This was posted by a site member yesterday.
I think the most interesting aspect of your Ron Paul Curriculum is the class on entrepreneurship that you mentioned some weeks ago on this site followed closely by the class on personal finance.Could you do an article describing in detail the aspects of the entrepreneurship class and the philosophy behind it. I am very interested in this class for my children and to recommend to others. I would like to know more.
The fellow who spearheads homeschooling in my state told me years ago that about half of the graduates of the accredited homeschool high school program started their own businesses upon graduation. Entrepreneurship is a natural for homeschoolers.
The course will be academic as well as practical.
From an academic standpoint, I will teach the sections in Ludwig von Mises's writings that deal with entrepreneurship. I will also deal with follow-up writings by other Austrian School economists. The concept of the market process, which is driven by entrepreneurship, is one of the fundamental insights of the Austrian School of economics. The students need to understand this material.
The reason why the student must be introduced to the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurship is this: he needs to understand this aspect of the free market. He needs to understand how it is that the private property system, which has no central planning, and which supposedly prices all capital goods and resources in terms of their productivity in the process of production that the resources or capital goods provide, can still leave a profit for an entrepreneur. This was the great unanswered issue raised by the classical economists, especially by Karl Marx. He came up with the idea that profits come from the exploitation of labor by capitalists. But he could never prove it. I will devote some amount of time to the writings of Marx on this issue. I wrote about this in 1968 in my book, Marx's Religion of Revolution. There are variants of his thesis out there, including the explanation by Keynes and other critics of free-market production.
If a student is called in life to be an entrepreneur, and if he is successful, he then faces an enormous problem. He will be tempted to send his children to a very expensive and prestigious university, where the children will be taught by people who despise the free market, despise the wealth of entrepreneurs, and are systematically involved in a program to destroy the children's faith in the fathers' professions. This was the issue raised in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeter in his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. A businessman who takes the RPC's business courses will understand exactly why his career is morally acceptable and highly profitable. He will not suffer from an inferiority complex. The course explains the motivation of the haters of capitalism in terms of envy. Students will be immunized against this. The second issue is this: Can the student begin to develop the skills of entrepreneurship while still in high school? This will depend on individual students. Some people just do not have the knack. But if the student takes the two courses on business, plus my year of English for seniors, the student will be equipped to make a living in the free market.
My senior course in English is like nothing ever taught to high school English students. It is a course on how to develop direct-response marketing. It will be a course entirely on rhetoric -- persuasion -- but the type of rhetoric studied focuses on motivating people to take action by means of written ads, YouTube ads, and direct mail. No high school English teacher has ever done this before. So, at the end of the course, the student will understand how to motivate people to do what he recommends. The students study classic ads that have generated millions of dollars. I also show them the techniques used by political direct response advertisers to motivate people to vote in a particular way, and especially to send donations to a political campaign. I also cover nonprofit direct-response advertising. I have a great deal of experience there, too. This course begins in spring, 2015.
I plan to market this English course to businessmen. Why should a businessman pay $250 to enroll, plus $50 for this course? Any business owner who doesn't is making a huge career error. I show him how to generate money that he doesn't know is there. I also show him how to evaluate ad proposals pitched to him by skilled advertising agency salesmen, who are more interested in selling him on their multimillion-dollar ad campaign than selling whatever it is he sells to the public. He can enroll all of his children as free riders for the flat $250 enrollment fee.
The instructors will teach the students how to start a small online business. We will also give the student an introduction to the basic tools of modern business, which includes spreadsheets, database management, and presentation graphics. Basically, we will teach them how to use Libre Office, which is a free program comparable to Microsoft Office. The students will also be taught how to use a free program that competes with Photoshop.
My goal is to get them into an apprenticeship program with a local business that generates income somewhere in the $3 million/year range. I want the student to be under the guidance of a business owner who has started his business from scratch, and who has extend it beyond the first major ceiling, which is about $500,000 a year. If a businessman can get beyond this barrier, he is skilled in the basics of small business management. I would like the student to apprentice to the millionaire next door.
At the end of high school, the student should have a business that generates enough money part-time that it will pay for all of the student's college education. I want to make certain that the parents never pay a dime for the students' education beyond high school. Of course, if the students take the Ron Paul Curriculum seriously, they will enter college as juniors, and a few of them will quiz out of their entire college program by the time they graduate from high school. The whole thing will cost them around $15,000. It will cost their parents nothing.
Here are the options.
(1) Send your child to a free public school, and then pay $50,000 to $250,000 of after-tax money for the child to attend a Left-wing university that will try to undermine the child's faith in the free market.(2) (A) spend $500 a year for a child's education in the Ron Paul Curriculum, grades 1-12, and have the child pay for college in a distance learning program; (B) keep the $50,000 to $250,000 in your retirement portfolio.
Which makes better sense to you?
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