WEBVTT

NOTE Teacher Training for AP Economics: They’re Back

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.560
If you listen carefully to that introduction, and I made it that way on purpose, I could have put lots in there,

2
00:00:06.560 --> 00:00:14.400
but what I wanted to get across was the idea that I am not a politician, I'm an economist.

3
00:00:14.400 --> 00:00:18.480
I worked for President Reagan, but before that I worked for President Carter and there was a reason.

4
00:00:18.480 --> 00:00:24.640
Besides the obvious reason that I was young and I needed the work, which is the age-old reason for doing things,

5
00:00:24.640 --> 00:00:32.400
I actually was raised in a Roosevelt Democrat family.

6
00:00:32.400 --> 00:00:37.240
My parents were maleducated at Reed College in the 30s.

7
00:00:37.240 --> 00:00:42.120
My father became an international economist through the Fletcher School of Business at

8
00:00:42.120 --> 00:00:46.880
Harvard in the 1940s, but nonetheless, he was grounded in the American principles in

9
00:00:46.880 --> 00:00:52.280
the sense that he sacrificed a lot during World War II as a fighter pilot, but he didn't

10
00:00:52.280 --> 00:01:05.280
I didn't really connect all of the principles and what we do at Mises is we try to connect principles because otherwise you get people like Paul Craig Roberts who has gone astray because he hasn't fully grounded in all the ideas.

11
00:01:05.280 --> 00:01:10.280
He's not Austrian trained. He has some economics and he has a lot of confused economics.

12
00:01:10.280 --> 00:01:17.000
Okay, well that explains a little bit about what may be a confused background.

13
00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:22.360
I went on from my family's just absorbing the ideas that business was bad, government

14
00:01:22.360 --> 00:01:29.400
was good, that somehow businesses were greedy but politicians weren't.

15
00:01:29.400 --> 00:01:33.560
And then that training continued at the University of Connecticut where I learned to three decimal

16
00:01:33.560 --> 00:01:40.260
points to prove in a mathematical model that that was true in the Keynesian multiplier.

17
00:01:40.260 --> 00:01:45.660
So I went to work for President Carter and soon found out that everything I had learned,

18
00:01:45.660 --> 00:01:50.400
everything I had learned in macroeconomics was simply not fitting reality.

19
00:01:50.400 --> 00:01:56.360
So here's the problem, I was also trained as a mathematician and a scientist, oops.

20
00:01:56.360 --> 00:02:02.020
So we have data that's orthogonal to the reality that you're observing and if the data is good,

21
00:02:02.020 --> 00:02:06.540
you have to question the theory behind which you were trained.

22
00:02:06.540 --> 00:02:12.580
And that started me on an investigation, because at my core I was a scientist, not an ideologue.

23
00:02:12.580 --> 00:02:18.060
And that training led me eventually to read some people that I never read in graduate

24
00:02:18.060 --> 00:02:19.060
school.

25
00:02:19.060 --> 00:02:20.060
I never even read Milton Friedman.

26
00:02:20.060 --> 00:02:28.600
I got a Ph.D. in economics in the 1970s, while he got his Nobel Prize, we never read him.

27
00:02:28.600 --> 00:02:29.600
It's even worse.

28
00:02:29.600 --> 00:02:34.600
Because who else got the Nobel Prize for Economics in the 1970s?

29
00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:40.600
Friedrich Hayek. Never even heard of him. At least I'd heard of Friedman.

30
00:02:40.600 --> 00:02:45.600
So when I say maleducated, I mean it. So I had to educate myself.

31
00:02:45.600 --> 00:02:50.600
So I started studying Milton Friedman. I got it about free markets. I got it about capitalism and freedom.

32
00:02:50.600 --> 00:02:57.600
But still the economics of it didn't make a lot of sense, particularly if there was a central command and control of the most important price in the economy,

33
00:02:57.600 --> 00:03:02.600
and the economy, which is the price of time interest rates.

34
00:03:02.600 --> 00:03:07.600
So that led me then from Chicago to Vienna.

35
00:03:07.600 --> 00:03:12.600
It was a long, strange trip, as Jerry Garcia would say.

36
00:03:12.600 --> 00:03:17.600
Well, reading the Austrians really, really cemented my economic thinking,

37
00:03:17.600 --> 00:03:22.600
because for the first time in my life, I saw an Aristotelian logic to it all.

38
00:03:22.600 --> 00:03:25.600
I saw first principles. I saw derived theorems inside of it.

