About Us

This website is intended to promote intellectual exploration, aka intellectual diversity. It is by Kinkaidians, for Kinkaidians. It puts students and their natural curiosity first.

As things now stand at The Kinkaid School of Houston, textbooks and teaching in Government, Economics, and U.S. History, not to mention numerous Interim Term courses, offer students only a dull landscape of various statist alternatives—from old-fashioned American progressivism, to modern European democratic socialism, to contemporary Anti-Racist radicalism. Despite the supposed diversity of those outlooks, the same collectivist perspective permeates the courses and materials. The only question for students is: Which flavor of collectivism are you going to choose? The alternative of Individualism, if it is mentioned at all, is caricatured as dated, rigidly ideological, atomistic, simplistic—espoused only by the ignorant and the bigoted.

The Kinkaid community should know that the standard fare is intellectually suspect. It needs competition. A large and growing band of great minds, intellectual super-heroes to some, over the last three centuries have been creating a new frontier that students can explore: Individualism. That said, this website does not deal with issues of sex or religion. It is not about foreign policy. Nor does it emphasize civil liberties and civil rights. Students should know that Individualism offers alternatives in all those fields, which are not discussed here.

FreeKinkaid.org is focused solely on the science of liberty as an alternative to political Collectivism. That science is embodied in many branches, such as Austrian-School economics, Public Choice sociology, Objectivist philosophy, Free-Market environmentalism, and the Enlightenment era’s discovery of a new political science. Another cross-disciplinary area might be called “the rest-of-the-story” U.S. History, which delves into the emergence of political collectivism in the America, discovering largely forgotten motivations and forces on the front end and many unintended negative consequences on the back end.

Individualism, which in the socioeconomic area is sometimes called classical liberalism or market liberalism, informs a wide variety of disciplines to better understand the world. Just in U.S. history, for example, classical liberalism exposes both the cynical statism of corporations in the supposed era of laissez-faire, and the deep-seated racism of the Progressivist intellectuals (via eugenics) who fought the corporations.

This website is not intended to “chill” Leftist perspectives at Kinkaid. Quite the reverse. This website’s advocacy for a “debate of visions” offers a power-of-opposites approach to learning and may well lift students’ appreciation of Collectivism above the dreary status of an unquestioned assumption. That said, Kinkaid must have ideological diversity in its faculty. Students cannot truly know “the Other” with encountering “the Other” face to face. They cannot truly understand what an Individualist intellectual looks like, and speaks like, and thinks like without encountering an actual Individualist intellectual among their teachers.

Students must be taught to approach the humanities as they approach the sciences: through evidence, hypothesis, and theory. The best guarantee that they do so is the same challenge culture that underlies scientific debate.

And just that challenge culture is what this website is designed to facilitate and accelerate. It is something that should be wanted by all: sophisticated presentations of opposing views to achieve the intellectual debate that yields understanding and self-understanding on all sides.

Your comments and suggestions for improvement of freeKinkaid are welcomed. And enjoy the excitement of the true diversity of intellectual exploration in the quest for a better world.