The School Revolution (4 page)

In other words,
at the center of leadership is ethics
. Followers are patient with a leader who is not super competent if they are convinced that the person is reliable ethically. Trust is central to all leadership. At some point, the person must display
competence. But competence in the sense of mastery of a set of skills is far less important than integrity. The earlier people learn this in life, the more successful they will be. Once again, this principle relies on self-government. If the leader must depend on someone else to whip him into line, he is not a libertarian. He may have the ability to lead others, but he does not have the ability
to lead others in terms of the principles of the freedom philosophy.

I am convinced that the freedom philosophy attracts idealistic people who have a desire to make the world a better place. They have this desire in the same way a member of Alcoholics Anonymous has the desire to make his life better and, through that action alone, make the world a better place. He is not looking
to whip others into line. He wants to lead by example. This is what we might call
word and deed
leadership. It is leadership that walks the talk.

So, successful leadership begins with self-government. It is extended through successful followership. A person learns the basics of leadership by working closely with a competent leader who
serves as a model. He gains access to the leader through his willingness to submit to leadership. This is the principle of bottom-up leadership. It begins at the bottom. Then, over a period of time, the follower advances in his level of responsibility. Maybe he attends a meeting on a regular basis; he shows up. This is basic and absolutely necessary to success in life, because a lot of people do
not show up. Maybe he gets there early. He helps to set up the chairs. He learns how to make the coffee. He offers himself as a servant to whoever is running the meeting.
He becomes useful to somebody else
. As I said earlier, this is the essence of Alcoholic Anonymous, but it’s also the essence of libertarian leadership.

When individuals are committed to a program of self-improvement
in terms of a philosophy of personal responsibility and voluntary action, they become leaders. This may be in spite of themselves. So few people are faithful servants that those people inevitably rise in the chain of command, even if there is no official chain of command. So few people are reliable followers that leaders reach out to them, train them, disciple them, and put them in positions
of leadership.

The program I’ve developed to teach these principles is aimed primarily at teenagers, but I see no reason older people would not benefit greatly from it. Teenagers have to start at the bottom, the best place to start.

If you are interested in finding out about this program, send an e-mail to:

M
ost people want to leave a positive legacy. Even graffiti artists who spray-paint walls want to be remembered for something. Today, as never before in history, it is possible for almost anyone to leave a legacy. You can start a blog free of charge and publish your opinions. It will probably stay up for a
hundred years or more. You can use an inexpensive pocket camera or your cell phone to shoot a video and post it free of charge on YouTube. It will also likely be there in one hundred years or more. It might be there forever. Search engines will let people find whatever you have said or written. If you have something to say, you can have it there for all the world to see. This is simply tremendous.
It is truly unprecedented.

These days, most high school students are way ahead of the rest of us when it comes to anything digital. They communicate with one another with technologies that the rest of us barely understand. I am positive that I do not have anything to tell them they don’t already know when it comes to digital communications. But it takes more than familiarity
or even expertise with technical matters to leave a legacy. The most important thing is having something important to say. It is my goal to train thousands of future libertarian activists who will dedicate themselves to spreading the message of liberty.

When I say activists, I do not necessarily mean political activists. Other forms of activism are far more important than political activism.
There are so many ways for people to make a contribution to society besides politics that it is probably a waste of time for most people to devote time to political activism at all. Each person ought to find some area of life in which he can make a contribution, and then devote himself to making that contribution. So much needs to be done, and there are so many talented people who have the
innate ability to get things done, that it is a shame that more people do not become activists. I believe in voluntarism as a philosophy of life, and therefore I believe in volunteering. People always need help. Anything we can do to help one another, either for profit or not, is a contribution we ought to be making.

My goal is to help young people find ways of becoming volunteers. I
would like to give them the vision—meaning the motivation—to find their niche in life, and find it early. I don’t mean necessarily their employment niche, though that is good, too. I mean their service niche. The earlier a person can find this, the more fulfilling his life will be.

