Teaching Economics

Earlier today I wrote that school destroys critical thinking. Many of you asked for proof. The proof is Marx. Marxism is probably the most tested theory in human history. Tested on paper by the best economists in the world. Tested at full scale on hundreds of millions of people, across several continents, for more than a century. And it failed every single test. A free mind, one that checks its ideas against reality, cannot remain Marxist. If so many people still are, it's not a problem of intelligence. It's a problem of method. They were never taught to verify. Let's start from the beginning. In 1867, Marx publishes Das Kapital. Everything rests on one idea: the value of a good comes from the amount of labor it contains. The boss's profit is therefore labor stolen from the worker. Four years later, in 1871, Menger and Jevons independently show that this is wrong. Value doesn't come from labor. It comes from the usefulness the buyer sees in the good. An hour spent digging a useless hole creates zero value. That's the marginal revolution, and all of modern economics is built on it. In 1896, Böhm-Bawerk shows that Marx's system contradicts itself: real prices don't match labor values, and Marx knew it. The foundation collapses. In 1920, Mises asks the question that kills it: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, how does a central planner know what to produce, how much, and with which resources? Answer: he can't. Hayek finishes the job in 1945: economic knowledge is scattered across millions of minds, and no central bureau can ever gather it. That's the theory. Now the predictions. Marx predicted the revolution would break out in the most industrialized countries, England and Germany. It happened in Russia, an agrarian country. Wrong. He predicted workers would grow poorer and poorer under capitalism. They grew richer than at any point in history. Wrong. He predicted the State would wither away. Everywhere his ideas were applied, the State became total. Wrong. Now the experiments. USSR: forced collectivization, famine in Ukraine, millions dead, the Gulag. China: Mao's Great Leap Forward. Between 15 and 45 million dead depending on the historian. The largest famine in human history, produced by a plan. Cambodia: the Khmer Rouge killed roughly a quarter of their own population in four years. Then there are the natural experiments. The most brutal ones, because they eliminate every excuse. Korea. Same people, same language, same culture, same history. In 1945, the North was richer than the South. Today, income per person in the South is about 29 times higher than in the North. Only one variable changed: the system. Germany. One people cut in two. One side had to build a wall. Not to keep people out. To keep them in. Venezuela. The largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people fled the country. 21st-century socialism ended with Maduro captured last January. Meanwhile, the other system, the one you were taught to hate, did this: in 1820, about three quarters of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today, around 10%. And the biggest escape from poverty in history, China after 1978, happened at the exact moment the Communist Party brought markets back. From Marx to Maduro, 150 years of data. All pointing the same way. So how does anyone stay Marxist? With the magic sentence: "that wasn't real communism." Think about what that sentence means. A theory that fails every time it's tried, whose believers then declare that none of the attempts counted, is no longer a theory. It's a faith. Karl Popper saw it as early as 1945: Marxism survived its refutations by making itself irrefutable. A mind trained to think for itself asks one question: how many failures does it take before you question the hypothesis? One, two, ten, forty? That's exactly the question school never teaches you to ask. Marx isn't taught as a hypothesis to test against the data. He's taught as a morality tale: there are oppressors and oppressed, and the right side is obvious. You learn the conclusion, never the method. A four-year-old would ask: "Okay, but where did it work?" Fifteen years of schooling later, they've stopped asking. A system that teaches you to obey has no interest in teaching you to verify. Because the day you start verifying is the day you start being free. And that day, you stop being a Marxist.