As long ago as the first few years of the nineteenth century it was a subject for government complaint that the ordinary people had become literate… Far from subsidising literacy, the early nineteenth-century English governments placed severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the exercise of the public’s reading and writing abilities. Yet despite this obstacle, by the time government came round to subsidising on a tiny scale in the 1830s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the people (according to one modern specialist– see p. 164) were already literate… Moreover, the effects of the subsidies to schools were probably more than offset, in the early years at least, by the continuation of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, i.e. the enormous taxes on paper, newspapers, and pamphlets which were not removed until the 1850s and 1860s… The notion held by many people that had it not been for the state they or at least most of their neighbours would never have become educated is a striking monument to the belief of the Victorian lawyer, Dicey, that people’s opinions and convictions eventually become conditioned by the legislated institutions they make themselves.

In the more formal or statistical evidence of literacy in the nineteenth century, the first thing that stands out is the consistency of its testimony that the ability to read was always in advance of the ability to write… and this reflected the relative contemporary demand. Ordinary people wanted to read in order to enjoy… magazines and newspapers, whereas they did not have quite the same need for writing and writing materials were expensive because of taxes upon them.

[Of pauper children] in Suffolk and Norfolk [in 1838], 87 percent could already read to some extent… a smaller proportion of them could write but even this was 53 percent. It is interesting to compare this evidence with the extent of literacy as measured by UNESCO in some countries in 1950: Portagal 55-60 percent, Egypt 20-25 percent, Algeria 15-20 percent. The UNESCO figures are percentages of the adult population, whereas the English example refers only to pauper children between 9 and 16 years.

An estimate of literacy among miners in in 1840 [in Northumberland and Durham]… show that 79 percent of these miners were already able to read; also more than half of them had learned to write… largely independent of state help which started in 1833.

The Reports from the Assistant Handloom Weavers’ Commissioners in 1839 indicated that handloom weavers were even more advanced. For instance, according to one inspector only 15 of 195 adults in Gloucestershire could neither read nor write. A special survey of the reading and writing abilities of the people of Hull in 1839 found that of the 14,526 adults, 14,109 had attended day or evening school and that only 1,054 of them could not read; in other words over 92 percent could read.

The statistics of literacy… [showed] a remarkable consistency between all the various surveys in different parts of the country and by different types of investigators. Second, there is evidence that the education inspectors who made some of the tests were so demanding that their figures were, if anything, underestimates.

If at least two-thirds of the working classes were literate round about 1840, how far are we to attribute the improvement of the remaining third to government intervention from that time down to 1870? … As late as 1869, two-thirds of school expenditure was still coming from voluntary sources, especially from the parents, directly or indirectly. Even the state subsidies were derived from a tax system which was largely repressive… three-fifths of taxation fell on food and tobacco… so it is not easy to demonstrate that had the state not raised the money through taxation to subsidise the schools the total expenditure on them would have been lower.

If most people were already literate in 1870, by what means was such a feat accomplished? … The first comprehensive official statistic on schooling were provided by Henry Brougham’s Select Committee in 1820. It stated that in 1818 about 1 in 14 or 15 of the population was being schooled… In 1828 Brougham… was astonished when his findings indicated that the number of children in schools had doubled in ten years.

Who then paid for the pre-state education? It is common to point to philanthropy and the Church. But to dwell on these sources is to conceal the part played by the ordinary people themselves. If we are to believe the evidence of Henry Brougham most parents bought education by modest fee-paying.

The evidence shows that the number of years of voluntary schooling was indeed growing with those gradual increases in incomes that came with the economic growth of the nineteenth century.

Professor George J. Sitgler, who measured the kind of education which leads to increases in income-earning power of the individual, concluded that in 1940 as much as two-thirds of it was acquired not in colleges or schools by but experience and instruction within the [workplace].

The case of food is interesting. Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. It is difficult to envisage, however, that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards of food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating, or that it should entertain measures which lead to increased taxes and rates in order to provide children’s food ‘free’ at local authority kitchens or shops… Protection against the supply of adultered food to children (or to anybody else) is effected simply by a system of inspection, reinforced by regulations, breaches of which are punishable by law… It is still more difficult to imagine that most people would unquestionably accept this system, especially where it had developed to the stage that for ‘administrative reasons’ parents were allocated those shops which happened to be nearest their homes; or that any complaint or special desire to change their pre-selected shops should be dealt with by special and quasi-judicial enquiry after a formal appointment with the local ‘Child Food Officer’ or, failing this, by pressure upon their respective representatives on the local ‘Child Food Committee’ or upon their local M.P. Yet strange as such hypothetical measures may appear when applied to the provision of food and clothing, they are typical of English state education as it has evolved.

Presumably it is recognised that the ability in a free market to change one’s food shop when it threatens to become, or has become, inefficient is an effective instrument whereby parents can protect their children from inferior service in a prompt and effective manner. If this is so, then one should expect that the same arguments of protection would in this respect point in the direction not of a free school system where it is normally difficult to change one’s ’supplier’ but in the direction of fee-paying where it is easier… Voting in the market… is a process whereby the wishes of the parent are immediately and more continually expressed, for the market mechanism is, in the words of Lord Robbins, ‘a continuous general election on the principle of proportionate representation.’ Second, the political process allows advantages to those who can organise themselves more readily into pressure groups; and because parents are less easily organisable in the political sense than others, much of their bargaining power is reduced. Third, voting through the ballot box is much less discriminating since it is less able to avoid the necessity of large ‘package deals.’ For instance, the selection of a local councillor involves voting not only for what he is expected to do in education but also for his policy in housing, roads, health, sewage, etc. In contrast, the fee-paying system… nicely discriminated not only between schools or schoolmasters but also between subjects.

Present-day statistical evidence… shows that crime has increased at the same time as state education has been growing. Certainly this does not deny that crime could have grown equally or even more in the absence of state education. But scientific objectivity demands that all things should be suspect, especially where there is a positive correlation… The Crowther Committee found… that the last year of compulsory education was also the heaviest year for juvenile delinquency and that the tendency to crime during school years was reversed when a boy went to work. Not only was this a long-standing phenomenon but also when in 1947 the school leaving age was raised from 14 to 15… there was an immediate change over in the delinquency record of the 13-year olds and the 14-year olds… [one] could argue, but with less certainty, that the evidence shows a prima facie relationship in the opposite direction, i.e. that state education involved adverse external effects and aggravated or even helped to cause the prevailing trend towards increased criminal behaviour.

[In nineteenth century America,] New York State was chosen for study… For instance, in 1830 parental fees contributes $346,807 toward the total sum for teachers’ wages of $586,520… In the first half of the century figures of private schooling throughout the State were hard to come by. But it will be observed that the 1811 Commissioners observed that in thickly populated areas the means of education were already provided for… The Superintendant’s Report of 1830… of the city of New York… showed that of the 24,952 children attending school in the city, the great majority, 18,945 were in private schools… In the report of 1821 it was stated that the whole number of children between the ages of five and sixteen residing in the State was 380,000; and the total number of all ages taught during the year was 342,479. Thus, according to this evidence, schooling in the early nineteenth century was already almost universal without being compulsory… The Superintendant of the State himself… conceded in his annual report dated 1871 that it was rarely the case that ‘parents who provide for their children in other respects, wholly neglect their education.”

I reached the conclusion that on a reasonable assessment of the evidence, the behaviour of most families in the nineteenth century seems to have been much more commendable than we have often been led to suspect. What is more, it seems to have been improving with experience and with the growth of private incomes. The exceptions to this rule are always in danger of receiving such a disproportionate amount of public attention that the unwary are constantly in danger of being blinded by them. The widely read Dickensian caricatures of some nineteenth-century families, for instance, may be rich in literary appeal but in them lies the danger that they may too easily be taken as dispassionate and representative social commentary.

Gladstone warned [in 1856]: “It appears to me clear that the day you sanction compulsory rating for the purpose of education you sign the death-warrant of voluntary exertions… are we preparing to undergo the risk of extinguishing that vast amount of voluntary effort which now exists throughout the country? Aid it you may, strengthen, and invigorate, and enlarge it you may; you may have done so to an extraordinary degree; you have every encouragement to persevere in the same course; but always recollect that you depend upon influences of which you get the benefit, but which are not at your command– influences which you may, perchance, in an unhappy day, extinguish, but which you can never create.”

One would like to know how [to] allocate the credit for the most striking of all English industrial advances in the late eighteenth century which occurred despite the complete indifference of English universities and the entire absence of state education… For McCulloch argued that the economic superiority of Britain over Prussia and France was precisely due to the relative failure of their education, and it was in these very countries that centrally administered school systems did exist. Britain, on the contrary, relied on a privately supplied education.

Education and the State, E. G. West, 1965, http://www.amazon.com/Education-State-G-West/dp/0865971358/.

Altogether, my teams tested 24,000 [of the poorest] children. We started in India and moved on to Nigeria, then Ghana, then back to India, then on to rural China… On all the indicators explored, government schools, in general, performed worse than both recognized and unrecognized private schools… Class sizes were smaller in both types of private schools than in public schools. Both types of private schools had a higher… percentage of teachers teaching when our researchers called unannounced. Only on one quality input — the provision of playgrounds — were government schools superior… Children in both types of private schools in general scored higher on standardized tests in key curriculum subjects than did children in government schools. This remained true even when we controlled for an array of background variables, to account for differences between children in public and private schools. The higher standards in private schools were usually maintained for a small fraction of the per-pupil teacher cost in government schools… No wealthy outside agencies were assisting them. Even so, often they do better… Government school teachers were paid considerably more than private school teachers– up to seven times more.

I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.

Mahatma Gandhi, Chatham House, London, October 20, 1931.

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, James Tooley, 2009, http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1933995920.

Homeschooling grew from nearly nonexistent in the 1970s to roughly two million students in grades K to 12 by 2009… Numerous studies by dozens of researchers have been completed during the past 25 years that examine the academic achievement of the home-educated (see reviews, e.g., Ray, 2000, 2005; 2009b). Examples of these studies range from a multi-year study in Washington State (Wartes, 1991), to other state-specific studies, to three nationwide studies across the United States (Ray, 1990, 1997, 2000; Rudner 1999), to two nationwide studies in Canada (Ray, 1994; Van Pelt, 2003). In most studies, the homeschooled have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests, compared to the national school average of the 50th percentile (which is largely based on public schools). A few studies have found the home educated to be scoring about the same or a little better than public school students.

Researchers have examined relationships between several variables and homeschool students’ achievement (e.g., Ray, 2000; Ray & Eagleson, 2008; Rudner, 1999). Examples are parent educational attainment, family income, race or ethnicity, number of years the child had been home educated, time spent in formal instruction, and degree of regulation of homeschooling by the state. A few of these variables (e.g., parent education level) are consistently associated with homeschool students’ achievement, although the relationships are often relatively weak. Several variables studied to date show no or very little relationship to these students’ achievement; examples of such variables are the degree of regulation (control) of homeschooling by the state and whether the parents have ever been state-certified teachers.

