Criticism of Libertarianism

[sashi]

Five pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

[ericbarbour]

Lol so much for that thread....I wouldn't say libertarian ideas don't "spread everywhere" so much as they are taken up mostly by a specific cohort of angry men. Usually anti-feminists (hell yeah many of them are guys who can't get laid of course, loool).

That's part of what makes Ayn Rand so "funny". She codified much of it and manchildren went for it. The fact that she was female and from a well-to-do Russian Jewish family makes it all the more bizarre. (I've noticed that a lot of modern-day "alt right" pseudo-libertarians often tend to be anti-semitic--and incapable of understanding "irony".)

[Strelnikov]

Lol so much for that thread....I wouldn't say libertarian ideas don't "spread everywhere" so much as they are taken up mostly by a specific cohort of angry men. Usually anti-feminists (hell yeah many of them are guys who can't get laid of course, loool).

That's part of what makes Ayn Rand so "funny". She codified much of it and manchildren went for it. The fact that she was female and from a well-to-do Russian Jewish family makes it all the more bizarre. (I've noticed that a lot of modern-day "alt right" pseudo-libertarians often tend to be anti-semitic--and incapable of understanding "irony".)

The antisemitism in Libertarian circles goes back to the 1940s; many of them were survivors of the 1930s fascist/National Socialist wave backed by German money; the Koch brothers went along with it, because if you could discredit history, you might be able to sink the New Deal. They cut off guys like James J. Martin, Austin App, and Robert LeFevre when Reagan hit office in 1980 because they wanted to ramrod their Libertarianism in with the conservative wave. The philosophy has done endless damage to the US government and society in general, because it's shilling posing as scholarship.

[Strelnikov]

I tried to post this before but the site rejected it: the pdf of "meet Charles Koch's Brain", the story of Robert LeFevre, the former "I AM" cultist, Depression-era flim-flam man, leader of a sex cult, Red-baiter, FBI stooge, friend of Willis Carto, and repeated failed businessman who trained Charlie Koch in the fine arts of Libertarian horseshit and working with Holocaust deniers (because the early ranks of libertarianism were shot through with two types: free-market hucksters like Ludwig von Mises and the Foundation for Economic Education* or the ex-Nazi Holocaust denier-types that actually had academic backgrounds, such as Austin J. App and James J. Martin.) Article mentions how LeFevre and Frank Chodorov battled to control a lectern in 1961 because Chodorov had a stroke mid-speech but would not sit down even though he was saying gibberish, with LeFevre fighting him to sit down so he could finish Chodorov's remarks. And you will read very little to nothing about this stuff on Wikipedia thanks to Libertarian fanatics or paid editing, or both.

_______________________________________________
* Heavily backed by "The Big Three auto makers GM, Chrysler and Ford; top oil majors including Gulf Oil, Standard Oil, and Sun Oil; major steel producers US Steel, National Steel, Republic Steel; major retailers including Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field and Sears; chemicals majors Monsanto and DuPont; and other Fortune 500 corporations including General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, BF Goodrich, ConEd, and more." (according to Mark Ames, in "The True History of Libertarianism") Organization was run by a former US Chamber of Commerce executive named Leonard Read. Von Mises was there to give the corporate shilling some intellectual respectability, it was his first gig as a foreign professor in the United States.

[Strelnikov]

And now Charles Koch is trying to screw up high school Introduction to Philosophy courses:

The Handmaiden of Entrepreneurship: Philosophy in the time of Charles Koch

David V. Johnson, The Baffler

When you hear the phrase “Philosophy 101,” what comes to mind? Like me, you might think of skepticism, the Socratic method, the law of non-contradiction, the mind-body problem, the categorical imperative, the problem of induction, the social contract, the trolley problem—in other words, the classic quandaries and ideas from the history of philosophy useful for an introductory overview of the subject.

One word that probably doesn’t come to mind is “entrepreneurship.” The University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom would like to change that.

Funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the institute synergizes the intellectual heft of one of the leading philosophy departments in the country, especially thanks to its political theorists, with the advancement of libertarian and free-market ideals in higher education and beyond. The Center’s director, David Schmidtz, embodies this marriage: a notable political philosopher and expert on Adam Smith, he is also a libertarian who is using Koch money and donations from other conservative businessmen to fund free-market-oriented research and public outreach.

Narrowly construed, none of this is obviously objectionable: Many initiatives in higher education nowadays are funded by philanthropy, and libertarian ideas have their place in free and open academic debate. Critics of such initiatives have to be careful, lest they condemn other forms of funding for ideas and research that they like.

The center offers a course called “Philosophy 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship” for Arizona high school students “interested in going beyond the basic state standards for economics,” the center’s website says. “Students will come away better prepared for college, and for the ethical challenges that go with careers in business, or in law, politics, education, or journalism.” The center also offers workshops to train teachers to bring the course to their high schools.

Although the course is typically taught with digital materials, Schmidtz and University of Arizona colleagues Cathleen Johnson and Robert Lusch published a textbook named after the course, Ethics, Economy & Entrepreneurship, for those high school and college professors who want to teach Philosophy 101—i.e. an introduction to entrepreneurship—to their charges. A student and former professor of philosophy myself, I eagerly ordered a copy via Amazon Prime and dove in. What I found was a peculiar mixture of the utterly banal and the frighteningly ideological. The best introductory philosophy books avoid both, the less successful tend toward the former; but until now, no professionally produced introductory textbook in philosophy I’ve read leaned toward the latter.

First, the banal: The body of the book is largely a competent introduction to economics, business, and finance. Readers learn the basics about supply and demand, price, monopoly and monopsony, money, GDP, marginal value, and so on. It also explains some of the elementary philosophical concepts that ground a market economy, such as value, knowledge, trust, and property. Finally, it also offers some useful guidance on credit, accounting, and budgeting to those many high school students aspire to start their own small businesses. (I don’t know about you, but in my experience, the few high schoolers who had this desire were the ones who sold pot—which, to be fair, has become a perfectly respectable business of late.) If these chapters of the book were used in Economics 101 or Business 101 for high schoolers, I would find little problem.

But the “ethics” portion of the Philosophy 101 textbook—the only part that is nominally philosophy—recasts the entire course. The bread holding this econ-and-business sandwich together at both ends is a libertarian ideological framework that blurs the distinction between the market and community, and identifies market values as fully determinative of ethical, social, and cooperative value. In so doing, the textbook offers up about as alarming a display of Koch-inspired free-market propaganda as I have ever come across.

Consider page one, from the introduction, which poses the fundamental nature of human existence in the following way:

The human condition is that we each arrive as newborn babies to a world that does not need us. The greatest and most joyful challenge of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around you better off with you than without you. It is within your power to show up at the marketplace with something to offer that will make others glad to know you.

It would certainly be news to evolutionary anthropologists that human parents, and indeed the larger tribal groups of which they are members, have no need of their offspring. It would also be surprising to the many philosophers, such as Aristotle, who see the building blocks of human society in families, households, and other basic social groupings, rather than individuals. But in the authors’ entrepreneurial hermeneutics, all of us are born orphans, claiming true love and respect only when we create something of value in the marketplace that other people need. Here Heidegger’s concept of geworfenheit (thrownness)—the idea that our existence consists of feeling thrown into circumstances not of our choosing—is spun into a social-Darwinist tale worthy of Herbert Spencer.

And how do we advance from our infant worthlessness? By getting our hustle on:

Homo sapiens became the wisest of primates around forty thousand years ago when we learned to make deals with strangers. . . . That’s humanity’s super-power: not wings, fins, or fangs but our ability to make deals.

Yes, at the apex of that famous series of photographs from knuckle-dragging primates, to coarse Neanderthal, to upright homo sapiens, is Donald J. Trump, the deal maker.

