My friend Matt Clark of WAAM radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan had an interesting radio show this past Sunday afternoon.  Matt randomly called people who live in the Detroit area and asked them what they knew about the recent bankruptcy of their once prosperous city.  Expectantly few knew anything about the matter even though they live at ground zero of one of the most epically failed instances of Keynesian economics seen currently in the world.  Detroit is unique as an example because its failure is unequivocally driven by liberal politics inspired by philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and the economics of socialist England under the subterfuge of the Fabian Socialists where Keynesian economics was born.  CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.  Detroit’s collapse is the fault of failed social and economic philosophy and even as the evidence is crumbling down around them, the people of Detroit are disconnected and uninterested.    The fire of thought has long since been put out of their ability to have opinions.  Have a listen:

It is impossible to have any kind of republic which is the governing principle of The United States if the people who make up that republic are not intellectually engaged.  There is no way to elect representatives to the republic if such disinterested manner is placed on elections.  The fault of this social awareness of course falls on the education system which has failed to ignite in the minds of the youth any interest in such things, even though a  passive interest in the affairs of the American Republic is more important than learning mathematics, English, or even general history.    Instead, schools have allowed their teacher unions to lobby law makers into watering down the education curriculums into radicalism against American tradition to fulfill progressive strategies—the same kind of strategies that have destroyed Detroit in the present day.  The public education system chose radicalism focused on social issues over republic representation of quality as a teaching method.  The result is a society of lost minds who do not know what to do with the facts of our day.  A vast majority of the American public is disconnected—and happy to proclaim it, because their public school institutions have taught them that such a social position was good.

I remember what it was like in public school and I hated every moment of it.  In my entire 13 years of attending I can’t remember a single day that I enjoyed.  At an early age I had the deep suspicion that the teachers wanted nothing to do with any truth.  They were intent to reshape minds into a direction guided by some invisible hand that went by the name of “legislators.”  The reason I didn’t enjoy school was because I liked my mind, and didn’t want it shaped by anybody but me.  I remember feeling this way even in kindergarten.  Naturally teachers didn’t know what to do with me because I wasn’t following the “formula.”  So I was in trouble all the time and being much more stubborn than they were, I held out like an  inmate in a prison for 13 years always looking for that graduation day where I’d be free of them once and for all.

I could tell many stories about my public school days, but the short of it was that I was always in trouble, my parents were constantly called with attempts to shove me in some direction which I continuously resisted.  I was constantly grounded as a student at home because of my rebelliousness at school making the experience a miserable one for my young mind.  And all along, I had a very keen understanding of what I was resisting.  I was resisting the tendency to be a social buffoon.  As I moved into high school the pressure escalated and I pushed back even harder and a lot of people were hurt.  Once I was able to drive and have a job of my own, the groundings at home, the constant peer pressure at school to be a mind numb debacle for the human race began to subside a bit because that long desired goal of being free of the public school system was near.  To let “them” know they had not beaten my mind into submission I routinely wore a sport coat to school with a tie to let the statist know that they had failed utterly in their breaking of me—and I relished the audacity.  The constant detentions, the threats, the many, many trips to the principal’s office, the calls to my parents, the attempt to pit other kids in the school against me had all failed spectacularly and I enjoyed seeing the looks of disappointment on their faces.

