There was a rather extraordinary piece on the WSJ Web site yesterday that I meant to call to your attention, but the piece was so long I couldn’t find a chunk of time long enough to finish reading it myself. Now I have, and I highly recommend it.
Here’s a link. I hope it works for you; I’m never sure since I subscribe to the Journal, and I can never tell what I have access to as a subscriber and what’s free.
The piece, written by an advocate of private-school vouchers, is a point-by-point explanation what’s wrong with the idea that if we just provide market-based options, our education problems will be solved. What really struck me about it was the extent to which it supports pretty much every point we’ve tried to make as to why vouchers and tuition tax credits are a bad fit for South Carolina.
- For "choice," in the sense of vouchers and tax credits, to work at all, there have to be real choices — there has to be someplace for kids and parent to spend those incentives. As we’ve said so many times, it makes zero sense to apply a system designed for dense northern cities with an existing, parallel Catholic school system to South Carolina, where the usual problem is in poor, rural areas where there are no viable private alternatives, and where the population is insufficiently dense for such alternatives to arise as an economic response to vouchers or tax credits. As this writer says (about the Catholic schools that are themselves going away, in spite of the availability of vouchers), "where would the city’s disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?" The question has exponentially greater force in the Corridor of Shame.
- The existence of voucher-backed private competition does NOT cause the public schools to get better. This would seem obvious to most people, who understand that if external pressure were all that was needed, the Accountability Act would have solved all our problems. Ask a teacher whether he or she feels pressure to perform. They’ll probably answer that pressure is about all they feel from the world outside the classroom. As the author says, "sadly — and this is a second development that reformers must face up
to — the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is
making public schools better." - The only thing that will improve the public schools is — drumroll here — improving the public schools (which, in the absence of the kind of alternative educational infrastructure northern cities once had, are the only schools most kids will ever have the opportunity to go to, with or without vouchers and tax credits).
Mr. Stern holds up Massachusetts as an example of what works:
Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state’s average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.
The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.
Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state’s board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Ms. Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students’ academic achievement."
Mr. Stern hasn’t abandoned his faith, in spite of the evidence: "Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools." And he remains one of those ideologues who considers "choice" advocates and school "reformers" to be the same set of people. (We see that in South Carolina all too often, in which people who simply don’t buy into the idea of public education decry others for standing in the way of "reform.") But within his own definitions, he asserts that "we should re-examine the direction of school reform."
And I will say yet again, the proper direction is clear. We should implement the kinds of reforms that our editorial board has pushed for years, starting with curriculum standards (which the EAA is meant to address) to such innovations as merit pay for teachers, principals empowered to hire and fire without interference, and consolidation of districts to get money out of administration and into the classroom.
Unfortunately, every effort to implement ANY kind of educational reform — and "reform," when I use it, means fixing schools, not abandoning them — is quickly suffocated by "choice" advocates in our Legislature, who tie their amendments around the neck of any education bill that tries to get through the General Assembly. This, of course, has the the effect on education reform of tying an anvil around the neck of a swimmer, causing all sides to spend all available political energy arguing about their digressions. So we get nowhere.
Related Posts
Spending on public education in South Carolina has increased dramatically in the past decade. Where are the results?
Education reform by way of PACT testing has been in place for nearly a decade. Where are the results? Where is the accountability? When the statistics show no improvement, the school districts blame the tests. When an individual student does not meet the basic standards, he is still pushed along to become a probable high school dropout.
What is different today versus the public school systems we attended thirty years ago? Teachers are micromanaged to death, principals live in fear of lawsuits from parents over trivial issues, discipline is deteriorating, grades are inflated to get the kids out the door, the me-decade parents have created me-me-me children with no work ethic and shaky personal ethics.
We teach kids stuff they don’t want to learn and probably don’t need to learn. And we wonder why they’re not doing well.
These issues have nothing to do with funding public education or vouchers.
I’ve given up on the voucher idea because it’s clear that there are too many forces who want to protect the status quo because of the money involved.