39
00:03:25.600 --> 00:03:55.600
and I saw things as a scientist, as a mathematician would see, the logic of liberty, the science of liberty and so that's what's drawn me to this school ever since and of course I'm completely self-trained in it since very few people, maybe a few here teach some of this in graduate school but I had to learn a lot of it on my own and I'm still working on it. So with that introduction I'll just start my presentation if I can figure out how to do this here. Oh yeah, you might have also heard that I worked for President Clinton.

40
00:03:55.600 --> 00:04:00.600
Well, I want you to think for a minute. When was the last time we had a balanced budget?

41
00:04:00.600 --> 00:04:09.600
I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Treasury in order to implement that in my little world of the agricultural banks and the agricultural system.

42
00:04:09.600 --> 00:04:19.600
So it's not about political party or even political ideology. It's about economics, true economics, praxeology, the logic of liberty.

43
00:04:19.600 --> 00:04:29.440
So, this is somehow messed up. There we go. Okay. Now, AP Economics is Advanced Placement

44
00:04:29.440 --> 00:04:35.520
Economics because besides what I was introduced as, all of that is simply a way of supporting

45
00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:40.680
my teaching habit in the public schools. I have three boys in a charter school in Colorado

46
00:04:40.680 --> 00:04:45.520
Springs. It's called the Vanguard School. We're graduating our first senior class this

47
00:04:45.520 --> 00:04:52.240
This year, and before I had them take my course, I had them pre-read The Road to Serfdom as

48
00:04:52.240 --> 00:04:53.800
an introduction to their economics.

49
00:04:53.800 --> 00:04:59.120
Well, I had to go to this training, this advanced placement training put on by the college board

50
00:04:59.120 --> 00:05:05.040
in order to be not certified so much, but really qualified to teach this because when

51
00:05:05.040 --> 00:05:09.560
you get an advanced placement course in high school, that gives you college credit.

52
00:05:09.560 --> 00:05:14.480
And boy, the central authorities control what is and what is not college credit.

53
00:05:14.480 --> 00:05:15.480
So I went to this training.

54
00:05:15.480 --> 00:05:34.480
I put my conclusion at the top because the title is actually what I learned at AP Economics teacher training, but my conclusion is separation of school and state, so I thought I'd add that to the title.

55
00:05:34.480 --> 00:05:40.600
If you want to get in touch with me, the best way, and I have this PowerPoint and I can

56
00:05:40.600 --> 00:05:45.840
either send it to you or I'm going to post it on my website which is pikespeakeconomicsclub.com.

57
00:05:45.840 --> 00:05:50.320
It's a long word but very simple, pikespeakeconomicsclub.com.

58
00:05:50.320 --> 00:05:53.280
You can contact me through that and I'll have this posted.

59
00:05:53.280 --> 00:05:59.320
On that website we have RSS feeds to Mises articles, we have RSS feeds from Cafe Hayek

60
00:05:59.320 --> 00:06:03.880
if those of you might be familiar with what they're doing at George Mason University.

61
00:06:03.880 --> 00:06:12.100
Well, we know that economics training is critical to maintaining a free society ever since Adam

62
00:06:12.100 --> 00:06:20.560
Smith really discovered or uncovered a basic human principle that this invisible hand leads

63
00:06:20.560 --> 00:06:27.480
us to wealth and prosperity, much more so than a central command and control.

64
00:06:27.480 --> 00:06:31.880
But for too long, the study of economics has been ignored in the U.S. educational system.

65
00:06:31.880 --> 00:06:36.400
Now, at the school that I teach, the Vanguard School, with our first senior graduating class

66
00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:42.260
this year, it's a charter school in Colorado, and I'm a refugee from a failing district

67
00:06:42.260 --> 00:06:47.360
system inside Colorado Springs, and a lot of parents got together and started their

68
00:06:47.360 --> 00:06:48.360
own school.

69
00:06:48.360 --> 00:06:52.500
It's a public school, but yet we have our own board of directors, and we don't hire

70
00:06:52.500 --> 00:06:57.880
union teachers, and our curriculum, all it has to do is meet the outcome standards of

71
00:06:57.880 --> 00:07:00.680
the state, so we can pretty much teach what we want.

72
00:07:00.680 --> 00:07:08.360
So our high school students, we have them study Aristotle, they study Thucydides, they

73
00:07:08.360 --> 00:07:13.160
study Homer and they study the Bible in a public school.

74
00:07:13.160 --> 00:07:17.920
We do all that because it's literature and we just push back to the ACLU.

75
00:07:17.920 --> 00:07:22.400
We are the number one high school in the state of Colorado by every available metric, by every

76
00:07:22.400 --> 00:07:24.320
available metric.

77
00:07:24.320 --> 00:07:29.980
We have of those small, very small first-graduating class 29 students, every single one of them

78
00:07:29.980 --> 00:07:33.940
has not gone into college but has got into the college of their choice

79
00:07:33.940 --> 00:07:37.100
and they've earned 1.2 million dollars in scholarships.

