It really is not too complicated of a concept, but I will say that it is rather abstract. To believe that you are in charge of yourself and you, and only you, are responsible for the decisions that you make is seemingly a dying notion. It is not sexy in the world of give-aways and buying votes for politicians to tell you that you are responsible for you and they will leave it that way. We need to take an abstract concept like liberty and put real world application behind it. We need to start working on winning the war for our minds. People keep turning to the State to see what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do has been hardwired into their brains since they start their K-12 indoctrination. You are raised to think that the U.S. had a glorious history and was always the good guy in every situation extinguishing evil. You are also raised to believe that taxes are the price of living in that great nation. Within that time, you are raised to accept a watered down education that gives you some basic skills to contribute to society. Within that period, any deviation from the norm is penalized by drug usage to turn you into a zombie. That zombie then graduates with a useless diploma and a dead spirit. Like George Carlin told us that they want obedient workers. They do not want a generation that is capable of critical thinking.
After that point you are faced with a fork in the road. You have to choose whether you want to take out easy-access loans for a degree that will most likely be meaningless or you enter the workforce and try to get some experience. If you choose the first option, you will undoubtedly at some point wake up from the socialist education that you not only paid for through these easy-access loans, but also subsidized through taxes or you paid straight out of pocket for a private education. Either way, the market has been distorted by these loans that you cannot default on and you can get nearly as much as you want. This has led to a skyrocket in the cost of education and has sentenced you to be not only a tax-slave, but also a debt slave for most of your life. If faced with having to make hard decisions and applying for loans that they only give to good candidates, you would see less people go to these propaganda factories. People would have to make responsible decisions in university admissions, how the students will pay for it, and whether or not it is worth the risk of loaning money to a student. Repsonsibility without the moral hazard will start the fixing of the entire higher education system.
Liberty in education should begin much sooner than we want to admit. It took me about 22 years of life to realize the game was rigged. At that point, even at what has become at least relatively the least-Leftwing institution in America, Texas A&M University, I realized that most of what I had learned had to be unlearned. I had to go back and rewire my brain to get the programming out of it. Through 16-17 years of indoctrination, you learn the history that they want you to be taught. You learn faulty economics that makes you believe government spending is a good thing. Even in college, although at that point it was more of a loathing of whites and a resentment of ancestors than in high school, you have really no true discourse. In order to pass the professor’s exams, you had to learn what they wanted you to learn. The exams were tilted to procure the outcomes that they wanted. In high school, like a machine, you learn about the “Great Presidents”, which were always big Statist heroes who expanded welfare or started a war. You spent very little time talking about pre-Lincoln and if you did it was always tainted as these men were slave owners therefore they need to be ignored. This was also 18 years ago so it has gotten much worse. Especially since the Left knew how to win the long-game through education. The Right ceded the playing field and now we face the mess that we are in currently where students come out socialist dependents on their Nanny State.
To understand exactly the mess that we are currently facing, you have to understand a few things, college students are graduating with massive debt from easy-access loans that they cannot default on. They are then having to take jobs that cannot pay that back and instead of understanding why that is, they turn to the cause of the problem to be the hero. Back in 2005, when they made it impossible to default on student loans (Biden was a self-proclaimed hero in its passing), they created a massive distortion in the student loan industry. It created moral hazard in lending and it has saddled the students with debt. It has also allowed kids who should not even go to school access to easy loans that they could not afford. The second piece of this puzzle was in Obamacare where they nationalized student loans. This made the prices of education not only skyrocket, but become less valuable. Funny how every time they create more of something it seemingly always decreases the value of it. So loans are given to bad candidates and these bad candidates cannot default on them. They then settle for a useless major because they have been taught since kindergarten that the path of finding yourself at college is not only acceptable, but virtuous. In those sixteen to seventeen years of indoctrination, they never learn why these things occur. They never learn about the business cycle, the Federal Reserve, what actually causes inflation, etc. These kids then come out and make 12 dollars an hour at a job that they did not need a degree for and they are turning to the creators of the problem for the cure. The government loves this. Both parties have allowed this monster to carry on and go forth because they need you to be dependent on them.
The people on the other side, typically an older crowd that did not have access to those loans that the new generation had access to, tell them to work their way out of it. Before 2005, it was much more difficult to obtain the loans to begin with. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve and the government bury them further in debt. The answer to these students is to add more to the debt by helping them out with their student debt. This will undoubtedly lead to more inflation which will lead to a decrease in their dollar’s value. They would get 10,000 (which is an arbitrary number and they do not have the power to do), but the value of their dollars will shrink even further. Then you will get higher prices everywhere else. Case in point, the stimulus checks in the COVID packages. You got $1,200 but paid an extra 4,000 per year in cost of living in 2021 and it worse in 2022.
The point of this rant is to bring up that liberty in education begins when you accept the following premises:
1.) That the government is the cause of and the horrible solution to most of your problems. Read the above as an example or reference the 2008 Financial Crisis (Meltdown by Tom Woods) to show you what is in store for the bubbles they have created.
2.) Centrally planned economies are not free market economies. They have no skin in the game so therefore they act as managers and not entrepreneurs.
3.) Increasing the money supply does not increase prosperity but rather decreases it. What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard or End the Fed by Ron Paul.
4.) The real heroes in history were the ones you do not read about. Read about actual heroes of liberty in books such as Brion McClanahan’s 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried to Save Her or Forgotten Conservatives in American History. A general rule of thumb is that whoever they are trying to cancel, is definitely worth reading. I bought Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century and will read that soon. I have spent the last several years reading Early American History since our overlords and education want to get rid of every single person Pre-Lincoln.
5.) The deprogramming of your kids has to start early. You are responsible for your kids. The government wants to take this responisibilty from you by inflating your dollar so much that you have to work more to cover basic living costs. This will make sure that they will continue to always be the “savior”.
If we are going to start working on becoming more independent, we are going to have to start taking back ourselves and our families from control of the State. This starts with what we choose to put into our brains. I believe that the Mises Institute and the Abbeville Institute are a good place to start. If you need a curriculum to home school your kids, Tom Woods and Ron Paul have what you need. If you need a refresher or want to learn history from professors, I recommend Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom or Brion McClanahan’s McClanahan Academy or their podcasts that are free.
We need to stop having conversations about prayer in school or how our kids need to be taught finances. It is our responsibilty to pray with our kids and to teach them these things. The less the State is in charge of the better. The sooner Conservatives understand this, the better. Take responsibilty for everything in your life and your families. You will have to work to get yourself in better positions in life. If you cannot afford private school (you will still have to rewire your kids’ brains) or do not have the time to homeschool, you can do the easiest thing possible, teach yourself what is most important and then teach your kids. This will help create critical thinkers rather than obedient workers. It costs next to nothing and is a better use of our time than scrolling feeds and arguing with strangers. Inside out is the way we protect our liberty. Let’s start with winning the war for our minds and our families. Then we look outward to others. Spread the word and embrace liberty. We have a long road ahead of us with very powerful enemies.
As always, thank you for reading.