The only areas additional money should be spent on public education should be on hiring and rewarding the best teachers and principals and on developing vocational training programs as alternatives to the traditional high schools.
Doug, certainly you know as well as I that that the "results" of the EAA were expressed in several straight years of improvements in most categories at most grade levels, as measured by the best state-to-state comparisons such as the NAEP.
As for your other points, were you answering me, or did you mean to speak on a parallel track? I didn’t say a word about spending more (which you argue with twice). I talked about reforms we should implement, instead of wasting time fighting over the "choice" distraction.
In light of what I am saying and have always said, it is a grotesque lie to suggest that I "want to protect the status quo." Can you not read the words I write. I want REFORM, and the biggest obstacle to reform is the insistence by an ideological faction in the Legislature that we talk ONLY about their incentives-to-abandon-the-schools idea. They hog-tie every discussion about trying to change things, so we don’t change — we’ve done little in the way of major reform since the EAA in 1998.
The great irony here is that in your third paragraph you decry problems that my proposals for reform would address. Why not work together to solve the problems, instead of staying on this ideological merry-go-round? Let’s empower principals. Let’s insist on discipline. (And I would add, let’s consolidate districts, do away with the supt. of ed. as a separately elected official.) Let’s implement merit pay. That last point will generate plenty of opposition among the ACTUAL defenders of status quo, so those who want reform have to work together to do the hard work of making it happen.
One more point, which I offer to correct both you and me. There is ONE fairly significant reform since the EAA, which also addresses your complaint that we teach kids things "they don’t want to learn and probably don’t need to learn." In 2005, the Education and Economic Development Act was passed. Its aim is to help kids work toward a career and shape their curricula to be relevant to that. It’s not a thing I’ve been overly enthusiastic about (I think education should be broad, and tend to resist anything that even sounds vaguely like it narrows a kid’s options, which supporters insist it won’t, but there’s my problem), but I’ve been a minority of one on our board, and the state’s business leadership is extremely high on it. We’ll see.
Here is the problem at the basic level when we grew up most of us had a stable and predictable enviroment. I could read, write, add and subtract by the time I was four years old. This had nothing to do with me being smart but everything to do with a grandmother who demanded I learn. I had to sit there until I got it right. How many kids today get that kind of comittment from their parents or parent?
When you have a fast paced high tech enviroment like today many adults cannot even keep up with what there kids are being taught let alone help them. I have an eight your old nephew who helps me with my computer. Ha! Then you factor in all the hi tech distractions not to mention peer pressure and it’s not easy for our children to stay focused.
I agree with both of you about the disciple. However there is too much politics in the education system. One of the things I agree with Cindi S. about is the cost of education should be borne by the state and allocate first where it is needed most. Otherwise the whole intergration idea is a waste of time. Also, I am against the whole teachers union idea. American teachers have always been considered selfless public servants. The whole idea of merit pay will simply cause the teachers to start shopping school districts and we will be right back where we started. Unless the merit is to attract teachers to rural and poor urban areas.
The major problem in our state with education is not failing schools. It is failing homes. The predominate factors which determine whether or not a child will be successful in school, are in place by the time the child enters school.
Brad,
The voucher issue is a red herring. We don’t have vouchers, we haven’t had vouchers, and we probably won’t have vouchers. The debate over vouchers has ZERO to do with the state of public education in South Carolina. Which reforms are being stopped (and by whom) because of the non-existent vouchers?
You reference NAEP but ignore PACT. What purpose does PACT serve? Wouldn’t our public school students be better served by using all the resources (teaching time, money, etc.) to address core issues?
And it is about spending. Reforms will cost money. The education fairy won’t just come in and wave her wand and make things better. That’s why I suggest we stop wasting money on PACT. Use those resources to attract better teachers instead.
As for the “teaching toward a career” effort, it doesn’t go far enough in my opinion. My daughter is in a fantastic culinary program at Blythewood High School but all they get is one class per day for one semester out of the year. For kids like her, who want to pursue a career in baking, it makes little sense for her to have to take required math classes for four years when she would be better served by taking business, marketing, or communications classes.
