 I've got some bad news and some good news, but I actually want to start with another piece of good news. The good news is there are tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of teachers in government-run schools, tax-funded schools that are marvelous. I'm not saying equally marvelous because I believe that Sheila is more equal than many of the teachers. But there are millions, perhaps even, of marvelous people who, when they shut that door and work with their class, you know, 32 or 42 or 22 children, tend to forget the nonsense and tend to get down to real teaching of real things. So the fact that some of the children do survive the gauntlet and some of them do get through is testimony to the number of quality teachers that there are remaining in the system. So that's kind of a preamble I like to give, so that as teachers hear this on cassette tapes and they get the kind of sense, many of them, that I'm not teacher bashing at all, but I am system bashing and smashing. So that's why that little piece of good news. Now I do have some literal bad news to share with you this morning. We libertarians love to think about and talk about liberty. But words like duty, obligation, responsibility are words where we take kind of a deep breath. We think there's someone coming at us with his coercive 9mm and is going to enforce his standards of those things on us and hackles tend to rise on our necks. I was mentioned to Walter just before I came up here that I'm going to start with him and the responsibility that we talked about last night, his 3-year-old daughter has been caught in a blizzard. She's trespassing on your front porch. Do you have a responsibility to bring her inside or not? And Walter and I were discussing that perhaps you do have a responsibility, but he wouldn't want that to be legally enforceable. But I'm not necessarily talking about legality, legalisms and that sort of things, but more about responsibility. The theme of this speech today is that when parents do their duty, they can exercise their rights. When parents do their duty, they can exercise their rights. So I'm going to dwell a little bit on duty, responsibility and obligations before I get over to that favorite part for libertarians, our rights, our rights. And I believe that the stepping stone that we need in order to get to the liberty that we crave is responsibility, that we can't get there. We cannot get to liberty. We cannot get to those rights without becoming responsible and without teaching others, assisting others in becoming responsible. Now modern people seem to have abandoned, shirked their duties, their responsibilities as much as they possibly can. From that, they claim false rights. One of my, each of us has got our own hilarious examples, but a couple of years ago in Boston there was a lady, what do they call those people that lift weights, weight lifters. Right here on the tip of my brain almost, right, what's left? Lady weight lifter, who was weight lifting in a men's government run, PACS funded gym. And men's gym. And she was evicted. And she sued for her constitutional rights to lift weights. That were, she was so strong they didn't have enough weights in the ladies' gym, so she went into the men's gym to lift weights. And she was suing for her constitutional rights to lift weights. Yeah, chuckle chuckle. We've lost our claim on real rights, many of us, because we have abandoned to the state the responsibility for the education of our children. I take issue with my friends on the conservative side who are preaching and prattling about parental rights, parents' rights. The parents' rights initiative and amendment, et cetera, et cetera. And I say it's the conservative version of the welfare hissy fit of welfare rights. Because essentially what our conservative friends are saying is, other people should pay for my children's education, I get to decide what it is. This is nothing more than a false right, a fake right. How would you say it here in French, you've got the French, far, far rights or something like that? Faux, foie, foie, foie. Thank you. Yes, I'm equally unknowledgeable of French. These abandoning or shirking of parental responsibilities to educate their children, particularly the financial responsibility, leads to the weakening of the bonds of the family and the strengthening of the bonds to the government. I give three quick examples and I'm going to call on Karen to give me sort of the decade here. And I meant to do this before I got up here. I was so impressed. It's Karen Sullick, right? I was so impressed with what she said yesterday. I was just delighted. I was ecstatic listening to her too. Hmm, two for two on Canadian women. Anyway. I'm going to give three quick examples in the 1840s, and I borrowed this from Bob Anderson. In the 1840s, the centralizers, command-oriented folks, the Horace Manns in America, came to the parents and said, you know what? You're no longer responsible for paying for your children's education. Society is, your neighbors are responsible, and we're going to enforce that through taxation. And a typical parent said, oh, hey, it's a pretty good idea, and I can afford that second mule. We could be a two-mule family if I don't have to pay all that tuition. They called rate bills in those days. In the 1870, Bismarck came to the children and he said, you know, you children shouldn't have to pay to take care of your aging parents. Why, they should look to Berlin. They should look to the government for that. Think of a log being split. Think of these wedges coming between parent and child. Americans thought that was such a splendid idea. They