80
00:07:37.100 --> 00:07:40.660
So it's an amazing place and I'm blessed and privileged to work there and also

81
00:07:40.660 --> 00:07:43.260
have my three youngest boys there

82
00:07:43.260 --> 00:07:45.820
which is another reason why I work there.

83
00:07:45.820 --> 00:07:49.420
So I was so excited because for too long the study of economics has been

84
00:07:49.420 --> 00:07:50.340
ignored

85
00:07:50.340 --> 00:07:53.860
and now I get a chance to build the advanced placement program for these

86
00:07:53.860 --> 00:07:57.420
students.

87
00:07:57.420 --> 00:08:01.280
in fact economics is no longer required in most high schools

88
00:08:01.280 --> 00:08:04.420
nor for most college degrees so here's the funny thing if you start with Adam

89
00:08:04.420 --> 00:08:06.900
Smith and you realize political economy

90
00:08:06.900 --> 00:08:10.080
today you can get a degree in political science and never have taken an

91
00:08:10.080 --> 00:08:11.760
economics course

92
00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:15.020
you can get a degree in economics and never have taken a political science

93
00:08:15.020 --> 00:08:15.820
course

94
00:08:15.820 --> 00:08:22.100
so the entire profession has gone so off track it's just shocking

95
00:08:22.100 --> 00:08:26.080
well economic ignorance, in my claim, is at the root of many of the world's

96
00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:27.340
problems

97
00:08:27.340 --> 00:08:35.540
People do not understand trade-offs, opportunity, costs, incentives, how they work.

98
00:08:35.540 --> 00:08:38.020
Here's economic ignorance, some data behind it.

99
00:08:38.020 --> 00:08:42.620
The National Council on Economic Education, they put out a paper called, Why Johnny Can't

100
00:08:42.620 --> 00:08:43.620
Choose.

101
00:08:43.620 --> 00:08:49.380
It was a take-off on one of the earlier paper, Why Johnny Can't Read, Why Johnny Can't Choose.

102
00:08:49.380 --> 00:08:56.860
It's about the economic illiteracy in America, and the link to it is in this PowerPoint which

103
00:08:56.860 --> 00:09:01.420
Here's a quote from the former chairman of the American Stock Exchange.

104
00:09:01.420 --> 00:09:06.780
The American economy is the eighth wonder of the world.

105
00:09:06.780 --> 00:09:13.220
The ninth wonder is the American ignorance, is the economic ignorance of the American

106
00:09:13.220 --> 00:09:14.220
people.

107
00:09:14.220 --> 00:09:16.380
That's really phenomenal.

108
00:09:16.380 --> 00:09:23.540
Here's an economic literacy survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis showed

109
00:09:23.540 --> 00:09:31.500
that 44% of the public has even taken a course in economics.

110
00:09:31.500 --> 00:09:39.500
High school students average score on economics quiz is 53%, that would be an F. And of the

111
00:09:39.500 --> 00:09:47.420
total number of high school students, 60% of them flunked.

112
00:09:47.420 --> 00:09:50.940
And that's ahead of the general population, by the way.

113
00:09:50.940 --> 00:09:56.340
Well, it wasn't always this way.

114
00:09:56.340 --> 00:10:03.900
Here's a cartoon from the Chicago Tribune, 1934, not sure how much of it you can read.

115
00:10:03.900 --> 00:10:08.380
Down here is that Trotsky, Spend, Spend, Spend, Plan of Action for the U.S.

116
00:10:08.380 --> 00:10:15.420
This was pushback in the journalist profession, if you remember back when they were journalists,

117
00:10:15.420 --> 00:10:20.220
against Roosevelt's New Deal, depleting the resources of the soundest government in the world.

118
00:10:20.220 --> 00:10:24.340
Whoopee, a bunch of drunk people running around spending money over here at Stalin, saying

119
00:10:24.340 --> 00:10:29.260
how red the sunrise is getting, okay?

120
00:10:29.260 --> 00:10:33.900
Well now, think about what we have now from the Columbia School of Journalism, okay?

121
00:10:33.900 --> 00:10:35.980
We have the red.

122
00:10:35.980 --> 00:10:41.460
Well, here's a cartoon about what it used to be like in America.

123
00:10:41.460 --> 00:10:43.700
Now you can see how old I am.

124
00:10:43.700 --> 00:10:49.460
I was here in the 50s when we breathed liberty, because we were taught this in the public

125
00:10:49.460 --> 00:10:52.700
schools before the left had taken it over.