The other factor is that our legislators are far too involved in the process. Jim Rex should have the authority to say “no more PACT” and be done with it. Rex was elected to be the Secretary of Education and that position should have more authority instead of being the figurehead role it appears to be.
NAEP scores:
Math (grade 4) 2005 score: 238 2007: 237
Math (grade 8) 2005 score: 281 2007: 282
Reading (grade 4) 2005 score: 213 2007: 214
Reading (grade 8) 2005 score: 257 2007: 257
So flat performance is due to the voucher debate?
Doug, I think you labeled half the years wrong in the above post.
Me, I’d just like to say that my local school board is fighting choice by promising to provide its own choice under the Rex plan for choice, if the legislature passes his plan, which doesn’t mandate choice but has each district appoint a committee to create its own plan for choice without ever actually having to implement it.
That’s every bit as bureaucratic as our superintendent’s plan to name three new principals, under which each school to get a new principal will have a committee of “at least 10 people,” some of them parents, some of them people working at the school, all of them working together to find the right principal. I’m trying to imagine parents interviewing possible principals, but I know that can’t possibly be what the superintendent has in mind, and I’m wondering why he doesn’t just hire the principals himself, since he’s the one who’s supposed to have the expertise to do such things, and because, when it’s all done, he will be the one who named the principals anyway, after having tried to create the illusion that everyone else was involved.
This is the kind of rigmarole that running a school system has become, now that anybody and their brother can start up a charter school, creating a battle royale for access to those precious state dollars.
Meanwhile, the private schools that Brad doesn’t notice “in poor, rural areas where there are no viable private alternatives” are spending less than half the dollars public schools do per student with a much higher success rate.
Shame is, our culture has so much evolved we can’t really talk about what’s actually going on, for fear we might hurt someone’s feelings.
Wayne, You’ve hit the nail on the head; parents who don’t know, don’t care, or can’t afford to provide their children with the oversight and discipline they need to achieve in school (and when I say ‘can’t afford’ I mean have to work to buy groceries, not can’t buy the notebooks,etc.)are going to have children who have lost their best chance to learn and escape a losing lifestyle before they ever attend their first day at school. In those schools that are most poverty stricken, a real push needs to be directed toward very early childhood development.
Here’s a perfect example from today’s State that shows the voucher debate is NOT holding up reform. Unfortunately, as I said before, the reform is actually more testing (that takes TWO YEARS to implement) and, guess what, costs more money to administer. Even Jim Rex doesn’t support this — so what value does the Secretary of Education provide???
Testing Bill
Spend the money on teachers, not tests!
Doug, if you had been at the State House over the last few years, you would have seen the pattern than I’m talking about — education bills getting “choice” or “tax credit” riders, and the ensuing fight bogging everything down.
I suppose you could call this testing bill “reform;” I’ve been so distracted by the partisan wrangling over it I’ve hardly stopped to consider that.
“Spend the money on teachers, not tests” sounds fine to me, but what does it mean? The thing is that our business community and conservative Republicans decided in the 90s that they didn’t trust teachers to teach, there had to be objective measurements. If not tests, what sort of mechanism would you suggest?
If you don’t want measurements, you just want to trust teachers to teach, or incent them to teach, OK — but that’s not the direction that most critics of public education seem to be coming from these days.
Oh, and weldon — how many poor black kids are being educated in those wonderful rural private schools? How many will they accept in the future. How many CAN they accommodate, and please explain how the inadequate voucher and tax credit amounts will pay for it? There are so many reasons why these proposals don’t work and can’t work, because markets don’t work that way, that it’s the height of absurdity that we’re still talking about it.
Brad is absolutely on top of this debate.
One of the most inane arguments against education vouchers is that there aren’t enough private schools to serve all the poor children who would abandon the public schools.
To this mentality, all assets in the world are fixed, and can only change ownership. This mentality does not comprehend the creation of wealth in response to market demands.
