gat

are vanishing, that the workplace demands more regulation and discipline, that "foreign
competition" will bury us if we don’t comply with expert prescriptions in the years ahead? One
powerful antidote to such propaganda comes from looking at evidence which contradicts official
propaganda—like women who earn as much as doctors by selling shrimp from old white trucks
parked beside the road, or thirteen-year-old boys who don’t have time to waste in school because
they expect to be independent businessmen before most kids are out of college. Meet Stanley:
I once had a thirteen-year-old Greek boy named Stanley who only came to
school one day a month and got away with it because I was his homeroom
teacher and doctored the records. I did it because Stanley explained to me
where he spent the time instead. It seems Stanley had five aunts and uncles,
all in business for themselves before they were twenty-one. A florist, an
unfinished furniture builder, a delicatessen owner, a small restauranteur, and
a delivery service operator. Stanley was passed from store to store doing free
labor in exchange for an opportunity to learn the business. "This way I decide
which business I like well enough to set up for myself," he told me. "You tell
me what books to read and I’ll read them, but I don’t have time to waste in
school unless I want to end up like the rest of these people, working for
somebody else." After I heard that I couldn’t in good conscience keep him
locked up. Could you? If you say yes, tell me why.
Look at those 150,000 Old Order Amish in twenty-two states and several foreign countries:
nearly crime-free, prosperous, employed almost totally at independent livelihoods; proprietors
with only a 5 percent rate of failure compared to 85 percent for businesses in non-Amish hands. I
hope that makes you think a little. Amish success isn’t even possible according to mudsill theory.
They couldn’t have happened and yet they did. While they are still around they give the lie to
everything you think you know about the inevitability of anything. Focus on the Amish the next
time you hear some jerk say your children better shape up and toe the corporate line if they hope
to be among the lucky survivors in the coming world economy. Why do they need to be hired
hands at all, you should ask yourself. Indeed, why do you?
2 By "community" Brownson meant a confederation of individual families who knew one another; he would have
been outraged by a federation of welfare agencies masquerading as a human settlement, as described in Hillary
Clinton’s It Takes A Village, in which the village in question is suspiciously devoid of butcher, baker, and candlestick
maker joining their voices in deciding child-care policies.
3 The Boston Globe for September 8, 1999, carried this dismal information: if all the households in theUnited
States are divided into five equal fractions, and the household incomes in each fifth averaged together, the
economic classes of the country look like this compared to one another: the bottom fifth earns $8,800 a year, the
second fifth $20,000 a year, the third fifth $31,400 a year, and the fourth fifth $45,100 a year. The balance of the
fruits of our managed society have been reserved for the upper 20 percent of its households, and even there the
lion’s share drops on the plate of a relatively small fraction of the fat cats. If this is the structure our centrally
controlled corporate economy has imposed after a century in close partnership with science, government, religion,
and schools, it argues loudly that trusting any large employer not to be indifferent, or even hostile, to American
social tradition and dreams is misplaced trust. Of course, it’s always a good idea to treat such data with caution
because marshaling numbers to prove anything is remarkably easy to do (indeed, teaching a reverence for
numbers may be the most significant blindness of modern times). And yet my own intuition tells me that profound
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