 Dr. Boyce is an economics professor. He's also the founding director of the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, which is a fairly new shop at Arizona State University. He gave a terrific speech at our AERC, our Scholars' Conference in Auburn early this year. And he is absolutely well positioned to talk about how tough it is in academia to be a free market or Austrian minded person. And maybe the greatest praise I can give him this morning is that unlike most academics who have a tendency to become less and less radical throughout their careers, I think it's safe to say that perhaps Dr. Boyce has become more and more radical throughout his academic career. So thank you and welcome Dr. Boyce. Thank you, thank you Jeff. It's a great honor to be here. Looking out at this crowd of about 300, except for a couple things reminds me of being in front of my classes. Couple things, it's a little older audience and you're paying attention. As a professor, I have to start out giving you a little quiz. So I'm wondering if you can answer this. What did the Soviet socialists use for light before candles? Electricity. I'm going to be talking about the long view today. Since I've been in this fight, what seems like the long view and I'm not sure made much progress, but I've had a few students that I've impacted. I'd like to do a lot more. But the odds are against us. The media is strongly skewed to the left. The academia is strongly skewed to the left. K through 12 is strongly skewed to the left. 90% of faculty at university consider themselves either far left or very liberal. 96% of faculty at universities contribute to the Democrat Party. The general public, to say the least, is skeptical of capitalism and free enterprise. So why? Why? Well, I maintain because that's what education does. That's the purpose of public education. Hayek challenged the equal polytechnique for a strategy of engineering everything. They had a view which he took issue with in a chapter on the counterrevolution of science. They had a view that he called was a source of socialism, the source of scientific hubris, that they could engineer everything, including man. They could engineer everything. And unfortunately, I think a lot of Austrians haven't paid too much attention to public education. Lou Rockwell had a nice piece a few years ago. Marie Rothbard had a pamphlet Education Free and Compulsory where he explained that the true purpose of public education is indoctrination. It's what we might call social justice. It explains why civic elite is so suspicious of homeschooling, private schooling. It's not fear of low test scores driving this. The worry that these kids will be learning the values the state doesn't think are important. Equality is a big phase of this. The idea is of promoting equality. We're dominant in thinking of the influential group of educationists in the mid 1800s. The famous socialist Robert Owen recognized that he had to educate the whole child. Kind of sounds like today done. We got to educate the whole child. He said we have to do that in order to mold the coming generation sufficiently. These were the thinkers who pushed through the public schools, taking a few statements of thinkers that you would have heard of let me just read them. The common schools would take a diverse population and mold them into one people. The good children must learn to mingle with the bad ones as they will have to do later in life. If a rich child is sent to a private school he'll be taught that he's better than a public school child. That's not republicanism. Every child should be educated to obey authority. It was very necessary for people to be accustomed from their earliest years to submit to authority. A teacher must lead his students to accept the existing government. School policy is to mold all the people into one people and with one common interest. That's the 1830s. That's what public education says. That's what it does. The same philosophy dominates primary, secondary education today. To be a teacher one must have to get a teaching certificate given by the state. One must have to go through education college where they're taught the same thing. Why would we trust the state to do this because the market is chaotic? I mean, think about this. The most early 20th century intellectuals, capitalism looked like anarchy. You know, why they wondered would we trust deliberative conscience, guidance to build a house but not when building an economy? Why would we trust the chaos of the market to provide something as important as education to our children? Prior to the government's involvement in education in the late 1800s, there were a variety of schools. There were non-denominational schools. There were Quaker schools, Lutheran schools, fundamental schools, liberal Protestant schools, classical schools, technical schools and on and on. When government took over, parents lost control. The educational intellectuals ran. The schools and in essence raised the children. One room schools were closed, school districts merged, control schools continued to get increasingly centralized. The result that Mises would have predicted from public education is exactly what's occurred. Performance has declined while costs have risen because education is centrally planned. The U.S. spans more than any other country per pupil on education. And yet our achievement scores have not improved in 30 