The fact is that removing the existing barriers to teaching and the disincentives to building private schools would open up all sorts of possible solutions.
Of course the supporters of the status quo cannot imagine new ways of providing quality education, nor comprehend most innovations which are put before them. That is why they are supporters of the failed status quo.
Thanks, um… “some guy.”
> If not tests, what sort of mechanism
> would you suggest?
Use national tests administered every few years. Don’t waste resources reinventing the wheel. We lose two weeks or more of classroom time for PACT right now (plus the week before PACT testing where no homework is given so the kids don’t get tired out).
We should be able to do whatever testing is required in two days at the end of the school year. I would even suggest we extend the school year by two days to do testing.
Our “testing” is like taking a blood pressure reading and not doing anything when the results say “190/120”. It’s data collection only. Score below basic in English in 8th grade? Move along, son… maybe you’ll get the hang of it in high school.
Most of the education metrics are useless for making corrections to the process, because they lump students together, ignoring major social and economic factors.
The test scores only become of value when compared in conjunction with other, real categorizations, such as range of family income, native intelligence of the students, if they have two, one, or zero parents in their household, relation and marital status of the head of household, vocation of adults in the household, etc.
A gross average score for a class or school is rather worthless, much less the aveage scores for a district, county or state.
How many poor black kids are being educated in those wonderful rural private schools?
Very few.
How many will they accept in the future?
As many as they need to keep going.
How many can they accommodate?
Again, as many as they need to keep going.
How will the inadequate voucher and tax credit amounts pay for it?
I don’t know that they can, but thanks for at least acknowledging that those “wonderful” schools exist, though I know you’re being facetious in using that word, because they are the heart of the education problem in the rural South Carolina.
I watched with dismay as they began to develop, way back when I was just about to finish high school.
I never attended one, and no child of mine has ever attended one, and no grandchild, either.
But there they are, polarizing communities racially, skewing test score results and wrecking education economics.
If somehow the education system as a whole could incorporate them, a fully integrated school system might eventually result, and thus a fully integrated society.
But for now, their teachers make half what public school teachers do, and their coaches make virtually nothing, all so the white minorities in black-majority communities can maintain control of something.
The shame of it is, a great many of those private-school teachers could help the public schools work wonders.
And if everyone were involved in the public school system, everything would probably work better.
But for almost half a century, private schools have been mucking up the deal.
Treating them as though they don’t exist won’t make them go away. Using vouchers (or anything else that offers some financial incentive) might help break down racial barriers and tip the scales toward “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
In cities the size of Columbia, the private schools may not mean much. But in communities the size of mine, they turn education into an us-them thing by color, a partisanship more poisonous than left-right or Republican-Democrat.
Weldon — I think Brad’s point is that if these private schools you speak of aren’t particularly interested in taking on poor minority students with fairly extreme social and academic needs, then they just won’t do it. More students isn’t necessarily what they want. If these private schools were for-profit businesses, then maybe they’d take all-comers. But since they respond to the wants of parents of current and prospective students who expect a certain atmosphere and curriculum, it’s logical, I think, that they’re going to use admission standards and what all else to keep out the ‘undesirable’ students.
Exclusivity may very well be the name of the game for many such schools. Which isn’t to say that’s necessarily always a bad thing…if that’s what parents are paying for and the schools truly do an excellent job, then OK. But the public schools aren’t allowed to operate that way, and the private schools that do aren’t likely — well, again, so now I’m rambling — to take in students who are difficult to teach, I figure.
Now, it can go the other way: Magnet schools based on strong academic and arts concepts can work to attract wealthier families into the public schools (though I would think they’re tougher in rural communities with small school systems). High schools can offer strong AP programs. These scenarios might re-segregate, to some extent, within schools. But they can certainly bring more integration than what we see in communities heavily divided between public and private schools.
Of course, these kinds of things do require good leadership, which some communities unfortunately lack. And they require the funds to innovate and provide things that would bring some families back to the public schools.
