'Public' Intellectuals and the Calculation Problem Applied to Public Schools

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The Alliance of Intellectuals and the State


Modern professional intellectuals in general, and especially those employed in tax-funded schools, are begotten to the state apparatus because it is the source of their income. Even in so-called private universities, the curricula are still determined by the state through various directives so that change and innovation are sacrificed. Your professors might not explicitly advocate left-statism, but indoctrination is never overt. Modern sociology for example, promotes a class division in society by slicing and dicing it into many warring factions. For them, there is always one class exploiting the other. Men are exploiting women, whites exploiting blacks, rich exploiting poor, Christians exploiting Muslims. In doing this they serve to perpetuate the class division that they sought to erase. A foremost Filipino historian once wrote that historians are, by default, marxists with a small ‘m’. Without a philosophy grounded in reality and knowledge in sound (Austrian) economics, historians tend to draw interpretations out of the air because they do not have the proper methodology to identify real cause-effect relationships. I am not saying their facts are wrong, but only the interpretation. In a free market, competition in the provision of education will promote change and improvement, intellectuals will have to keep up to new ideas lest their human capital go down, and hence their wages. In a free market, wages of intellectuals are determined just like wages for computer engineers and construction workers, on the basis of merit. In a statist school system, career success of intellectuals depends on how close you are to the state. Survival means you have to accept statist premises. Since justifying government depredations into our everyday life is easier than open debate and intellectual change, intellectuals naturally ally with the state.

Calculation Problem Applied to Tax-funded Education

Even if the government were filled with angels, government would still create shortages and dismal quality of services. The problem with government is not intellectual, it is not psychological, it is not the character of government officials, the problem with government is economic calculation.

Government can put children into classrooms, arrange a curricula, hire teachers, build school structures, fix number of hours for schooling, make students answers tests and read textbooks. All those the government can do. What the government cannot do is educate. Let me explain. First of all, today’s school curricula and teaching methods are decided on by the arbitrary whims of the bureaucrat. No matter how intelligent and experienced the bureaucrat is, he does not have an objective basis for his decision making. He can never know what tens of millions of unique Filipinos really want and need. How can tens of millions of Filipinos’ valuations be aggregated and be made useful? Only through the price mechanism. Price is the objective expression of countless peoples’ subjective valuations. The only way to make sure school curricula and teaching methods correspond to what skills Filipinos really need is through the market process itself. Free market education is superior to government education because free market education systems are coordinated by the price mechanism. This is opposed to education wherein FEW bureaucrats decide. The difference is between the knowledge of millions of education consumers and the knowledge of few pompous bureaucrats.