Sunday, December 18, 2011

Strategic Educational Advice to Austro-libertarians

The Austro-libertarian community often deplores the fact that the promotion of sound economics and sound political philosophy is hampered by their virtual exclusion from the state-cartelized mainstream university system and its curricula. I personally believe that this is much less of a problem than usually supposed - nowadays, it is actually quite easy to expose mainstream university students to Austro-libertarian ideas regardless of the extent to which their official reading lists are packed with Marxism, Keynesianism and "post-modernism", and sometimes even because of it.

The reason for that is simple: usually students do not give a hoot about their reading lists and instead rely on Google when writing their essays. Thus, they ultimately imbibe and utilize the information popular on the Web, not among mainstream academics. And since Austro-libertarianism has an exponentially growing Internet following, which includes a number of very adept Web entrepreneurs, even today it is not uncommon to see von Mises' or Rothbard's books in the bibliographies and footnotes of generic student essays on socialism, capitalism, the Great Depression, etc. (here I'm speaking from my own teaching experience).

Hence, my advice is very simple: let us all engage in more web entrepreneurship, especially of the most elementary sort - let us all link profusely to Austro-libertarian texts (especially those stored on already popular sites, such as mises.org) on our webpages, blogs, discussion boards, and other Web outlets, thus bumping up their (already considerably high) position in Google search results. The opportunity costs of this are minimal, and I believe that the effects on the intellectual culture of mainstream university students can be very rewarding.

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