The inability of unions to achieve real, widespread raises : wage rates—to raise the standard of living generally—is i part obscured by the phenomenon of inflation. As a cons quence of the government’s policy of deficit spending at credit expansion, the purchasing power of the monetary uni the dollar, has diminished drastically across the years. Nom nal wage rates have increased considerably more than re wage rates, that is, wages measured in terms of actual pu chasing power.
What has further served to obscure this issue is the fa that real wage rates have risen considerably since the start ( the century. In spite of destructive and increasing goven mental restraints on the freedom of production and trad major advances in science, technology, and capital accumul tion have been made and have raised the general standard < living. It should be added that these advances are less tha would have occurred in a fully free economy and, as contro continue to tighten, such advances become slower an rarer. It is relevant to consider against what obstacles busines: men have had to fight and to go on producing—when one hears labor leaders proclaiming, in indignant tones, the workers' right to a "larger share" of the "national product." To paraphrase John Gait: A larger share—provided by whom? Blank out. Economic progress, like every other form of progress, has only one ultimate source: man's mind—and can exist only to the extent that man is free to translate his thought into action. Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls, ask himself the following question: If one had a "time machine" and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets? When one grasps that they would not, one should identify who and what made these things possible.7 Postscript: After completing the above, I noticed an article in The New York Times of September 8 that is too apropos to let pass without acknowledgment. The article, entitled "10 U.A.W. Leaders Find Unions Are Losing Members' Loyalty," by Damon Stetson, reports that executives of the United Automobile Workers met to discuss the problem of workers' increasing lack of loyalty to union leadership and union solidarity. One U.A.W. official is quoted as declaring: "How can we get greater loyalty from the individual to the union? All the things we fought for, the corporation is now giving the workers. What we have to find are other things the workers want which the employer is not willing to give him, and we have to develop our program around these things as reasons for belonging to the union." Is any comment necessary? (NOVEMBER 1963.) 7 For excellent, more detailed discussions of these issues, see Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, especially the chapter entitled "Wages, Unemployment and Inflation," and Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), especially the chapters entitled "Minimum Wage Laws" and "Do Unions Really Raise Wages?" PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD EDUCATION BE COMPULSORY AND TAX-SUPPORTED, AS IT IS TODAY? The answer to this question becomes evident if one makes the question more concrete and specific, as follows: Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents' consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve? Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principle of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No. There are no moral grounds whatever for the claim that education is the prerogative of the State—or for the claim that it is proper to expropriate the wealth of some men for the unearned benefit of others. The doctrine that education should be controlled by the State is consistent with the Nazi or communist theory of government. It is not consistent with the American theory of government. The totalitarian implications of State education (preposterously described as "free education") have in part been obscured by the fact that in America, unlike Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, private schools are legally tolerated. Such schools, however, exist not by right but only by permission. Further, the facts remain that: (a) most parents are effectively compelled to send their children to State schools, since they are taxed to support these schools and cannot afford to pay the additional fees required to send their children to private schools; (b) the standards of education, controlling all schools, are prescribed by the State; (c) the growing trend in American education is for the government to exert wider and wider control over every aspect of education. As an example of this last: when many parents, who objected to the pictographic method of teaching schoolchildren to read, undertook to teach their children at home by the phonetic method—a proposal was made legally to forbid parents to do so. What is the implication of this, if not that the child's mind belongs to the State? When the State assumes financial control of education, it is logically appropriate that the State should progressively assume control of the content of education—since the State has the responsibility of judging whether or not its funds are being used "satisfactorily." But when a government enters the sphere of ideas, when it presumes to prescribe in issues concerning intellectual content, that is the death of a free society. To quote Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine: Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language, and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, there will be a considerable variation in different schools; the parents must judge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum offered. Then each must strive for objective truth. . . . Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the "supremacy of the state" as a compulsory philosophy. But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the "will of the people" in "democracy." Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy.8 The disgracefully low level of education in America today is the predictable result of a State-controlled school system. Schooling, to a marked extent, has become a status symbol and a ritual. More and more people are entering college— and fewer and fewer people are emerging properly educated. Our educational system is like a vast bureaucracy, a vast civil service, in which the trend is toward a policy of considering everything about a teacher's qualifications (such as the number of bis publications) except his teaching ability; and of considering everything about a student's qualifications (such as his "social adaptability") except his intellectual competence. The solution is to bring the field of education into the marketplace. •CaldweU, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964, pp. 271-272. Originally published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1943. There is an urgent economic need for education. When educational institutions have to compete with one another in the quality of the training they offer—when they have to compete for the value that will be attached to the diplomas they issue—educational standards will necessarily rise. When they have to compete for the services of the best teachers, the teachers who will attract the greatest number of students, then the caliber of teaching—and of teachers' salaries—will necessarily rise. (Today, the most talented teachers often abandon their profession and enter private industry, where they know their efforts will be better rewarded.) When the economic principles that have resulted in the superlative efficiency of American industry are permitted to operate in the field of education, the result will be a revolution, in the direction of unprecedented educational development and growth. Education should be liberated from the control or intervention of government, and turned over to profit-making private enterprise, not because education is unimportant, but because education is so crucially important. What must be challenged is the prevalent belief that education is some sort of "natural right"—in effect, a free gift of nature. There are no such free gifts. But it is in the interests of statism to foster this delusion—in order to throw a smokescreen over the issue of whose freedom must be sacrificed to pay for such "free gifts." As a result of the fact that education has been tax-supported for such a long time, most people find it difficult to project an alternative. Yet there is nothing unique about education that distinguishes it from the many other human needs which are filled by private enterprise. If, for many years, the government had undertaken to provide all the citizens with shoes (on the grounds that shoes are an urgent necessity), and if someone were subsequently to propose that this field should be turned over to private enterprise, he would doubtless be told indignantly: "What! Do you want everyone except the rich to walk around barefoot?"