Research shows that the large majority of home-educated students consistently interact with children of various ages and parents outside their immediate family (see, e.g., Medlin, 2000; Ray, 1997, 2009b).

The second part of the socialization question asks whether home-educated children will experience healthy social, emotional, and psychological development. Numerous studies, employing various psychological constructs and measures, show the home-educated are developing at least as well, and often better than, those who attend institutional schools (Medlin, 2000; Ray, 2009b). No research to date contravenes this general conclusion.

It appears that the home educated are engaged, at least as much as are others, in activities that predict leadership in adulthood (Montgomery, 1989), doing well on their college/university SAT tests (Barber, 2001, personal communication) and ACT tests (ACT, 2005), matriculating in college at a rate that is comparable or a bit higher than for the general public (Ray, 2004; Van Pelt 2003), performing well in college (Gray, 1998; Galloway & Sutton, 1995; Jenkins, 1998; Jones & Gloeckner, 2004; Mexcur, 1993; Oliveira, Watson, & Sutton, 1994), satisfied that they were home educated (Knowles & Muchmore, 1995; Ray, 2004; Van Pelt, Neven, & Allison, 2009), involved in community service at least as much as others (Ray, 2004; Van Pelt, Neven, & Allison, 2009), and more civically engaged than the general public (Ray, 2004; Van Pelt, Neven, & Allison, 2009). There is no research evidence that having been home educated is associated with negative behaviors or ineptitudes in adulthood.

Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study, Academic Leadership Journal, 2010, http://www.academicleadership.org/392/academic_achievement_and_demographic_traits_of_homeschool_students_a_nationwide_study/.

Census Bureau Reports Public School Systems Spend $10,499 Per Pupil in 2009

In the study, there was an only slight relationship between the yearly cost of education (including textbooks, other teaching materials, tutoring, enrichment services, counseling, testing, and evaluation) and homeschooled student test scores. The median amount spent per child each year was $400–599.

Homeschoolers’ median family income ($75,000–79,999) closely spanned the nationwide median (about $79,000) for families headed by a married couple and with one or more related children under 18.

Homeschool Progress Report 2009, Home School Legal Defense Association, http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/ray2009/2009_Ray_StudyFINAL.pdf.

We are encouraged to think of acts of police violence more or less in isolation, to consider them as unique, unrelated occurrences… The danger of the job is a constant theme in the defense of police violence… Between 1995 and 2000, 360 cops were murdered and 403 died in [car] accidents… Naturally it is not to be lost sight of that these numbers represent human lives, not widgets or sacks of potatoes. But let’s remember that there were 5,915 fatal work injuries in 2000… Policing may be dangerous, but it is not the most dangerous job available. In terms of total fatalities, more truck drivers are killed than any other kind of worker… A better measure of occupational risk, however, is the rate of work-related deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2000, for example, it was 27.6 for truck drivers. At 12.1 deaths per 100,000, policing is slightly less dangerous than mowing lawns, cutting hedges, and running a wood-chipper: groundskeepers suffer 14.9 deaths per 100,000. By occupation, the highest rate of fatalities is among timber cutters, at 122.1 per 100,000. By industry, mining and farming are the most dangerous.

Where are all the headlines, the memorials, the honour guards, and the sorrowful renderings of taps for these workers? Where are the mayoral speeches, the newspaper editorials, the sober reflections that these brave men and women died, and that others risk their lives daily, so that we might continue to enjoy the benefits of modern society? Policing, it seems, is the only industry that both exaggerates and advertises its dangers… The exaggerated sense of danger has helped to re-order police priorities, to the detriment of the public interest. [Rodney] Stark argues that, “the police ought to understand clearly that they are being paid to take a certain degree of risk and that their safety does not come before public safety or the common good. Unfortunately, the police typically place their safety first and in recent years we have come to accept this priority.”

All together, 1,820 law enforcement officers were murdered during the… period between 1976 and 1998. In the same time, the police killed 8,578 people, averaging 373 annually– more than one a day. If we do the math, we see that police kill almost five times as often as they are killed.

The study of police brutality faces any number of methodological barriers, not least of which is the problem of defining it. There is no standard definition, nor is there one way of measuring force and excessive force… Even where the facts of a case are agreed upon (which is rare), there may yet be intense disagreement about the relevant standards of conduct and their application to the particular circumstances… Until very recently, nobody even bothered to keep track of how often the police use force… Furthermore, the data on which the studies are based are surely incomplete. Many of the reports rely on local police agencies to supply their numbers, and reporting is voluntary.

According to a 1996 U.S. Justice Department survey, 20 percent of the American public had direct contact with the police during the previous year. Most of these contacts took the form of traffic stops, and most were unremarkable. Only 1 in 500 residents was subject to the use of force or the threat of force… Now, that may not sound like a lot of people, until you realize that “1 in 500″ is a polite way of saying nearly half a million– an estimated 471,000 people in 1996 and 422,000 in 1999.

More than three quarters of the victims (76 percent) characterized the force as excessive, and the vast majority (92 percent) of persons experiencing [the] threat or use of force said the police acted improperly… In 1999, for example, 86.9 percent of the victims of police violence were male, and 55.3 percent were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. While most victims were White (58.9 percent), Black people and Latinos were victimized in numbers significantly out of proportion to their representation in the general population… Of those killed by police from 1976 to 1998, 42 percent were Black.

According to a Justice Department study of six police agencies, police use force in 17.1 percent of all adult custody arrests… Suspects, in contrast, use force against the police in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.

Of course, the propensity for violence is not distributed evenly throughout police departments. The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (also called the Christopher Commission) noted… “The top 5 percent of officers ranked by number of reports accounted for more than 20 percent of all reports, and the top 10 percent accounted for 33 percent.” … One retired LAPD sergeant told the Christopher Commission that there were at least one or two cops in every division who regularly use excessive force. This would imply that not only is brutality routine, it is widespread.

Even where officers are found guilty of misconduct, discipline rarely follows. For example, in 1998 New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board issued 300 findings against officers; fewer than half of these resulted in disciplinary action… A National Institute of Justice study on police integrity discovered, “A surprising 61 percent indicated that police officers do not always report even serious criminal violations that involve the abuse of authority by fellow officers.”

These figures, which I have recited with relatively little comment… seem altogether too sanitized. They should, to do the subject justice, come smeared with blood, with numbers surrounded by chalk outlines. The real cost of police violence, the human cost, is too easily forgotten, figured away, buried under a mountain of decimal points.

Police activities, legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent, tend to keep the people who currently stand at the bottom of the social hierarchy in their “place,” where they “belong”– at the bottom… Put differently, we might say that the police act to defend the interests and standing of those with power– those at the top… Police brutality is pervasive, systemic, and inherent to the institution.

Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, Kristian Williams, 2007, http://www.amazon.com/Our-Enemies-Blue-America-Revised/dp/0896087719.

Just one of countless examples of police brutality:

Otto Zehm, a mentally handicapped, 36-year-old unemployed janitor, was beaten to death in a Spokane convenience store in March 2006. “All I wanted was a Snickers bar,” pleaded the battered and bloody man before he was gagged by his assailant.

Their Right to Kill, Our Duty To Die: The Murder of Otto Zehm, William N. Grigg, December 22, 2011, http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/12/their-right-to-kill-our-duty-to-die.html.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that the duties of law enforcement may require limited, officially sanctioned deception in the course of criminal investigations. United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 434 (1973): “Criminal activity is such that stealth and strategy are necessary weapons in the arsenal of the police officer.” … The Supreme Court has referred to these sanctioned ruses as “strategic deception.” Illinois v. Perkins, 496 U.S. 292, 297 (1990).

Training Cops to Lie, Pt 2, Val Van Brocklin, December 21, 2009, http://www.officer.com/article/10233016/training-cops-to-lie-pt-2.

Recent re-examination of the history and meaning of the Fifth Amendment has emphasized anew that one of the basic functions of the privilege is to protect innocent men. Griswold, The Fifth Amendment Today, 9-30, 53-82. “Too many, even those who should be better advised, view this privilege as a shelter for wrongdoers. They too readily assume that those who invoke it are either guilty of crime or commit perjury in claiming the privilege.” Ullmann v. United States, 350 U.S. 422, 426 . See also Slochower v. Board of Higher Education, 350 U.S. 551 , when, at the same Term, this Court said at pp. 557-558: “The privilege serves to protect the innocent who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.”

U.S. Supreme Court, Grunewald v. United States, 353 U. S. 391, 421 (1957), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=353&invol=391&pageno=421.

Any lawyer worth his salt will tell [a] suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to police under any circumstances.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, former Attorney General of the United States and Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4060.

… the settled principle that while the police have the right to request citizens to answer voluntarily questions concerning unsolved crimes they have no right to compel them to answer.

U.S. Supreme Court, DAVIS v. MISSISSIPPI, 394 U.S. 721 (1969), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=394&invol=721.

Ordinarily, an investigating officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Amendment. INS v. Delgado, 466 U. S. 210. Beginning with Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, the Court has recognized that an officer’s reasonable suspicion that a person may be involved in criminal activity permits the officer to stop the person for a brief time and take additional steps to investigate further. Although it is well established that an officer may ask a suspect to identify himself during a Terry stop, see, e.g., United States v. Hensley, 469 U. S. 221, it has been an open question whether the suspect can be arrested and prosecuted for refusal to answer, see Brown, supra , at 53, n. 3. The Court is now of the view that Terry principles permit a State to require a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a Terry stop. Terry, supra, at 34.

The Fifth Amendment prohibits only compelled testimony that is incriminating, see Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, and protects only against disclosures that the witness reasonably believes could be used in a criminal prosecution or could lead to other evidence that might be so used, Kastigar v. United States, 406 U. S. 441. Hiibel’s refusal to disclose was not based on any articulated real and appreciable fear that his name would be used to incriminate him, or that it would furnish evidence needed to prosecute him. Hoffman v. United States, 341 U. S. 479. It appears he refused to identify himself only because he thought his name was none of the officer’s business. While the Court recognizes his strong belief that he should not have to disclose his identity, the Fifth Amendment does not override the Nevada Legislature’s judgment to the contrary absent a reasonable belief that the disclosure would tend to incriminate him. Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/03-5554.

Civil rights are fundamental to a free society and to human dignity. Their blatant denial to many, but especially to blacks in the South, was for too long a mockery of American ideals… The poisonous atmosphere surrounding any attempt to debate issues involving race and ethnicity is demonstrated in many ways. In addition to the usual ad hominem attacks and overheated rhetoric, there has also developed a fundamental disregard for the truth.

The historical data show that the economic rise of minorities preceded passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by many years, the existing upward trend was not accelerated, either by that Act or by quotas that became generally mandatory in 1971, and during the era of affirmative action, such disadvantaged blacks as young males with little experience or education, and members of female-headed households, actually retrogressed relative to whites of the same description, while more advantaged blacks rose both absolutely and relative to their white counterparts. In short, although affirmative action invokes the name of the disadvantaged, these are precisely the people who have fallen further behind under its auspices.