126
00:10:52.700 --> 00:10:56.680
We were taught our founding principles, we were taught John Locke's life, liberty and

127
00:10:56.680 --> 00:11:00.140
property leading to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

128
00:11:00.140 --> 00:11:04.460
We were taught free market economics from Adam Smith.

129
00:11:04.460 --> 00:11:06.860
And that was sort of in the air.

130
00:11:06.860 --> 00:11:13.080
So this is from Hardin College, it's called Make Mine Freedom, and I would submit that

131
00:11:13.080 --> 00:11:17.520
and no college today except perhaps Hillsdale and one or two others would even think of

132
00:11:17.520 --> 00:11:18.520
making such a thing.

133
00:11:18.520 --> 00:11:23.240
But this was just the common thinking of the world at the time.

134
00:11:23.240 --> 00:11:27.120
It was to create a deeper understanding of what has made America the finest place in

135
00:11:27.120 --> 00:11:28.120
the world to live.

136
00:11:28.120 --> 00:11:31.520
It's a 10-minute cartoon.

137
00:11:31.520 --> 00:11:35.280
I'm not going to play it for you here because I don't really think we have time.

138
00:11:35.280 --> 00:11:39.040
If we do have time later on, we'll go back to it.

139
00:11:39.040 --> 00:11:43.480
But it's really interesting that this was produced by the Extension Service of a small

140
00:11:43.480 --> 00:11:48.520
college in America, because this is how everybody used to think.

141
00:11:48.520 --> 00:11:50.760
Not everybody, but a lot.

142
00:11:50.760 --> 00:11:51.760
A lot of people.

143
00:11:51.760 --> 00:11:57.160
The common American public thought this way, and at one point the intelligentsia were grounded

144
00:11:57.160 --> 00:11:58.160
in this.

145
00:11:58.160 --> 00:11:59.160
But no longer.

146
00:11:59.160 --> 00:12:00.160
Something has happened.

147
00:12:00.160 --> 00:12:01.160
I'm going to show you what has happened.

148
00:12:01.160 --> 00:12:05.680
Well, there's a little bit of hope.

149
00:12:05.680 --> 00:12:09.680
Here's a journalist's idea of what the actual stimulus plan is.

150
00:12:16.680 --> 00:12:18.680
Shovel-ready projects.

151
00:12:20.680 --> 00:12:26.680
Well, so, when I found there was this new push for advanced placement economics education in high schools, I got pretty excited.

152
00:12:26.680 --> 00:12:34.680
Because, after all, parents like advanced placement because students get free college credit, free of charge to them.

153
00:12:35.680 --> 00:12:51.680
The Advanced Placement courses bump up your GPAs, so if you get an A in Advanced Placement course, that gives you five points instead of four, so it's not so much grade inflation, it's just a much harder class and it gives you college credit at the same time, if you can pass the standardized test.

154
00:12:51.680 --> 00:13:03.680
The administrators like it, because they're judged on the number of courses that they offer, the number of AP courses, and the number of students that are enrolled. That's the metric.

155
00:13:03.680 --> 00:13:08.680
Well, we know that you get what you measure. We know that in business. So here's what they're measuring.

156
00:13:08.680 --> 00:13:12.680
The number of courses and the number of students enrolled, but here's one of the problems is,

157
00:13:12.680 --> 00:13:16.680
they're not judged on the number of students who actually pass.

158
00:13:16.680 --> 00:13:20.680
So they're pushing all this AP economics training and AP courses in the high school,

159
00:13:20.680 --> 00:13:25.680
but it's not important to them what the people learn or if they can even pass the course.

160
00:13:25.680 --> 00:13:29.680
They're judged on how many courses they offer and how many students enter,

161
00:13:29.680 --> 00:13:37.600
not how many exit with a passing grade very interesting so more economics teaching is a good

162
00:13:37.600 --> 00:13:43.920
thing you would think right well we'll see wrong here's a paraphrase from Walter Williams i don't

163
00:13:43.920 --> 00:13:48.720
know what the exact quote is so i paraphrased i just remember hearing him say it once there are

164
00:13:48.720 --> 00:13:55.840
two kinds of economists good economists and bad economists good economists know there's no such

165
00:13:55.840 --> 00:13:59.120
The first thing is a free lunch.

166
00:13:59.120 --> 00:14:03.000
Well here's the thing, in order to pass the Advanced Placement National Macroeconomics

167
00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:08.400
Exam, students must be taught that there is a free lunch.

168
00:14:08.400 --> 00:14:12.040
Even more so, they are taught that it comes from the government, and they have to answer

169
00:14:12.040 --> 00:14:18.680
this to get credit for the course.

