Ken Schoolland has probably done more to advance the ideas of liberty than any other person in Hawaii.
Schoolland, a director for the International Society for Individual Liberty, is the author of The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey. It is the satirical tale of a young man—Jonathan—shipwrecked on an island with a government bureaucracy run amok. (Sound familiar?)
Jonathan's 34 adventures—in which he encounters the Food Police, the Bureau of Idea Control, the Immorals Department, and candle makers who want to ban light from the sun—explode collectivist notions and show how democracy can spawn tyranny when property rights are not respected. Schoolland even calls for the privatization of libraries, zoos, and lakes. His book explains the most complex economic principles in words simple enough for anyone to understand, words that both enlighten and inspire.
States the epilogue: "[The philosophy of this book] is based on the principle of self ownership. You own your life. To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you do. No other person, or group of persons, owns your life nor do you own the lives of others."1
Schoolland has also published essays in Liberty, The Japan Times, The Asahi Evening News, The Honolulu Advertiser, and Freedom News Network. And he teaches Economics and Political Science at Hawaii Pacific University. Without imposing his views, his lectures do show the careful listener how government regulation hurts both consumers and producers. (And he makes excellent use of his vast collection of John Stossel documentaries.) Professor Schoolland invites his students to make not merely utilitarian judgments of government policies but moral judgments.
Along with all his other professional credentials, Schoolland can boast of having studied and taught in Japan: he taught in a university exchange program at Hakodate University in Japan, and was Director of the Master of Science in Japanese Business Studies Program at Chaminade University of Honolulu. He's also been an advisor to the White House.
To top it all off, it was Ken Schoolland who introduced Atlas Shrugged to the man who would translate Rand's novel into Russian. His own book has been translated into Russian, Norwegian, Dutch, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish; 21 languages2 in all.
—by Stuart Hayashi and David M. Brown
Copyright © 2000, The Daily Objectivist - Reprinted with permission of The Daily Objectivist and Davidmbrown.com.
29 May 2009 (last edit: 19 Feb 2024)
You can assist the work of Freedom Circle by purchasing one of the works discussed above:
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Ken Schoolland, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey, Commentary Edition, New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2005, p. 247. (Freedom Circle note) ↩︎
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As of 2023, it claims 55 translations (Freedom Circle note) ↩︎