Much has been made of the number of blacks in high-level occupations before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What has been almost totally ignored is the historical trend of black representation in such occupations before the Act was passed. In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s– when there was little or no civil rights policy– than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.

The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act). If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were professional and technical workers rose less in the five years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years preceding it… Nor did the institution of “goals and timetables” at the end of 1971 mark any acceleration in the long trend of rising black representation in these occupations.

The history of Asians and Hispanics likewise shows long term upward trends that began years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were not noticeably accelerated by the Act or by later “affirmative action” policies. The income of Mexican Americans rose relative to that of non-Hispanic whites between 1959 and 1969, but no more so than from 1949 to 1959. Chinese and Japanese Americans overtook other Americans in income by 1959– five years before the Civil Rights Act.

What is truly surprising– and relatively ignored– is the economic impact of affirmative action on the disadvantaged, for whom it is most insistently invoked. The relative position of disadvantaged individuals within the groups singled out for preferential treatment has generally declined under affirmative action… In 1969, before the federal imposition of numerical “goals and timetables,” Puerto Rican family income was 63 percent of the national average. By 1977, it was down to 50 percent. In 1969, Mexican American family income was 76 percent of the national average. By 1977, it was down to 73 percent. Black family income fell from 62 percent of the national average to 60 percent over the same span.

There are many complex factors behind these numbers. The point here is simply that they do not support the civil rights vision. A finer breakdown of the data for blacks shows the most disadvantaged families– the female-headed, with no husband present– to be not only the poorest and with the slowest increase in money income during the 1970s but also with money incomes increasing even more slowly than among white, female-headed households… Black faculty members with numerous publications and Ph.D.’s from top-rated institutions earned more than white faculty members with the same high qualifications, but black faculty members who lacked a doctorate or publications earned less than whites with the same low qualifications… The top fifth of blacks have absorbed a growing proportion of all income received by blacks, while each of the bottom three fifths has received declining shares.

None of this is easily reconcilable with the civil rights vision’s all-purpose explanation, racism and discrimination… It is much more reconcilable with ordinary economic analysis. Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a sufficient track record to reassure employers… It is precisely the disadvantaged who suffer from affirmative action.

Groups with a demonstrable history of being discriminated against have, in many countries and in many periods of history, had higher incomes, better educational performance, and more representation in high-level positions than those doing the discriminating. Throughout southeast Asia, for several centuries, the Chinese minority has been– and continues to be– the target of explicit, legalized discrimination… Nowhere in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, or the Philippines have the Chinese ever experienced equal opportunity. Yet in all these countries the Chinese minority– about 5 percent of the population of southeast Asia– owns a majority of the nation’s total investments in key industries… In Malaysia, where the anti-Chinese discrimination is written into the Constitution, is embodied in preferential quotas for Malays in government and private industry alike, and extends to admissions and scholarships at the universities, the average Chinese continues to earn twice the income of the average Malay… The number of Chinese killed within a few days, at various times in the history of southeast Asia, has on a number of occasions exceeded all the blacks ever lynched in the history of the United States.

Nor are the Chinese minorities in southeast Asia unique. Much the same story could be told of the Jews in many countries around the world and in many periods of history. A similar pattern could also be found among East Indians in Africa, southeast Asia and parts of the western hemisphere, or among Armenians in the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. Italian immigrants to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also encountered discrimination, but nevertheless rose from poverty to affluence, surpassing the Argentine majority… Japanese immigrants to the United States also encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, culminating in their mass internment during World War II, but by 1959 they had about equalled the income of whites and by 1969 Japanese American families were earning nearly one-third higher incomes than the average American family.

In short, two key assumptions behind the civil rights vision do not stand up as general principles. The first is that discrimination leads to poverty and other adverse social consequences, and the second is the converse– that adverse statistical disparities imply discrimination.

One of the most central– and most controversial– premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by “society.” … Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc… A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences… Initially, civil rights meant, quite simply, that all individuals should be treated the same under the law, regardless of their race, religion, sex or other such social categories… later… the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results [affirmative action].

The fatal flaw in this kind of thinking is that there are many reasons, besides genes and discrimination, why groups differ in their economic performances and rewards. Groups differ by large amounts demographically, culturally, and geographically… Cultural differences are real, and cannot be talked away by using pejorative terms such as “stereotypes” or “racism.” … Self-employed farmers, for example, do not depend for their rewards on the biases of employers or the stereotypes of observers. Yet self-employed farmers of different ethnicity have fared very differently on the same land, even in earlier pre-mechanization times, when the principal input was the farmer’s own labour… That Jews earn far higher incomes than Hispanics in the United States might be taken as evidence that anti-Hispanic bias is stronger than anti-Semitism– if one followed the logic of the civil rights vision. But this explanation is considerably weakened by the greater prosperity of Jews than Hispanics in Hispanic countries throughout Latin America.

Female headed households are several times more common among blacks than among whites, and in both groups these are the lowest income families. Moreover, the proportion of people working differs greatly from group to group. More than three-fifths of all Japanese American families have multiple income earners while only about a third of Puerto Rican families do. Nor is this a purely socio-economic phenomenon, as distinguished from a cultural phenomenon. Blacks have similar incomes to Puerto Ricans, but the proportion of black families with a woman working is nearly three times that among Puerto Ricans. None of this disproves the existence of discrimination, nor is that its purpose.

Data collected for several American ethnic groups, and going back several decades, show that youngsters of Mexican, Chinese, American Indian, and Puerto Rican ancestry scored just as high (or higher) on tests when they went to schools that were virtually all of their own group as they scored in society at large.

With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies… Much of the literature on women shows little relationship between its evidence and its conclusions. “Landmark legislation and government action prohibiting employment discrimination based on sex” is credited by a U.S. Department of Labor study with increasing the labor force participation rates of women– even though the data in the very same study shows this to be a long-run trend going back at least as far as 1940.

The increase in the general participation of women in the labor force at all levels has little correlation with civil rights or the women’s liberation movement. The rising labor force participation rates of women in general, and of working mothers in particular, goes back at least as far as 1940. Nor has the rate of increase accelerated from 1960 to 1970, compared to its increase from 1950 to 1960– even though the decade of the 1960s marked the rise of women’s liberation as well as the civil rights revolution. On the contrary, the 1950-1960 increase was slightly greater– and that from 1940 to 1950 much higher still.

What is at issue is whether statistical differences mean discrimination, or whether there are innumerable demographic, cultural, and geographic differences that make this crucial automatic inference highly questionable.

Many who perceive the ineffective or counter-productive aspects of preferential policies nevertheless hesitate to “go back” to the world that existed prior to the civil rights revolution. Yet that is a false choice. No one could “go back” even if they wanted to… What is lacking in many discussions of discrimination is a sense of economics… Sweeping Jim Crow laws were used in the South to keep blacks “in their place” precisely because of the futility of trying to do so in a competitive economy… From an economic point of view, to say that any group is systematically underpaid or systematically denied as much credit as they deserve is the same as saying that an opportunity for unusually high profit exists for anyone who will hire or lend to them. When Japanese American farmers began bidding for underpaid Japanese American laborers in the early twentieth century, white farmers had no choice but to join the bidding war rather than lose good workers… Third-generation Mexican Americans earn 20 percent higher incomes than first-generation Mexican Americans of the same age, though it is doubtful if most employers seek the genealogical information necessary to make such a distinction.

Sincerity of purpose is not the same as honesty of procedure. Too often they are opposites… If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever.

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, Thomas Sowell, 1984, http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Rights-Rhetoric-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0688062695.

Walter Williams is an African American Ph.D. economist from George Mason University.

Coupled with dramatic breakdown in the black-family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black rate was only 19 percent in 1940, but skyrocketed in the late 1960s, reaching 49 percent in 1975. As of 2000, black illegitimacy stood at 68 percent and in some cities over 80 percent… Several studies point to welfare programs as a major contributor to several aspects of behavioral poverty. One of these early studies was the Seattle/Denver Experiment… Among its findings: for each dollar increase to welfare payments, low-income persons reduced labor earning by eighty cents… Ann Hill and June O’Neill found that a 50 percent increase in the monthly value of welfare benefits led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.

Gross historical discrimination alone has never been sufficient to prevent blacks from earning a living and bettering themselves by working as skilled or unskilled craftsmen and as business owners, accumulating considerable wealth. The fact that whites sought out blacks as artisans and workers, while patronizing black businesses, can hardly be said to be a result of white enlightenment. A far better explanation: market forces at work. The relative color blindness of the market accounts for much of the hostility towards it. Markets have a notorious lack of respect for privilege, race, and class structures. White customers patronized black-owned businesses because their prices were lower or their product quality or service better. Whites hired black skilled and unskilled labor because their wages were lower or they made superior employees.

As will be argued in subsequent chapters, restrictive laws harm blacks equally, whether they were written with the explicit intent– as in the past– to eliminate black competition or written– as in our time– with such benign goals as protecting public health, safety and welfare, and preventing exploitation of workers.

Some might find it puzzling that during the times of gross racial discrimination, black unemployment was lower and blacks were more active in the labor market than they are today… In 1970, 71 percent… In the early 1900’s, coal mining companies competed vigorously for black workers… Those observations cannot be explained simply by racial tastes. Surely one cannot explain the fact of higher black employment rates during earlier periods as a product of less racial discrimination.

Numerous laws, regulations, and ordinances have reduced or eliminated avenues of upward mobility for many blacks. The most common feature of these barriers is that they prevent people from making voluntary transactions that are deemed mutually advantageous by the transactors themselves… [Blacks] were the last major ethnic group to become urbanized and gain basic civil rights. When they finally achieved that status, blacks found that new barriers had been erected.

A reader might be compelled to ask what can be done to help. My answer would be similar to that given by abolitionist Frederick Douglass [in 1865], “What the Black Man Wants,” and in it, Douglass said:

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for trying to fasten them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall.

And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone– your interference is doing him a positive injury.

Race and Economics, Walter Williams, 2011, http://www.amazon.com/Race-Economics-Blamed-Discrimination-PUBLICATION/dp/0817912452.

Title II… Beginning in 1960 sit-ins and other Gandhi-style confrontations were desegregating department-store lunch counters throughout the South. No laws had to be passed or repealed. Social pressure—the public shaming of bigots—was working.

Even earlier, during the 1950s, David Beito and Linda Royster Beito report in Black Maverick, black entrepreneur T.R.M. Howard led a boycott of national gasoline companies that forced their franchisees to allow blacks to use the restrooms from which they had long been barred.

The social campaign for equality that was desegregating the South was transmogrified when it was diverted to Washington. Focus then shifted from the grassroots to a patronizing white political elite in Washington that had scurried to the front of the march and claimed leadership. Recall Hillary Clinton’s belittling of the grassroots movement when she ran against Barack Obama: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964…. It took a president to get it done.”