170
00:14:18.680 --> 00:14:22.920
Students must prove, and I say must, I'll tell you what happened when I pushed back

171
00:14:22.920 --> 00:14:25.200
a bit at the training.

172
00:14:25.200 --> 00:14:30.200
They must prove that printing more money, more paper money, creates real income and wealth.

173
00:14:30.200 --> 00:14:33.200
It's called a monetary policy stimulus.

174
00:14:33.200 --> 00:14:37.200
They are taught that inflation is caused by too many people working.

175
00:14:37.200 --> 00:14:40.200
The old Phillips curve, trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

176
00:14:40.200 --> 00:14:43.200
And they have to answer this to get credit for the course.

177
00:14:43.200 --> 00:14:48.200
They are furthermore taught that taking money from the private sector and giving it to the government

178
00:14:48.200 --> 00:14:50.200
creates more real income and wealth.

179
00:14:50.200 --> 00:14:52.200
It's called the balanced budget multiplier.

180
00:14:52.200 --> 00:14:57.200
You're familiar with that because you run those models to three decimal points, proving it, but we know it's nonsense.

181
00:14:57.200 --> 00:15:04.200
They have to prove that a weak dollar relative to foreign currencies creates more real income and wealth.

182
00:15:04.200 --> 00:15:10.200
We debouch our currency domestically, we debouch it internationally, and we're all better off somehow for this.

183
00:15:10.200 --> 00:15:13.200
And they actually have ways of proving this.

184
00:15:13.200 --> 00:15:18.200
But what this is based on is this fact, that their belief.

185
00:15:18.200 --> 00:15:23.880
The economy is inherently unstable and can only be stabilized by government policy.

186
00:15:23.880 --> 00:15:33.960
Now, when you understand what the economy is, it's us, it's people, it's what we do, it's what we're born and created and designed to do, to produce and trade and create wealth.

187
00:15:33.960 --> 00:15:36.360
That's who we are.

188
00:15:36.360 --> 00:15:43.560
When people say the economy is inherently unstable, that means that they believe that liberty itself is unstable.

189
00:15:43.560 --> 00:15:48.260
It doesn't work. People can't be trusted to make their own decisions to do the right thing.

190
00:15:48.260 --> 00:15:54.260
That's what it means. If you believe, in a Keynesian sense, that the economy is inherently unstable,

191
00:15:54.260 --> 00:16:03.260
you must therefore believe that people themselves set free at liberty are not going to create good outcomes.

192
00:16:03.260 --> 00:16:07.260
So I asked about competing economic theories, different schools of thought.

193
00:16:07.260 --> 00:16:09.960
You know, there they were drawing their aggregate supply and demand curves,

194
00:16:09.960 --> 00:16:13.360
improving all the stuff about the balanced budget multiplier and so forth.

195
00:16:13.360 --> 00:16:19.480
What about supply-side economics? What about people responding to incentives? What about

196
00:16:19.480 --> 00:16:23.680
simple classical theory? What about the fact that you have to save in order to create capital

197
00:16:23.680 --> 00:16:27.440
in order to produce the wealth that you're talking about here? I don't know if that's

198
00:16:27.440 --> 00:16:34.360
a leakage from the system. So here's what I was told. Actually, I even brought up Mises.

199
00:16:34.360 --> 00:16:39.680
I said, what about Austrian economic theory? What if a student answers any of these questions

200
00:16:39.680 --> 00:16:45.180
is on your College Board test with a different theoretical construct.

201
00:16:45.180 --> 00:16:46.180
I was told this.

202
00:16:46.180 --> 00:16:47.980
This is not a quote, but it's a paraphrase.

203
00:16:47.980 --> 00:16:51.880
It doesn't matter with some anger on the part of the teacher.

204
00:16:51.880 --> 00:16:52.880
The trainer.

205
00:16:52.880 --> 00:16:54.060
No, I won't use the word teacher.

206
00:16:54.060 --> 00:16:55.220
The trainer.

207
00:16:55.220 --> 00:16:58.220
The Keynesian answer is the only correct answer.

208
00:16:58.220 --> 00:16:59.860
Now, here's the thing.

209
00:16:59.860 --> 00:17:03.820
If you remember my background, I came into the government, Keynesian-trained, in an era

210
00:17:03.820 --> 00:17:08.940
of stagflation that wasn't supposed to happen under the Keynesian model.

211
00:17:08.940 --> 00:17:11.340
I thought we had gotten over all of that.

212
00:17:11.340 --> 00:17:15.580
You see, I thought we had then disproved that and I thought we'd moved on.