Back then I had a USA Today newspaper delivered to my first period class which I carried around with me and read throughout the day.  The newspaper was a window to the outside world.  It was like a light through the window of a prison cell that was way too small for me, and I enjoyed reading about disruptions in the Middle East while the students around me were passing around love notes to each other declaring how drunk they wanted to get at the next Friday night football game.  I had a few friends, and they thought like me for the most part—people brought together by common values.  In some cases those friends were intellectually smarter than the rest of the administrative staff with genius level intellects, and in some ways other friends were physically superior to even the best athletes, and were heavily recruited to play sports for the school which were declined out of sheer rebelliousness.  At the Friday night football games my friends and I would sell those same stupid kids cases of beer out of a car trunk saving them the disgrace of trying to buy beer from a convenient store only to be turned away by a clerk who carded them.  I enjoyed this because it allowed me to punch back at society from two fronts, I was thumbing my nose at the laws politicians made for underage drinking, and I was violating the stupid policy of letting the school believe football games were anything but an excuse for the kids to get drunk.  This would go on right in front of the school administration and the police both of whom had no idea what to do about the practice.   I had learned at an early age the hypocrisy of statism and knew that there was nothing they could do to me.  They had already punished me in every way possible for over a decade, and as a young high school kid I was making as much money as most of the kid’s parents between all my jobs.  Earning money was my freedom from the statism of public education, and the first minute I could do it, I did.  I mowed lawns, worked as a bus boy at an upscale restaurant for tips, and started dating girls who were in their mid-twenties when I was 15 and 16 who would then buy the beer I could sell to the high school kids.  Around the time I was doing all this the Tom Cruise film Risky Business came out and when I went to see it, I realized that I was living that life, except more violently.

My motives were to use capitalism to escape statism, and as a kid who grew up in the 80s under President Ronald Reagan, that was at least possible.  As I look around at kids today, having raised two of my own and meeting many of their friends, I don’t think they even have those same opportunities.  Instead of reading a USA Today, kids at least have the internet on their phones to escape from the statist environment, but instead of reading about current events, they keep their minds on entertainment related topics.  For me I was able to beat my captors by being smarter than they were.  And when that didn’t work, I was more willing to resort to physical confrontation than they were.  It was no secret then and it’s no secret now.  I still live by those same rules—because they work.  As I look at the public education system now, I am sure there are kids trapped there like I was, but even lack a president to admire.  Most of them have been put on Retalin or some other drug to numb their active minds, as public schools have found that the way to beat students like me was to get them on mind numbing drugs so early that nobody knows what kind of genius they could become.  They call this these days ADHD.  I openly campaigned for Ronald Reagan in the 7^th grade when the other students were busy contemplating which bands were good over others, but since him, there hasn’t been a president that young people could even get excited about.

For me the fight against statism has always been present.  I fought it then as a captor stuck within the system.  Upon my graduation traveling back from UD arena in Dayton I passed the future superintendent of Lakota schools on I-75 south, a man who tried to pin me down with every trick known to the book of school administrators.  I slowed down to match his speed and look him in the face.  My friend sitting in the passenger’s seat toasted him with a beer.  Between him and me we were living the movie version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.   The future superintendent had tried to catch me time and time again for doing something wrong and often I would do things just to prove to him that I couldn’t be caught.  On that day now that I was free of them, I slowed my car down behind his speed and dropped back about 200 yards.  Then I gunned the engine to my Pontiac Firebird and flew past him on the highway at 110 MPH.  I drove by him so closely that my passenger’s side mirror almost hit the mirror on his car.  I maneuvered so closely to him because I wanted the air from my car to rattle his at that high-speed.  Many reading this will wonder why I was so aggressive about this maneuver, and those that came before, and many that came after.  Because I hated him, I hated the school, I hated the administrators, and I hated the system they all represented.  For many, hate is a strong word, but for me, hate is the correct term.  I hated him, and I wanted him to know it.

I hated that system then and I hate it now because it produces the kind of people who can watch a city like Detroit die of progressive philosophy without feeling an urge to defend the city from the parasites.  There is no fire in the minds of the people Matt called on the air, because that fire was put out by their public schools, and that is why I hate them.  I like to see fire behind the eyes of human beings.  I like to see energy, passion, and imagination, and too often those elements are destroyed in children before they get out of their first year of kindergarten.  Some manage to retain some of those traits and not be destroyed completely, but virtually all lose massive amounts of their future potential in those first two years of public school.  I didn’t know in the early days why I fought, but just knew that I should. I am proud now that I have a grandchild to say that I have never yielded to statism, and I never will.  But it always makes me sad to see so many lights out in the minds of mankind.  And Detroit, as Matt proved, is bankrupt and morally lost not just because they ran out of other people’s money to give away, but because the light is out in the minds of the residents—a light that was put out during their years in public education.

Rich Hoffman

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