We will never know how the original movement would have evolved—what independent mutual-aid institutions would have emerged—had that diversion not occurred.

Libertarians need not shy away from the question, “Do you mean that whites should have been allowed to exclude blacks from their lunch counters?” Libertarians can answer proudly, “No. They should not have been allowed to do that. They should have been stopped—not by the State, which can’t be trusted, but by nonviolent social action on behalf of equality.”

The libertarian answer to bigotry is community organizing.

Context-Keeping and Community Organizing, Sheldon Richman, June 18th, 2010, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/18/sheldon-richman/context-keeping-and-community-organizing/.

Parents heavily influence their kids in many ways; they see it with their own eyes. Their mistake is to assume that their influence lasts a lifetime, instead of fading out as kids grow up… Twin and adoption studies find that the long-run effects of parenting are shockingly small. As long as you don’t do anything crazy, your kids will probably turn out fine… Today’s typical parents artificially inflate the price of kids, needlessly worry, and neglect the long-run benefits of larger families.

Once upon a time, nature versus nurture was a matter of opinion, but now there are hard answers: Nature wins, especially in the long run. If your child had grown up in a very different family… (s)he probably would have turned out about the same… The secret to unravelling the nature-nurture mystery is to study special kinds of families where there is a clear seam– or even a complete separation– between biology and parenting. From this standpoint, two kinds of families are special: Families that adopt, and families with twins… Twin and adoption studies do not support the middle-of-the-road answer. Identical twins are much more similar than fraternal twins– even when separated at birth– and their similarity often increases as they age.

Parent don’t affect life expectancy. Major twin studies find no influence of family environment on life span. One looked at almost 3,000 pairs of Danish twins born between 1870 and 1900… They found moderate genetic effects… [and] no evidence for an impact of a shared (family) environment. Another study looked at the mortality of about 9,000 Swedish twins born between 1886 and 1925… The Swedish study found strong genetic effects… and zero effect of upbringing.

Parents have little or no effect on overall health… A study of over 3,000 elderly Danish twins found moderate effects of heredity on hospitalizations and self-reported health, but no effects of family environment. Another team of researchers looked at about 2,500 Swedish twins and found moderate genetic effects on self-rated health, but small or nonexistent nurture effects.

Parents don’t affect height, weight, or teeth… Genes strongly influence both height and weight, while upbringing influences neither. In the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging, twins raised together were about as similar in height and weight as twins raised apart, and identical twins were about twice as similar as fraternal twins– both strong signs that nature matters and nurture doesn’t… A major study of adult Swedish twins looked at gingivitis, periodontal disease, and complete tooth loss. All three conditions showed moderate genetic influence. Family environment, in contrast, mattered only for the rare problem of losing all your teeth.

Parents might have a small effect on smoking, drinking, and drug problems…The answers from twin and research aren’t completely one-sided. Some conclude that nature fully explains why smoking, drinking, and drug use run in families… But other researchers find that nurture plays a role as well.

A large scientific literature finds that parents have little or no long-run effects on their children’s intelligence. Separated twin studies, regular twin studies, and adoption studies all point in the same direction. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart reunited almost 100 separated identical twins and triplets and gave them two standard IQ tests. It found large effects of genes on adult intelligence: “… Growing up in the same family does not contribute to similarity in cognitive abilities later in life.” … In 1975, the Colorado Adoption Project began studying 245 adopted babies… It also set up a control group of 245 comparable babies being raised by their biological parents. By the age of twelve, adoptees raised in high-IQ homes were no smarter than those raised in average homes.

Parents grossly overestimate their influence [on child happiness]. The Minnesota Twin Registry gave personality tests to over 1,300 pairs of adult twins raised together… Identical twins were far more similar in their happiness than fraternal twins… The same goes for self-esteem. The single most impressive study interviewed almost 8,000 twins from the Virginia Twin Registry and found zero effect of parenting on self-esteem for both men and women.

What about unhappiness? We’re quicker to blame our parents for our misery than thank them for our joy, but further research using the Minnesota Twin Registry concluded that nurture is equally irrelevant… The twins’ personality test measured many different ways to feel bad: nervous, upset, guilty, mistreated, betrayed, angry, vindictive, and so on. Upbringing didn’t matter. By the time you’re an adult, your parents’ past mistakes are not the reason for your present unhappiness.

Parents have little effect on how much school their kids get… The Korean adoption study is most remarkable for what it failed to find. Rich parents routinely try to give their kids an edge by moving to good school districts, hiring tutors, and paying tuition for fancy schools. Yet neither family income nor neighbourhood income increased adoptees’ academic success… Another major study of over 2,000 Swedish adoptees plus their adoptive and birth parents got almost the same results.

Parents have no effect on grades… An early study of about 500 Australian twins reported little or no effect of upbringing on college-bound students’ knowledge of arts, science, English, geography, math, or biology. A research team investigating the attitudes of almost 700 Canadian twins discovered that family had no effect on high school seniors’ GPA.

Parents have little or no effect on how much money their kids make when they grow up… In Sacerdote’s Korean adoption study, biological children from richer families grew up to have much higher incomes, but adoptees raised in the same families did not. The results are strong to the point of shocking. The income of the family you grew up with has literally no effect on your financial success… Identical twins’ incomes are much more similar than fraternal twins’. A recent working paper looks at over 5,000 men from the Swedish Twin Registry born between 1926 and 1958. Identical twins turn out to be almost exactly twice as similar in labor incomes as fraternal twins… A study of over 2,000 Australian twins finds the same thing.

Parents have little or no effect on conscientiousness or agreeableness… To answer, we need plausible ways to measure character… Personality psychologists have been there and done that. Some find small effects of family environment on character; the rest find none at all… One team looked at almost 2,000 German twins… they found unusually large effects of nature on conscientiousness and agreeableness, and no effect of nurture… In 2005, leading psychologist John Loehlin took a comprehensive look at family studies of personality: Character does run in families… In 1984, Science published a study of almost 15,000 Danish adoptees age fifteen or older…As long as the adoptee’s biological parents were law abiding, their adoptive parents made little difference… If the adoptee’s biological parents were criminal, however, upbringing mattered… In 2002, a study of antisocial behaviour in almost 7,000 Virginian twins born since 1918 found a small nurture effect for adult males and no nurture effect for adult females… For outright criminality, however, heredity was the sole cause of family resemblance.

Parents have a big effect on religious labels, but little on religious attitudes and behaviour… One early study of almost 2,000 adult Minnesota twins reared together and apart found little or no effect of parenting on religiosity… Another team of researchers looked at the religiosity of over 11,000 adult twins from Virginia. Parents have almost no effect on adult church attendance.

Parents have a big effect on political labels, but little on political attitudes and behaviour… Twin studies confirm that politics is a lot like religion. Parents have a large effect on your political label… In politics as in religion, however, the biggest nurture effects are also the most superficial. The Virginia 30,000 study found that parents have little effect on the strength of your partisan commitment. A national survey of young American adult twins found that parents have little influence over whether people bother to vote or participate in other political activities… The same goes for overall political philosophy and positions on specific issues.

Parents have little effect on traditionalism and modernism… Diverse twin studies find little or no effect of nurture on openness, including studies of over 1,000 Swedes raised apart and together, almost 2,000 Germans, and about 1,600 American high school juniors, and 500 Canadians.

Parents have moderate influence over when their daughters start having sex, but little over their sons. There are two major Australian twin studies of sexual initiation. The first included over 3,000 women born between 1922 and 1965. A follow-up roughly doubled the sample size by adding older and younger female twins. Both studies found moderate to large nurture effects [for women].

Parents have little or no effect on teen pregnancy… Girls’ parents are more likely to take extreme measure due to fear of teen pregnancy. Their precautions largely fail… A study of about 2,000 female Swedish twins born in the Fifties found zero effect of upbringing on teen pregnancy.

Parents have little or no effect on adult sexual behaviour… Two major twin studies find little effect of upbringing on adult sexuality. The first surveyed nearly 5,000 Australian twins about their… promiscuity… Family environment had almost no effect on sociosexuality; if you were in the 80th percentile, you could expect your adopted sibling to stand in the 51st.

Parents have little or no effect on marriage, marital satisfaction, or divorce… A study of over 4,000 Minnesota twins, most in their thirties and forties, found zero effect of parenting on marital status… A research team asked 1,000 female Swedish twins and their spouses about the quality of their marriages. The women’s parents had no effect on the marital satisfaction of their daughters, but they did have a small effect on the marital satisfaction of their son-in-law… One of the main reasons why divorce is heritable… is that marital stability depends upon personality and values, which in turn depend on genes.

Both twin and adoption studies confirm that parents affect how their children perceive and remember them… Half a century from now, your children will remember how you treated them… “good memories” are one of the few that clearly depend upon how you raise your child.

Children under five years old are almost five times as safe today as they were in the Idyllic Fifties. Children age five to fourteen are almost four times as safe.

Despite popular fears of overpopulation, more people make the world a better place. Our population and our standard of living have risen side by side for centuries… New ideas… are the main reason we keep getting richer. The source of new ideas, without a doubt, is people.

The critics of genetic determinism aren’t just wrong; they’re not even listening. Twin and adoption studies never claim that genes fully explain variation in human behaviour… If family environment matters so little, why is human behaviour hard to predict? Because there’s a lot more to “the environment” than the family.

The most important weakness of behavioural genetics is simply that research focuses on middle class families in First World countries… So you shouldn’t conclude that Haitian orphans would turn out the same way if raised in Sweden… Adoptees almost never grow up in lower-class homes, even though their biological parents tend to be lower class.

Do not be alarmed when twin and adoption studies conclude that your children’s future is outside your control. They’re not saying that your children will do poorly. They’re saying that your children will probably turn out fine, whether or not you’re a great parent.

The most effective way to get the kind of kids you want is to pick a spouse who has the traits you want your kids to have.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, Bryan Caplan, 2011, http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046501867X.

In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces.

Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be ‘hyper-aware’ of danger in their environment.

However, the anterior insula and amygdala are also areas of the brain implicated in anxiety disorders. Neural adaptation in these regions may help explain why children exposed to family violence are at greater risk of developing anxiety problems later in life.

“Not every child exposed to family violence will go on to develop a mental health problem; many bounce back and lead successful lives. We want to know much more about those mechanisms that help some children become resilient.”

Maltreated children show same pattern of brain activity as combat soldiers, University College London, December 5, 2011, http://www.psypost.org/2011/12/maltreated-children-show-same-pattern-of-brain-activity-as-combat-soldiers-8282.

The total killed on both sides — 620,000, with an additional 400,000 wounded — would rank the conflict as the bloodiest in all of United States history… Many deaths had no grandeur at all. Just as in previous wars, disease — not enemy fire — was the primary killer. While 140,000 Union soldiers perished as a result of battle, more than 220,000 died from disease. The same grim two-to-one ratio prevailed in Confederate forces as well.

