Douglas E. French, President of MISES, is a clear and methodical speaker who delivers an important talk, Strategies for Changing Minds Towards Liberty, as to how technology is empowering individuals and subverting Government's monopoly on information. As POTUS attempts to leverage the FaceBook crowd with rhetoric, his top-down, one-size fits all, anti-entrepreneurship Statism is being challenged by Google, Khan Academy, LINUX, YouTube, WikiPedia and a dozen other ventures that are 'emerging' from bottom-up collaboration. The continued expansion of the Imperial Presidency and a bloated bureaucracy embodied in the IRS, EPA, DEA, DOE, DOA, TSA, CIA—a near endless bloat of regulatory restrictions administered by apparatchicks—can still suppress the budding efflorescence of freedom and reason.
It goes without saying, this is why Google is such a threat to tyrannies such as China and Iran—information is power.
Again, great message—one spot troubles me though, the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power Co.' citation, probably based on O'Keefe and Vedder's paper 'Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing' as to why universities hold a monopoly power of accreditation seems to be a stretch. Companies can still administer aptitude tests that are job-related—much like the US Navy did to screen us into the nuclear power program—they just can't be generic screenings.
I would tend to agree that there's a bubble in college education that's about to be popped by online learning systems like Khan Academy, but there will always be an important institutional niche for universities as locations where mentor-apprentice relationships are developed in complex fields—medicine, nuclear physics, electronics &c.—careers that truly require the intense theoretical and practical devotion.
Roderick T. Long makes some interesting points in his MISES talk on How to Reach the Left (Strategies for Changing Minds Towards Liberty. He readily admits that the aristocratic Left, the Teddy Kennedy's and Barack Obama's, are a lost cause—but there is an anti-privilege Left that can be in alignment with Libertarian ideas.
The core point is that the Left and Right mistake the existing economic order as a result of free market operation when in fact it is due to cronyism, favouritism, regulation, subsidies, direct and indirect grants and monopoly protection (including in the labour market the alliance between government and unions.)
In other words, the military-industrial-university-labour complex (an extension of President Eisenhower's military-industrial linkage) that exists today is not the 'freed' market—it is the result of monopoly power gained through access to government regulations that exclude competition to allow conglomerates and corporations that span the country and the globe. E.g., ObamaCare™ is a boon not for American health, but for Health Maintenance Organisations, the American Medical Association, and is especially sweet for Insurance Companies!
Liberals and Conservatives are equally interventionist and differ mainly in the means, not the desire to manipulate and control through Government edict—not only at home, but abroad (it is no small coincidence that Bush and Obama are spendthrifts and activists domestically and internationally.) It is time to create a 'freed' market that will function outside of the reins of a few privileged oligarchs.
No comments:
Post a Comment