Book Reviews

54 BOOKS Market Education: The Unknown History by Andrew 1. Coulson Transaction Publishers and the Social Philosophy and Policy Center • 1999 • 430 pages • $54.95 cloth; $24.95 paperback Reviewed by George C. Leef T he most pernicious of all the widely held modem beliefs is that education must be provided by the state. "Education is an enti tlement!" say nearly all politicians and mem bers of the vast education establishment. Few challenge that assertion. The inseparability of school and state is almost as much a given as the separation of church and state. In this book Andrew Coulson takes dead aim at that belief. Coulson, senior research associate at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, is a computer software engineer who developed a strong interest in educational his tory and policy. Market Education: The Unknown History is the product of his research. It's a strong case for letting the free market work in education.

Coulson's historical overview of education al history is extremely beneficial. Govern ment education is so widely assumed to be the only possibility that many will be surprised to learn there have been places and times when government kept out entirely. The author's contrast between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece is illustrative. In Athens, Coulson writes, "with the excep tion of two years of military training, the state played no role in schooling." That, of course, did not mean an uneducated populace. Just as Athenians managed to feed, clothe, and house themselves without any government action, so did they educate themselves. Parents paid monthly tuition for the education of their chil dren at whichever of the numerous private schools they preferred. Schools could survive only by offering educational services parents found sufficiently valuable to pay for. Education was not an "entitlement," and wasn't "equal," but Coulson states that even the poorest families were consumers in the edu cation market.

Education was not static in Athens. "Each step in the evolution of Athenian society was matched by a corresponding change or expan sion in the offerings of educators," Coulson writes. No government planning agency exist ed to decide what subjects must be taught and who was permitted to teach them. The result of this laissez-faire approach was a civiliza tion that far surpassed any other in the ancient world. Athens was the intellectual center of the Mediterranean, a wellspring of genius in science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and more. All those brilliant thinkers working in a culture that esteemed learning-and not a government school to be found! In contrast, Sparta established a govern ment education monopoly to ensure the preservation of the collectivist/militarist phi losophy of Lycurgus and later rulers. Children were regarded as property of the state, which used its education monopoly to breed obedi ent, warlike people ready to sacrifice them selves for the imagined glory of the state.

Intellectual and artistic achievements of the Spartans? Virtually none, Coulson remarks, "apart from being a beacon to those advocat ing totalitarian systems of education." The author's investigation into the history of education, both market-driven and state dominated, proceeds on through Rome, the Middle Ages, the Islamic world (which ini tially followed the Athenian approach, with similarly magnificent results), and eventually to the last several centuries in England, France, Germany, and the United States. He uniformly finds that beneficial consequences have flowed from educational liberty and less desirable if not downright disastrous conse quences from state control. The largest part of the book is Coulson's examination of the American educational experience, and a fascinating study it is. We learn of the struggle of black parents in Boston in the mid-1800s to escape from seg regated public schools, only to lose in a court decision that would become a precedent for the Supreme Court's infamous "separate but equal" doctrine. We learn of the early advo cates of "public education," such as James G.

Carter, who argued that we should emulate Sparta's educational model. We learn of the various failed educational fads that our edu cation "experts" have embraced with terrible results for the human guinea pigs subjected to them. After reading Coulson's lengthy exposi tion, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that abandoning the education marketplace in favor of government schooling is one of our greatest national blunders. The last part of the book turns to the many proposals for education reform that are on the loose. Coulson is not very enthusiastic about any of the nostrums such as charter schools, vouchers, and private management. He does, however, praise the idea of privately funded scholarships to enable children to escape from the clutches of the public school system. Sometimes Coulson drops his scholarly tone in favor of hyperbole, and sometimes he makes important assertions without apparent support. The lapses in the book, however, are microscopic compared to its powerful research and argumentation. If restoration of the free market in education is a matter of importance to you-and it should be-this is a book you don't want to be without. D George Leef is director ofthe Pope Center for High er Education Policy at the John Locke Foundation and book review editor ofThe Freeman.

