What If Government Ended Tomorrow?

There is a podcast I listen to called School Sucks which I have mentioned before on my Homeschooling Is Freedom blog. It is hosted by Brett Veinotte and through this podcast series he is methodically and expertly making the case of how damaging government education is to a free society.

His target audience is meant to be teens and young adults, I suspect because he knows they can more easily go out and really make some changes, for themselves first and then in the world. However, these podcasts are great for anyone interested in the problems of education and I highly recommend them.

But today, I wanted to share an interesting exercise Brett did in one of his most recent podcasts titled, The Natural State?, the last in a series on American History.

In this podcast, he asks the question: what if government ended tomorrow? What possible chains of events could occur if suddenly we all woke up and there was no government? What would be the worst case scenario and how would you feel about the worst case scenario?

In the introduction to this particular podcast, he says this:

"Imagine if we all woke up tomorrow, and government was gone. All government, all over the world, all individuals calling themselves government all over the world had vanished.

Now at that point, imagine this: Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong and one of the worst possible chains of events, that I can imagine anyway, goes into motion. What would the eventual outcome look like? What would the world look like if the worst fears of a respectful and peaceful person all came true?

And, most importantly, how would most people, supporting the state today, for its apparent ability to protect and provide and maintain order, how would those people feel about perhaps the most tragic and chaotic outcome of this stateless world?

Well, that would seem like a pretty easy question for them to answer, but it's not. And I sincerely hope that realization helps ease some fears about the eventual demise of the state.

Now at this point, if you go to the podcast, at 1:01:55, you can listen to Brett lay out his idea of the worst possible scenario that could happen. (It runs about 16 minutes.) I think it makes a lot of sense. What do you think?

The Self-Education of Karl Hess

I listened to this podcast today about Karl Hess, a fascinating man with a fascinating life history. (You can get started learning about him at Wikipedia. )

In this podcast, at 2:20, the narrator talks about Hess' educational experiences under the influence of his mother, a dropout (note that this was not unusual at the time).

She did several things that I found interesting from the standpoint of helping a child move forward into developing a strong ability to self-educate. Supposedly she:

1. Began to refuse to answer his questions if she thought he could use resources to find out the answers on his own.

2. Showed him how to use the library, dictionary and other reference books, and also took him to government offices and showed him how to access public records. In other words, she guided him to resources.

3. Finally, and this was really cool, she wrote him notes so he could skip school anytime he wanted, as long as he went to the library or stayed home and read books which he then later discussed with her.

It's amazing to me that his mother had such a clear idea of self-education and when you look at Hess' life you can easily see that the man was a life-long learner, constantly taking in more information and then changing his life as he processed what it all meant to him.

That's educational freedom and one of the best gifts we can all give to our children.

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Is Limited Government An Oxymoron

Wow, one of the best videos I've seen lately. They made such great points in such a short time.