barged into that in the 1930s with the Social Security. And then here in Canada, and in other countries, some to the south of you, mothers are no longer responsible for treating the fathers of their children well enough to keep them, because you all have, what do you call it, mothers' allowance, right? Kick him out. A third wedge, like into a log, splitting the family between child and parent, between parent and child, between mother and father. You will never get a weak government until you have strong families. And if we continue to weaken the family, we will inadvertently be strengthening the government. Now government involvement in schooling, and this goes whether you're at the local or at the national level, undermines parents in three ways. Two I believe are actually fatal, and the third is just a heck of a problem. The three ways that government involvement in schooling undermines parents is first, it undermines their responsibility by saying you are not financially responsible for the education of your children, which of course is part and parcel of all tax-funded vouchers, all tax-funded charter schools. Those are mere exacerbations of the problem. By saying you are not responsible for the education of your children's society is, they undermine that parental responsibility. Let's go back to the beginning of born life. A mother and father bring a child into the world. In most parts of the planet, that child needs to be fairly quickly protected from the elements. I found out, I never knew this when I had four children, what a receiving blanket was. Now that I've got four grandchildren, now I ask questions about words. What is a receiving blanket, you know, because I have these. And that is the blanket that receives the baby. It's the first blanket that all you moms knew that. Didn't you look at the smiles, you know, the moms are having this little glow and thinking of a receiving blanket, right? Imagine a couple so strange by our standards, so perverse, so enamored with externalities that they say, you know what, society benefits if my child doesn't freeze to death. Therefore, society should pay for the receiving blanket. We, of course, will choose, will attempt to choose the quality and the color, etc. But it turns out that society, now that it's paying for the receiving blankets out of Ottawa, or Washington, D.C., or Canberra, or wherever, right? Since we now have a right to receiving blankets at our neighbor's expense, guess who's going to decide the quality of that? And if parents expect the government to pay for the receiving blanket, they can equally say, well, you know what, if the child doesn't eat at harm's society, therefore society should pay for all the child's food. If he's not clothed, I mean, how many of us want the children running around naked? But maybe I shouldn't ask for a show of hands here. But the society should pay. Education, medication, vacation. You take this long enough and you end up with a society that believes the world owes me a living. If the world owes you a living, well, I work for it, right? In other words, if we continue on this track, and this is not anything new to the libertarians, but if we continue on this track, we end up with everybody being the parasite, trying to sponge off of, you know, we can't find John Galt and get our mitts on him so that we can tax him anymore. He escaped somehow. The producers are gone. And it begins with, at least to the best of my ability to seek it out in American society, it begins in the 1830s and 1840s. It's one of the few times when we jumped ahead of the Swedes and Brits in the welfare entitlement attitude and did it in the 1840s and had the government take over the schools. By the way, I noticed that George Smith is here in the audience and I want to give public credit to him and his tape and his speech. Public schools are a success, at least if you measure them by their own goals. I want to give public recognition to George Smith to the guy that lit the original match inside of me. I was listening to him on cassette tape. I've listened to that tape eight, nine times, and I love it. And let's hear a round of applause for George Smith. But we're beginning that march of a thousand steps to total dependency with saying that since education is benefit to society, therefore society should pay for it. I want to toy with this responsibility issue for a few seconds and come at it obliquely through names. I think names are kind of important for things. And in the States, I don't know what you all call them in your countries. I know that the English, of course, used the word public school differently than the Americans do. But in America, we defer to them as private schools and public schools. And by the way, Sheila, the inability of people to use English correctly has become a great bother to I. I agree with you on me. No, I can't ever say me. I agree with you on this, become a brother to I also. We've used the terms now for perhaps a little over a century of public schools and private schools. That is sort of a snapshot of the deed. Who owns them? Are they owned by the government or are they owned by the some private entity, church, for-profit company, whatever, individual or state operation? Now, what if we had, rather than looking at that snapshot of the deed, what if we had looked at the flow of funds? What if from the beginning we had referred to schools as parent financed and tax financed? Now we're looking at, instead of the balance sheet, we're looking at the income statement of the cash flow for the chartered accountants among us. And we're looking at the money, the source of