213
00:17:15.580 --> 00:17:19.540
I thought we had at least accepted some of the tenets of supply-side economics, some

214
00:17:19.540 --> 00:17:22.780
of the ideas of Milton Friedman, at least in terms of the power of markets.

215
00:17:22.780 --> 00:17:28.140
And certainly we were moving towards more Austrian understanding of the real economy

216
00:17:28.140 --> 00:17:30.660
and how it works and what it's about.

217
00:17:30.660 --> 00:17:36.580
And certainly the economic boom that we had over the last 20 years or so, 25, 30 years,

218
00:17:36.580 --> 00:18:05.500
Number one, cut the tax rates, provide incentives for people to produce and save and invest.

219
00:18:05.500 --> 00:18:09.840
Number two, deregulate the markets so the government can get out of the way and people

220
00:18:09.840 --> 00:18:14.420
can be free then to trade what they've produced.

221
00:18:14.420 --> 00:18:22.460
Number four, harden the currency, not only gold standard but just stop printing it, stop

222
00:18:22.460 --> 00:18:26.420
printing these pieces of paper and that's what Volcker did, stop printing these pieces

223
00:18:26.420 --> 00:18:27.420
of paper.

224
00:18:27.420 --> 00:18:28.420
So we got those three done.

225
00:18:28.420 --> 00:18:29.420
The fourth one we didn't get done.

226
00:18:29.420 --> 00:18:32.980
The fourth one was to cut government spending while we were waiting for the revenues to

227
00:18:32.980 --> 00:18:33.980
come in.

228
00:18:33.980 --> 00:18:39.980
I promised $2 in spending cuts for every dollar in tax cuts, and he was a lying son of a bitch.

229
00:18:39.980 --> 00:18:41.980
What can I say?

230
00:18:41.980 --> 00:18:45.980
So we got three out of four of those, and that was enough to give us a pretty darn good boom.

231
00:18:45.980 --> 00:18:49.980
Because those principles are economic principles.

232
00:18:49.980 --> 00:18:52.980
It's as if it never happened.

233
00:18:52.980 --> 00:18:55.980
So part of my subtitle is, they're back.

234
00:18:55.980 --> 00:18:56.980
I mean it, they're back.

235
00:18:56.980 --> 00:18:58.980
And they're back with a vengeance.

236
00:18:58.980 --> 00:19:02.980
Because they're not just teaching any old high school students, they're teaching the best and the brightest.

237
00:19:02.980 --> 00:19:07.980
And they're not teaching them, they're brainwashing them. I'll go through this.

238
00:19:07.980 --> 00:19:12.980
Here's what they said. If your students want to pass the exam, they have to give the Keynesian answer.

239
00:19:12.980 --> 00:19:19.980
They have to. Because these exams are controlled by the Central College Board.

240
00:19:19.980 --> 00:19:23.980
Who are they? Who are these guys?

241
00:19:23.980 --> 00:19:28.980
They control the economic standards that have to be taught in order for students to pass.

242
00:19:28.980 --> 00:19:35.980
consists of college professors, high school teachers, government education bureaucrats, and textbook publishers.

243
00:19:39.480 --> 00:19:49.980
AP Economics textbooks, well for many years, when it was becoming more mainstream to think of incentives and supply side economics in that sense,

244
00:19:49.980 --> 00:19:57.980
and that dominated the real world of policies and of course the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Eastern European economies

245
00:19:57.980 --> 00:20:01.580
and even China and many places around the world.

246
00:20:01.580 --> 00:20:05.580
So the AP, the Advanced Placement Economics of Choice, was N. Gregory Manku,

247
00:20:05.580 --> 00:20:10.540
Principles of Economics. It's not bad. For a mainstream economics text, it's not bad.

248
00:20:10.540 --> 00:20:15.980
It's not what we'd like, but it's not bad, okay? Well, here's what happened.

249
00:20:17.420 --> 00:20:22.540
Now that markets are out of fashion, out of fashion, the Advanced Placement Textbook of

250
00:20:22.540 --> 00:20:30.620
The choice is Paul Krugman's economics. Now it's published brand new in 2009. He got his

251
00:20:30.620 --> 00:20:37.100
Nobel Prize in the fall of 2008. That was not an accident. They show up at these AP

252
00:20:37.100 --> 00:20:41.740
training courses all around the country, all around the country with stacks of these to

253
00:20:41.740 --> 00:20:48.660
give out as their suggested textbook. Who is this guy, Paul Krugman? We've talked a

254
00:20:48.660 --> 00:20:52.300
little bit about him. We've heard a little bit about him. He won the Nobel Prize in the

255
00:20:52.300 --> 00:21:03.560
He's an op-ed columnist and economics blogger for the New York Times, his blog is called

256
00:21:03.560 --> 00:21:04.900
The Conscience of a Liberal.