years. Achievement schools remain mediocre relative to other countries even. Think what competition would do for education. Think what it does for the supermarket. Imagine, you go to the supermarket and you can get anything you want, it's there. How did it get there? Nobody said that milk ought to be there. But in education, we have to dictate every single step. And they all have to be the same. We've even moved in a direction of something called common court to federalize this. Competition drives suppliers to provide the goods people want the services they want at the lowest possible price in the highest quality. Isn't that what we want for education? Think about technology products or clothing or golf clubs or golf balls or just any good you might imagine. We don't have black telephones with rotary dials and a big long cord anymore. The cell phones aren't those huge packages. Why? The free market, the competition. When I was a grad student, and this is a long time ago, I was doing my dissertation and I had to use the computer and a computer was housed in one building in the university. And to use the computer, we had to put our data on what they call computer cards. So I had a box of computer cards about this long. And the computer cards are a little thin like a piece of paper and you type your data in there and punch holes. And then you take your box over to the computer common and give it to the fellow running the computer and then he'll take his time and put the cards through the computer and sometime that day you'll get a result. And I got one result a day for six months to finish my dissertation. Today I could sit down if I wanted to and I could run a hundred of those on my own computer in one day. We're so much better off because of free competition in the market. In education, the same thing would occur if we would create a free market in education. K-12 would be totally altered. Universities would be totally altered. We wouldn't have the Prussian model university that we have that was founded in 1700. We need to move aggressively to create a free market in education. Okay, now there are a number of steps we might take. I see it this way. I see the first thing we do is we get rid of public schools, we convert them all to charters. That switch would introduce choice immediately. Students could then attend any location they wanted. If the charter was oversubscribed, it could choose to expand or it could provide a means to determining student eligibility. Then we prepare the charters to become private for profit. The state would continue to provide funds at a declining rate for a short period of time, say four years. During that four-year period, the people running the charters would begin to privatize those in a sense, get ready. Sorry, it's my Italian background. Get ready to run those for profit. Now, we wouldn't need school districts anymore. So we could eliminate school districts and all district staff. We could get rid of district buildings. They could be sold or leased off. And all the funds provided would go to the individual schools. The individual schools would manage their budgets. Okay, now as we moved to privatize, we would sell or lease school buildings. The charters would have to figure out a way to purchase or lease those school buildings. The state would no longer build school building. If the state's not providing support for schools, it need not have a property tax. So we eliminate the property tax. Now, the fourth step would be to privatize all the charter schools. Now, this actually is a difficult step, but we have lessons. We have lessons from the 1990s in Eastern Europe. How Czechoslovakia and Poland privatized their massive state plans, centrally planned economies. And they distributed vouchers to millions of people. Vouchers could be used to bid for ownership in particular companies. These eventually turned into private companies. And the private companies then had to either compete or go out of business. Now, this was done in Czechoslovakia and Poland very successfully. In Russia, the corruption was so bad it never made it. But we could use those vouchers in many ways. We could, the people running the charter schools could be given 50% of the vouchers and they could decide what to do with them. Or they could be given 100% of the vouchers and distribute them among the teachers and faculty, staff, or they could be used to bid on charter schools in particular areas. It will take some thinking to get through that stage, but it can be done. It can be done. And if we're gonna make progress in increasing liberty, it's gotta be done. I think it's the number one issue facing us. Why we have the 20th century progressive century is because that's what public education gave us. Students go through school today and through university, they don't come out thinking about free enterprise, free markets. They know they're bad. Economists have told them they're bad. We've gotta change that. We've gotta have people thinking differently. And it can only be done if we change education. So I'd like you all to begin thinking about ways that we can move in a direction of totally privatizing public education. There are a lot of other things we ought to do, given the Federal Reserve and IRS and the Departments of Education and you, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But education, in my opinion, is the number one. Thank you very much.