China in the New Millennium: Market Reforms and Social Development edited by James A. Dorn Cato Institute • 1998 • 416 pages • $24.95 cloth; $15.95 paperback Reviewed by Steven W. Mosher I n June 1997 the Cato Institute sponsored an academic conference in Shanghai, along with Fudan University's Center for American Studies. The government signed off on the event and, for the most part, the Chinese par ticipants carefully avoided sensitive political topics. Not so the irrepressible Cato crowd. James Dorn, Cato's vice president for acad55 emic affairs, reminded his listeners that "The continued success of China's journey to pros perity . . . will depend on whether [they] are willing to allow a true market system to develop, in which individuals can hold secure title to their property and are held accountable for their mistakes, or whether China remains a 'socialist market economy.' " Edward Crane, Cato's president, made the connection with politics explicit. "There are two fundamental ways to order society: Vol untarily, through the private interaction of individuals, associations, religious organiza tions, businesses, and so on . . . or coercively, through state mandates ... because it is in the nature of man to be free . . . society is better off-not just economically but spiritually when politics plays as small a role as possible in societal affairs."

The Chinese participants (who did not have the advantage of holding either American cit izenship or outbound plane tickets) were mostly silent. Professor Zhou Dun Ren stood alone among those who pointed out the con nection between economic and political free dom, suggesting that China needed more of both. "The pointer on the roadmap of the 21st century is for China to go down the road of a true market economy. The more developed China is economically, following the free market model, the more freedom and democ racy will advance." Perhaps it is not surprising that Professor Zhou is the former deputy director of the Center for American Studies. In China, libertarian sentiments do not go unpunished. The conference proceedings, published here, offer abundant evidence that China's steps away from rigid central planning and toward the free market have generated spec tacular economic growth over the past 20 years. Per capita income has increased four fold; exports have skyrocketed. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of dire poverty.

At the same time, China's increased mater ial prosperity has had no discernible effect on the political system, which remains a self perpetuating one-party dictatorship. Despite participant Mao Yushi's claim that "China's economic reforms and opening to the outside 56 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • NOVEMBER 1999 world have advanced both material progress and civil society," evidence of the latter remains scanty. Kate Xiao Zhou argues that women in rural China have experienced a revolutionary change in their lives as their participation in the market has increased their personal auton omy and freedom. In "Market Development and the Rural Women's Revolution in Con temporary China," she writes that rural women by the millions "have participated in the development of markets, the rise of rural industry, and migration." China's economic changes have weakened social controls for women, but it has gained them nothing in terms of political rights from the state. And the weakening of the mediating institutions of family and village, as the one child policy demonstrates, may in some ways render women even more vulnerable to state exploitation. Zhou regrets that this "contem porary rural women's revolution," as she calls it, "has no organization, no leader, and no ide ology," but it could hardly be otherwise. If it did, the Party would see it as a threat. It would be either co-opted or crushed, as the China Democracy Party was recently crushed.

Minxin Pei, assistant professor ofpolitics at Princeton University, draws a connection between the economic liberalization and the thousands of semi-official associations that have sprung up over the past 15 years. Pei sees these associations, which include groups of private entrepreneurs, consumers, and village and township enterprises, as a nascent civil society. This may be too optimistic a reading. Many of these organizations represent pre existing Party and government organizations (the village and township organizations, for instance), and all are required to register their membership and goals with the government. Moreover, a recent government edict forbids the formation of new groups. What is one to make of this increasing gap between China's material prosperity and the retro behavior of the Chinese Communist Party? Crane suggests that China is "at a crossroads, and that it must choose between political society and civil society-that is, between coercion and freedom as society's organizing principle." I believe that China's leaders have chosen-long ago-to organize on the principle of coercion. And there is no evidence I can see that they are wavering in this choice. Indeed, they seem convinced that a continuation of the present "socialist market economy" is their road to national power and personal wealth.