257
00:21:04.900 --> 00:21:08.220
All of these are hot live links inside my PowerPoint.

258
00:21:08.220 --> 00:21:14.820
Quote, government deficits are the only thing that have saved us from a second Great Depression.

259
00:21:14.820 --> 00:21:20.180
That's Nobel quality thinking.

260
00:21:20.180 --> 00:21:29.180
He calls socialized medicine a trillion-dollar bargain. It will result in lower health care costs.

261
00:21:29.180 --> 00:21:35.180
Well, that's, you know, I heard that word. And it's possible.

262
00:21:35.180 --> 00:21:42.180
Here's what he said about betraying the planet. Global warming deniers are committing treason against the planet.

263
00:21:42.180 --> 00:21:47.180
Well, that kind of sets you up because we know what the penalty for treason is in most nations.

264
00:21:47.180 --> 00:21:51.980
That's a pretty extreme guy, but yet his textbook is the textbook of choice.

265
00:21:51.980 --> 00:21:56.820
Now the textbook is not full of a lot of this nonsense, but it's getting money to the guy.

266
00:21:56.820 --> 00:22:00.920
You understand, when you buy his textbook, you're funding this guy.

267
00:22:00.920 --> 00:22:06.800
Your tax dollars are funding this guy.

268
00:22:06.800 --> 00:22:13.720
He said the current stimulus is too low and too slow, we need a second stimulus.

269
00:22:13.720 --> 00:22:17.520
So we have the top Keynesian economists are near unanimous in their belief that there

270
00:22:17.520 --> 00:22:20.360
must be a second stimulus.

271
00:22:20.360 --> 00:22:22.560
Where does this come from?

272
00:22:22.560 --> 00:22:26.360
The best and the brightest of our high school students are being taught this free lunch

273
00:22:26.360 --> 00:22:30.280
economics.

274
00:22:30.280 --> 00:22:31.460
So I was pretty discouraged.

275
00:22:31.460 --> 00:22:35.440
I sat there for five days listening to all of this and every time I tried to object or

276
00:22:35.440 --> 00:22:40.600
bring up a different thing, it wouldn't even listen.

277
00:22:40.600 --> 00:22:44.800
So what I did was I talked with the teachers in the lunchroom, because I'm kind of a people

278
00:22:44.800 --> 00:22:48.720
person and a street guy, okay, I don't care about the professors that much, but who is

279
00:22:48.720 --> 00:22:52.080
teaching AP economics?

280
00:22:52.080 --> 00:22:56.560
The history teacher, the English literature teacher, somebody with no training in economics

281
00:22:56.560 --> 00:22:58.000
whatsoever, okay.

282
00:22:58.000 --> 00:23:02.160
So they're absorbing all of this and this is what they have to be teaching, they have

283
00:23:02.160 --> 00:23:05.700
to learn this aggregate supply and demand Keynesian model and then teach it to their

284
00:23:05.700 --> 00:23:09.020
students for their students to get the credit for the courses.

285
00:23:09.020 --> 00:23:11.660
This is a horrifying situation.

286
00:23:11.660 --> 00:23:17.100
So I talked to them and a couple of them, at one point during my pushback to them, one

287
00:23:17.100 --> 00:23:23.100
of them from Louisiana turned to me and she just mouthed the words, this is totally bogus.

288
00:23:23.100 --> 00:23:26.660
So there's some smart people there as part of our teachers, they just don't know what

289
00:23:26.660 --> 00:23:28.540
to do, they have to teach this.

290
00:23:28.540 --> 00:23:32.140
But they don't even themselves know why it's wrong, it's just intuitively wrong.

291
00:23:32.140 --> 00:23:37.280
It's intuitively false that if you take, it's intuitively that if you take money from productive

292
00:23:37.280 --> 00:23:40.640
of People and give it to unproductive people. It's intuitive that you're not going to help

293
00:23:40.640 --> 00:23:46.780
the economy. It doesn't take a lot of Aristotelian insight. So a lot of these teachers were just

294
00:23:46.780 --> 00:23:51.080
confused as they could be. So I did my best to straighten them out. I'm in touch with

295
00:23:51.080 --> 00:23:56.800
many of them still and I'm on the AP Economics blog, which is an international blog of advanced

296
00:23:56.800 --> 00:24:00.080
placement teachers, pushing back, pushing back, pushing back. But you should see some

297
00:24:00.080 --> 00:24:04.280
of the things that are coming out of that. It's amazing.