Brad –
Massachusetts has done a great job; we could certainly learn a lot from what it’s accomplished. But we gotta look and learn quickly, because politics as usual is screwing it up. The bad guy? Barak Obama’s buddy Deval Patrick. Here’s the sad story:
Union support trumps educational success.
We can’t trust Democrats on defense or education.
Some Guy, the problem is simply that having two school systems in a small town doesn’t work economically. The private schools can’t pay much, but they do put middle-class parents in a financial bind because the parents are paying taxes to support public schools and forking over private school tuition, too.
Meanwhile, public schools are becoming mansions that house teachers who drive in from other places to speak educationese such as “The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students’ academic achievement.”
That’s just saying “the lesson from Massachusetts is that having teachers keep pace with a strong curriculum works,” which any idiot shoulc have known from the start, but phrasing it in such a way as to take up twice as much space as necessary and guarantee that almost nobody understands the sentence the first time through.
Some people might stand back in awe of such teacher-speak gobbledygook, particularly the questionably literate members of the school board in my hometown, but such pseudo-intellectual tripe fills me with dismay, because it’s devoid of actual communication and exists only to glorify the speaker and attract more dollars from legislators who don’t want to waste their time interpreting such high-flung tomfoolery, yet fear it might actually mean something.
What I fear is that the private schools are something while the public schools pretend to be something. I also see the financial burden that the dual school systems put on my community breaking its economic back.
If only someone somewhere somehow could route the two systems back toward each other in some way more substantive than having the football teams from the two schools eat together once each year and the baseball teams play each other.
The private schools aren’t swimming in the kind of economic stability that will allow them to be exclusive forever. They become less exclusive every year, but no less determined. The private school in my community has recently started busing in students from other counties, availing itself of students who once attended nearby schools that have closed.
Just the right push might be enough to start the two systems on courses that eventually meet. If vouchers won’t work, something else must. The quality of life in my little town is at stake.
We have 30 years of experience to show that lower-income families, black and white, will send their children to private schools when they have economic assistance to do so, and that the private schools generally deliver a better education for lower cost.
In Philadelphia, thousands of poor black children migrated to Catholic schools. In Rome, GA the white students paid higher tuition to subsidize poor students, mostly black, and emptied the public schools.
That’s what educrats fear.
And public school teachers and administrators rank just behind physicians in the percentage who send their children to private school. In Chicago, 40% of public school teachers send their children to private school.
The Wall Street Article pointed out that scholarships for poor families help their children get a better education. However the 2005 House Bill 3652, “Put Parents In Charge” would only benefit those that could afford to pay for private education. The legislation in PPIC allows for a state tax credit to be deducted for state income tax. In other words, one wishing to benefit from “school vouchers” would have to earn enough money to pay state income tax. To realize the full benefit of the tax credit, I calculated that the minimal annual family taxable income for South Carolina residents would have to be $35,000 for the year 2005. In 2005, the minimum wage was $5.15; based on a forty hour work week, the annual income would be almost $11,000. Two full time jobs in the household would not cross the salary threshold to earn the tax credit.
Clearly, “Put Parents In Charge”, was a tax credit targeted to those that could already afford to send their children to private school.
Sometime during the 2005-2006 PPIC period, Brad Warthen blogged about receiving a letter from the Catholic Diocese of Charleston, SC, advocating “school vouchers” saying that it would allow more children to attend Catholic schools. Pardon me, but a church is a non-profit organization. If a church wants to educate children that can’t afford tuition, why doesn’t the church grant scholarships? Frankly, the state subsidizing the church goes against our founding fathers’ separation of church and state. There is no nation-sanctioned religion.
The “What’s in it for me?” attitude: I think that is the attitude of those supporting “school vouchers”. They are thinking: I pay taxes for public education AND I am paying for my child’s education; I deserve a tax credit! Expanding on their twisted logic, my wife and I have no children; yet we have paid for public education for 30 years. Since we don’t use the system of public education, we should not have to fund public education. We deserve a tax credit also and we don’t have to pay for the tax credits for those families that choose to send their children to private schools. If they get a tax credit, we deserve a tax credit!