For all the talk about China's "nascent civil society," the People's Republic is at present governed by a single class. This kleptocracy uses its power-combined with the strength of Chinese family ties-to engage in a mas sive accumulation of wealth. Non-relatives the vast majority of the Chinese people-can expect to be cheated. Cato is to be congratulated for going to China and sounding a libertarian call to arms. The conference volume· that resulted is worth reading. But there is no force in China today capable of taking the field against the vast Communist kleptocracy. D Steven Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of the forthcoming Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World. The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate The Free Press. 1998 • 415 pages • $27.50 Reviewed by Daniel Shapiro M any books have discussed political indoctrination on American campuses, but none is as thorough and damning as this one. Alan Kors, a history professor at the Uni versity of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Silver glate, a criminal defense attorney and civil liberties litigator, present overwhelming evi dence that the loss of liberty on campuses is far greater than most people realize. Speech codes, which punish students and faculty for offensive or "harassing" speech, are ubiqui tous. Due process is the exception rather than the rule: secret judicial proceedings routinely deny accused faculty and students the right to be represented by legal counsel, to confront or call witnesses, and to have an impartial judge and appeals process. Most chilling of all, "sensitivity training," a.k.a. thought reform, tells students what to believe and labels them as "in denial" or as "oppressors" unless they profess the politically correct orthodoxy about race, gender, and so on.

Most people, even critics of political cor rectness, are unaware of this system because much of it happens outside the classroom. To see the destruction of liberty on American campuses one must also examine offices of student life, residential advisers, judicial sys tems, deans, freshmen orientation, and the promulgation of rules and regulations. These aspects of the university are inescapable for students (and increasingly for faculty), and punishment for violating its rules occurs behind closed doors. Hence the book's title: The Shadow University. Kors and Silverglate rip the veil off this system, revealing far more cases than have hitherto been reported. Besides providing compelling narratives of various assaults on liberty, the authors also cogently explain the basic moral and constitutional principles of free speech and academic freedom, due process, and freedom of conscience, which are routinely violated throughout academia. A hallmark of their violation is the double stan dard: provocative speech (such as "born again bigot," "Uncle Tom") by the politically cor rect is protected, but those who appear to crit icize feminism, affirmative action, or other reigning orthodoxies may be censored and/or re-educated.

I'll sketch only a few of the incredible cases: a (white) student at the University of Pennsylvania calls noisy (black) students "water buffaloes" and is charged with racial harassment; a professor at Dallas Baptist Uni versity criticizes feminist arguments, is charged with defamation, and is then fired, along with the dean who defended him; a stu dent at Sarah Lawrence is sentenced to sensi tivity training for "homophobia" for laughing at a remark made about a gay student; a Catholic residential adviser at Carnegie Mel lon University is fired for refusing to wear a symbol in support of gay and lesbian stu dents; freshmen orientation at Williams ColBOOKS 57 lege requires everyone to gather in a dark auditorium where insults are hurled at them from all directions; a professor at Cornell University is found guilty of sexual harass ment at a hearing that he is forbidden to attend or call witnesses, and where the head of the investigating committee says "we have to make the rules as we go along."

How did this arise? Bad ideology plus careerist administrators, answer the authors. The bad ideology is New Left theorist Herbert Marcuse's argument in his 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance," that the marketplace of ideas masks repression of "progressive" ideas. To prevent the silencing of these ideas, "reactionary" ideas must be censored. This zero-sum view of freedom is followed by today's defenders of speech codes and other assaults on liberty. (However,the authors give no evidence that today's censors were influ enced by Marcuse.) As for administrators, they perform their jobs in hopes of moving on to a more prestigious position, often at a new campus. To move on, their reign must be rela tively untroubled, which means they aim to appease groups who can cause trouble: mili tant feminists, blacks, and gays. Sacrifice of other people's freedom doesn't matter. I wish the authors had dug deeper on the careerism issue. They remark that colleges and universities have taken on many of the trappings of large corporations, minus the accountability, but they do not discuss whether re-establishingaccountabilityrequires that colleges become proprietary institutions.

Kors and Silverglate suggest two strategies for restoring liberty. First, litigate. Court chal lenges to university oppression frequently succeed. State universities are bound by the First Amendment and the requirements of due process; private universities are contractually bound to keep their promises of free inquiry and procedural fairness. Second, publicize oppression: Universities hate publicity. Pub licity can shame the university into change, and/or arouse freedom-minded colleagues to revolt. This is a great book, and that's not hyper bole. It is not an enjoyable topic, but one indispensable for anyone concerned with lib erty in academia. I am in awe of the authors.