Historians and buffs debate the fundamental causes of the American Civil War as hotly today as the combatants did then. More has been written on the subject than almost any other event in human history; by one estimate, 50,000 separate books.

Why did the southern states want to leave the Union? And why did the northern states refuse to let them go? The answer to at least the first of these questions necessarily revolves around… black slavery.

Quakers organized the world’s first antislavery society in Philadelphia in 1775… Vermont in its constitution of 1777 became the first to abolish the institution… The Pennsylvania legislature enacted gradual emancipation in 1780… State after state followed with either outright abolition or gradual emancipation. The Continental Congress passed the Ordinance of 1787, prohibiting slavery in the western territories north of the Ohio river… Slavery was more economically entrenched in the former southern colonies, where 90 percent of British America’s 460,000 blacks had resided…

On the one hand, the Constitution never acknowledged slavery’s existence by using the term, and it contained a clause permitting Congress to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade after twenty years. On the other hand, this gave the states of the lower South plenty of time to replenish their slave populations, and during this time imports would exceed those in any other two decades in American history… The Constitution also… in Article IV, Section 2, compelled the return of fugitive slaves even if they escaped to states that had abolished the institution… The Constitution counted three-fifths of a state’s enslaved population to determine its representation in the House of Representatives. This… principally increased the political power of slaveholders in proportion to the number of enslaved blacks.

A group of young, radical abolitionists burst upon the scene in the 1830s, exasperated at the betrayal of the Revolutionary promise that American slavery would wither away… The most vitriolic of these abolitionists was William Lloyd Garrison:

“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm. Tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher. Tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate– I will not excuse– I will not retreat a single inch– AND I WILL BE HEARD.” … “Slavery brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity a lie.”

[Garrison] believed that if anything the North should secede. That way it could become a haven for runaway slaves.

Most of the new nations of Central and South America abolished slavery when they gained their independence from Spain. British abolitionists… pressed Parliament into implementing compensated emancipation in its West Indian colonies in 1833; France and Denmark followed in 1844. By 1850, slavery persisted only in the United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil.

The South’s siege mentality turned it into a closed society. Advocating abolition became a felony in Virginia in 1836. The Georgia legislature offered a reward of $5,000 for anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him south for trial and punishment. Louisiana established a penalty ranging from twenty-one years hard labor to death for speeches and writings “having a tendency to promote discontent among free colored people, or insubordination among slaves.”… Most northern locales had legally mandated discrimination of some sort. One infamous incident involved a Quaker schoolmistress named Prudence Crandall, who decided in 1833 to racially integrate her private academy for girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. The state legislature passed a special act that threw her behind bars.

Slavery inflicted on blacks tremendous pain, suffering, and sometimes death, along with other more mundane burdens, such as lost income. The American South not only was poorer overall as a result, but non-slaveholding whites were also poorer.

The runaway slave was the system’s Achilles heel… [The fugitive slave clause] was the prime way the United States government subsidized the peculiar institution… Not only did the free states willingly cooperate, but many of them allowed Southerners to bring along slaves on visits… Radical abolitionists… illegally evaded it… [leading] to the famous underground rail road, in which white abolitionists and free blacks spirited runaways to freedom in Canada… Since the constitution explicitly required their return, we can now understand why Garrison’s call for disunion represented an effective way to eliminate this subsidy to slaveholders… Slavery flourished because the country’s political and legal structure socialized its enforcement costs. Like the incomes enjoyed by today’s tobacco growers… the economic viability of the peculiar institution rested on political power… All the slaveholder needed to do was present an affidavit. The alleged fugitive enjoyed no right to a jury trial or even to testify. Furthermore, commissioners had a financial incentive to rule against the fugitive. They received a $10 fee from the government for deciding that a black was an escaped slave, but only $5 for not. To enhance enforcement, Congress empowered commissioners to conscript the physical aid of any private citizen… Obstructing the law was subject to a $1,000 fine, six months in prison, and $1,000 civil damages for each escaped slave.

The only fully successful servile insurrection in all of human history was the one in Haiti [in 1791].

Perhaps the United States Supreme Court could settle the matter… involving a slave named Dred Scott… Chief Justice Roger Taney, speaking for the majority, reached two unmistakable judgements. First, Dred Scott could not sue in federal court because he was not a United States citizen, and he could not be a United States citizen because he was black… None of the Constitution’s protections therefore applied to blacks, whether enslaved or free… Second was that residence in federal territory could not free Scott because the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery had been unconstitutional.

In the Lincoln-Douglas Debates… Lincoln revealed the limits to his support for racial equality: “I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races– that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the Negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality; and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white man.”

Lincoln’s election was a bitter pill to swallow for a section of the country that had hitherto dominated the national government. South Carolina acted swiftly [in December, 1860]. Before the year was out, a state convention unanimously passed an ordinance of secession. Within another six weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had followed South Carolina out of the Union. The South Carolina convention cited northern evasion of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause as its foremost grievance.

Did South Carolina have grounds for its fears? Lincoln, after all, was not an abolitionist… He promised to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and respect slavery in the existing states… Southern fire-eaters, however, recognized that a major faction within the Republican Party did endorse further steps to divorce the general government from slavery.

Union authority evaporated from the deep South. Federal officials resigned in droves. State troops took possession of customhouses, post offices, arsenals, revenue cutters, and military posts… Only Fort Sumter in Charleston and three other forts along the Florida coast had garrisons of sufficient size and determination to keep them in Union hands… President Buchanan slipped out of office still refusing to turn over these last vestiges of federal pressure.

Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union by force if necessary: “I hold that… the Union of these States is perpetual,” he asserted in his first inaugural address. “The Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” The deep South’s refusal to abide by the outcome of a fair and legal election struck northern voters as a selfish betrayal of the nation’s unique mission.

The day after his inauguration… after extensive and lengthy consultations with his cabinet, the President ordered an armed relief expedition to sail [to Fort Sumter]… With relief pending… Major Anderson refused one final demand to vacate, whereupon the Confederate guns opened fire.

The [Union] military authorities soon began imprisoning prominent secessionists without trial. The writ of habeas corpus was a constitutional safeguard to prevent such imprisonments without sufficient legal cause, and one of the incarcerated Marylanders, John Merryman, attempted an appeal on that basis. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, ordered Merryman released, but federal officials, acting under Lincoln’s orders, refused… Lincoln also wrote out standing orders for the Chief Justice’s arrest, although these were never served… At the state’s next election in the fall of 1861, federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls and arrested any disunionists who attempted to vote. The Lincoln Administration imprisoned at least 14,000 civilians throughout the course of the war, and state and local authorities probably seized many more… The federal government simultaneously monitored and censored both the mails and telegraphs, and for the first time demanded passports of those entering and leaving the country. No one eligible for the draft could depart. It also suppressed newspapers. Over three hundred, including the Chicago Times, the New York World, and the Philadelphia Evening Journal, had to cease publication for varying periods. Lincoln repeatedly invoked the war emergency to increase presidential power. He had enlarged the regular army, clamped down the blockade, dispersed government funds, authorized government borrowing, suspended habeas corpus, and instituted postal censorship before Congress even convened.

In Missouri, the Federal military gained nominal control over most of the state… John C. Fremont, who assumed command of the Union’s Western Department, imposed martial law at the end of August… On his own authority, Fremont freed the slaves of those in rebellion and confiscated all their other real and personal property… The President countermanded the precipitate emancipation and replaced Fremont in order to placate what loyal sentiment was left in the various border states… “The Kentucky Legislature would not budge till that proclamation was modified,” Lincoln confided in private correspondence.

Lincoln had made clear that the war was for the preservation of the Union only. He promised not to interfere with slavery in the states, and many Union commanders during the early campaigns returned runaways to their southern masters in compliance with the Fugitive Slave Law.

The Civil War’s impressive medical achievements [of reducing ratio of deaths from disease to battle] can largely be credited to civilian organizations, outside the military bureaucracies. Inspired by the example of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, northern women who had been active in the antislavery movement or other reform crusades began as soon as the war broke out to organize what became the United States Sanitary Commission… Lincoln initially dismissed the organization as “fifth wheel to the coach.” The commission did achieve official recognition in June 1861 but remained a decentralized, privately funded, voluntary organization… The story of Civil War medical care is moving testimony to the unmatched courage and efficacy of private action.

By early 1862, Lincoln… promoted, with funds supplied by Congress, the colonization of free blacks to central America. But he publicly warned that he would take whatever action he thought necessary to win the war. “My paramount object in this struggle,” the President declared– replying to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of 20 Million,” published in the New York Tribune — “is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help save the Union.” Lincoln added, however, that “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”

The President issued the final Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of 1863. But it technically freed no slaves. As a war measure similar to that of the British during the American Revolution, the proclamation only applied to the areas still in rebellion. It did not emancipate any of the slaves in the four border states. Nor did it emancipate any slaves in those sections of the Confederacy that Union armies had already reconquered, including all of Tennessee and large portions of Virginia and Louisiana. The only slaves covered were the ones beyond the reach of Union authority. This anomaly inspired a cynical retort from Seward. “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

The Emancipation Proclamation did offer freedom to those who fled to Union lines. It therefore struck at slavery as effectively as any measure that encouraged fugitives, accelerating a process already well underway. Congress’s previous abolition in the District of Columbia had brought slaves flocking in from the surrounding border state of Maryland. Now they crowded into Union camps from all over the South… By early 1865, at a time when Confederate armies were starved for manpower, the Georgia legislature felt compelled to establish a special cavalry battalion for stopping slaves from escaping to the enemy. The numbers reaching the sanctuary of Federal jurisdiction eventually swelled to over half a million… In the final analysis, it was not military conquest but the fugitive slave who brought down the South’s peculiar institution. Liberation, so often presented as something the Union did for blacks, was as much something they did for themselves.

Up and down the Union-controlled areas of the Mississippi River, regulations put able-bodied blacks back to work on plantations. Although the former slaves now could choose among employers, some of whom were Yankee lessees and other Southerners who had taken a loyalty oath, contracts lasted for a year with “respectful, honest, faithful labor” enforced by the military. Idleness and vagrancy were crimes, and those found unemployed had to labor on public works. At other locations, Union authorities coercively impressed contrabands to build fortifications or do other military work. Perhaps several hundred thousand labored for the war.

[After the war], new Black Codes established a racial subjugation at least as rigid as the apartheid system developed in South Africa decades later… The southern states also imported the system of tax-supported, compulsory schools… Literacy among white Southerners had exceeded 80 percent before Fort Sumter, slightly below that of Northerners and better than in Britain or any other European country outside of Sweden and Denmark… Fifteen years after the war ended, the literacy rate among southern whites had shown no noticeable gain, whereas 70 percent of southern blacks still could not read… Moreover, the public schools created during congressional Reconstruction were all racially segregated, except briefly in New Orleans… The national government consequently turned its back as white Southerners engaged in a process euphemistically labelled Redemption. The continuing physical intimidation, coupled with social ostracism and economic pressures kept blacks away from the polls… The first southern state to effectively disfranchise the majority of its blacks was Mississippi, in 1890, with a literacy test– fourteen years after the last federal troops left the South… The country’s latest State-worshipping reform movement, progressivism, avidly participated in the wave of Jim Crowe laws.