funds, the flow of it, rather than the ownership. What if for a hundred years we'd referred to tax-funded schools and parent-funded schools? Or maybe we even labeled them a little bit more accurately, in a sense. We always referred to them as voluntarily financed schools and coercion financed schools. What was that? What if those have been our names? And then somebody came up with this great idea, after a hundred years, you know, the parent-financed schools seem to be doing better than the tax-financed schools. I got an idea. Let's get tax-financing to go to the parent-financed schools. You'd all look at me as if I were daft. Because you would have built into the names some sort of essence as to what is special or different, unique about that school. You would have built your understanding into the name. So once again, with all respect and deference to Milton Friedman and other greats in the Liberty Movement, somehow you didn't even claim to be infallible. And I think that he might be just a little off on the idea of using tax-financing to finance parent-financed schools. Let's see if we can get coercively financed money into voluntarily financed schools and see if we can help them that way. I say it is time for mental floss. Sheila Morrison mentioned people getting second mortgages to put their children in her school. Barbara Salt during the question period mentioned 85% of the school children in Haiti that are in school, which of course is not, well, that go to the private schools that are parent-financed in the poorest country in the world. Parents manage to find the dollars to do that. Harry Brown in his book, What's Wrong with Government? Why government doesn't, what does, quick, embarrass me here. I mean, let me out of this embarrassment. Why government doesn't work no more and probably never did. Okay, don't work no more. Never did. It points out that the cost of schooling has gone up by 21 times when adjusted for inflation in the United States since the turn of the century to 1995. In other words, the people of the turn of the century said, if we had a little bit more money, maybe twice as much, we could do a better job. So they doubled it, right? And by 1920 they had twice as much money. You know what, if we had more money, we could do a better job. We could double it again. Yeah, we could double that. Okay, let's go to, so by 1960, 48, actually, you got twice as much money again. So you know what, if we could just have a little bit more money, we could do a better job. So what if we doubled it again? Okay, that'd be good. We could double it by 1970. And I say, you know, if we had a bit more money, we could do a better job. Double it again, right? By 1990. Now it's at 21 times its original size. Are they doing that much better a job of teaching children to read, write, and cipher than they were 100 years ago? And by the way, you can even predict what the next doubling is going to do because you can go find school districts that are spending $11,000, $12,000 per year double what the current American average is $6,000 per year. You can find them, government schools spending $11,000, $12,000 a year. Are you doing a better job? Well, one can't see much evidence of that. So I don't know how many more doublings will please them, but I have my doubts. But what a parent pays for something, they make decisions. They are involved. They decide. You buy a pizza for your family, you decide what's on it. No ifs, ands, or buts. You decide, you pay for education. You decide what's in it. I tell the Americans all the time that when the government removed Protestant prayer from the schools in the 1960s, that didn't change a whole lot. They always say, what do you mean Protestant prayer? I say, well, do they take the Hail Marys out of the schools? Public schools in America, government schools? Is Marshall Fritz about to take a $1,000 bill out of this pocket and show it to you all? Why not? Don't have one in there. Otherwise I probably would. Hey, look what I got. Jim Johnson liked my speech so much. Look what he slipped me, right? Oh, I wouldn't embarrass you in public, I'd say. A generous and wonderful person in the front row. We'd like to be matched by somebody in the next row, but anyway. They didn't pull Hail Marys out of the public schools in America because they weren't there. Then the next question is, well, did they take them out of the Catholic schools? Huh? I don't know how many have been hanging around Catholic schools in America recently, but from what I can tell, they didn't take them out. You pay for it. You're responsible. You're involved. You're deciding what's on that pizza. You're deciding what's on that phonics plate. And the teachers cry for parental responsibility and involvement. And there's a way to get it. Good news, bad news, teacher. Good news is you can have it. Let the parents pay. The bad news is they might not pay you. So one, government involvement, and this is the worst I believe, undermines parental responsibility by encouraging, enabling and encouraging the parent to shirk the responsibility for their children to other people, to their neighbors. And that shirking of responsibility, if it begins there, there's a continuum to the level of irresponsible parenting that we seem to be striving for and not just in the United States. Secondly, governments invariably undermine parental authority. Each of you in this audience has a moral code. And I suspect there are some common items on that moral code, that laundry list that you have of do's and do not's, that I have and that everybody else in the room has. One, for instance, is a respect for the private