58 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY. NOVEMBER 1999 It must have taken enormous energy, intellec tual focus, and a burning passion for justice to uncover this massive oppression on American campuses. All lovers of liberty are in their debt. D Daniel Shapiro is an associate professor ofphiloso phy at West Virginia University. Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good by Richard A. Epstein Perseus Books • 1998 • 372 pages • $30.00 _Reviewed by William H. Peterson L aw and economics were once openly tied, as witness the title of John Stuart Mill's 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy. Or consider that Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek both held doctorates from the Univer sity of Vienna not in economics but in jurisprudence. Economics came into its own as a "pure" science, however, with the establishment of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885 and publication of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics in 1890. Has its independence been for the better? Economics has since become increasingly uncertain, mathematical, and state-oriented. But the relationship between state and society at home and abroad in the stormy twentieth cen tury has been anything but calm and stable.

The welfare state has arrived, and liberty retreats far more often than it advances. As AEA cofounder and first president Richard T. Ely contended, a "new world is coming into existence," and "we must have a new economics to go along with it." The state should no longer be only an umpire, said Ely, but should become an agency "whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable condi tions of human progress." What is the proper role of the state? Was Ely correct in advocating a highly interventionist state? Or is it possible to reconcile laissez faire, private property, individual choice, and minimal government with the common good? That reconciliation constitutes the broad mission of this book by Professor Richard A. Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School. Epstein is a constitutionalist, one who upholds natural law for its utilitarian value and asks for a return to our limited govern ment roots. He is a meticulous thinker who approaches his job here by analyzing scores of law cases. His philosophy can be seen in his endorsement of this quotation from the Edinburgh Review in 1843: "Be assured that freedom of trade, freedom of thought, free dom of speech, and freedom of action, are but modifications of one great fundamental truth, and that all must be maintained or all risked; they stand and fall together."

Epstein believes that private property rights are vital in the quest for the common good and registers his approval of recent Supreme Court decisions that have moved in the direc tion of greater protection for property owners against the grabbiness of government. For example, in Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), the city had maintained that it had the right to compel Mrs. Florence Dolan, the owner of a plumbing-supply store, to dedicate land for a bicycle path without any compensation. The Supreme Court disagreed, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist writing, "We see no rea son why the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, as much a part of the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment or Fourth Amendment, should be relegated to the status of a poor relation." Epstein is also skeptical of government reg ulation that is supposed to improve the work ing of the market for consumers. He takes a dim view of the antitrust suit against Microsoft, arguing that while it may be bene ficial to Microsoft's competitors, it ill-serves the legions of Internet consumers who contin ue to enjoy the competition and downward drift in prices. Epstein fears that use of state coercion to compel Microsoft to vary its prod uct offerings along government-acceptable (that is, competitor-acceptable) lines mocks true competition and risks stifling the sort of innovations that sparked the Information Rev olution in the first place.

On the whole, the book offers a splendid defense of laissez faire, but Epstein's Chicago School utilitarianism sometimes leads him into questionable positions. He accepts, for example, some "forced exchanges" such as public highways and utilities. In granting the state some right to coerce in selected prag matic cases, Epstein seems to open windows of opportunity for both inefficiency and polit ical hanky-panky. Debates between Epstein and the Rothbardian free marketers over the advisability of permitting government to make people participate in forced exchanges would be intellectual events to savor. But do not allow this reservation to deter you from reading Principles for a Free Soci ety. Epstein's focus is on the need to preserve and indeed to expand freedom, not on the rare instances where he concludes that govern ment coercion is justified. His strong argu ment that freedom and the common good can be reconciled is one that we must make again and again. D William Peterson is adjunct scholar with the Her itage Foundation in Washington and Distinguished Lundy Professor Emeritus ofBusiness Philosophy at Campbell University in North Carolina.