There is a lot of confusion over what is sometimes called a vocation.
Usually when people speak of their vocation, they mean their job. When I use the word
vocation
, I have in mind the older usage, which used to be known as a “calling.” I distinguish between a person’s job and his calling. Put differently, I distinguish between his occupation and his vocation. A job is work that someone does to earn a living. It’s what puts food on the table. A calling is very different
in most cases.
A calling is the most important thing you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace
. There are a few people who are fortunate enough to find a job that is also their calling. Teachers and preachers are paid to do the most important thing they can do, and for which they would be most difficult to replace. Professional athletes probably qualify as people whose jobs are
their callings. So do physicians. There are others, of course, but for most people, this is not the case.

Consider my career. Up until 1976, my career was my occupation, and my occupation was my vocation. I believed that the most important thing I could do, for which I would be most difficult to replace, was to deliver babies. I had been trained to do this. I was well paid
to do this. People understood what I did for a living, and I think most people respected my occupation. Most people like babies, so anybody who can help mothers deliver babies has a good reputation. I was content to deliver a lot of babies.

Then, in August 1971, President Nixon unilaterally abolished the last traces of the gold standard. I became concerned that we were going to enter
a period of serious inflation. I saw this as a betrayal of the American people, and I believed that it would lead to highly negative consequences. I decided to speak out against this policy, and this led to my decision to run for Congress in 1976. I was elected.

All of a sudden I had a new career. I had a new job. I had a new calling. I guess you would say it was a calling. The trouble,
as I found out in November of 1976, was that I was easy to replace. Out of about 180,000 votes, I lost the election by fewer than 300. So I went back to delivering babies. But I had a major decision to make. Should I continue to campaign or should I forget about politics? I decided to continue to campaign, and in 1978, I defeated the man who had defeated me in 1976. I stayed in Congress until
1985. In 1984, I ran for the Republican Party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and I was defeated. I went back to delivering babies. In 1988, I ran for president as the Libertarian nominee, then I went back to delivering babies. Then, in 1996, I decided to run for Congress again, and I was elected. You can see my dilemma. I believed that it was important to deliver babies, but I also believed
that I could make a contribution to the cause of liberty by using my position in the House of Representatives to set forth principles of liberty, and then to vote in terms of those principles. In this respect, I believed that this was the most important thing I could do for which I would be most difficult to replace.

When I decided to run for the Republican Party’s nomination for president
in 2007, I believed that this was part of my calling. I ran for the nomination in 2011 for the same reason. I believed that I could get out the message of liberty to far more people as a candidate for president than I could as a congressman working in the shadows. You are probably reading this book because of my decisions in 2007 and 2011 to run for president.

I am involved in a lot
of activities today that I hope will leave a legacy. One of them is to create a homeschool curriculum. I also speak out on various economic and political issues. I do this in order to make clear the principles of liberty and their application. It is my goal to persuade thousands of people to make a similar study of liberty and to speak out effectively in their own areas of authority. My recent activities
are part of my calling. They are more important than being reelected to Congress. In other words, the most important things I could do, for which I would be most difficult to replace, lie outside Congress. So, I changed my job, but I did not change my calling. My calling is still the same: to articulate the principles of liberty, and to help people see ways in which those principles can be
applied in the real world.

You could say that I came to my calling somewhat late, but the earlier in life that somebody discovers his calling, the earlier he can dedicate himself to a long-term program of self-education. This should eventually lead to a long-term program of educating others. But, as I wrote in the preceding chapter, education
is mainly about self-education. So is reform.

If a student discovers in high school what he should commit himself to as part of his calling, he can achieve more in the long run than if he discovers it twenty or thirty years later. It is like beginning a savings program. The sooner you begin, the sooner the capital growth begins. The longer the compound growth process continues, the larger
the legacy at the end of your life. This applies not only to money but also to almost everything we do.

We all know about the fast-changing job market. Very few people find themselves working in jobs ten years after college that are in any way related to what they majored in while in college. It is common for young people to have half a dozen different jobs after college graduation,
before they finally settle down in what is anything like a lifetime occupation. The pace of change is incredibly fast, so anybody who concentrates in college on a particular career is probably going to be disappointed. Maybe this will work if he is preparing for a specialty position in a profession such as medicine or accounting or chemical engineering, but if he majors in the general liberal arts,
his college degree will likely have very little to do with what he does for a living a decade after he graduates.

