Shmulkey

Competition.

Destroy the public school monopoly with vouchers so that the same forces of creative destruction that power the tech industry can modernize and make more productive the education industry.

Zinn is an ideologue who picks his facts based on the social goal he is trying to achieve (imposition of a Marxist system in the US):

http://hnn.us/articles/1493.html:

“Objectivity is impossible,” Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

I rest my case.

The author is currently doing time for refusing to pay income taxes. A crank, IMHO.

Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt: http://jim.com/econ/, http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (video series, too)

Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek (short, non-technical paper which is full of brilliant insights): http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

Not a book, but the Econtalk podcast is fantastic: http://www.econtalk.org/

Your thinking so does not make it so.

I fail to see any reason why being a skilled researcher has any relevance to question of one's ethics. There's no logical connection between the two. A trivial case in point: according to social science research, conservatives -- under-represented in academia and thus less likely than liberals to be "skilled researchers" -- give more charity than liberals.

Huh? When did being smart have anything to do with being moral?