Sins of the Freedom Center and its Textbook
Not content with establishing beachheads in the form of “Freedom Centers” on well over 400 U.S. college and university campuses, the Kochs and their donor network have been busy pushing into K-12 classrooms.
As many readers no doubt already know, here in Tucson a couple years ago, the UA “Freedom Center” managed to slip its “Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship” dual enrollment high school course into the TUSD system without the required board approval. Members of Kochs Off Campus! fought back, and last December, the TUSD Board voted to stop offering the course, effective fall 2018. In July, the Board effectively reaffirmed that decision, but the door was left open for proponents to try to get the course reinstated. Which they are doing.
The course has now morphed from a full-year version that fulfilled the Arizona high school economics requirement into a one-semester elective focusing on entrepreneurship, despite the extremely poor presentation (see discussion below) of the risks and demands of entrepreneurship in the Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship [EEE] textbook that would still be used. One might wonder why, at this point, after two rebuffs from the TUSD Board, supporters of the course and the textbook persist in trying to keep the course in the TUSD curriculum.
Part of the answer – perhaps the most important part – can be found in the donor agreement with the John Templeton Foundation, which bankrolled the development of the “EEE” course and textbook to the tune of $2.9 million dollars, as well as on that foundation’s website [see https://www.templeton.org/grant/philosophy-politics-and-economics-of-freedom]. The funders hope that the UA “Freedom Center” will become the international headquarters of a global empire of instruction in “freedom economics,” infusing young minds with a positive view of the “free-market” capitalism that the Templeton Foundation supports. So, given such big plans, it is no surprise that the UA “Freedom Center” is fighting to keep the course alive, in whatever form, in TUSD. Rather embarrassing, isn’t it, for an international headquarters not to be able to get its product adopted on its own doorstep, in the very school district where it is physically located, one of the largest school districts in the whole state of Arizona?
Unfortunately for the supporters of the course, TUSD policy requires that textbooks for proposed courses go on display for public review and comment for a period of 60 days. The authors of the EEE textbook—i.e., “Freedom Center” director David Schmidtz and his wife, Cathleen Johnson—produced one (1) copy of the so-called 3rd “printing” of the book, which is in reality a (somewhat) corrected edition of the original printing, which suffered from hundreds of grammatical errors, omitted words, etc. The authors refused, however, to allow the public access to the online version of the book, which is what would normally be used for the course, and which contains photos and informational figures absent from the printed version. As a result, TUSD Superintendent Trujillo exercised the option of appointing a citizens’ committee to review the book. Schmidtz and Johnson have persisted in refusing to allow access to the online version or to provide additional copies of the 3rd “printing” of the book that is still on display at the Lee Instructional Center. Consequently, committee members are now reading copies of the 2nd (!) printing of the book that TUSD had previously acquired.
Those familiar with the M.O. of the Koch donor network over the past several decades will recognize the usual pattern of entitlement, arrogance, obstructionism, and secrecy. No surprises there. What might surprise, though, is the abysmal quality of the EEE textbook itself. I’ve already mentioned how poorly the original version of the book was proofread. It appears that at least some of those mistakes have now been corrected, but the book’s more fundamental deficiencies remain unchanged. Those consist of sins of both commission and omission; the former are considerable, but in the end, the latter far outweigh them.
The sins of commission begin with a string of nonsense about prehistoric human beings in the introduction and continue right through to a closing gush of self-intoxicated rhetorical uplift on the last page. In between, one gets (for instance) the bizarre (and repeated) claim that the chief motivation of people in business is not to make money, but to “be of service” to their fellow human beings; gross exaggeration of the economic importance of entrepreneurs; a very incomplete, slanted analysis of the failure of Jamestown [pp 180ff – page references are to the original printing of the textbook, which is the one this writer has and the one that is – sometimes – available on Amazon]; sustained, repellent contempt for ordinary wage-earning people [e.g., pg 63], together with relentless glamorizing of entrepreneurs; ongoing and gratuitous sniping at what the right-wing authors apparently view as favorites of the left (e.g., the minimum wage [pp 142, 144, 203, 209] and Native Americans [pg 176]); serious understatement of the degree to which monopolies can erect barriers to competition [pg 202]; a poorly justified and somewhat capricious bias toward privatization [e.g., pg 34, which seems to okay subsidizing “schools and hospitals,” but not roads]; the untenable claim that capitalism and entrepreneurship are like “science,” even though, unlike “science,” they do not accommodate controlled experiments or allow for controlled formulation and then proof or disproof of “hypotheses” [pg 241]; rank pandering to the Kochs’ latest marketing gimmick, the 2014 “Well-Being Initiative” [pp 213 and 244]; and, last and least, an obnoxious penchant for name-dropping (note how Adam Smith suddenly pops up out of the blue, with no explanation of who he is, or phrases like “Pareto-superior moves” [pg 192] that are guaranteed to leave just about any teenager scratching their head!).
