Supermarkets and schools

Three years ago, in an op-ed called “Your Child Is Not State Property,” I wrote the following:

Education, like nutrition, should be recognized as the exclusive domain of a child’s parents, within legal limits objectively defining child abuse and neglect. Parents who starve their children may properly be ordered to fulfill their parental obligations, on pain of losing legal custody. But the fact that some parents may serve better food than others does not permit government to seize control of nutrition, outlaw home-cooked meals, and order all children to report for daily force-feeding at government-licensed cafeterias.

Last week, I came across an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, called “If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools.” There, Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, uses a similar analogy at much greater length, to make a point about the economic insanity of our public education regime. An edited excerpt:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. . . .

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. . . .

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn’t organize themselves efficiently to meet customers’ demands. . . .

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets’ monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers,” on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce. . . .

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions’ self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

I urge you to read the whole (short) article. The economic case for total separation of education and state is unanswerable. But the economic case is not enough—I’m convinced that only a moral challenge to public education can achieve fundamental change. Our children are not state property, and we shouldn’t let educational bureaucrats (and the politicians who protect them) get away with acting otherwise.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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