DISQUS

Why would people not want to send their kids to small, simple schools? Would they rather pay many more thousands of dollars per year for enormous campuses with swimming pools, gymnasiums, ampitheaters, and so forth (all of which could be more efficiently and more cheaply provided via other businesses) that are no better at educating students? The high school I attended had about 130 students total, from 9th grade to 12th, so about 30 students per grade. I knew each student in my class and most of the students in the school by name, unlike many public schools these days with thousands of other students in each grade. Why is big better? Just because that's what you are familar with and that's what the government provides?

I have a complaint against a teacher, I gotta sit on hold for two hours before getting to talk to some teenager in India reading off a script...perfect!

Kaplan is a private corporation, and yet all teachers must provide students with their email address and/or a phone number and are required to respond within 24 hours to any query.

Or maybe the school my kid's in has all its money looted by executives...and in the middle of the year I have to take a month off work to find a new one...that I have to pay for myself...brilliant!

Would you like me to point you to the many cases of government bureaucrats and teacher's union thugs looting the money that should have been spent on education? Or how about the time that one of my sister's teachers got sick in the middle of the year and was replaced with a incompetent substitute? (One of the reasons my sister switched schools, incidentally.)

I'd rather vote for that private army you guys keep pushing...hehe :)

Much worse than that public army currently using your tax dollars to wage a war against a country that represented no threat to you or me.

Oops, should have read Steve's comment first.

Ever hear of a pre-existing condition clause? These are inherently adverse-selective. I would add that they're a market failure as well since the chronic, day-to-day medical expenses, i.e. the ones most likely to be financially crushing, are the ones that aren't covered.

This is not a market failure of insurance because it falls outside the definition of insurance. Insurance insures against risk. Pre-existing conditions are not a risk; they are a certainty.

Maybe you could say that this is a general failure of the market, but that is not a new complaint; everyone already knows that the "market" itself cannot provide charity to people who can't afford things. That is something only charitable people and organizations, or thieving governments, can do.

I think this fits in with Will's original post nicely. An average elementary school costs about $30 million to build. Throw in books, cubbies, school buses, etc. and you are looking at over $50 million. There is one in every neighborhood in America.

School districts enjoy certain economies of scale because they are educating every kid in America. Under the voucher program, the cost of replacing one elementary school with 30-40 smaller ones to suit the tastes of different parents would probably double or triple the costs.

I teach part-time for Kaplan, a company that specializes in test preparation. They have a large number of offices with classroom facilities in every state in the U.S. (and multiple in driving distance from me), and they also offer classes at local schools and other facitilities. Their offices are nothing more than your standard strip-mall office complex, like a dentists office with larger rooms. Yet I doubt they spend anywhere near the amount of money you cited.

You are stuck in the mold of thinking that the free market will provide education in exactly the same way that the government monopoly does. Life doesn't quite work like that, Bub.

And anyway, why do you care so much about the costs entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists will have to pay to create new schools? Since when is that a concern of statists? You guys are able to think of the most absurd reasons to reject a free market in education when the serious problems of state monopoly education are staring you directly in the face.

Ugh, I'm through here. Enough stupidity for one day.

Since when am I obligated to agree with everything Hayek said?

Insofar as we can provide better opportunities for the disadvantaged without engaging in political violence to force others to submit to our authority, that is most certainly a good thing. The fact that liberals like monkyboy say they want to improve educational opportunities for poor children, yet seem more concerned with making sure lots of money goes to public schools than with making sure actual children get what the tax dollars are paying for, is at once both incredibly humorous and incredibly frightening. It shows where some people's real priorities are: not on helping people; but instead on maintaining political power at any cost. (borrowing a concept from monkeyboy himself)

Oh, I don't need any clues about that. It's as obvious as a Mack truck barreling staight towards you. But again, that has little to do with anything that's been said in this thread.

Take the Social Security 'reform' effort led by the Republicans.

I just finished writing that the effort is not being led by Republicans, but by libertarians. The Republicans only followed after the fact.

There are plenty of ways to extend the life of SS with small adjustments in retirement age, benefit calulations, tax rates, etc.

Sure, and there may have been plenty of ways to extend the institution of slavery. Why we would want to extend the either of these two dreadful (but certainly not on the same level ethically) social institutions is beyond me. Privatization is a step towards ending it, not mending it, and that's a good thing.

That these accounts will give Wall Street firms (leading Republican supporters, natch) tens if not hundreds of billions in windfall bucks isn't even disputed by Bush.

And why should it be? Doesn't any large privatization effort necessarily give private firms hundreds of billions in windfall bucks? That's simply the definition of privatization: instead of the government taking people's money through taxation, firms and customers trade value for value. What's the problem?

