Your Teacher Said What?! (31 page)

Now, if you're going to load a question for a bunch of ten-year-olds, you couldn't really do much better than this: The conflict is between people who want to protect the environment and those who want to help (or at least not hurt) business. Environment or business: Pick one.

Here's part of what Blake wrote in response:

She goes on to propose a compromise involving frequent testing to make sure that soil, plants, and animals are not harmed; and encouraging the company to use its profits to develop greener ways of operating its factories.

It may not be easy to raise a fifth-grade capitalist in twenty-first-century America. But it can be done. Just ask Blake.

This book began with a confession: that I haven't really had all that much to complain about during my life. The reason is that I've been extremely lucky. Part of that luck was to be born into the most affluent and freest society in human history—something that every American should probably give thanks for at least once a year.

But most of my luck has appeared in the form of other people, and I'd like to recognize a number of them.

First, Bill Rosen has been an invaluable researcher and collaborator; this book wouldn't have existed without him.

I'm grateful to Mark Hoffman, president of CNBC, for his support and for allowing me the freedom and opportunity to write
Your Teacher Said What?!
Brian Steel and Nik Deogun have blessed the project and offered valuable advice in its creation.

Every day, I'm grateful for the chance to work with a bunch of extraordinary professionals on
Squawk Box
, and I hope this will make up for all the times I forgot to say so to Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla, my coanchors for most of the last decade; to our executive producer, Matt Quayle, and our vice president of business news, Jeremy Pink. Also, thanks to Todd Bonin, Anne Tironi, Rob Contino, Matt Greco, Mark Haines, David Faber, Larry Kudlow, Rick Santelli, Ron Insana, Bill Griffeth, and Susan Krakower.

A special thanks to longtime friends Ron Meyer, Peter Foss, Rick Cotton, Jack Schneider, and David Zaslav.

To my mentors, the people who gave me so many opportunities to earn a living in the world of television: Jack Welch (and his wife Suzy); Jeff Immelt; Bob and Suzanne Wright; Jeff Zucker. Thanks also to my former boss at CNBC, Roger Ailes (and his wife Beth); Bill Bolster; Neil Cavuto; and Jonathan Wald.

Blake has a special thank you to offer her friends and—yes—her teachers, for though this project was always intended to remedy some of the gaps in the way she's been taught how the free market works, she's been the lucky beneficiary of a first-rate education in just about everything else, and that matters, too—a lot.

It's likely that readers will notice that this book depends a huge amount on the reporting of others. Much of their work is cited in the endnotes, but a few deserve special notice: my friend and frequent
Squawk Box
guest Steve Forbes, whose magazine and books are practically a road map to free-market philosophy, much of which I've channeled over the last year. The same is true for the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal
and the magazine
Reason
, and I'm grateful to their respective editors, Paul Gigot and Nick Gillespie, as well as the dozens of contributors whose thoughts are on display in dozens of places throughout this book. Barry Habib was a huge help in explaining the ways of modern unions. Even more is owed to writers and thinkers whose work has long survived them: Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and—the father of them all—Adam Smith. (And thanks, of course, to Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, both never-ending sources of inspiration.)

The staff at Sentinel has been a joy from start to finish, and I'm grateful beyond words that this book has been in their care: Thank you, Adrian Zackheim, Jillian Gray, Amanda Pritzker, and Will Weisser—and thanks to my representatives at William Morris Endeavor, Eric Simonoff and Ari Emanuel, for brokering this particular match.

Most of all, Blake and I are grateful to the rest of our family: Janie, Chris, Preston, Suzanne, and Margaux Scott; the Kernen dogs, Reagan and Pongo (and Rudolph, the Russian tortoise who will outlive all of us); and most of all to son and brother Scott and wife and mother Penelope. Not only could we not have done it without you; we wouldn't have even wanted to.

Joe Kernen and Blake Kernen

6 “accelerate the desirable process”:
John B. Parrott, “Obama and Herbert Croly,”
American Thinker
, March 27, 2010.

6 “Don't go into corporate America”:
Byron York, “Michelle Obama: “Don't Go into Corporate America,”
National Review
, February 29, 2008.

6 “I, like most of the American”:
Julianna Goldman and Ian Katz, “Obama Doesn't ‘Begrudge' Bonuses for Blankfein, Dimon,”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
, February 10, 2010.

8A study by the Federal Reserve:
Sam Allgood, et al. “Is Economics Coursework, or Majoring in Economics, Associated with Different Civic Behaviors?”
Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports
, no. 450, May 2010 (available at
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr450.pdf
).

9 “lower interest rates”:
Joe McGowan, “Signs of Trouble,”
Time for Kids
, January 23, 2008.

13A professor of psychology and economics:
Joseph Henrich, et al. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in Fifteen Small-Scale Societies,”
AEA Papers and Proceedings
91, no. 2 (May 2001): 73–78.

14 “When the greater part ”:
Peter J. Dougherty,
Who's Afraid of Adam Smith?: How the Market Got Its Soul
(New York: John Wiley, 2002).

16 “way too gullible”:
Jeffrey Miron,
Libertarianism from A to Z
(New York: Basic Books, 2010).

16 “In 1922, when the U.S. gross”:
Galbithink, “Annual U.S. Advertising Expenditure Since 1919” (available at
http://www.galbithink.org/ad-spending.htm
).

