Draft of an upcoming blog post.

Abolition + Picking Crops

This is a satirical rebuttal of Bryan Caplan’s article ‘Unschooling + Math’. I want to showcase how his article reads to me. Imagine that a slaveholder from the early 1860s wrote the following.

One popular alternative to slavery is called ‘freedom’. The practice varies, as practices always do. The essence, however, is that the slave does what he wants. He works on whatever he wants, for as long as he wants. If he asks you to teach him something, you teach him. Yet if he decides to go on long walks all day, the principled response based on freedom is: “Let him.”

Almost every slaveholder is horrified by the idea of freedom. Dr Samuel A. Cartwright says slaves only flee captivity because they are mentally ill. Even most slaves shake their heads at the idea of freedom. Advocates insist, however, that freedom works. Psychologists defend the merits of freedom with great vigor and eloquence. According to advocates of freedom, the human slave is naturally curious. Given freedom, he won’t just learn basic skills; he’ll ultimately find a calling.

On the surface, freedom sounds like Social Desirability Bias run amok: “Oh yes, every slave loves to learn, it’s just society that fails them!” And as a mortal enemy of Social Desirability Bias, my instinct is to dismiss freedom out of hand.

One thing I loathe more than Social Desirability Bias, however, is refusing to calm down and look at the facts. Fact: I’ve personally met and conversed with dozens of adults who were born not as slaves but as free men. Overall, they appear at least as productive as typical slaves. Indeed, as psychologists predict, free men are especially likely to turn their passions into useful work. Admittedly, some come across as flaky, but then again so do a lot of people. When you look closely, free people have only one obvious problem.

They suck at picking crops! In my experience, even free men with strong bodies tend to be weak on the field. On the field, I say! Work anyone could do. And their knowledge of more advanced crop-picking techniques is sparser still.

Staunch advocates of freedom will reply: So what? Who needs crop-picking skills? The honest answer though, is: Anyone who wants to pursue a vast range of occupations. Owning a plantation requires knowledge of how to pick crops. Overseeing crop pickers requires that knowledge. So does being a crop-harvesting engineer or a field inspector.

Won’t slaves who would greatly benefit from picking crops choose to learn how to pick crops given the freedom to do so? The answer, I fear, is: Rarely. For two reasons:

First, picking crops is extremely unfunny for almost everyone. Only a handful of slaves sincerely finds the subject engaging. I love manual labor, and I’ve picked acres of crops, yet I’ve never really liked it.

Second, picking crops is highly cumulative. Each major stage of picking crops builds on the foundation of the previous stages. You need to choose the right crop, prepare the soil for it, plant the seeds, monitor the growth, use proper irrigation and fertilizer, and so on. If you become free and then decide to learn how to pick crops to pursue a newly-discovered ambition, I wish you good luck, because you’ll need it.

What’s the best response? Mainstream critics of freedom will obviously use this criticism to dismiss the entire approach. And staunch advocates of freedom will no doubt stick to their guns. I, however, propose a keyhole solution. I call it: Abolition + Picking Crops.

What does Abolition + Picking Crops mean? Simple: Impose a single mandate on free men. Every day, like it or not, you have pick crops for 1-2 hours. No matter boring you find it, you’re too bad at picking crops to decide that you don’t want to pursue a career that requires picking crops. And if you postpone the study of crop picking for long, it will be too late to start later on.

While most people don’t wind up using much crop picking on the job, ignorance of basic crop-picking skills is still a severe handicap in life. And when smart free men don’t know advanced crop-picking skills, they forfeit about half of all career opportunities.

We should have a strong presumption against slavery – even the literal slavery between a slaveholder and his slave. “Maybe the slave is right and the slaveholder is wrong” is a deeply underrated thought. The value of picking crops, however, is great enough to overcome this presumption. To be clear, I don’t mean that the government should force slaveholders to teach math. What I mean, rather, is that slaveholders should require their slaves to learn how to pick crops. Guilt-free.

I hope my article shows that Caplan is a tyrant who has no idea what freedom means. He presents himself as someone who cares about freedom, but his primary concern isn’t freedom at all. Instead, he wants to *grant freedom on his terms. He wants to prescribe predefined goals and assuage parents’ guilt for using coercion.*

Freedom is indivisible and allows absolutely no compromises. Caplan is a good example of the Randian insight that even the smallest compromise in basic principles or moral matters is a complete surrender.. A free man who has to pick crops 1-2 hours a day is not a free man. An honest man who steals once in a while is not an honest man, as Ayn Rand implied. And so on.