property of other people. You tried to transmit this to your children to the best of your ability. On some other items in the, you know, I mean, in the ten commandments, I suspect all of us here are like three, and don't steal, don't lie, and don't kill. There's some that may like nine, right? You remember when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he says, well, I got good news and bad news. And all the Hebrews said, oh, okay, well, what's the goodness? Because I got it down to ten commandments. But the bad news is adultery is still in there. Now each of us has some sort of a moral code. We have some sort of a source of that moral code. It may be the Koran, and it came from Allah. It may be the Book of Mormon, and it came from the golden tablets from Moroni. It may be from natural law, natural rights. We may have, some people believe we've evolved a moral code. So some have a theistic, and some have a non-theistic explanation for the existence of a moral code. But I suspect that virtually everyone in this room has one. And I suspect you're trying to transmit to your children. Well, you know, your kid, you know, stole my kid's little truck. Would you please do something about it? Oh, no, we're going to let Johnny decide on the theft issue for himself. Right, we wouldn't want to impose our old-fashioned do not steal standards on him. So he, you know, we think it's wonderful that he plays with your child. And later, maybe life will teach him some lessons in his 20s, 30s, or 40s. And then he'll make those decisions for himself. Hogwash. I don't think there's a libertarian on the planet that isn't imparting slash imposing his moral code, respect for private property being certainly one of the first several commandments on his children. And you don't like to be undermined. It's not good to be undermined. I'll tell you a personal story. My wife and I didn't want our children to grow up as racist as prior generations had grown up in America. One of our close relatives used the N-word, a great deal, and was teaching the N-word to our two-year-old, three-year-old son in some little song. And I said to this relative that my wife, Joan, and I are not trying to avoid that, to minimize the lesson that racism thing. And this relative was, you know, insistent that it was his or her responsibility if we weren't going to do the job to teach our nice white children the hierarchy of races that he or she was going to do it for us. At which time I reminded this person that IBM stands for I've been moved. And it'd be fairly easy for me to move to Boston or Maine from California and that he or she might get much less access to his or her great-grandchildren or nieces or nephews. I don't want to be too clear here on who I'm hitting. He didn't like being undermined by a relative. And it would have been harmful to our children to try to teach them two different moral codes by two different people who love the children greatly. If it's not just confusing to a child, but for a child to get one moral code from one set of modern-term caregivers and then a different moral code from a different group of caregivers, children decide what is truth, what is right, what is wrong. Little kids, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old, on who loves me, who takes care of me, what do they say? That doesn't mean that they always live up to the truth and do the right. But that's how they figure it out. When you put them into a situation where one group, the parents perhaps say A, and another group says not A. And then you smile and say, I'll be sure that you're obeying Mrs. McLumpfie and your teacher and all that sort of thing. The child is now hearing A equals not A, and there's no conflict there. What happens to a five, six, seven, eight, nine-year-old child who's taught that? Spiritual philitimide, some sort of stress on the building of character. You end up graduating a person who either believes that right and wrong do not even exist, or that is unknowable. And if you can add to that self-esteem technique-y stuff, so you can have an inflated self-esteem, then what you have is a graduate who feels good about himself while doing evil. The schools, as they undermine parents, have become factories for the production of sociopaths. If I were in a Catholic country, I'd be wiggling and waving my finger at the Catholics for undermining the children of other people. If I were in an atheist country, such as the Soviet Union, I'd be wagging my finger at the Marxists for undermining the children of Muslims and Christians. If I were in a, quote, post-Christian country of relativists, deconstructionists, postmodernists, modernists who are teaching children that there is no such thing as absolute truth, all truth is relative, I'd be wagging my fingers at them, and I am. Another course in America, man, a course of study, used to teach that if you live far enough north, long enough, it's all right to murder your grandmother. Now, you just can't go, you know, to the North Pole for a week and put Granny out on a nice flow. That's not nice, right? And if you live far enough south where it's warm, that's not nice either. That's murder. But you see, if you're an Eskimo and Granny can't chew the walrus hide anymore and she's no longer useful, what that society does is, according to this, Jeremy Brunner and the man a course of study, is put the child, put the Granny outside and let her freeze or starve to death. And that's okay for them. You see, murder is dependent upon latitude and length of stay. That's the real message of man, of course, of study, of that little dollop of deep multiculturalism. Values, clarification, so