Paired with this appallingly narrow vision of human life is an emaciated concept of ethics and human community, in which the market is elevated for all its communal aspects and non-market communal values are ignored or dismissed. In its introductory discussion of ethics, it defines the subject as “how people have to live in order for the world to be a better place with them than without them.” On its face, this definition sounds innocuous. But as we read how the authors make use of it, we see why it avoids talking more straightforwardly about ethics in terms of one’s obligations to other people. The entrepreneur who can claim to have made the world a better place through his business savvy can’t be said to owe anything more to others or to the community beyond the good he has already provided as an entrepreneur. Assuming he has followed the law and acted with integrity (i.e. not cheated or defrauded other market actors), he has done all that can be expected of him.

Behold the lynchpin of the book’s introductory thoughts on the point of ethics:

Imagine that 70 years from now, you are lying in bed, and you have done just about everything you are going to do in this life. Whatever time you have left, you will spend that time wondering what your life was all about. . . .

If you can say, I made a pile of money, that is good. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But you already know that there is something better than making a pile of money. Better is being able to say: I made the world a better place. It is good that I was here. I showed up. I believed in something.

The deathbed fantasy is certainly a common way to introduce the importance of ethics to people who can’t be assumed to understand its importance. But it’s also a peculiarly narcissistic way to introduce it. Sure, it’s important to come to the end of life, ideally a time of honesty where there are no temptations and incentives to cloud one’s judgment, and believe that we have lived ethically. The real question is what it even is to live ethically, day by day in the middle of life, so that one isn’t deluded on that death bed. But the authors make no mention of the prevailing theories on this (e.g. Utilitarianism, Kantianism, Virtue Ethics, let alone Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments), instead settling for a system “that encourages agents in the market place to be on the lookout for opportunities to make Pareto-superior moves.”

Admittedly, the ways in which trade has led to the formation of cooperative relationships that undergird a community or society has been the subject of an enormous body of thought and research going back to ancient philosophy. But no fair and reasonable discussion of such arguments—certainly not in an introductory textbook for high schoolers—can conclude that the market alone suffices to explain social cooperation and norms. One cannot simply conclude from F.A. Hayek’s discussion of how market agents settle on the price of tin that “what emerges from the haggling is not only a deal but something larger: a community.” One cannot state flatly, as a basic principle, that, “A society where people are free to trade will be a cooperative venture for mutual benefit,” because there is more that goes into cooperation than market rationality.

This free-market ideology plagues the textbook’s thoughts not only on ethics but also on more mundane matters. Taxes, for example, are a straightforward necessity for a market society that requires institutions to enforce rules and protect market actors, yet libertarians always seem to sputter over such an obvious and ethical requirement. This textbook is no different, entreating its students to consider the circle game, a thought experiment from libertarian economist David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom, which it claims illustrates the unseen consequences of taxes:

Imagine a circle of a hundred taxpayers. You are the tax collector. You go round the circle, taking a penny from each and then you pick one out of the hundred for a fifty-cent windfall. That person is now delighted and thinks taxes are a good thing on balance.

Now do the same thing another hundred times, picking a different person each time for a fifty-cent windfall. In end, we’ve taken a hundred from each taxpayer, we have given back fifty to each, and everyone is happy and thinks taxes are a good thing on balance.

Why are they happy? Because they see the fifty-cent windfall, and may even come to depend on it.

They do not see the hundred cents they paid for that fifty-cent windfall, because that was taken from them one cent at a time. The way the pennies add up is unseen.

(Emphasis added.)

Yes, where do those unseen fifty cents from each round of taking go? It’s as if they disappear into a black hole—just like taxes! Of course, if the value of tax withholdings is unseen to you, it’s perhaps because you have a very narrow, market-oriented view of society—one that acknowledges (begrudgingly) how taxes pay for functioning markets in the first place, but cannot bear that even a penny of their value creation go to any communal purpose beyond the market. (You know, there is a technical phrase for this I picked up from my deep reading of abstruse philosophy texts: “blinded by greed.”)