Driving Forces: The Automobile, Its Enemies, and the Politics of Mobility by James Dunn Brookings Institution. 1998 • $44.95 cloth; $18.95 paperback Reviewed by John Semmens O ver the last two generations a battle between the automobile and its enemies has raged in most urban regions. Aligned against the automobile is an elite composed of self-appointed visionaries who believe they have the answer to how urbanized man should live. On the other side we have the masses of common people and the commercial interests that have catered to man's preference for the automobile. The battle is over. The auto has won. Because it empowers the individual to go where he wants to go when he wants to go, the auto provides a freedom and quality of ser vice that public transit systems cannot match. BOOKS 59 The author refutes all the key anti-automobile arguments. For example, in response to the claim that General Motors conspired to drive the streetcar out of business, Dunn points out that streetcars went out of business around the globe, not by any nefarious deeds of General Motors, but by the superior performance of the automobile. In Los Angeles the auto was embraced as a means of escape from the "cor rupt" streetcar monopoly.

In response to the argument that the Inter state Highway Act and Highway Trust Fund gave autos an unfair advantage, Dunn points out that the federal highway trust fund is self sustaining from taxes and fees levied on high way users. This stands in contrast to federal aid to transit in which users pay a minor share of the costs. Dunn compares transit's and autos' shares of passenger travel (1 and 99 percent respectively) with their shares of gov ernment expenditures (25 and 75 percent). Transit would seem to have the unfair advan tage. In response to the argument that American cities should imitate European cities, Dunn asserts that Europe is imitating America. Despite heavy gasoline taxes, huge subsidies for public transit, and more densely developed urban. land use, auto ownership has been growing faster in Europe than in the United States. Public transit has been declining for very good reasons. Foremost among them is that public transit's attractiveness is inversely cor related to personal income. When people are poor, public transit may be the best trans portation they can get. As people prosper, they want to move up to a higher quality of transportation. It is economic growth that dooms public transit to a dwindling share of urban travel. Short of driving the majority of urban populations into poverty, there is no public policy that is likely to revive public transit.

Dunn acknowledges that traffic congestion and air pollution are serious negative byprod ucts of the automobile. The cure, though, is not to waste billions of dollars on attempts to resuscitate moribund public transit systems in the vain hope that this will provide some relief. Instead, he recommends that public 60 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • NOVEMBER 1999 policy focus on more cost-effective solutions. He calls his program "Auto Plus." The key is to make auto transportation work more effectively and with fewer negative social impacts. Along those lines, he suggests elec tronic road pricing, technological fixes for vehicle emissions, and vouchers for the tran sit dependent. Transit agencies, rather than jealously protecting faltering bus and train monopolies, should become "mobility man agers," says Dunn. As such, transit officials would promote rather than suppress competi tion from "jitney vans." And instead of attempting to hold on to the urban poor as a captive clientele, they would be supportive of ways to help the poor obtain cars.

There is one aspect of Dunn's prescription that may cause some consternation among highway advocates. He recommends ending the "trust fund" concept. In fact, he goes even further by suggesting that higher taxes on cars and trucks could be a productive source of revenue for general government purposes. Let's not tum efficient transportation into a cash cow for federal boondoggles elsewhere. Whether one agrees with Dunn's prescribed remedies or not, his emphasis on hardheaded realism is a better foundation for policy debate than the notions of those who wish that things were different, that people could be induced to give up their prized mobility, or that the clock could be turned back to a time when life was "simpler." D John Semmens is an economist with the Laissez Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. President Grant Reconsidered by Frank 1. Scaturro University Press of America. 1998 • 152 pages $34.50 cloth; $16.95 paperback Reviewed by Burton Folsom I n almost all polls of U.S. presidents, Ulysses S. Grant ranks near the bottom.

