How to Unlearn Government Propaganda

Ludwig von Mises
VERBATIM POST

In the old days, Americans had three television channels. Those, along with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, told them what the establishment thought they needed to know. They set the boundaries of respectable opinion. You may be for Kennedy or for Nixon, citizen. What variety!

Then we got cable TV, and — eventually — hundreds of channels. This is a revolution, some said.

To some degree, it was. It undermined the gatekeepers at least in principle.

But the revolution we are living through right now could scarcely have been conceived of. Now anyone, anywhere, can express his opinions, or report on events, via a blog, a video, a podcast, or countless other means of transmission. This is a revolution that will make Gutenberg look like a lazy bum.

No longer does someone need a major institution behind him in order to bring his various creations to the public, or even in order to create them in the first place. Musicians can make and market their music independently. The same goes for feature films and documentaries. Entrepreneurs of all kinds have new and exciting ways to reach the public.

Last year, after a good deal of soul-searching and some advice from a trusted friend, I figured out where I myself fit in this revolution.

How about, instead of griping about the kind of history and economics so many students are condemned to learn, I just go ahead and teach it myself?

So, with the help of several people I trust, I did it. In April I launched LibertyClassroom.com.

I’ve written a lot of books and articles, and made a lot of YouTube videos, that take direct aim at the establishment view of history and at various forms of anti-market economics. Liberty Classroom does plenty of this as well. But it goes much deeper. It doesn’t just challenge myths and refute fallacies. It builds from the ground up, teaching each course the way it should be taught in the first place.

The better our intellectual foundation, the more formidable and effective we’ll be.

All the lectures can be viewed on a user’s computer or mobile devices, but each one is also available in an audio-only format for use while driving or walking. And each one is accompanied by links to recommended reading and other resources.

We supplement the courses with live sessions, in which users can ask questions directly of the faculty, who appear on their screens. We also have discussion forums, so if there’s something you’d like to know, an article you’d like to answer, or whatever, our faculty and our other members will be glad to help.

We’ve been surveying our members to find out what future courses they’d like to see. More will be added on a regular basis, and members will get immediate access to them.

Before the technological revolution made something like Liberty Classroom possible, we might have been sitting around wondering how to reform the universities. Talk about hopeless.

But in this day and age, we don’t even need to reform the universities. We can simply go around them.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is the author of eleven books, most recently Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse and Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, as well as the New York Times bestsellers Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. He is also the editor of five other books, including the just-released Back on the Road to Serfdom.