, cumbersome manufacturers with lots of expensive labour are dead. The clever guys are rejigging everything and are going to work smart. And if any country can do this it’s the US. It has the brains and the will.
However, it must look after its own backyard, and get out of the imperialism business to be truly successful. Otherwise everything will be wasted.
DR: All excellent points. We wonder, though...can a country already so deeply entrenched in the hazards of war ever realistically hope to extricate itself? How far gone is too far gone when it comes to the imperial march? Looking back through history, it would seem the mantle of world power is more frequently seized than it is (voluntarily) surrendered.
Next up, Reckoner T. Marrs wonders about the shift of power already underway from the West to the East...
I have a 40 year old company that makes auto parts in China. We are a USA company and do engineering and testing here in the USA. We have been in China for 16 years and have since become a global company. The Chinese market for auto parts is growing faster than it is in the US and Europe. The labor cost in China used to be $1 per hour fully loaded. Now it is $2.50 per hour. The US cost is more like $30 per hour by the time you pay health insurance for the workers and a decent wage. China is certainly changing, but still not bad.
We’re currently getting about 20% of our revenue from China and another 60% from non USA business, which would make it difficult to move back home. Factories are going to be automation in a suitcase in the future so you can just pick up and move next door to the big Auto Company when and where they want.
Every country wants “local content” so I’m never going to get to go to work in my slippers again. That’s just the way it is.
And here’s a Reckoner who goes by the name “The Arkansas muleman” with some thoughts on Charles Kadlec’s brilliant musing concerning state sponsored corruption...
I just read the article in the Daily Reckoning, and I have a few comments. First, I agree almost totally with his view that the root cause was Congressional culpability. I have a little different take on it.
When you create conditions that lend themselves to abuse, what do you expect? All the liberals point to Wall Street and their greedy ways. Are they a bunch of greedy self-serving bastards? Sure. Do I blame them? No. And here’s why.
You put 500 teen age boys in a 100 acre field with no adult supervision and a beer truck full of cold beer...
What are you gonna have? Answer: A party. Wall Street was only doing what they do. Was it wrong? Yes. Did they create the conditions? No.
DR: Perhaps no other modern day firm epitomizes “Wall Street greed” quite like Goldman Sachs. Reckoner Goforth chimes in on the subject of corporatism and avarice aplenty...
Your latest article features a Mr. Smith who complains about “Wall Street Greed” and specifically, that of Goldman-Sachs. News flash: EVERYONE is GREEDY! In case you haven’t heard, it is one of the seven deadly sins and just as much a part of one human being as another. By the way, Wall Street is not a human being, and as avaricious as the humans who work on The Street may be, I fail to understand why they are any more guilty than the thugs in our Federal Government. I am also mystified as to why said thugs “get a pass” on the real estate meltdown. It was, after all the Community Reinvestment Act which was the catalyst, a leftover from the Carter years revived by the “caring and concerned” federal bureaucrats who felt home ownership was the right of all Americans. The fact that all Americans cannot afford to own a home was an overlooked detail.
Socialism is evil. It encourages the greedy nature resident in all humans. It would have us believe that it is acceptable to take from one person without their permission and give to another who has not earned that which is being given. For the government to do this is legalized theft and immoral and has led our erstwhile free nation down a very dark road — it will all end in tears.
And now for today’s guest column... External Advertisement
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The people in my community love their public schools. So too it is in most of the country. If only they knew the costs, and I don’t mean just the financial costs, which are two and three times those of private schools. I also mean the opportunity costs: If only people knew what they were missing!
Jeffrey Tucker
Imagine education wholly managed by the market economy. The variety! The choice! The innovation! All the features we’ve come to expect in so many areas of life — groceries, software, clothing, music — would also pertain to education. But as it is, the market for education is hobbled, truncated, frozen and regimented, and tragically, we’ve all gotten used to it.
The longer people live with educational socialism, the more they adapt to its inefficiencies, deprivations and even indignities. So it is with American public schools. Many people love them, but it’s like the “Stockholm Syndrome”: We’ve come to have a special appreciation for our captors and masters because we see no way out.
There is a way out. But first we have to see the problem for what it is. I know of no better means than exploring an absolutely prophetic book first published in 1974, edited by William Rickenbacker. It is called The Twelve-Year Sentence. Laissez Faire Books is offering this book, a key that unlocks the prison door, right now for $10.
This is not only one of the great titles in the history of publishing; it is a rare book that dared to say what no one wanted to hear. True, the essays are all scholarly and precise (the book came out of an academic conference), but a fire for liberty burns hot below the footnoted surface. Especially notable: This book came out long before the home-schooling movement, long before a remnant of the population began to see what was happening and started bailing out.
