Tom Woods

A headline the author spends the rest of his time undermining.

I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over….

Right now, we have an educational system packed with thousands of mediocre schools charging astronomical tuitions to offer hundreds of thousands of students mediocre educations. My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption….

But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?

…What’s absolutely clear is that a vast number of people can’t afford a good education, and many of those who are paying through the nose aren’t getting a good education, and that kind of situation provides a clear opportunity for the Internet to do what it does best: spread knowledge at low cost. Sure, we should be skeptical of the promises made by snake-oil salesmen, but we should also be very excited. For years we’ve just been scratching at the surface of what the Net can deliver. Now we’re beginning to dig deep.

Obviously, this is something like the idea behind my Liberty Classroom: use the power of the Internet to convey knowledge to a great many people — specifically, knowledge they would like to have but was kept from them in school. Think of all the students — even doctoral candidates, for heaven’s sake, who have never heard of Ludwig von Mises. We can change that, little by little.

Here’s Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education. I had never heard him speak until this video.

At least 253,330 brain injuries and 1700 amputations, writes Spencer Ackerman.

Tax revenues fell precipitously in Greece last month.

Raytheon’s Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or Riot, seeks to gather intelligence on people by canvassing their social media. The Guardian reports: “Riot was featured in a newly published patent Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a security risk.”

I was extremely surprised to learn this morning that Pope Benedict XVI, 85, has decided to renounce the papal chair on the grounds of advancing age and deteriorating health. In my opinion he has been the best pope since Pius XII. That’s not to say I have agreed with him across the board, as you may note here. But his restoration of the classical Latin liturgy (which was always about far more than mere language) places him at the front rank of modern churchmen, most of whom are aesthetically and liturgically tone deaf.

In a piece I wrote for The American Conservative, unfortunately not available online, I explained the significance to the non-Catholic world of Benedict’s liturgical restoration. A great many non-Catholics in 1971 signed a petition urging the retention of the Church’s traditional liturgy, for good reason: it inspired a great proportion of the artistic and musical corpus of the West.

Here I explained why Benedict allowed the pre-1962 liturgy to coexist with full rights alongside the modernized liturgy, and here I give an overview for beginners.

And, of course, I wrote a book about this.

News reports will call him a “staunch conservative.” But remember that these reporters think Sean Hannity is a conservative. Benedict has been many things, but a conservative in the mold of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani or Pope St. Pius X he is not. He occupies a rightmost spot along the existing spectrum of opinion within the episcopate, which is well to the left of where it was before Vatican II.

I have not been as close a Vatican watcher over the past several years as I once was, so I don’t have a sense of the plausible papal candidates. My guess would be that speculations about an African pope will be in vain, at least this time around. Italians have lived through 35 years of non-Italian popes. One suspects this will not continue.

Today and tomorrow (February 11 and 12). Today I’m talking to Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America. Listen live (no subscription necessary) from 10am-12pm Eastern today. Number to call in: 855-4-SCHIFF.

Harper’s magazine, talking to Monopoly champion Richard Marinaccio, writes:

“Monopoly players around the kitchen table”—which is to say, most people—“think the game is all about accumulation,” he said. “You know, making a lot of money. But the real object is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible. To have just enough so that everybody else has nothing.” In his view, Monopoly is not about unleashing creativity and innovation among many competing parties, nor is it about opening markets and expanding trade or creating wealth through hard work and enlightened self-interest, the virtues Adam Smith thought of as the invisible hands that would produce a dynamic and prosperous society. Instead, it’s about shutting down the marketplace… The initial phase of competition in Monopoly, the free-trade phase that happens to be the most exciting part of the game to watch, is really all about obliterating free trade and annihilating competition in order to replace it with monopolistic rent-seeking.

Right, but Adam Smith never imagined someone would confuse a game in which people randomly land on properties and arbitrarily have to pay exorbitant sums with the free market.

Ben Powell explained the problems with Monopoly in a nice article at Mises.org. (Now let me note: I am not a humorless automaton who can’t just shut up and enjoy a game of Monopoly. I have in mind here the people out there who actually think Monopoly is supposed to be an approximation of the real free market.) He writes:

In the game Monopoly, owners of land and houses and hotels, though acquiring their possessions by luck, are flattered into believing they are masters of the universe, extracting profits from anyone who passes their way. There is no consumer choice and no consumer sovereignty. This is not a small detail. The entire raison d’etre of the market is missing, and thus the real goal and the guide of all production in a market economy.

Consumer choice is replaced by a roll of the dice. The player then becomes passive. Landing on property owned by another person creates not a mutual gain but a loss. In this way, trade is portrayed as “zero-sum.” The elimination of consumer choice leads to the belief that businesses profit only at the consumers’ expense….

In Monopoly, a roll of the dice forces exchanges between producers and others. However, business to business transactions are left to free negotiation. Players are allowed to offer property for trade or cash to other players on mutually agreeable terms. Even in these transactions, regulation raises its ugly head when there are buildings on the property. Players are forced to demolish buildings before making any property exchanges.

The pervasiveness of monopolies in the game does not represent the situation in the real world. Every piece of property on the game board is essentially a monopoly; once the dice roll determines where a player lands, there is only one seller who the consumer must purchase from….

In fact, Monopoly better illustrates how an economy works when it is based on intervention, central banking, and government privilege.

Read “What’s Wrong With Monopoly (the game)?“

Four out of five Americans either have been laid off during the recession or know someone who has, according to a recent study.

On a related note, I read yesterday that during the housing bubble years, the net creation of breadwinner jobs was zero.

You don’t say! You mean, taxation isn’t all about looting rich people and handing the money to me? Some people are encountering reality the hard way.