The total labor supplied by former slaves fell by approximately one-third. Here we encounter a dramatic demonstration of the limitations of economic aggregates for measuring well-being. Income per capita went down because people were better off. They were working less or producing household amenities, both of which represented improvements in the quality of life.

The Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution. Four successive ideological surges had previously defined American politics: the radical republican movement that had spearheaded the revolution itself; the subsequent Jeffersonian movement that had arisen in reaction to the Federalist State; the Jacksonian movement that followed the War of 1812; and at length the abolitionist movement. Although each was unique, each in its own way was hostile to government power… The great irony of the Civil War is that everything changed at the very moment that abolition triumphed. As the last, great coercive blight on the American landscape, black chattel slavery, was finally extirpated– a triumph that cannot be overrated– the American polity did an about face.

The fact that emancipation overwhelmed such entrenched plantation economies as Cuba and Brazil suggests that slavery was politically moribund anyway. An ideological movement [abolitionism] that had its meagre roots in the eighteenth century eventually eliminated everywhere a labor system that had been ubiquitous throughout world civilizations for millennia… Slavery was doomed politically even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace. The Republican-controlled Congress would have been able to work toward emancipation within the border states, where slavery was already declining. In due course the Radicals could have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. With chattels fleeing across the border and raising slavery’s enforcement costs, the peculiar institution’s final destruction within an independent cotton South was inevitable. Even future Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens had judged “slavery much more secure in the Union than out of it.” Secession was a gamble of pure desperation for slaveholders, only attempted because the institution clearly had no political future within the Union.

Just such a process later accelerated the demise of slavery in Brazil. This slave economy was in 1825 the New World’s second largest, holding in bondage only slightly fewer than the American South. Yet even before Brazil’s abolition, manumission caused free blacks to exceed slaves in total numbers… Brazilian abolitionists succeeded in outlawing slavery in the northeastern state of Ceara in 1884. An underground rail road immediately came into existence. Planters retaliated with a fugitive slave law, but the law was widely evaded. The state of Amazonas and many cities joined Ceara. Slavery rapidly disintegrated in the coffee growing region of Sao Paulo. The value of slaves fell by 80 percent despite the fact that none was slated to be liberated through a gradual emancipation. Finally in 1888 the government accepted a fait accompli and decreed immediate and uncompensated emancipation… [This took about as long - 4 years - as the American Civil War.]

The Fourteenth Amendment’s second section… for the first time used the word “male” in the Constitution… Disillusioned, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organized the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869… It also represented the incorporation of mainstream feminism into the broader drive for enlarged government guardianship… The Leviathan co-opted and transformed feminism the same way it had co-opted and transformed abolitionism… It had acquired for central authority such new functions as subsidizing privileged businesses, managing the currency, providing welfare to veterans… And it had set dangerous precedents with respect to taxes, fiat money, conscription, and the suppression of dissent. These and the countless other changes… mark the Civil War as America’s real turning point. In the years ahead, coercive authority would wax and wane with year-to-year circumstances, but the long-term trend would be unmistakable. Henceforth there would be no more major victories of Liberty over Power. In contrast to the whittling away of government that had preceded Fort Sumter, the United States had commenced its halting but inexorable march toward the welfare-warfare State of today.

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, 1996, http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=419.

“… To experience all the miseries through which every one of us has passed, or to remain here doing nothing?” “This,” said Candide, “is a grand question.” … Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsion of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom. Candide did not agree, but he did not provide any other opinion.

Pangloss sometimes would say to Candide: “All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for your love of Miss Cunegonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not travelled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, then you wouldn’t be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”

“Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but we must cultivate our garden.”

Candide, Voltaire, 1759.

Millions of parents take it as an article of faith that putting a bicycle helmet on their children, or themselves, will help keep them out of harm’s way. But new data on bicycle accidents raises questions about that. The number of head injuries has increased 10 percent since 1991, even as bicycle helmet use has risen sharply… But given that ridership has declined over the same period, the rate of head injuries per active cyclist has increased 51 percent just as bicycle helmets have become widespread.

Many specialists in risk analysis argue that… the increased use of bike helmets may have had an unintended consequence: riders may feel an inflated sense of security and take more risks.

One parallel, risk experts said, is anti-lock brakes. When they were introduced in the 1980’s, they were supposed to reduce accidents, but government and industry studies in the mid-1990’s showed that as drivers realized their brakes were more effective they started driving faster, and some accident rates rose.

Insurance companies have long been familiar with the phenomenon, which they call moral hazard. Once someone is covered by an insurance policy there is a natural tendency for that person to take more risks. Companies with workers’ compensation insurance, for instance, have little incentive to make their workplaces safer. To counter such moral hazard, insurers may give discounts to companies that reduce hazardous conditions in their factories, said Robert Hartwig, chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute. ”People tend to engage in risky behavior when they are protected,” he said. ”It’s a ubiquitous human trait.”

The most effective way to reduce severe head injuries may be to decrease the number of accidents in the first place.

A Bicycling Mystery: Head Injuries Piling Up, Julian E. Barnes, The New York Times, July 29, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/business/a-bicycling-mystery-head-injuries-piling-up.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm.

(1) http://www.cpsc.gov/cgibin/NEISSQuery/home.aspx (product=5040); (2) http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/business/a-bicycling-mystery-head-injuries-piling-up.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm; (3) http://www.cpsc.gov/library/helmet.html; (4) http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pubs/811402.pdf; (5) http://www.nsga.org/files/public/Ten-Year_History_of_Sports_Participation_4web_100521.pdf; helmets.ods.

As helmet usage went up, deaths (per riders) went up. Either helmet usage increases risky riding and/or there are more important things such as riding at night, in urban areas, age, etc.

The bicycle study documented the large number of bicycle-related injuries and deaths that occur every year, and evaluated the use and hazard patterns of bicyclists in the United States… the bicycle study does not indicate any simple or direct remedies to the hazards of bicycle riding.

A large proportion of bicycle injuries result from behaviors which are risky or reflect poor riding judgement (e.g., stunting or riding too fast given the riding conditions). In addition, the cognitive and physical immaturities of children are likely contributing factors in many of their injuries. The bicycle study also found that environmental factors, such as riding terrain and riding conditions, play an important role in the injury risk. On the other hand, while poor bicycle maintenance was a hazard factor, the structure of the bicycle itself appeared to play little role in the injury risk.

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/344.pdf.

Hence it is that, though in every age everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been taking place, nobody seems to reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason… On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Critical & Historical Essays, Thomas Babington Macaulay, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2333/pg2333.html.

History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations, mischievous prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates faster than governments can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can destroy. We see the wealth of nations increasing, and all the arts of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection, in spite of the grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the part of rulers.

Southey’s Colloquies on Society, Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830, http://www.bartleby.com/349/412.html.

So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

First, I will present a series of theses that constitute the… Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point…

Let me begin with the… Marxist belief system:
(1) “The history of mankind is the history of class struggles.” It is the history of struggles between a relatively small ruling class and a larger class of the exploited. The primary form of exploitation is economic: The ruling class expropriates part of the productive output of the exploited or, as Marxists say, “it appropriates a social surplus product and uses it for its own consumptive purposes.”

(2) The ruling class is unified by its common interest in upholding its exploitative position and maximizing its exploitatively appropriated surplus product. It never deliberately gives up power or exploitation income. Instead, any loss in power or income must be wrestled away from it through struggles, whose outcome ultimately depends on the class consciousness of the exploited, i.e., on whether or not and to what extent the exploited are aware of their own status and are consciously united with other class members in common opposition to exploitation.

(3) Class rule manifests itself primarily in specific arrangements regarding the assignment of property rights or, in Marxist terminology, in specific “relations of production.” In order to protect these arrangements or production relations, the ruling class forms and is in command of the state as the apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The state enforces and helps reproduce a given class structure through the administration of a system of “class justice,” and it assists in the creation and the support of an ideological superstructure designed to lend legitimacy to the existence of class rule.

(4) Internally, the process of competition within the ruling class generates a tendency toward increasing concentration and centralization. A multipolar system of exploitation is gradually supplanted by an oligarchic or monopolistic one. Fewer and fewer exploitation centers remain in operation, and those that do are increasingly integrated into a hierarchical order. Externally (i.e., as regards the international system), this centralization process will (and all the more intensively the more advanced it is) lead to imperialist interstate wars and the territorial expansion of exploitative rule.

(5) Finally, with the centralization and expansion of exploitative rule gradually approaching its ultimate limit of world domination, class rule will increasingly become incompatible with the further development and improvement of “productive forces.” Economic stagnation and crises become more and more characteristic and create the “objective conditions” for the emergence of a revolutionary class consciousness of the exploited. The situation becomes ripe for the establishment of a classless society, the “withering away of the state,” the replacement of government of men over men by the administration of things and, as its result, unheard-of economic prosperity.

All of these theses can be given a perfectly good justification, as I will show. Unfortunately, however… Marxism [derives] them from a patently absurd exploitation theory.

What is this Marxist theory of exploitation? According to Marx, such precapitalist social systems as slavery and feudalism are characterized by exploitation. There is no quarrel with this. For after all, the slave is not a free laborer, and he cannot be said to gain from his being enslaved. Rather, in being enslaved his utility is reduced at the expense of an increase in wealth appropriated by the slave master. The interest of the slave and that of the slave owner are indeed antagonistic. The same is true as regards the interests of the feudal lord who extracts a land rent from a peasant who works on land homesteaded by himself (i.e., the peasant). The lord’s gains are the peasant’s losses. It is also undisputed that slavery as well as feudalism indeed hamper the development of productive forces. Neither slave nor serf will be as productive as they would be without slavery or serfdom.

The genuinely new Marxist idea is that essentially nothing is changed as regards exploitation under capitalism (if the slave becomes a free laborer), or if the peasant decides to farm land homesteaded by someone else and pays rent in exchange for doing so. To be sure, Marx, in the famous chapter 24 of the first volume of his Kapital, titled “The So-called Original Accumulation,” gives a historical account of the emergence of capitalism which makes the point that much or even most of the initial capitalist property is the result of plunder, enclosure, and conquest. Similarly, in chapter 25, on the “Modern Theory of Colonialism,” the role of force and violence in exporting capitalism to the, as we would nowadays say, Third World is heavily emphasized. Admittedly, all this is, generally correct, and insofar as it is there can be no quarrel with labeling such capitalism exploitative. Yet one should be aware of the fact that here Marx is engaged in a trick. In engaging in historical investigations and arousing the reader’s indignation regarding the brutalities underlying the formation of many capitalist fortunes, he actually side-steps the issue at hand. He distracts from the fact that his thesis is really an entirely different one: namely, that even if one were to have “clean” capitalism so to speak (one in which the original appropriation of capital were the result of nothing else but homesteading), work and savings, the capitalist who hired labor to be employed with this capital would nonetheless be engaged in exploitation. Indeed, Marx considered the proof of this thesis his most important contribution to economic analysis.