The thought that anything gets done in Washington because it's the right thing to do is laughable.

And yet you want to solidify the statist system which you yourself admit is easily and inevitably corruptable? Whose laughing now, monkyboy?

Micha, whether handing every child a voucher would = better education is open to debate. The motives of the Republicans are pretty clear, though.

Where do you get the idea that Republicans came up with this idea? Just like Social Security privatization, school choice is an issue that libertarians like Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute have been advocating for decades, and has only recently been adopted by Republicans. I could care less what their motives might be. I judge public policies by their expected consequences, and not by the motives of the people who propose them.

Your M.O. seems to be:

Step 1: Assume all Republicans intend to do evil.

Step 2: Conclude from Step 1 that any policies proposed by Republicans are necessarily evil, because that is what Republicans intend to do.

Step 3: Profit!

Ummm...Micha, you seemed to have proven my point about channeling money to religious institutions???

Don't change points in midstream. Your "point" was that vouchers are really just a vast right-wing conspiracy to channel money to strong Republican supporters for political results.

As the Supreme Court itself recognized, it is the families who ultimately decide whether their vouchers will be spent on religious schools or secular schools, not the government.

And I don't know whether you know this or not, but you may want to rethink exactly how much support Republicans get from Jews and Black Muslims. Surely two of the most widely represented groups in the Republican base.

This also seems to be a private effort, not a government program. I don't think anyone doubts rich kids (and kids helped by rich people) have better schools open to them.

And yet, acknowledging this, you still wish to deny these same opportunities to poor children. Shame on you for calling yourself a liberal.

Government funded vouchers would take money away from public schools...

...And give it to poor children so that they can go to better schools. You seem more concerned with giving money to public schools than you do with actually doing things that help the children who go to these schools.

monkyboy writes,

No one really cares if it will provide for a better education system...though the Republicans always pay a few shills to say vouchers are about the children.

Taken from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation:

The Children’s Education Foundation (CEF) was started in August of 1992 with a gift of $1 million from a successful Atlanta businessman who wanted to provide a choice of educational opportunities to low-income families. Because of limited finances, these families had no choice in where their children went to school.

The program was designed to provide participating families with a 50 percent financial scholarship (in the form of a voucher) toward the tuition cost at a school of the parents’ choice, either public or private. The other half of the tuition would have to be paid by the family.

Despite the availability of a “free” education at their assigned public school, many times more low-income families applied to participate in the program than could be accommodated. Within the first week of the program’s announcement, CEF received more than 500 applications for the 200 slots, and was forced to cut off applications when the number reached nearly 1,000.

Being able to remain at the public school system of her early school years (City of Decatur) gave Tiffany much needed stability in the seventh grade when her family was falling apart and she was faced with having to move to an inferior and unfamiliar middle school. (Tiffany’s residence was moved out of Decatur, so she was faced with a $2,250 out-of-district tuition to remain in her excellent public school, Renfroe Middle School.)

The Amish people in the Pennsylvania Dutch country are free to attend their own schools and to follow the way of life that they as a community have chosen. As with the Amish people, children in inner-city Atlanta, and many others throughout the entire metropolitan area, also want to fulfill their hopes and dreams by getting the best education available. Therefore, those hopes and dreams may not be fulfilled by attending the public school to which they are assigned. For example, Murjan Ali’s dreams include attending a Black Muslim school. For Micha and Rina Ghertner, it is attending Yeshiva, a Hebrew school.

For these children and many more, the privately-funded voucher program of the Children’s Education Foundation is their only hope — their ticket out. Being financially disadvantaged, these children would have no alternative to the schools assigned to them, except for CEF.

----

So tell me again, monkeyboy: who doesn't really care about providing a better education system?

Will,

Regarding this:

There are surpassingly few empiricists about politics. And among those wide-minded few there are liberals, conservatives, libertarians, etc. The reason we do not converge on an evidence-based consensus is that we all started with different priors, and all use different methods of updating our beliefs, about which we also have different priors, which causes us to avail ourselves of certain kinds of evidence and not others, to trust certain kinds of studies and not others, to give credence to certain experts and not others, to mistrust certain methods of inquiry, and not others.

David Friedman made a similar point a few years ago in post the rest of which I disagree with (and it's probably one of the only things he has every written that I find disagreeble). Here's how he put it:

I have been arguing politics for a long time. In arguing with people on the left, I find it is very hard to come to an agreement on the assumed facts surrounding the situations we are judging. My imaginary capitalist has capital because he worked hard clearing part of the boundless forest while his employee to be was being lazy and living on what he could gather--so it is entirely just that the capitalist gets part of the output of his land and his employee's labor. But the leftist doesn't like that hypothetical. His imaginary capitalist inherited his capital from a father who stole it. I don't like that hypothetical. I conclude that our moral intuitions are similar enough so that the same assumed facts push both of us in the same direction--and since we want to go in opposite directions we want so assume different facts.