What one does not get, ever, is the whole story. What EEE leaves out is far more important than the moments of snarkiness, ignorance, venality, or flagrant bias it leaves in, and what is left out is far more harmful, potentially, to its intended teenage audience, which may be able to detect and dismiss acts of aggression by the authors but is a lot less likely to detect acts of suppression. Acts of suppression result in something just not being there, and how can one notice the absence of something unless one has enough experience of life to have a reasonable expectation about what ought to be there, but is not?The graver omissions in EEE include the following:
Any acknowledgement of the extreme libertarian ideology underlying and governing the textbook (i.e., no “truth in labeling”);
Ordinary human ties that do NOT involve pecuniary transactions – e.g., family ties or ties among members of a group;
Unpaid work, aka “the second shift” (the only acknowledgement of this enormous sector of human activity is a reference to “odd jobs done around the house…by the homeowner”—presumably male; so much for “women’s work!” [EEE, pg 226])
Volunteer work
Collectively owned enterprises (as opposed to “guilds” and “communes,” which are marginal or non-existent in the modern American economy, but which the authors do write about – a rather odd choice in an introductory text on economics);
The transfer of wealth and its social effects;
Theories of economics or liberty besides Adam Smith’s, John Stuart Mill’s, or Friedrich Hayek’s and James Buchanan’s (in a book that purports to offer a general introduction to economics!)
Mention of any leading economists besides Smith, Hayek, or Buchanan, and that includes John Maynard Keynes and even Milton Friedman (!);
The obvious fact that some demand (e.g., for basic needs, such as healthcare) is NOT elastic;
An honest portrait of the grave risks and the often significant human costs of truly innovative (or other) entrepreneurship for the friends and family of entrepreneurs, not to mention the entrepreneurs themselves;
Labor unions and their crucial role in the evolution of modern economies;
Examples of the positive role of government regulation and government interventions in modern regulated market economies (e.g., in A.D. 2008);
The repeated and numerous failures of market economies (aka capitalism) to function without major government intervention (i.e., panics, bubbles, crashes, recessions, depressions);
The positive results of the New Deal (e.g., infrastructure created by the WPA, the TVA system, etc.) – but that would have contravened the authors’ assertion that taxes and government action using taxes cannot create “wealth;”
Down-to-earth information on the realities of starting and running a business, rather than high-flying theoretical discussions or examples that come from the world of well-capitalized corporations;
In-depth discussion of the full range of ethical problems a small businessperson is likely to encounter and of the pressures to fudge the truth (or worse) that the world of business exerts on businesspeople;
The abusive practices of capitalism that continue outside the First World and still affect a large percentage of the human race;
The dependence of capitalism on those practices, plus outright pillaging and theft, especially but not only in the past;
The deteriorating conditions, economic and otherwise, for more and more workers during the last 30 years in this country;
Oligarchy, and its growing role in the contemporary world;
Data, in general, rather than just a priori theorizing;
Recent economic data [e.g., the data discussed on pp 233-35 stop at 2003, even though data through 2014 were available when this book was written – but then, the authors would have had to deal the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and thereafter, as well as the effects of the U.S. war in the Middle East and the Bush tax cuts];
An index;
A bibliography;
Footnotes;
Arguments (and evidence) for and against the authors’ many unsupported assertions (how can one teach critical thinking without practicing and modeling it!)
The upshot is: there is a lot more that ISN’T in this book, and ought to be, than what IS in it. Really, the Templeton Foundation ought to demand its money back. Is this the best that the UA “Freedom Center” could produce for almost $3M?
