School choice:

Let's make the right one.

Government schools are a disaster and they should be abolished. There should be a complete separation of “school and state” for exactly the same reasons as we separate church and state.

That’s the pure libertarian position on the issue and it is unassailable. One person or group of people has no right to steal from another to build anything. A schoolhouse is no exception.

Government schools are worse than a boondoggle. As one should expect from a monopolist, the state provides education at much too high a price and delivers far too little of the good and at far too poor a quality. Without competition, there is little hope for improvement.

We’ve all seen the charts. Since the 1970s, total inflation adjusted cost of government schools have skyrocketed while performance stays flat — or declines.

Even worse, government schools have become woke, leftist indoctrination centers where kids are taught to hate their parents, their society, and themselves. It was bad enough when schools intentionally molded the kids in the Prussian model. The modern version of state-sponsored brainwashing is a horror show.

They are also disturbingly violent. As Michael Malice famously says,

“Public schools are literal prisons for children and the only place where many people will experience violence from their peers for their entire lives.”

I would link to examples of the two claims above, but I fear if I started, I would never stop. There are millions of them. Use yer Googles.

So, we should never stop advocating for the elimination of government schools. But unlike some prominent libertarians, I also support the school choice movement that has become popular in the US as of late.

School choice in some form has been advocated at least as far back as Milton Friedman. It’s an imperfect solution. Government still collects taxes for education, but instead of directly funding government schools, they give vouchers or Education Savings Accounts to parents, who can then use the funds for any education expenses they choose.

Again, from the libertarian perspective, this isn’t ideal. Taxation is still involved. Perhaps worse, there is a danger that government use this opportunity to define what qualifies as an “educational expense”. Via that lever, government could regulate the private provision of education in exactly the same horrific ways it does government schools.

Of course, the government has the power to regulate private schools any time it wants, but implementing school choice gives them an obvious excuse to do so.

Even in this period of infancy, the school choice movement has ignited an amazing period of innovation and options for parents and kids to choose from. Each and every one is a massive improvement over government schools. As the market expands, these options are only going to grow, while their price tag will come down.

Such is the way of markets, competition, and freedom.

Still, some of my libertarian friends, colleagues, and mentors insist that we should turn our backs on school choice. “Advocate only for complete separation!” they say, “half-measures such as these will only expand government control into private education too!”

Perhaps. But as I said above, government can always regulate anything it wants to. The “public good” trope can always be stretched to suit the desires of some regulatory busybody.

But even though a 10% tax is evil, it’s better than a 30% tax, and it’s not insane to vocally prefer one over the other. Freeing our kids from the horrors that are government schools via school choice is better than not doing so.

We should not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Of course, we should also never stop shouting from the rooftops that we should abolish government schools and their larcenous funding mechanism too.

But can any of these libertarian purists honestly say that if they somehow found themselves in a state legislature voting on a school choice measure that they would vote against it?

Say the vote was tied and this purist was in a position to literally decide whether to maintain the status (statist) quo, or allow school choice.

Would a purist really be so heartless as to vote against freeing millions of children from government schools because the measure “isn’t libertarian enough”?

I certainly hope not.

Naturally,

Adam