Your Teacher Said What?!

Table of Contents

 

 

 

SENTINEL
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First published in 2011 by Sentinel,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Joe Kernen and Blake Kernen, 2011
All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Kernen, Joe.

Your teacher said what?! : defending our kids from the liberal assault on capitalism / Joe Kernen and Blake Kernen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-51519-8

1. Capitalism—United States. 2. Free enterprise—United States. 3. United States—Economic conditions—2009–. 4. United States—Economic policy—2009–. I. Kernen, Blake, 1999–. II. Title.

HB501.K458 2011

330.12'20973—dc22 2011005036

 

 

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To Penelope

It took me twenty years to find something about America really worth ranting about.

Oh, I ranted anyway. A lot. I grumbled about brain-challenged bureaucrats at every level of government and about the jug-headed legislators who employ them. I fumed about the policies of the Federal Reserve, about the accountants at the Social Security Administration, and about everything related to health-care reform and global warming. I even whined about the incomprehensible forms used for everything from insurance claims to travel reimbursement. And as is the sacred right of all Americans, I groused long and eloquently about taxes.

But I didn't actually have anything all that awful to complain about, since for nearly the entire twenty years I was getting paid to share my rants about the world's largest and freest economy. I got to talk about business and the economy with everyone from billionaire industrialist Warren Buffett to former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson. I met with the country's—the world's!—smartest investors and economists during the greatest bull market in history and the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. And I got to do so in front of an audience who watches me on television with a devotion that borders on the obsessive. They watch so carefully, in fact, that hundreds of them send me e-mails every day, agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or telling me how I've entirely missed the point.
¹
You may be one of them. If you're tired of hearing me complain, I understand.

But if so, you should stop reading now. Because a couple of years ago, I found the first truly worthwhile reason to rant about the economy. It wasn't unfunded mandates, Medicare insolvency, CEO compensation, or the federal deficit.

It was one nine-year-old girl. And that same girl—by the time you read this, she'll be eleven, going on twenty—is the reason for this book.

She's not what I rant about, of course. From the day Blake Alexandra Kernen was born, the day after Christmas in 1999, she's done hardly anything worth complaining about. This didn't mean that she never made her mother and me fret. Like any new father, when I wasn't overwhelmed by the sheer terror of it all (in my case, terror amplified by the fact that I had become a father for the first time in my mid-forties), I was worrying plenty: Was a temperature of 100 degrees worth a call to the doctor or a trip to the hospital? Was she walking early enough? Too early? Did she have enough playdates?
Too
many?

By the time Blake's brother, Scott Joseph, showed up two years later, I was an old hand at worrying. In fact, by then I had found an entirely new and durable thing to worry about. Like any father, I worried about whether I would measure up—whether I would succeed in doing for Blake and Scott what my parents had done for me: giving them the values that reflected what their mother and I cherished most. We wanted our kids to believe in God, love their country, and respect the principles of hard work and fairness. We wanted them to value honesty, courage, and kindness, to be polite and respectful.

Simple, right? After all, these principles are widely shared in twenty-first-century America. Our church teaches us that we are obliged to care for people who can't care for themselves; our schools reward hard work and demand respect. Kids learn good sportsmanship from playing tennis and soccer. The heroes of their favorite movies and television programs are generally pretty brave (though occasionally a little goofy; SpongeBob, anyone?).

With one exception. Penelope and I are capitalists—and not just because we've done pretty well out of the capitalist system. We believe that free-market capitalism is not only the most powerful engine for human prosperity ever but also history's strongest force for freedom and human advancement. We believe—no, we
know
—that economic freedom is as important as religious freedom or freedom of speech. We believe that productive work, freely exchanged, is a virtue, just like charity freely given.

Please don't misunderstand this. We're not teaching Blake and Scott that their purpose in life is to get as rich as possible; it's to make sure that everyone is as
free
as possible. For us, the only difference between defending economic freedom and defending religious freedom is that while the mainstream culture offers no real opposition to the many ways in which Americans worship, there is a powerful current of antagonism toward the ways in which they do business.

Some of the attacks on free-market capitalism are overt: the idea, for example, that capitalism is unavoidably brutal, or at least immoral. Some are of the more-in-sorrow-than-anger category, such as the notion that we should increase the benefits of the free market by taxing and regulating it into submission. Many are specific to the issues of the moment, like the idea that the best solution to the unsustainable growth of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare is to make them grow even faster (you can't make up some of this stuff).

And
that
is something worth ranting about: not anything my kids do, but what is being done to them.

Consider that, during Blake's first ten years, the United States of America not only elected a Republican president who increased the nation's debt by more than $4 trillion—yes: that's trillion, with a
T
—and a Democrat who is certain to break even that dubious record but experienced the worst economic disaster since the Chicago Cubs were a dynasty.
²
About the only constant of those ten years, in fact, is that trust in the free-enterprise system seemed to sink lower in every one of them.

The country, of course, is still suffering from a loss of faith in free markets. But at least in the Kernen household, it doesn't have to incapacitate us. Which is why we decided to spend a year—it turned into nearly two—taking the antidote: a daily (okay, not daily—but nearly) dose of free-market philosophy.

It started with asking Blake to start writing down words and phrases she heard but didn't understand about the economy, politics, and so on. Some of them seemed complicated but weren't (“What's physical stimulus?”) and some seemed simple but were really complicated (“I already
know
what a price is!”). Some of Blake's questions led me to discover ideas I didn't know about already, like the Higgs effect: the way that governments manage to turn temporary crises into permanent programs. And sometimes her answers served to remind me that she was still, after all, ten years old (with Blake, you constantly need to remind yourself of this). The idea of credit, for example, led naturally to an attempt to explain that money has a time value, that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar a year from now. Not, it turns out, to someone whose purchases are entirely subsidized by someone else.

What else? Blake and I learned something about the origins of the Progressive movement in America, and the fact that its strongest political component has always been labor unions. This is not a coincidence: Progressivism
always
prefers collective endeavors to individual ones, and the biggest collectivists in the American economy are the ones whose whole reason for being is—wait for it—collective bargaining. Unfortunately, they are also the adults our children spend the most hours a day with, and we spend a lot of time talking about the pluses (small) and minuses (humongous) of unionism, from the plumbers who fix our furnace to the teachers who wonder aloud about the benefits of the free-enterprise system that pays their salaries.

There was more: Tea partiers in the United States versus socialist rioters in Europe; the sinister side of food propaganda—I swear I didn't know what “locavorism” was before, and am still not sure it wasn't made up as a joke—and the huge significance of property rights for not just prosperity but freedom itself. And if you're anything like me, I can guarantee that your jaw will drop the same way mine did once I started paying attention to the hostility to free-market capitalism that infects almost every movie and television show your kids are watching.