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Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a brief Easter ceasefire in his war with Ukraine, a declaration met with skepticism in Kyiv as the war enters a crucial phase and US-led negotiations stall.

Putin said “all hostilities” would halt between 6 p.m. Moscow time on Saturday (11 a.m. ET) and midnight on Monday (5 p.m. Sunday ET).

“We assume that the Ukrainian side will follow our example,” he said, adding that the truce would help Russia determine how sincere Kyiv is about wanting to reach a ceasefire.

However, just hours after the announcement, Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of continuing to fight.

For many decades now we have labored under the delusion that education is something desirable in itself. While this might be true of moral and spiritual education, it is bullheadedness of the worst sort to deny that our education is supposed to provide us with a living. Only when we have placed education in its proper context can we begin to shape it so that through it we achieve the results we desire. Since education as we know it is a source of income, it is best to treat education as a business or an industry, so that we employ the least number of resources to produce the highest possible results.

Those who argue for the state/government to take charge of education usually contend that since education is a basic need, the state should not let it be run by the chaotic mechanisms of the market. By this argument, the state should take charge, like in all failed socialist countries, of food and water, of health, and even of vital industries. This is obviously a faulty argument. By putting education out into the market, we can make sure that schools compete in prices and in quality.

The magic word here is competition. Competition is the most vital ingredient of a free market. All trusts (often referred to as cartels) are anathema to competition. If 20 schools form a cartel to fix prices and fix the curriculum structure, the public is denied the benefits which would result from those 20 schools competing for the favor of a student’s money. Trusts turn markets into one large monopoly and should thus be eradicated by trust laws.

In order to make sure that schools don’t violently revolt against the eradication of their trusts, the legislature must pass laws which forbid the state from interfering with private enterprises—at the very least their prices. Government intervention in fixing price levels has the same exact effect as trusts fixing prices—they turn the market into one big monopoly.

Unions work the same way as trusts but from the opposite direction. While a trust would fix prices in order to eliminate competition between schools, a union of teachers would fix wages in order to eliminate competition between teachers. It is the consumer’s right—in this case a student—to demand that the teacher demanding from him a certain wage has earned that wage through fair competition. Unions thus deserve the same treatment as trusts. Again, it is the legislature’s job to satisfy the teacher’s unions that schools don’t form into trusts and hamper the teacher’s ability to negotiate in a free market their wages.

It has been argued that there remains a fringe group in every society which is too marginalized to participate freely in its market operations. This is true but not as abundantly true as we might first suppose. There are two ways through which we can approach this issue. The first is without incentives. If state funded schools are given charge of these marginalized students, there is no reason to suppose that they would not operate inefficiently. The second is with incentives. By tendering the education of these students to private schools (the fund would come from the government, preferably local) we can incentivize private schools to compete for this public fund. This would put the economically marginalized on a far better footing than if they had been subsidized without proper incentives.

Another point of contention has been the treatment of students as market products. Critics argue that while it might be okay to subject an ice-cream to an economic analysis of cost-benefit, it is not moral to do the same to a student. This argument depends on false equivalency. No child is by default a student. His studentship is something he acquires for his future benefit—much like a child born in Sparta would acquire military training. If it is perfectly reasonable to expect a child’s piano instructor to be a competent teacher who can deliver the maximum value in the least amount of time and resource, why is it not reasonable to expect the same of his mathematics instructor? And I ask you, if we are to decrease the effort it takes a child to complete school without compromising the quality of his education, what can we do but allow providers of that education to compete? If parents want their children taught the same syllabus in a lesser number of hours, the schools will gear up towards that task.

Of course, all of this is a discussion of semantics if we cannot produce a free-market economy that can absorb these people. The international sphere, dominated by economic and social freedom borrowed from the West, has made it abundantly clear that what most people want is prosperity. The direction of migration, focused as it is on capitalist countries, has also made clear the direction towards which we consciously or otherwise aspire. What remains is to apply the fundamental tenets of a prosperous economy—a free market, rule of law and a political organization geared towards individual freedom.