25 “perennial gale”:
Joseph A. Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(London, Allen & Unwin, 1976).

25 America had more than 100,000:
Michael Cox and Richard Alm,
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
(Indianapolis, IN, Library of Economics and Liberty, 2008).

36 None of them is bigger:
Daniel Michaels, “As Boeing Hits Turbulence, Uncle Sam Flies to Its Aid,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 10, 2009.

41 “What we want is not”:
Robert Heilbroner,
The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

46 “lucky fools”:
John V. C. Nye, “Lucky Fools and Cautious Businessmen: On Entrepreneurship and the Measurement of Entrepreneurial Failure,”
Research in Economic History
6 (supp. 1991).

48 “incroaching on one another's property”:
Adam Smith,
The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith
:
Lectures on Jurisprudence
(London, Clarendon Press, 1976).

60 North America's bison population:
Dale F. Lott,
American Bison: A Natural History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

78 Only at the last stop:
This description is taken from a Web site (
http://www.enotes.com/how-products-encyclopedia/shoelace
) that is a lifesaver for anyone with a curious nature or, more to the point, a curious child. The specifics come mostly from the Artur Mueller Company and the St. Louis Braid Company.

80 “the order brought about”:
David Boaz,
The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Readings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman
(New York: Free Press, 1997), citing Hayek,
Law, Legislation, and Liberty
, vol. 2.
The Mirage of Social Justice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

81 “an invisible hand to promote”:
Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations
(New York: Knopf, 1991).

87 a lot of people had been:
Daniel Engber of
Slate.com
points out quite a few: Daniel Engber, “The Underdog Effect: Why Do We Love a Loser?”
Slate.com
, April 30, 2010.

87 rooting for the team:
Jimmy A. Frazier and Eldon E. Snyder, “The Underdog Concept in Sports,”
Sociology of Sport Journal
8, no. 4 (December 1991).

87 underdogs have a bigger return:
Ibid.

88 the same phenomenon caused them:
Joseph A. Vandello, Nadav P. Goldschmied, and David A. R. Richards, “The Appeal of the Underdog,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
33, no. 12 (December 2007).

93 the dumbing down of American:
I'm grateful to Gennady Stolyarov at the Ludwig von Mises Institute for his essay “WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity,”
Mises Daily
, July 4, 2008.

97
Avatar
is simply the most:
James Bowman, “Avatar and the Flight from Reality,”
New Atlantis
no. 27 (Spring 2010).

98 the second-most-abundant element:
Colby Cosh, “Oil's Not Peaking. It's Jumping the Shark,”
Macleans
, April 13, 2010.

99 “for purposes of convenience”:
Alfred Marshall,
Principles of Economics
(London: Macmillan, 1890).

100 movies and TV shows that depict:
For more, see Christina M. Cohn and Lawrence W. Reed, “Free-Market Movie Moments,”
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
, June 1, 2007.

106 the measurable differences between:
Denis Boyles, “Vive la Difference: A Review of
The Narcissism of Minor Differences
by Peter Baldwin,”
Claremont Review of Books
, Spring 2010.

109 the idea that the United States is less generous:
Steven D. Levitt, “Who Spends More on Social Welfare: The United States or Sweden,”
New York Times
, May 10, 2010.

109–10 Even after spending fifty years:
From the CIA's World Factbook and author calculations; 2009 per capita GDP in terms of purchasing power parity puts France at $33,000, Germany at $34,000, and the United States at $46,000.

112 After a typical immigrant household:
Olaf Gersemann,
Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality
(Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2004).

113 In Germany, for example:
Ibid.

113 The one-time costs of setting:
Ibid.

116 German courts even hold:
Ibid.

116 In Italy, everyone employed:
David Segal, “Is Italy Too Italian?,”
New York Times
, August 9, 2010.

116 “workers who can afford”:
Gersemann,
Cowboy Capitalism
.

117 an article by the libertarian:
Lee Harris, “The Spirit of Independence: The Social Psychology of Freedom,”
The American: The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute
, July 2, 2010.

117 In 2006, the Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Survey:
Gersemann,
Cowboy Capitalism
.

121 “There is no sense”:
Segal, “Is Italy Too Italian?.”

122 “One of the most important features”:
Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

126 twenty-six states and dozens:
Steven K. Happel and Marianne M. Jennings, “The Folly of Anti-Scalping Laws,”
Cato Journal
15, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1995).

134 As reported by the invaluable:
John Stossel, “Good Intentions Gone Bad: The Problem with the Americans with Disabilities Act,”
Reason
, September 2, 2010.

134 “The Coast Guard is not”:
Patrik Jansson, “Top Five Bottlenecks in the Gulf Oil Spill Response,”
Christian Science Monitor
, July 1, 2010.

136 In Detroit, however:
Louise Radnofsky, “A Stimulus Project Gets All Caulked Up,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 21, 2010.

137 designed to get rid of:
Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanion, “How Government Prolonged the Depression,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 2, 2009.

141 “all of this is about food”:
William Neuman, “Group Seeks Food Label That Highlights Harmful Ingredients,”
New York Times
, October 13, 2010.

142 “to convince consumers to buy”:
Timothy Gardner, “Cars to Be Graded on Fuel Mileage, Emissions Standards,” Reuters, August 31, 2010.

142 “charged with an electric power”:
Ibid.

142 the cost of federal regulations:
Olaf Gersemann,
Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality
(Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2004).