Taxes not only go to the taxpayer’s immediate community but to the community enterprise as a going concern. On this matter the textbook hawks a line worthy of Ayn Rand’s worship of railroad barons. The authors target Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s famous comments on fair taxation, that those who become wealthy have a social obligation to “take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along,” because no one becomes wealthy without myriad benefits that society provides. Sensible enough, and the textbook’s authors—to their immense credit—acknowledge that the wealthy are obligated to pay what they legally owe to other parties, such as their employees, contractors, the IRS, et al. But they are troubled by Warren’s idea that they also owe future generations. Did Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, have such an obligation, they ask? Suppose for the sake of argument that he did.

Then the question becomes, did Edison, in fact, pay it forward? Did he help the next kid who comes along? And the answer is this: yes, of course, he gave something to the next kid who comes along. He gave that kid the light bulb.

Here again the only so-called philosophy driven home in this decidedly unphilosophical book is that there are no communal values, no ethical obligations to other people; there is only what you owe, and what you provide to, the market.

Of course, even the authors have to acknowledge that not everything is governed by the market. There are public goods and the commons, about which the book offers some reasonable discussion. And then there are social groupings, great and small, that eschew the market in favor of communal schemes. But, the authors argue, such doomed-to-failure experiments hardly deserve to be called communities at all:

In practice, communal regimes can lead to careless dumping of wastes, ranging from piles of unwashed dishes to ecological disasters that threaten whole continents. People get lazy and just don’t care enough about the sorts of basic courtesy—simply cleaning up after yourself—that good neighbors care about. You have been around long enough to know what we are talking about.

Here I am reminded of the late Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen’s way of cashing out the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” in terms of how people cooperate on a camping trip. Whether you ultimately agree with Cohen or not, I’m left wondering whether any of the textbook’s authors have been on a camping trip or lived in a co-op or engaged in any communal activity that does not dangle financial incentives.

The book concludes with a chapter titled “The Entrepreneur and Self-Assessment” in which the lessons for leading “a rewarding entrepreneurial life” are hammered home. Here again we get the same narcissism-spun-as-life-ethics, in which what the true entrepreneur really cares about is the respect from his community for making it better off thanks to his self-enriching efforts:

Some entrepreneurs may appear to be arrogant, but consistently successful entrepreneurs are not over-confident, and they are not self-absorbed. They understand the basic value proposition. That is, they are political animals, and being successful in life involves building a place for themselves in a community of other political animals. They want something from other people. A big part of what they want is for other people to know and appreciate what they do to be of service.

And what happens when the community at large comes to realize, perhaps by taking Philosophy 101 in high school, the immense value that entrepreneurs provide? Maybe the community will then stop making claims on the entrepreneur, based on such silly notions as “justice” and “fairness,” that he owes it more than simply his light bulb idea. This is what these “political animals” want from other people: to be freed from community ties and what they morally demand. This isn’t ethics; it’s indoctrination into the libertarian outlook on social relations.

The chapter ends with a rousing exhortation to the aspiring student-entrepreneurs worthy of the coal walks at a Tony Robbins’ “Unleash the Power Within” seminars:

What does it take for you to be able to get up in the morning wanting to give thanks for the fact that you have this day—this incredible gift of one more day of not-to-be-wasted life on this earth? What does it take for you to know in your bones that this is your day?

We told you that there would be a test.

“Now go out there and create value!” I can hear the textbook authors yell to their students.

The question for us is what test this textbook and this course present to us. The very libertarian-friendly state of Arizona has a public university with a center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation that provides free-market ideology courses to high school students under the rubric of philosophy. The point here is not to oppose the research and discussion of libertarian ideas in higher education, nor is it to dismiss the salutary idea of introducing philosophy to high school students. This is not what is going on here. This so-called “Philosophy 101” is about shaping the minds of high school students to adopt a radical free-market outlook, and its so-called textbook is propaganda, plain and simple.

[ericbarbour]

The question for us is what test this textbook and this course present to us. The very libertarian-friendly state of Arizona has a public university with a center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation that provides free-market ideology courses to high school students under the rubric of philosophy. The point here is not to oppose the research and discussion of libertarian ideas in higher education, nor is it to dismiss the salutary idea of introducing philosophy to high school students. This is not what is going on here. This so-called “Philosophy 101” is about shaping the minds of high school students to adopt a radical free-market outlook, and its so-called textbook is propaganda, plain and simple.