What, then, is his proof of the exploitative character of a clean capitalism? It consists in the observation that the factor prices, in particular the wages paid to laborers by the capitalist, are lower than the output prices. The laborer, for instance, is paid a wage that represents consumption goods which can be produced in three days, but he actually works five days for his wage and produces an output of consumption goods that exceeds what he receives as remuneration. The output of the two extra days, the surplus value in Marxist terminology, is appropriated by the capitalist. Hence, according to Marx, there is exploitation.

What is wrong with this analysis? The answer becomes obvious, once it is asked why the laborer would possibly agree to such a deal! He agrees because his wage payment represents present goods—while his own labor services represent only future goods—and he values present goods more highly. After all, he could also decide not to sell his labor services to the capitalist and then map the full value of his output himself. But this would of course imply that he would have to wait longer for any consumption goods to become available to him. In selling his labor services he demonstrates that he prefers a smaller amount of consumption goods now over a possibly larger one at some future date. On the other hand, why would the capitalist want to strike a deal with the laborer? Why would he want to advance present goods (money) to the laborer in exchange for services that bear fruit only later? … For if one can obtain a larger sum in the future by sacrificing a smaller one in the present, why then is the capitalist not engaged in more saving than he actually is? Why does he not hire more laborers than he does, if each one of them promises an additional interest return? The answer again should be obvious: because the capitalist is a consumer, as well, and cannot help being one. The amount of his savings and investing is restricted by the necessity that he, too, like the laborer, requires a supply of present goods “large enough to secure the satisfaction of all those wants the satisfaction of which during the waiting time is considered more urgent than the advantages which a still greater lengthening of the period of production would provide.”

What is wrong with Marx’s theory of exploitation, then, is that he does not understand the phenomenon of time preference as a universal category of human action. That the laborer does not receive his “full worth” has nothing to do with exploitation but merely reflects the fact that it is impossible for man to exchange future goods against present ones except at a discount. Contrary to the case of slave and slave master where the latter benefits at the expense of the former, the relationship between the free laborer and the capitalist is a mutually beneficial one. The laborer enters the agreement because, given his time preference, he prefers a smaller amount of present goods over a larger future one; and the capitalist enters it because, given his time preference, he has a reverse preference order and ranks a larger future amount of goods more highly than a smaller present one. Their interests are not antagonistic but harmonious. Without the capitalist’s expectation of an interest return, the laborer would be worse off, having to wait longer than he wishes to wait; and without the laborer’s preference for present goods the capitalist would be worse off having to resort to less roundabout and less efficient production methods than those which he desires to adopt…

Under a system of socialized production, quite contrary to Marx’s proclamations, the development of productive forces would not reach new heights but would instead sink dramatically. For obviously, capital accumulation must be brought about by definite individuals at definite points in time and space through homesteading, producing and/or saving. In each case it is brought about with the expectation that it will lead to an increase in the output of future goods. The value an actor attaches to his capital reflects the value he attaches to all expected future incomes attributable to its cooperation and discounted by his rate of time preference. If, as in the case of collectively owned factors of production, an actor is no longer granted exclusive control over his accumulated capital and hence over the future income to be derived from its employment, but partial control instead is assigned to nonhomesteaders, nonproducers, and nonsavers, the value for him of the expected income and hence that of the capital goods is reduced. His effective rate of time preference will rise and there will be less homesteading of scarce resources, and less saving for the maintenance of existing resources and the production of new capital goods. The period of production, the roundaboutness of the production structure, will be shortened, and relative impoverishment will result.

I will now outline in the briefest possible way the correct—Austrian, Misesian-Rothbardian—theory of exploitation; give an explanatory sketch of how this theory makes sense out of the class theory of history; and highlight along the way some key differences between this class theory and the Marxist one and also point out some intellectual affinities between Austrianism and Marxism stemming from their common conviction that there does indeed exist something like exploitation and a ruling class.

The starting point for the Austrian exploitation theory is plain and simple, as it should be. Actually, it has already been established through the analysis of the Marxist theory: Exploitation characterized the relationship between slave and slave master and serf and feudal lord. But no exploitation was found possible under a clean capitalism. What is the principle difference between these two cases? The answer is: the recognition or nonrecognition of the homesteading principle. The peasant under feudalism is exploited because he does not have exclusive control over land that he homesteaded, and the slave because he has no exclusive control over his own homesteaded body. If, contrary to this, everyone has exclusive control over his own body (is a free laborer, that is) and acts in accordance with the homesteading principle, there can be no exploitation. It is logically absurd to claim that a person who homesteads goods not previously homesteaded by anybody else, or who employs such goods in the production of future goods, or who saves presently homesteaded or produced goods in order to increase the future supply of goods, could thereby exploit anybody. Nothing has been taken away from anybody in this process and additional goods have actually been created.

And it would be equally absurd to claim that an agreement between different homesteaders, savers and producers regarding their nonexploitatively appropriated goods or services could possibly contain any foul play, then. Instead, exploitation takes place whenever any deviation from the homesteading principle occurs. It is exploitation whenever a person successfully claims partial or full control over scarce resources which he has not homesteaded, saved or produced, and which he has not acquired contractually from a previous producer-owner. Exploitation is the expropriation of homesteaders, producers and savers by late-coming nonhomesteaders, nonproducers, nonsavers and noncontractors; it is the expropriation of people whose property claims are grounded in work and contract by people whose claims are derived from thin air and who disregard others’ work and contracts.

Needless to say, exploitation thus defined is in fact an integral part of human history. One can acquire and increase wealth either through homesteading, producing, saving, or contracting, or by expropriating homesteaders, producers, savers or contractors. There are no other ways. Both methods are natural to mankind. Alongside homesteading, producing and contracting, there have always been nonproductive and noncontractual property acquisitions. And in the course of economic development, just as producers and contractors can form firms, enterprises and corporations, so can exploiters combine to large-scale exploitation enterprises, governments and states. The ruling class (which may again be internally stratified) is initially composed of the members of such an exploitation firm. And with a ruling class established over a given territory and engaged in the expropriation of economic resources from a class of exploited producers, the center of all history indeed becomes the struggle between exploiters and the exploited. History, then, correctly told, is essentially the history of the victories and defeats of the rulers in their attempt to maximize exploitatively appropriated income and of the ruled in their attempts to resist and reverse this tendency. It is in this assessment of history that Austrians and Marxists agree, and it is why a notable intellectual affinity between Austrian and Marxist historical investigations exists. Both oppose a historiography which recognizes only action or interaction, economically and morally all on a par; and both oppose a historiography that instead of adopting such a value neutral stand thinks that one’s own arbitrarily introduced subjective value judgments have to provide the foil for one’s historical narratives.

Rather, history must be told in terms of freedom and exploitation, parasitism and economic impoverishment, private property and its destruction—otherwise it is told false. While productive enterprises come into or go out of existence because of voluntary support or its absence, a ruling class never comes to power because there is a demand for it, nor does it abdicate when abdication is demonstrably demanded. One cannot say by any stretch of the imagination that homesteaders, producers, savers and contractors have demanded their expropriation. They must be coerced into accepting it, and this proves conclusively that the exploitation firm is not in demand at all. Nor can one say that a ruling class can be brought down by abstaining from transactions with it in the same way as one can bring down a productive enterprise. For the ruling class acquires its income through nonproductive and noncontractual transactions and thus is unaffected by boycotts. Rather, what makes the rise of an exploitation firm possible, and what alone can in turn bring it down is a specific state of public opinion or, in Marxist terminology, a specific state of class consciousness. An exploiter creates victims, and victims are potential enemies. It is possible that this resistance can be lastingly broken down by force in the case of a group of men exploiting another group of roughly the same size. However, more than force is needed to expand exploitation over a population many times its own size. For this to happen, a firm must also have public support. A majority of the population must accept the exploitative actions as legitimate. This acceptance can range from active enthusiasm to passive resignation. But it must be acceptance in the sense that a majority must have given up the idea of actively or passively resisting any attempt to enforce nonproductive and noncontractual property acquisitions. The class consciousness must be low, undeveloped and fuzzy. Only as long as this state of affairs lasts is there still room for an exploitative firm to prosper even if no actual demand for it exists. Only if and insofar as the exploited and expropriated develop a clear idea of their own situation and are united with other members of their class through an ideological movement which gives expression to the idea of a classless society where all exploitation is abolished, can the power of the ruling class be broken. Only if, and insofar as, a majority of the exploited public becomes consciously integrated into such a movement and accordingly displays a common outrage over all nonproductive or noncontractual property acquisitions, shows a contempt for everyone who engages in such acts, and deliberately contributes nothing to help make them successful (not to mention actively trying to obstruct them), can its power be brought to crumble.

The gradual abolition of feudal and absolutist rule and the rise of increasingly capitalist societies in Western Europe and the U.S., and along with the unheard-of economic growth and rising population numbers were the result of an increasing class consciousness among the exploited, who were ideologically molded together through the doctrines of natural rights and liberalism. In this Austrians and Marxists agree. They disagree, however, on the next assessment: The reversal of this liberalization process and steadily increased levels of exploitation in these societies since the last third of the nineteenth century, and particularly pronounced since WW I, are the result of a loss in class consciousness. In fact, in the Austrian view Marxism must accept much of the blame for this development by misdirecting attention from the correct exploitation model of the homesteader-producer-saver-contractor vs. the non-homesteader-producer-saver-contractor to the fallacious model of the wage earner vs. the capitalist, thus muddling things up.

The establishment of a ruling class over an exploited one many times its size by coercion and the manipulation of public opinion (i.e., a low degree of class consciousness among the exploited), finds its most basic institutional expression in the creation of a system of public law superimposed on private law. The ruling class sets itself apart and protects its position as a ruling class by adopting a constitution for their firm’s operations. On the one hand, by formalizing the internal operations within the state apparatus as well as its relations vis-àvis the exploited population, a constitution creates some degree of legal stability. The more familiar and popular private law notions are incorporated into constitutional and public law, the more conducive this will be to the creation of favorable public opinion. On the other hand, any constitution and public law also formalizes the exemplary status of the ruling class as regards the homesteading principle. It formalizes the right of the state’s representatives to engage in nonproductive and noncontractual property acquisitions and the ultimate subordination of private to public law.