Professor Thomas Bailey of Stanford, in a typical evaluation, writes, "Grant was an ignorant and confused President, and his eight long years in blunderland are generally regarded as a national disgrace." Frank Scaturro, an attorney with a strong interest in this subject, comes forth in Presi dent Grant Reconsidered to make the case that Grant was a much better president than historians say. He contends that modern histo rians have taken their cue on Grant from his intellectual contemporaries, who often despised him because he wouldn't appoint them to office. Henry Adams, for example, wrote that Grant "had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. . . . The progress of evolution from President Wash ington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin." Scaturro challenges this hyperbole and argues that Grant's presidency (1869-1877) was a positive one in U.S. history. He sees Grant as a forceful and honest president, who said, "I don't lie myself, and I won't have any one lie for me." He used the veto 93 times more than any of his predecessors-and sup ported vigorously the rights of newly freed blacks. Frederick Douglass wrote, "To [Grant] more than to any other man the [N]egro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party."

Scaturro argues that the amount of corrup tion in Grant's administration is greatly over stated. Of Grant's 25 cabinet appointments, only one, Secretary of War William Belknap, left in disgrace. A few others had charges made against them, but none was proven. The spoils system operated under Grant, as it had with previous presidents, but Scaturro observes that Grant introduced improvements in the civil service system. In the case of the New York customs house, the author insists that it operated more honestly under Grant than under previous presidents. Finally, Scaturro maintains that Grant's handling of Reconstruction was competent. The major arguments that Scaturro makes are useful, but he is a strong partisan and sometimes overstates his case. For example, he says it is unfair to blame Grant for the Whiskey Ring and the Credit Mobilier scan dals because they started before he became president. Those are valid points. But then he wants to give full credit to Grant for resolving the Alabama claims with England, when in fact those negotiations also began before Grant became president. (The United States had claimed damages from England caused by Confederate cruisers built and aided by British interests.) England's eventual agree ment to pay damages stemmed from the Ger man victory in the Franco-Prussian War-it did not want to risk an alliance between the United States and Germany. Grant's adminis tration had almost nothing to do with it.

Scaturro also omits some points favorable to Grant that should have been included. Grant reduced the national debt during his presidency and ended the federal income tax. He also favored a sound currency. Within two weeks after Grant became president, he signed the Public Credit Act, which pushed the United States to redeem its greenbacks in coin as soon as possible. Five years later, he vetoed an inflationary bill that would have increased the greenback supply by more than 10 percent. Grant was far from a consistent advocate of limited government. Before he assumed the BOOKS 61 presidency, as well as afterward, he supported the system of federal subsidies for the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Railroads. The resulting corruption led to the Credit Mobili er scandal and increased government regula tion. Grant also tried to annex Santo Domin go and expand the American empire abroad.

Scaturro's book helps offset the traditional historical bias against Grant. From a classical liberal standpoint, it exaggerates Grant's achievements, but it is still a useful corrective. In some ways, Grant's low ratings in presi dential polls are inevitable, the result of prej udices held by many historians. As historian Ari Hoogenboom once noted, "The historian is usually liberal, more often than not a Democrat. ... The post-Civil War era stands for all the historian opposes." If Grant had unveiled a huge program of land and income redistribution, he might have won over the historians, but that would have destroyed our heritage of liberty and sent us reeling on a sta tist course long before the "great" presidents of the twentieth century did so. D Burton Folsom is historian in residence at the Center for the American Idea in Houston, Texas. Inspired? Shocked? Delighted? AlarDled? Let us l~now.

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Name _ Address _ City State Zip. _ Credit Card # Exp. Date _ Signature Phone _ Make checks payable to: The WashingtonTimesNWE. Clip and mail with payment to: PO Box 96601, Washington, DC 20090 For lightning-fast delivery, call 1-800-363-9118 (Mention express code: 2055) The Pursuit of Happiness by Charles W. Baird The AFL-CIO: Renaissanceor Irrelevance? T o hear the AFL-CIO tell it, the union , movement has reversed its decline and is at the dawn of a renaissance. But among all the puffery, three reported claims are espe cially suspect: (1) employers routinely harass workers who want to organize; (2) in 1998 the number of union members increased by 101,000; and (3) on average workers repre sented by unions now make 34 percent more than union-free workers. Perhaps most trou bling of all are reports that clergy and civic leaders have announced coalitions with unions to promote improved living standards and a heightened "sense of community."