That would be typical for Arizona State University, which is long famous as a "frat boy party school". The U of A has a somewhat better reputation for academic quality. But in general, this is what one would expect from higher education in Arizona, the "Confederate State no one knows is a Confederate State". The only part of the Southwest where segregation was legal (until 1952, when it began to interfere with business concerns) and the state's major city was co-founded in 1868 by a former Rebel soldier.

And you're right about LeFevre's coverage on Wikipedia; his article has been mucked with repeatedly by Srich32977 and DickClarkMises, both regular glorifiers of the Von Mises content....and it says nothing about the sex cult business....

[Strelnikov]

I might have brought this up in the old thread but Ayn Rand was an admirer of William E. Hickman, a 1920s serial killer, Mark Ames writes about that and the gory details of Hickman's worst crime, the murder-dismemberment of Mary Parker, 12-year-old daughter of Los Angeles banker Perry Parker in 1927.

Just for "balance", here is angry Libertarian "The Ultimate Philosopher" ranting about the "smear" that Rand idolized Hickman. This is the same guy who gave us the absolutely obscure philosophy of Perfectivism and a book titled Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History.

Some of the rantier quotes from the article:

....First off, I want to point out the fact that the anti-Rand smear artists don't get to lift Rand's comments on Hickman from her journals while ignoring the rest of the contents in the book from which those comments came - not if they still expect to maintain a shred of intellectual moral credibility. One doesn't get to do that while ignoring her later (as in decades later), mature journal entries chewing the principle of "the role of the mind in man's existence" (her stated theme of Atlas Shrugged, as any actual scholar with a clue would know). The principle is the same when it came to Rand's decision to accept old-age government benefits (which is consistent with her published comments about accepting government benefits); the smear-artists cannot claim credibility when calling attention to this while ignoring everything else in the book from which this information came.

But that's the nature of these smear-artists, see. Usually they're leftist scum who put political sabotage-activism above moral and intellectual scruples, and who mistake Ayn Rand for their usual easy targets on the political "right." As I've noted elsewhere (see the link immediately below), I don't think that the Left knows how to handle an opponent like Ayn Rand. (It makes a massive difference that she is an Aristotelian and they decidedly are not - and it's a certainty that Aristotle himself would not resort to the moral level of the sewer that these smear-artists inhabit.)

In that context, I'd like to reproduce my comments from a reddit thread [his comment got zero karma and he has not been on Reddit in a year - S.] from a few weeks back in which the subject of Rand's "idolization of Hickman" came up - namely, I'd like to present a much fuller context, which the scummy smear-artists typically choose to ignore. Here are a number of key passages from Rand's journals concerning Hickman, followed by the first part of my commentary that appeared in the original thread comment:

p. 22: "[My hero is] very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me."

p. 37: "[the reaction to] this case is not a moral indignation at a terrible crime. It is the mob's murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against a man who dared to be alone. It is a case of 'we' against 'him.'"

p. 38: "Yes, he is a monster - now. But the worse he is, the worst must be the cause that drove him to this. Isn't it significant that a society was not able to fill the life of an exceptional, intelligent boy, to give him anything to out-balance crime in his eyes? If society is horrified at his crime, it should be horrified at the crime's ultimate cause: itself. The worse the crime - the greater its guilt. What could society answer, if that boy were to say: 'Yes, I'm a monstrous criminal, but what are you?'

"This is what I think of the case. I am afraid that I idealize Hickman and that he might not be this at all. In fact, he probably isn't. But it does not make any difference. If he isn't, he could be, and that's enough. The reaction of society would be the same, if not worse, toward the Hickman I have in mind. The case showed me how society can wreck an exceptional being, and then murder him for being the wreck that it itself has created. This will be the story of the boy in my book."

