Saving Capitalism One Fifth Grader At A Time

Joe Kernen, co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box and his daughter, fifth grader, Blake Kernen, have teamed up for YOUR TEACHER SAID WHAT?!: Defending Our Kids from the Liberal Assault on Capitalism, a primer to push back against what Kernen perceives to be an anti-capitalist bias within our public education system – a bias some believe begins in the earliest grades.

Is that even a point for debate at this point?

In YOUR TEACHER SAID WHAT?!: Defending Our Kids from the Liberal Assault on Capitalism (Sentinel, May 2011), Kernen recounts the challenges of teaching the value of free market capitalism to someone who still gets an allowance. He looks at the world through a fifth grader’s eyes and discovers the countless ways our education system and pop culture attack capitalism. As Joe tackles Blake’s tough questions, they cover tricky topics such as:

The plusses (small) and minuses (huge) of unions — including the unionized teachers who disparage the same free enterprise system that pays their salaries.

The truth about so-called “Fair Trade”: Rather than help poor farmers, it keeps them poor.

The differences between Europe and America, and why free health care isn’t really free.

With statism on the rise and Free Market Capitalism, a cornerstone of liberty and democracy under assault from the highest levels of politics, to the earliest grades in our schools, one less reading of Goldilocks replaced with a straight-forward, easy to understand primer in Free Market capitalism, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea from a conservative perspective. Homeschoolers may find it especially interesting and useful.

Ultimately, Joe convinced Blake that capitalism isn’t about greed; it’s about freedom. As she writes in one of her sections: “When I go to the store to buy a net for my aquarium (I have puffer fish) I can find a lot of nets, but no one told the store which ones to put on the shelf, and no one told the companies that make the nets how many to make, and no one told the companies that deliver the nets when to bring them. Or, rather, everyone told them. Millions of ordinary people deciding what to buy and sell are smarter than even the hundred smartest people in the world.”