All Posts Tagged With: "ignorance"

Progressive Intolerance

Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics—specifically an increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy—are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only several thousand years old (rather than 4.5 billion), that evolution [...]

26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | Continued

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

An annoying bumper sticker I have seen on occasion reads, “If you think education is costly, try ignorance.” That trope is meant to break down resistance to the education establishment’s desire to shop-vac in as much taxpayer money as possible. The trickery is subtle—deceive people into equating schooling with education. What the education establishment does [...]

22Sep2010 | George C. Leef | 15 comments | Continued

Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq

Americans, it is often said, are in general ignorant of history, both their own and that of other countries around the world. This lack of historical knowledge and understanding means that too many Americans cannot appreciate the context of many political events in other parts of the globe. For example, the political conflicts and atrocities [...]

5Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Failure versus Error

There are two kinds of error, and one of them is consistent with success.

6Apr2010 | Sandy Ikeda | 27 comments | Continued

Energy: The Master Resource

The economic and historical ignorance of the American public is frequently exploited by politicians and special-interest groups. The hotter the issue, the greater the exploitation, and no issue is hotter today than energy. Myths and misconceptions abound, leading people to embrace harmful interventionist policies. Ask a hundred typical Americans what role government should play in [...]

14Dec2005 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

School and State: A Neat Solution to the Neatby Dispute

Daniel Hager is a writer and consultant in Lansing, Michigan. Before there was Rudolf Flesch there was Hilda Neatby. In 1955 Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read, a bestseller that charged the U.S. educational system with malfeasance for not correctly teaching young students how to read. Two years earlier Hilda Neatby (1904–75), a University of [...]

1Dec2003 | Daniel Hager | 0 comments | Continued

Individualism and Intelligence

How intelligent are human beings? This short question is complex. Of course, intelligence exists in many varieties. A math genius might believe in the predictive powers of Tarot cards; a great novelist might stumble over the simplest exercise in logic; a stellar manager might be ignorant of literature. While interesting, this particular complexity afflicting the [...]

1May2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | Continued

Privatizing Airline Safety and Security

The events of 9/11 underscore the importance of improving the safety and security of air travel. The government’s response to the terrorist attacks employs a command-and-control approach. That approach ought to be questioned. After all, it was the Federal Aviation Administration’s system that failed on 9/11. Why should we expect additional controls to be more [...]

1Nov2002 | and and Paul A. Cleveland | 3 comments | Continued

If Americans Really Understood the Income Tax: Uncovering Our Most Expensive Ignorance

At first glance, John O. Fox’s book on the income tax, which has a dust jacket featuring the U.S. Capitol and a magnifying glass focusing on a 1040 form, promised to be a hard-hitting critique. I was eager to read what I hoped would be an insightful and penetrating analysis of taxation by a tax [...]

1Jul2002 | Murray Sabrin | 0 comments | Continued

Don’t Expect Much From Politics

The older I get and the more I learn from observing politics, the more obvious it is that it’s no way to run a business—or almost anything else, for that matter. The deficiencies, absurdities, and perverse incentives inherent in the political process are powerful enough to frustrate anyone with the best of intentions. It frequently [...]

1Dec2001 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | Continued

Sovereign Traders

Pierre Lemieux is an economist and visiting professor at the University of Quebec at Hull. The third Summit of the Americas, held in Quebec City (Canada) in April, was attended by 34 heads of state (or prime ministers) representing all North and South American countries except Cuba. It also attracted some 45,000 demonstrators against Free [...]

1Sep2001 | Pierre Lemieux | 2 comments | Continued

The High Cost of Government Schooling

Public (government) education in America costs a princely sum, and it isn’t getting any cheaper. But what taxpayers shell out for the government school monopoly doesn’t tell the whole story. What others in society must pay to correct the shortcomings of that failed monopoly is huge and a painful testimony to the need for a [...]

1Feb2001 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued

Markets, Politics, and Civility

“The teachable—those who aspire to an ever greater understanding—are those with an awareness of how little they know.” —Leonard E. Read In March, ABC Television presented “You Can’t Say That!”—another illuminating program by John Stossel. In it, he documented the distressing intolerance that many Americans have for the opinions of others, and a corresponding acceptance [...]

1Jul2000 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | Continued

Dangerous Donations

lf government didn’t build and support schools, almost everyone would be ignorant—right? Believers in liberty often have to argue against that canard. Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902-1930, by historians Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss, shows the remarkable extent to which northern citizens voluntarily supported the education of southern blacks when government [...]

1Jun2000 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

Money in the 1920s and 1930s

Richard Timberlake is a professor of economics retired from the University of Georgia, and author of Monetary Policy in the United States, An Intellectual and Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This article is the first in a series. One of the most enduring and troublesome mysteries in economics is money: how it is [...]

1Apr1999 | Richard H. Timberlake | 3 comments | Continued

Knowledge and Decisions

Ms. Shaw is a senior associate at PERC in Bozeman, Montana. Physicists tell us that a solid rock is mostly empty space interspersed with occasional dense specks of matter. “In much the same way,” says Thomas Sowell, “specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends upon how solid the [...]

1May1996 | Jane S. Shaw | 1 comment | Continued

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