P. 42: "[The] claim that Hickman's greatest crime is his anti-socialness confirmed my idea of the public's attitude in this case - and explains my involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling just because of this and in spite of everything else."

Some ranters from his comments thread:

Renee Katz March 18, 2014 at 3:41 PM

This reminds me so much of JTHM [Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, a comic Jhonen Vasquez did before creating Invader Zim -S.] it's crazy! I would think that Jhonen Vasquez was thinking the same thing Rand was thinking (almost, I think rand's plot would have been better tho).

Unknown October 28, 2015 at 9:51 AM

Hm, always loved JTHM and never realized how close Johnny was to Rands Heros. I will reread might signed hardcover now, thanks.

Daniel Silvers June 18, 2016 at 9:25 PM

This leftist smear is especially slimy when you read her words on William Hickman in context. What she saw in his crime was a "daring challenge to society," the supposed depravity of which was mitigated by Hickman's status as a Superman victimized by Christianity and its evil altruistic ways.

Rand just saw the case a little differently than did the average man, because she recognized the real villain:

"And when we look at the other side of it -- there is a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim?"

Rand observed that the mass public hatred of Hickman was "because of the man who committed the crime and not because of the crime he committed."

She understood that average people don't really get mad when other people's kids are murdered. They only really get mad if the one who committed it was one of their betters.

She knew society's irrational anger at the Superman William Hickman was more "loathsome" than the crime itself. As she said:

"No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'"

Especially loathsome because she knew the average man had committed crimes far worse than Hickman's. As she wrote:

"It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal...".

They especially hated Hickman's independence:

"It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Other Rand admirers: be wary of that "mass indignation." Unfortunately, the "average man" still wields enough power in society to make life difficult for the Supermen. If you do even the slightest thing wrong, that wrath may be directed at you just as it was at Hickman.

***

I find "Daniel Silvers" darkly hilarious because he is defending a sociopath who allegedly killed chickens and kittens as a child, came from a mother and grandmother who both suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and dropped out of college to run around robbing gas stations for thrills, murdered a girl in Milwaukee, and killed the grandfather of a crime partner by dropping the old man off a bridge. Truly Objectivism and Libertarianism are moral titans of political philosophy and philosophic ethics.

[sashi]

Looks like a book full of interesting histories of Virginia, Chile, North Carolina... from Buchanon to Koch... (through vouchers / private schools)

(from 14:45 or so... (click on historian to skip headlines): 35m interview) Democracy Now! interviews Nancy McLean (Duke) on her book "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America." (She's from the same department as Laurent Dubois and she seems to have written quite a book. )

Brief: Education is expensive. There is no such thing as the public interest.

But it seems awfully partisan as you're watching. David Bernstein (George Mason U), writing (where else?) at the WaPo wants the record set straight:

1 | 2

[Strelnikov]

From 2016, "Wish We Were Here", an NPR show in Colorado, did an entire episode on Robert LeFevre (turns out it it is pronounced "Luh-FAVE") and the Freedom School and the later Rampart College which features Mark Ames, historian Will Schultz, Brian Doherty (who wrote Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement and a Reason magazine hack), many others. The buildings still exist and are used as a summer camp; the school library became a small basketball court.

Link to the episode. It has a slideshow of photos, including shots from the color prospectus of the Freedom School; you get to see how LeFevre went from tall and hulking to a large blob.

[ericbarbour]

I have to add that the "Freedom School" was one of the funniest things Colorado Springs ever had. It has been a weirdly right-wing town since it was founded, but this was the Caketop Decoration of Crazy that really made the whole package. Because it attracted more right-wing cranks and Christian extremists from elsewhere. Something similar is happening in northern Idaho right now.

If anyone in Hollywood was ever looking for a subject to base a satirical movie around, LaFevre would be excellent. In fact, the whole "Trustees" page in the school's bulletin is a riot of fake libertarians and outright loonies. (And Koch and Milliken, who ended up footing many of the bills.)

Wait, let me guess, Wikipedia's coverage of the Freedom School/Rampart is shit because the von Mises Nut Squad is watching it......but of course!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_College
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_School