21 car century insurance: One thing academics got right. One.

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I'm in the middle of a sixteen-hour drive because I care about my daughter, and I'll be leaving her off at Grove City College, one of a handful of institutions to which I would entrust my children with no hesitation whatsoever.

She is going to flourish there. I have no concerns about her at all.

But I have a total of six children, and they won't all go to Grove City. So the question of what they should do comes up.

A lot of people on our side of the fence say: under no circumstances should you send your children to elite institutions. Urge them to be welders, etc.

I get that, and there is honor in being a welder. That isn't the point. The point is this: if we abandon the field to our enemies (let's not sugarcoat it; that's what they are), then they wind up with all the elite jobs, and there's no way anyone can persuade me that that's the optimal outcome.

For dissident students who do enter these institutions, I recommend they seek out dissident student groups -- members of these groups will keep each other sane throughout the experience. That's what I myself did.

For an episode of the Tom Woods Show coming out this week, I asked Auron MacIntyre for his opinions about this, and he gave the pithiest and most reasonable overview of who should go to college (not nobody, but not everybody, and his specific advice is valuable), and why completely withdrawing from them, tempting though it is, will not help our side in the long run.

Auron and I went on to discuss a related topic: the recent flourishing of independent academics who have walked away from the formal precincts of academia but who, thanks to technology, can now reach larger audiences than anyone could have imagined.

The institutions still crank out the credentials, but if you actually want to learn something, you can find more reliable voices than ever before, as dissident academics have figured out how to leverage the Internet to share their knowledge.

I myself left academia in 2006 and have been teaching vastly larger audiences online since 2010, more than I could ever have reached no matter what institution employed me.

Many of my readers will admire this story while exempting themselves from it: this is a story about the Internet being great for scholars, they think.

That is not the story. Scholars -- for a change -- simply noticed a larger trend that few other people had.

They noticed that the Internet had removed the need for permission, or funding sources, or patrons. Now you can just do things.

Thus you can easily acquire what you need for a solid, solopreneur business that you can operate from a laptop, and you don't need a million-dollar loan or the support of ten aristocrats. You need a handful of things whose collective cost to you is de minimis.

The year 2026 is an extraordinary one for human freedom and prosperity, and all people do is complain. You don't want to be one of those people. There's no dignity in it.

People don't do things like this because although the permissions are gone, the instructions haven't been given out. Hardly anyone knows how to set up or run a simple solopreneur business. How would they? Nobody teaches it -- certainly not the ideological prison camps we call schools.

If you have your own products or services, I can almost guarantee you are neglecting mechanisms that leverage technology to generate leads and sales. Practically guarantee.

And if you don't have your own products or services, I can still show you how to build something you can be proud of and that you can operate at any time and from anywhere you like.

Here is our chance not simply to theorize about capitalism or debate it on the Internet, but actually be part of it.

I am happy to announce that I will be holding an encore presentation coming up this Thursday teaching precisely this, and at a different time of day from my presentation last week. But this will be the last presentation I make this year, so be sure to be there.

If you're there live, I'm also giving away a tool that people from last week are still raving about: the Ideal Buyer Finder, which helps you attract just the right people, who want what you have to offer, from the very beginning. Your grandparents who ran a business would have cut their limbs off for this, as you'll realize when you start playing around with it. But you have to be there live for it.

Reserve your spot:

https://www.tomwoods.com/encoretom

Tom Woods