Then there is this problem: Half the students who enroll in college fail to graduate. Of those who do graduate, most take almost five years to earn their degrees. This investment of time and money is high risk. If I can persuade high school students to focus on a calling
in life, and to regard their occupations as flexible, I will help them to leave a long-term legacy. Getting a good job is a wonderful thing; it helps people put food on the table. But, in the long run, very few people can leave a major legacy based on what they do for a living. However, if they concentrate on some area of service to others in which they are important contributors in the broadest sense,
they will be better able to make judgments about what they should do for a living. They should view their occupations in terms of their vocations. They should view their jobs in terms of their callings. The two concepts play off each other. They should view temporary employment, even if it lasts for twenty years, as the means by which they make a major contribution that will last a hundred years
after they die.

I realize of course that most people will not make a major contribution that will last a hundred years after they die and impact the whole world. But almost anyone can make a contribution that will help somebody a hundred years after they die. They can write something, or make a video of something, or show someone how to do something. Those little things are meaningful.
In today’s digital world, people can come across information and put it to effective use in their lives even though the person who created that information has been dead and gone for many years. As I said, nothing like this has ever happened in history. My goal is to help teenagers begin to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity.

If a young person recognizes his calling early
enough, he can concentrate on it for decades. He will become incredibly good at what he does. Some researchers have said that a person can become competent in a field with about a thousand hours of work. He can become a master of the field in five thousand hours of work. If he has the innate capabilities, it probably takes ten thousand hours, plus training from a specialist who knows the field, to
become a virtuoso. Most people cannot become virtuosos, even if they invest ten thousand hours. But if they do have the innate talent, and they spend two hours a day of intense, concentrated effort to improve their talent, after about ten thousand hours they will become virtuosos.
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What a tragedy it would be for those people not to find their calling until it is too late.

The goal of my online curriculum is to serve the needs of dedicated high school students. If I get enough students to devote themselves to mastering the curriculum, some of them will become masters in the principles of liberty, and a few of them will become virtuosos. They need motivation to do this. They also need to figure out what their calling
is. I hope my curriculum will help them do this.

A meaningful legacy involves several generations of dedicated people. Let me give you an example. In 1871 a self-taught economist named Carl Menger had his book published. It was called
Principles of Economics
. With it, Menger made a major intellectual breakthrough. He argued that economic value is based on subjective imputation, not on
innate characteristics and not on the value of inputs to produce a product or service. He rejected the labor theory of economic value. He also rejected the cost of production theory of economic value. He offered in its place a subjective theory of value: the value of the object or service is based on the subjective assessments of potential customers or buyers of that product or service.

Menger taught another economist named Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. He took Menger’s idea and applied it systematically in the area of capital theory, which involves a theory of interest rates. Böhm-Bawerk in turn taught Ludwig von Mises. Mises extended the insights of both these men in the area of banking, money, and capital. He made this breakthrough in 1912. Over the next half-century,
he developed these ideas. In 1949, Yale University Press published his book
Human Action
. In that book, Mises offers a comprehensive theory of how markets work. His was the first comprehensive theory of the entire market based on a handful of what he called axioms and corollaries. Beginning in that same year, Murray Rothbard began to attend graduate seminars taught by Mises. Rothbard was not enrolled
at New York University, but Mises allowed outsiders to attend his seminars. Rothbard attended them for almost twenty years. Mises retired in 1969. Rothbard in turn taught a generation of libertarian activists and free-market economists, though not in a classroom setting. He did it by the power of his writing ability, which was legendary.

Here we see a meaningful legacy in action.
It began with Menger. It extended through Böhm-Bawerk to Mises, and from Mises to Rothbard. Each of these men was amazingly gifted. They were all good writers, and Rothbard was the greatest writer among them. The power of these ideas, coupled with the clarity of exposition, made possible the modern academic libertarian movement. Each of them played a special role. Each of them left something
behind for the next one to develop. From the publication in 1871 of Menger’s
Principles of Economics
to the publication in 1962 of Rothbard’s
Man, Economy, and State
, we see an extraordinary development of ideas. Menger had one important idea, but it was crucial. Rothbard had many important ideas. This was a case in which a series of giants stood on each other’s shoulders. I had met Mises, who
influenced me greatly, but Rothbard was my friend as well as my mentor.