Monkyboy liberalism: You've come this far already; why not go the extra 8% and make it a cool 100?

Surely Democrats will regain power with that invigorating clarion call.

A pretty good description of its opposite. Sounds a lot like the Public Choice (and Marxist) critique of the state.

always valuing ideology over a mixed economy that has worked fairly well over the years.

Compared to what? I never understand this criticism. Without some sort of conception of the ideal, how can we say whether welfare capitalism works well or not? Sure, it might be better than command-and-control economies, but that's like saying, "I'm not such a bad person, at least compared to Hitler." Wow, great accomplishment, mixed economy. Kudos.

Or as Chris Rock so eloquently puts it,

"Niggers always want credit for some shit they're supposed to do. They'll brag about stuff a normal man just does. They'll say something like, 'Yeah, well I take care of my kids.' You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker. 'I ain't never been to jail.' Whaddya want? A cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!"

People don't participate in insurance schemes because they want to help other people, they buy in because it's in their best interest to do so. Insurance is valuable for beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries alike because it insulates against catastrophic risk.

If Social Security is valuable and in our best interest in the same that insurance is valuable and in our best interest, then why make it mandatory? Why not let those who wish to insure themselves purchase insurance, and those who don't , don't?

Regardless of whether social security is a form of insurance, it is clear that the purpose of social security is to create a social minimum, a floor below which no one should be allowed to fall.

This is not clear at all. It is false. If the purpose of social security were to create a social minimum, it would be means tested. Only poor old people would be able to collect. This is not the case. Instead, all of us are forced to save in order to pay for our own retirement, regardless of whether we are poor or not.

I defend the intrinsic aesthetic value of widgets here. Well, not really, but kind of.

Since an American citizen living abroad can still collect Social Security upon retirement, I see no reason why the same wouldn't be true for someone living on the moon. Next excuse, monkeyboy?

Hey monkey boy, howsa bout we make a deal and I sell you all future claims I might have to my Social Security benefits, since you seem to be so certain that they are coming. How much would you offer me for them?

The drug war seems to have a life of its own. The successful framing of Social Security, on the other hand, can be directly attributed to a few extremely skillful politicians and bureaucrats.

I think Rorty has it about right. Well, maybe Rorty with a bit of Pinkerian evolutionary psychology mixed in to put some form of constraint on our arbitrary rhetoric.

Your last question is a great one:

The trouble I’m having with folks who seem obsessed with the problem of specious stability is that I can’t quite make out what they’re using as the standard by which they wish to evaluate the quality of our present preferences.

This is what I've never gotten about the post-modernists, post-structuralists, post-fill-in-the-blank-ists: if everything is socially contructed and entirely relative, why lean left? Why oppose free market transactions? Why say that the employer-employee or salesman-customer relationship is any more oppressive than the community-individual, democracy-voter relationship? I've got no huge objection to the po-mo's other than their strange preferences for social democracy, which, apart from a small handful like Rorty, they don't admit is any more arbitrary than anything else (and even Rorty is not so great when it comes to things like "democracy" reinforcing its own legitimacy).

I've only read parts of Huemer's essay, so I can say whether or not I agree with it in whole. Friedman's little piece, on the other hand, is excellent, and without some extreme revisionist interpretation of Rand's arguments, Friedman pretty much lays to rest to the whole notion of objective value.

Of course, the problem with these kinds of criticisms is that you'll always have reasonable Objectivists like Roderick Long or Chris Matthew Sciabarra who are able to save certain aspects of Rand; for example, by interpreting her in a more Aristotelian light, where her concern is human flourishing and not purely selfishness and survival. Objectivism means different things to different people and it's not clear which interpretation one needs to refute before one has successfully refuted Objectivism.

podraza,

David Friedman pretty much destroys the Objectivist derivation of value here.

For a lengthy and thorough critique of Objectivism, try Michael Huemer.

And if that's not enough for you, the Objectivism Reference Center always has more.

Did they enter into an agreement to not get fired? That is, did their dismissal violate the terms of their labor contracts? If so, and if their employer did not compensate them according to the terms of the contract, then indeed, they did not get what they deserved. Someone didn't follow the rules of the process, and that is an injustice, according to Will's argument.

Why are such simple concepts so difficult for some people to understand?