Austrian School Economics—for Kids!

While right-wing politicians and activists fight to keep left-wingery out of children’s education, the Tuttle Twins are trying to build an audience for libertarian cartoons

- By Max Chafkin

Just before she turned 6 years old, my daughter announced with an unsettling solemnity her plans for the future. “I’m going to buy a mansion,” she said.

We were six months into Covid-19 lockdowns, and she was, for no reason I could discern, newly interested in capitalism. She would wake up and, before eating breakfast or going to the bathroom, start rifling through her craft supplies, demanding tape, scissors, pipe cleaners, construction paper, and so on. She told us her plan was to assemble faux flowers in mass quantities, sell them on the corner outside our apartment in Queens, N.Y., “and get rich.”

This seemed strange. Alice shares her bedroom with her two younger brothers. She goes to one of those progressive public schools where kids are encouraged to pick their pronouns, solve their problems with collective action, and consider their privilege. Her baby bookshelves are filled with volumes that seem designed to give Ted Cruz nightmares. One favorite, A Is for Activist, includes such lines as “C is for Co-Op,” “T is for Trans,” “U is for Union,” “Z is for Zapatista.” The title’s Amazon.com page includes blurbs from the ecofeminist author Naomi Klein and another attributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which describes it as “A People’s History of the United States, but for two-year-olds.”