The core truth that this book tells: The government has centrally planned your child’s life and has forced both you and your child into the system. But, say the writers, the system is a racket and a cheat. It doesn’t prepare them for a life of liberty and productivity. It prepares them to be debt slaves, dependents, bureaucrats and wartime fodder.
I’m thinking of this book as I look at millions of unemployed young people in the US and Europe. This is what the system has produced. This is the mob that once gathered in “homeroom,” assembled for school lunches, sat for endless hours in their assigned desks and was tested ten thousand times to make sure they had properly absorbed what the government wanted them to know. Now they are out and they want their lives to amount to something, but they don’t know what.
And it’s just the beginning. There are tens of millions of victims of this system. They were quiet so long as the jobs were there and the economy was growing. But when the fortunes fell, many became members of marauding mobs seeking a father figure to lead them into the light.
Think of the phrase “twelve-year sentence.” They government took them in at the age of 6. It sat them down in desks, 30 or so per room. It paid teachers to lecture them and otherwise keep them busy while their parents worked to cough up 40% of their paychecks to the government to fund the system (among other things) that raises their kids.
So on it goes for 12 years, until the age of 18, when the government decides that it is time for them to move on to college, where they sit for another four years, also at mom and dad’s expense.
What have they learned? They have learned how to sit at a desk and zone out for hours and hours, five days per week. They might have learned how to repeat back things said by their warden — I mean teacher. They’ve learned how to sneak around the system a bit and have something resembling a life on the sly.
They have learned to live for the weekend and say “TGIF!” Perhaps they have taken a few other skills with them: sports, music, theater or whatever. But they have no idea how to turn their limited knowledge or abilities into something remunerative in a market system that depends most fundamentally on individual initiative, alertness, choice and exchange.
They are deeply ignorant about the stuff that makes the world work and builds civilization, by which I mostly mean commerce. They’ve never worked a day in the private sector. They’ve never taken an order, never faced the bracing truth of the balance sheet, never taken a risk, never even managed money. They’ve only been consumers, not producers, and their consumption has been funded by others, either by force (taxes) or by leveraged parents on a guilt trip.
So it stands to reason: They have no sympathy for or understanding of what life is like for the producers of this world. Down with the productive classes! Or as they said in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution: “Expropriate the expropriators” Or under Stalin: “Kill the Kulaks.” Or under Mao: “Eradicate the Four Olds” (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas). So too did the Nazi youth rage against the merchant classes who were said to lack “blood and honor.”
The amazing thing is not that this state system produces mindless drones. The miracle is that some make it out and have normal lives. They educate themselves. They get jobs. They become responsible. Some go on to do great things. There are ways to overcome the twelve-year sentence, but the existence of the educational penitentiary still remains a lost opportunity, coercively imposed.
Americans are taught to love the sentence because it is “free.” Imagine attaching this word to the public school system! It is anything but free. It is compulsory at its very core. If you try to escape, you are “truant.” If you refuse to cough up to support it, you are guilty of evasion. If you put your kids in private school, you pay twice. If you school at home, the social workers watch every move you make.
There is no end to the reform. But no one talks about abolition. Still, can you imagine that in the 18th and most of 19th centuries, as this book points out, this system didn’t even exist? Americans were the most-educated people in the world, approaching near- universal literacy, and without a government-run central plan, without a twelve-year sentence. Compulsory education was unthinkable. That came only much later, brought to us by the same crowd who gave us World War I, the Fed and the income tax.
Escaping is very hard, but even high-security prisons are not impenetrable. So millions have left. Tens of millions more remain. This whole generation of young people are victims of the system. That makes them no less dangerous precisely because they don’t even know it. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome: Many of these kids fell in love with their captors and jailers. They want them to have even more power.
We should celebrate the prophets who saw all this coming. William Rickenbacker saw it. He and the writers in this book knew what was going on. They knew what to call it. They dared to tell the truth, to speak the unspeakable: This system is more like prison than education, and it will end when its escapees are loosed on the streets to protest against anything and everything.
Even after nearly 40 years, this book has lost none of its power. It should take its place among the great documents in history that have dared to demand that the jailer step aside and let the inmates free.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Tucker
Executive editor, Laissez Faire Books, for The Daily Reckoning
P.S. By ordering today, you’ll get an additional 5% off the listed price of $9.95, just by clicking here. Enjoy.
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Here at The Daily Reckoning, we value your questions and comments. If you would like to send us a few thoughts of your own, please address them to your managing editor at joel@dailyreckoning.com
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
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