Class justice, i.e., a dualism of one set of laws for the rulers and another for the ruled, comes to bear in this dualism of public and private law and in the domination and infiltration of public law over and into private law. It is not because private-property rights are recognized by law, as Marxists think, that class justice is established. Rather, class justice comes into being precisely whenever a legal distinction exists between a class of persons acting under and being protected by public law and another class acting under and being protected instead by some subordinate private law. More specifically then, the basic proposition of the Marxist theory of the state in particular is false. The state is not exploitative because it protects the capitalists’ property rights, but because it itself is exempt from the restriction of having to acquire property productively and contractually.

In spite of this fundamental misconception, however, Marxism, because it correctly interprets the state as exploitative (contrary, for instance, to the Public Choice School, which sees it as a normal firm among others), is on to some important insights regarding the logic of state operations. For one thing, it recognizes the strategic function of redistributionist state policies. As an exploitative firm, the state must at all times be interested in a low degree of class consciousness among the ruled. The redistribution of property and income—a policy of divide et impera—is the state’s means with which it can create divisiveness among the public and destroy the formation of a unifying class consciousness of the exploited. Furthermore, the redistribution of state power itself through democratizing the state constitution and opening up every ruling position to everyone and granting everyone the right to participate in the determination of state personnel and policy is a means for reducing the resistance against exploitation as such. Second, the state is indeed, as Marxists see it, the great center of ideological propaganda and mystification: Exploitation is really freedom; taxes are really voluntary contributions; noncontractual relations are really “conceptually” contractual ones; no one is ruled by anyone but we all rule ourselves; without the state neither law nor security would exist; and the poor would perish, etc. All of this is part of the ideological superstructure designed to legitimize an underlying basis of economic exploitation.

And finally, Marxists are also correct in noticing the close association between the state and business, especially the banking elite—even though their explanation for it is faulty. The reason is not that the bourgeois establishment sees and supports the state as the guarantor of private property rights and contractualism. On the contrary, the establishment correctly perceives the state as the very antithesis to private property that it is and takes a close interest in it for this reason. The more successful a business, the larger the potential danger of governmental exploitation, but the larger also the potential gains that can be achieved if it can come under government’s special protection and is exempt from the full weight of capitalist competition. This is why the business establishment is interested in the state and its infiltration. The ruling elite in turn is interested in close cooperation with the business establishment because of its financial powers. In particular, the banking elite is of interest because as an exploitative firm the state naturally wishes to possess complete autonomy for counterfeiting. By offering to cut the banking elite in on its own counterfeiting machinations and allowing them to counterfeit on top of its own counterfeited notes under a regime of fractional reserve banking, the state can easily reach this goal and establish a system of state monopolized money and cartelized banking controlled by the central bank. And through this direct counterfeiting connection with the banking system and by extension the banks’ major clients, the ruling class in fact extends far beyond the state apparatus to the very nerve centers of civil society—not that much different, at least in appearance, from the picture that Marxists like to paint of the cooperation between banking, business elites and the state.

Competition within the ruling class and among different ruling classes brings about a tendency toward increasing concentration. Marxism is right in this. However, its faulty theory of exploitation again leads it to locate the cause for this tendency in the wrong place. Marxism sees such a tendency as inherent in capitalist competition. Yet it is precisely so long as people are engaged in a clean capitalism that competition is not a form of zero-sum interaction. The homesteader, the producer, saver and contractor do not gain at another’s expense. Their gains either leave another’s physical possessions completely unaffected or they actually imply mutual gains (as in the case of all contractual exchanges). Capitalism thus can account for increases in absolute wealth. But under its regime no systematic tendency toward relative concentration can be said to exist.

Instead, zero-sum interactions characterize not only the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, but also between competing rulers. Exploitation defined as nonproductive and noncontractual property acquisitions is only possible as long as there is anything that can be appropriated. Yet if there were free competition in the business of exploitation, there would obviously be nothing left to expropriate. Thus, exploitation requires monopoly over some given territory and population; and the competition between exploiters is by its very nature eliminative and must bring about a tendency toward relative concentration of exploitative firms as well as a tendency toward centralization within each exploitative firm. The development of states rather than capitalist firms provides the foremost illustration of this tendency: There are now a significantly smaller number of states with exploitative control over much larger territories than in previous centuries. And within each state apparatus there has in fact been a constant tendency toward increasing the powers of the central government at the expense of its regional and local subdivisions. Yet outside the state apparatus a tendency toward relative concentration has also become apparent for the same reason. Not, as should be clear by now, because of any trait inherent in capitalism, but because the ruling class has expanded its rule into the midst of civil society through the creation of a state-banking-business alliance and in particular the establishment of a system of central banking. If a concentration and centralization of state power then takes place, it is only natural that this be accompanied by a parallel process of relative concentration and cartelization of banking and industry. Along with increased state powers, the associated banking and business establishment’s powers of eliminating or putting economic competitors at a disadvantage by means of nonproductive and/or noncontractual expropriations increases. Business concentration is the reflection of a “state-ization” of economic life.

The primary means for the expansion of state power and the elimination of rival exploitation centers is war and military domination. Interstate competition implies a tendency toward war and imperialism. As centers of exploitation their interests are by nature antagonistic. Moreover, with each of them—internally—in command of the instrument of taxation and absolute counterfeiting powers, it is possible for the ruling classes to let others pay for their wars. Naturally, if one does not have to pay for one’s risky ventures oneself, but can force others to do so, one tends to be a greater risk taker and more trigger happy than one would otherwise be. Marxism, contrary to much of the so-called bourgeois social sciences, gets the facts right: there is indeed a tendency toward imperialism operative in history; and the foremost imperialist powers are indeed the most advanced capitalist nations. Yet the explanation is once again faulty. It is the state as an institution exempt from the capitalist rules of property acquisitions that is by nature aggressive. And the historical evidence of a close correlation between capitalism and imperialism only seemingly contradicts this. It finds its explanation, easily enough, in the fact that in order to come out successfully from interstate wars, a state must be in command of sufficient (in relative terms) economic resources. Ceteris paribus, the state with more ample resources will win. As an exploitative firm, a state is by nature destructive of wealth and capital accumulation. Wealth is produced exclusively by civil society; and the weaker the state’s exploitative powers, the more wealth and capital society accumulates. Thus, paradoxical as it may sound at first, the weaker or the more liberal a state is internally, the further developed capitalism is; a developed capitalist economy to extract from makes the state richer; and a richer state then makes for more and more successful expansionist wars. It is this relationship that explains why initially the states of Western Europe, and in particular Great Britain, were the leading imperialist powers, and why in the 20th century this role has been assumed by the U.S.

And a similarly straightforward yet once again entirely non-Marxist explanation exists for the observation always pointed out by Marxists, that the banking and business establishment is usually among the most ardent supporters of military strength and imperial expansionism. It is not because the expansion of capitalist markets requires exploitation, but because the expansion of state protected and privileged business requires that such protection be extended also to foreign countries and that foreign competitors be hampered through noncontractual and nonproductive property acquisitions in the same way or more so than internal competition. Specifically, it supports imperialism if this promises to lead to a position of military domination of one’s own allied state over another. For then, from a position of military strength, it becomes possible to establish a system of—as one may call it—monetary imperialism. The dominating state will use its superior power to enforce a policy of internationally coordinated
inflation. Its own central bank sets the pace in the process of counterfeiting, and the central banks of the dominated states are ordered to use its currency as their own reserves and inflate on top of them. This way, along with the dominating state and as the earliest receivers of the counterfeit reserve currency its associated banking and business establishment can engage in an almost costless expropriation of foreign property owners and income producers. A double layer of exploitation of a foreign state and a foreign elite on top of a national state and elite is imposed on the exploited class in the dominated territories, causing prolonged economic dependency and relative economic stagnation vis-à-vis the dominant nation. It is this—very uncapitalist—situation that characterizes the status of the United States and the U.S. dollar and that gives rise to the—correct—charge of U.S. economic exploitation and dollar imperialism.

Contrary to Marxist claims, this is not the result of any historical laws, however. In fact, no such things as inexorable historical laws as Marxists conceive of them exist. Nor is it the result of a tendency for the rate of profit to fall with an increased organic composition of capital (an increase in the proportion of constant to variable capital, that is), as Marx thinks. Just as the labor theory of value is false beyond repair, so is the law of the tendential fall of the profit rate, which is based on it. The source of value, interest and profit is not the expenditure of labor but of acting, i.e., the employment of scarce means in the pursuit of goals by agents who are constrained by time preference and uncertainty (imperfect knowledge). There is no reason to suppose, then, that changes in the organic composition of capital should have any systematic relation to changes in interest and profit.

Instead, the likelihood of crises which stimulate the development of a higher degree of class consciousness (i.e., the subjective conditions for the overthrow of the ruling class) increases because—to use one of Marx’s favorite terms—of the dialectics of exploitation which I have already touched on earlier: Exploitation is destructive of wealth formation. Hence, in the competition of exploitative firms (of states), less exploitative or more liberal ones tend to outcompete more exploitative ones because they are in command of more ample resources. The process of imperialism initially has a relatively liberating effect on societies coming under its control. A relatively more capitalist social model is exported to relatively less capitalist (more exploitative) societies. The development of productive forces is stimulated: economic integration is furthered, division of labor extended, and a genuine world market established. Population figures go up in response, and expectations as regards the economic future rise to unprecedented heights. With exploitative domination taking hold, and interstate competition reduced or even eliminated in a process of imperialist expansionism, however, the external constraints on the dominating state’s power of internal exploitation and expropriation gradually disappear. Internal exploitation, taxation and regulation begin to increase the closer the ruling class comes to its ultimate goal of world domination. Economic stagnation sets in and the—worldwide—higher expectations become frustrated. And this—high expectations and an economic reality increasingly falling behind these expectations—is the classical situation for the emergence of a revolutionary potential. A desperate need for ideological solutions to the emerging crises arises, along with a more widespread recognition of the fact that state rule, taxation and regulation—far from offering such a solution—actually constitute the very problem that must be overcome. If in this situation of economic stagnation, crises, and ideological disillusion a positive solution is offered in the form of a systematic and comprehensive libertarian philosophy coupled with its economic counterpart: Austrian economics; and if this ideology is propagated by an activist movement, then the prospects of igniting the revolutionary potential to activism become overwhelmingly positive and promising. Antistatist pressures will mount and bring about an irresistible tendency toward dismantling the power of the ruling class and the state as its instrument of exploitation.

If and insofar as this occurs, however, this will not mean social ownership of means of production, contrary to the Marxist model. In fact, social ownership is not only economically inefficient as has already been explained; it is incompatible with the idea that the state is “withering away.” For if means of production are owned collectively, and if it is realistically assumed that not everyone’s ideas as to how to employ these means of production happen to coincide (as if by miracle), then it is precisely socially owned factors of production which require continued state actions, i.e., an institution coercively imposing one person’s will on another disagreeing one’s. Instead, the withering away of the state, and with this the end of exploitation and the beginning of liberty and unheard-of economic prosperity, means the establishment of a pure private property society regulated by nothing but private law.

The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 1993, http://mises.org/books/economicsethics.pdf.