298
00:24:04.280 --> 00:24:09.440
Well, somebody once said, and maybe some of you actual professors would know who said

299
00:24:09.440 --> 00:24:14.160
this and it's a paraphrase, that two of the most important questions in the world are

300
00:24:14.160 --> 00:24:20.280
who will teach our children and what will they teach them, because we've stopped teaching

301
00:24:20.280 --> 00:24:23.800
them about liberty, the other people are now teaching them.

302
00:24:23.800 --> 00:24:28.680
Here's Karl Marx, the education of all children from the moment they can get along without

303
00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:35.340
out of mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense, straight out of the Communist

304
00:24:35.340 --> 00:24:36.340
Manifesto.

305
00:24:36.340 --> 00:24:41.920
Here's Vladimir Lenin, give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown

306
00:24:41.920 --> 00:24:45.480
will never be uprooted.

307
00:24:45.480 --> 00:24:48.880
We're now into our second and third generation, those of you that work in universities know

308
00:24:48.880 --> 00:24:49.880
you see it.

309
00:24:49.880 --> 00:24:56.000
We're into our second and third generation of Marxists in every single discipline, even

310
00:24:56.000 --> 00:25:09.280
Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it

311
00:25:09.280 --> 00:25:14.440
is aimed.

312
00:25:14.440 --> 00:25:21.320
Another blast from the past, Benito Mussolini, it is the state which educates its citizens

313
00:25:21.320 --> 00:25:26.820
and Civic Virtue gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

314
00:25:26.820 --> 00:25:33.140
So we've heard about this. This is very deliberate. It's very much related to the progressives,

315
00:25:33.140 --> 00:25:37.900
the takeover from the history that you go back to 1900s, to Woodrow Wilson, etc., etc.

316
00:25:37.900 --> 00:25:42.820
But it's just been there a long time and it's very hard to uproot it. So this is a fairly

317
00:25:42.820 --> 00:25:49.740
discouraging and perhaps depressing scenario for you. What I do like is when I see things

318
00:25:49.740 --> 00:25:53.340
There's like the Mises Institute involved with their high school training programs, there's

319
00:25:53.340 --> 00:25:58.340
one coming up here in a few weeks I believe, but what we've got to do is get to the teachers.

320
00:25:58.340 --> 00:26:02.000
Every state has got an organization called the Council of Economics Education.

321
00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:04.820
We have the Colorado Council of Economics Education.

322
00:26:04.820 --> 00:26:09.980
We educate the educators, okay, we educate them in markets and liberty.

323
00:26:09.980 --> 00:26:13.420
So there's probably one in Alabama, probably one in your state, I suggest you start working

324
00:26:13.420 --> 00:26:20.620
with them, because the ultimate conclusion here is we can't trust the state.

325
00:26:20.620 --> 00:26:25.400
We have to have separation of school and state before we can ever begin, ever begin our way

326
00:26:25.400 --> 00:26:28.220
back to liberty.

327
00:26:28.220 --> 00:26:32.540
Here's a quote from the Association of California School Administrators.

328
00:26:32.540 --> 00:26:33.540
It's about parent choice.

329
00:26:33.540 --> 00:26:37.420
Keep in mind I'm involved in that because we're working in a charter school.

330
00:26:37.420 --> 00:26:41.800
Parent choice proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual

331
00:26:41.800 --> 00:26:47.360
Social Students with an Education, who to thunk.

332
00:26:47.360 --> 00:26:52.280
In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which

333
00:26:52.280 --> 00:26:57.120
is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are

334
00:26:57.120 --> 00:26:58.760
sustained.

335
00:26:58.760 --> 00:27:04.960
Family choice is therefore basically selfish and antisocial in that it focuses on the wants

336
00:27:04.960 --> 00:27:09.000
of a single family rather than the needs of society.

337
00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:13.580
Society. Do you see the words here? Okay, that's the Association of California Public

338
00:27:13.580 --> 00:27:19.240
School Administrators. It's probably not that different here or anywhere you are in

339
00:27:19.240 --> 00:27:24.480
your state. So if we want to take this country back, we have to start with the kids. We have

340
00:27:24.480 --> 00:27:29.720
to start by educating for liberty. It's the motto of Hillsdale College, educating for

341
00:27:29.720 --> 00:27:37.720
liberty. So it's not so much the professors. Go volunteer in your high schools. Teach the

342
00:27:37.720 --> 00:27:45.000
Some middle school students, get involved because these people are serious and they're not going

343
00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:46.000
to stop.

344
00:27:46.000 --> 00:27:50.880
They're not going to stop until they win or we destroy them somehow.

345
00:27:50.880 --> 00:27:51.880
They're very serious.

346
00:27:51.880 --> 00:27:52.880
Okay.

347
00:27:52.880 --> 00:27:52.900
Thank you very much.