popular in the 70s and 80s in the America. How do you know what's right and wrong? Well, you look inside and you see how you feel. How do you know North from South? I don't know. I guess you sort of look inside. What do you feel about North? If you're uncertain how you feel about what's right and wrong, then you check with other children. If you're a 14-year-old, you're supposed to ask other children in your peers, well, what if I want to check with my mom or dad? No, no. Values, clarification. The foot soldiers of relativism. Any parent, be it Pagan, who believes in truth, Monotheist, who believes in truth, Atheist, who believes in truth, is being undermined by a system that, in effect, is teaching relativism. And no, there is no course relativism 1A. Please answer the even-numbered questions. Don't worry, the answers don't count. So there is no course in relativism. But you teach what you are. A system that denies the existence of a North star of any sort of moral code ends up teaching relativism. It must. So one, responsibility is undermined by the schools being paid for by the neighbors through the force of taxation. Two, your authority as a parent, be you Monotheist, Atheist, Pantheist, or Pagan. Your ability to transmit your moral code to your children is being interrupted, eroded. You may get it through, you may not. And three, finances. Your finances are being drained to pay for this monstrous system. And they will double it again, and double it again. Now, how do we get out of this thing, this speech, and get to a question-and-answer period, get up the mountain, get some lunch, do some other things that we want to get on with our lives? Well, that's why I'm on the last page. The answer, my friends, and given the nickname separation of school and state, and it's an American view, you might, if you should start such an organization in your own country, want to use some different name because you do not have probably that mantra almost of the separation of church and state that Americans have. So I'm playing off of that American sense. And this is a U.S. organization we accept on our proclam- we invite, encourage on our proclamation the signature of people from all over the planet because they too can proclaim that they want to see the government out of schooling. May I ask for a show of hands? How many here have had the opportunity in person or over the Internet to sign the proclamation for the separation of school and state? May I see a show of hands? Ho-hey! Well, there's a few left, right? And if you're feeling left out right now, run our way to 25 million signatures and you have the honor of being in the first million if you sign today. In fact, you have the honor of being in the first 2,500. But... Also, Walter, if you and your crew will hand this out, if you'd like to read more about the separation of school and state, this is normally $10 American money. I'm going to offer it for a half-price $5 and give a 38% discount, Canadian money. I don't have enough to everybody, so I can't give them away, but you're getting basically a 70-something percent discount over the regular price, and they're being passed out now so that you can glance at it and decide if you would like to have it. But it's titled No More Reform. We don't need its school reform. We need its replacement, and it is the strategy document for the separation of school and state. Anyway, it does include two. I've finally gone public with Milton Friedman's endorsement of me, which is... Well, on balance, Marshall does more good than harm. So, Sheila talked about parents who were downsizing their lifestyle in order to pay for their children's education. If you're going to teach responsibility to your own children, you need to be responsible yourself. You cannot teach responsibility not as I do. If you're going to teach responsibility to your neighbor, you must do that by being responsible for yourself and your children. And if you are currently enjoying your BMW and your luxury vacations and using the state to pay for your children's education, you have no chance of teaching your neighbor anything but what you are, a hypocrite. That's the bad news. You teach what you are. If you expect responsibility from your neighbors, you must be responsible yourself. The late Carl Hess said that so gently, so sweetly, I should be so kind. It's easy to sign the proclamation. I encourage you to do it. I think it was Chesterton who said, hypocrisy is that honor that evil pays to good. So it's better to sign the proclamation and keep your child in a government school and be a hypocrite than not even sign the proclamation. But figure out how you can home school your child, private school your child, teach your child to be a self-teacher and auto-didact. Help your children with their children. That's the answer. It begins with you. St. John Lennon said, think globally, act. I guess in your own family. We've got just a few seconds left for questions. And I would love to have any number of people come up after this session on the way and we talk about when the endurance caucus can meet. As many of you know, it's a tradition after my speeches for me to gather around people and ask them to critique the presentation. Tell me what they like and what they didn't like. And we'll be doing that sometime between now and 7 a.m. tomorrow morning when I leave. So if you would like to be part of that critiquing caucus, please join me. But ladies and gentlemen, liberty is possible, but we have to teach responsibility and to teach responsibility we have to be responsible. Thank you very much for your kind attention.