In the comments on yesterday's post, Pete writes:

Not increasing unemployment by millions during a depression sounds like a reasonable public good to me. Identifying it and agreeing upon it gives us guidance in designing a bailout plan: Is it likely to achieve that goal? Are there parts of the plan not related to the goal that can be removed? Are there other ways of achieving the same goal that may be better?

I think I'm less convinced than you that preventing the destruction of unionism is a worthy public goal (and I'm sure I'm less convinced that letting the big automakers go bankrupt would indeed destroy unionism), but to whatever extent it is a public goal, the same logic applies about tailoring the plan to focus on it.

With regard to gay marriage, I think I'm saying that separate but equal is possible and sufficient if government gets out of the business of marriage, which isn't such a bad idea.

And yes, the analogy holds for schools. Getting the government out of the education business is a far-fetched pipe dream, of course, and I don't imagine it ever happening in the United States. Nevertheless, I think all the education-related policy discussions would benefit from a thorough re-examination of exactly why education is a public good.

The standard view of public education is that it is a service provided to children and their parents, which I think it fundamentally wrong. The true client for public education is not the individual being educated, but society at large. Otherwise, why should those taxpayers who are neither in school nor raising children who are in school be obliged to participate? Why isn't it a private matter?

The answer is that when your taxes go toward education, your interest in the program is not to educate your own kids, but to educate everyone else's kids. It serves society at large to have an educated populace and not have a bunch of ignorant neglected kids turning into lawless hooligans. As a parent, you have an interest in educating your own kids, yes, but that's a private interest. You don't need a government program for it any more than you need one for your car, groceries, or vacation interests. As a citizen, whether parent or not, you have an interest in educating everyone else's interests. For that you do need a government program, and you need government enforcement for those parents whose private interest might be in conflict with the public's.

This is where advocates of school vouchers go awry. Their entire argument is based on the idea that education is a government handout for parents. This leads them to advocate "school choice" whereby the program is further disconnected from any public interest, thus making their assumption of education as entitlement a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if they were at all consistent with allegedly libertarian principles, as soon as it became a mere entitlement they'd want to abolish the program completely.

It's also how arguments about equal rights in education go awry. Education isn't a right at all. A better way to look at public education is that, like a military draft or a medical quarantine, it is a program in which the government deprives individuals of their liberty for the sake of a public good. Therefore, in arguments about discrimination in schools, the question is not whether some kids are unfairly being denied equal education, but rather whether some kids are suffering from unequal oppression in the name of education.

(Yes, I realize I'm arguing in a libertarian dream world where the government is not in the business of handing out goodies to citizens. So sue me.)

3:22:34 PM  [permalink]  comment []