Public education is the foundation of modern society. Our children are the future leaders of tomorrow. Providing all with a sound educational background benefits all of us. We would have to support those that are on welfare or in prisons that failed because of their lack of an education to be productive citizens.
My mother was a teacher. During her career, she taught in public schools, except for one or two years when she taught in one of those “segregation academies” that popped up like kudzu in the south during the late sixties. She didn’t like working for the private school and returned to public school teaching. My father and mother told my brother, sister and me, that they would send us to the school of our choice. We all chose to continue in the public school system.
Private schools can set their own criteria for admissions. Private schools do not have to accept everybody. They can limit admission on academics and space. They do not have to put up portable classrooms to accept all students. Public schools are required to accept all students.
It is time that South Carolina legislators reform the campaign contributions and ethics laws to reveal the real people that are using “shell corporations” to skirt the campaign contribution limits:
Howard Rich, $350,600; Eric Brooks, $105,000; Alex Cranberg, $80,000; Joseph Stilwell, $47,500; Arthur Dantchik, $40,000; Kermit Waters, $32,000; Paul Farago, $15,500
(Reference: http://www.followthemoney.org/)
Think outside the socialist box, Mr. Hightower. If you cannot imagine some of the ways the free market might find to help buy a better education for poor children, realize that there are people who can, and already have, because they are market motivated.
The market fits itself to what people really want and need.
Government forces people to fit themselves to what it is willing to hand out to them.
Socialism has nothing to do with public education.
Can you provide examples where the free market has provided a better education for poor children?
South Carolina has had four governors that supported public education, Dick Riley (Democrat), Carroll Campbell (Republican), David Beasley (Republican), and Jim Hodges (Democrat). Mark Sanford is not in that list.
To quote a line from Star Trek, “The Wrath of Khan”: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or one.”
Public tax money should be spent where it serves the public, not private enterprises. Certainly, those that can afford to send their children to private schools do not need a tax credit.
Government education is a socialist program.
I already provided two examples of poor children flocking to private schools in Philadelphia and Rome, GA in the 1970s. There are hundreds more. Why do public school teachers send their children to private schools at almost the same ratio as physicians and dentists?
And who enabled you or anyone else to decide who “can afford to” or “should” spend their money to send their children to the school of their choice?
Colleges already run off tuition tax credits and studentn loans. Why can’t primary, middle and high schools do the same?
If you really think education is so important for public good, you would favor tax credits to anyone who paid for anyone to get an education in any school.
School choice is not the same as school vouchers.
Nobody is stopping you from sending your children to private school. I am not stopping you.
Parents have had school choice for many decades. They have had the right to send their children to private school if they so desire. I am not opposed to school choice as it exists currently. I am not taking away your right to send your children wherever you see fit.
I am opposed to school vouchers. I am opposed to public money being spent on private ventures.
College grants, Hope scholarships, Life scholarships, and tuition tax credits are vouchers to use at the public or PRIVATE college of your choice.
Should we abolish them, or put in place the same sort of voucher system for primary and secondary education?
If you oppose using so-called “public money” for private schools, then just quit collecting that private money as taxes that becomes public money – let parents keep their own money and buy the education they want.
It took me a while, but I finally see your point. Let’s get rid of all government sponsored education, from elementary schools, through high schools, including government sponsored colleges and technical colleges. No more USC, Clemson, The Citadel, or the Medical University of South Carolina. Let’s get rid of all public education! Let’s not stop at the state level, let’s get rid of the Naval Academy, West Point, and the Air Force Academy at the federal level.
Once I saw the light of your anti-government leanings, I thought of an idea that you would embrace. Let’s get rid of government, period! No more city, county, state, or federal government and the taxes we pay to each. Wow! That is an incredible idea, no more government taxes taken out of our paychecks, no more services that governments provide.
Just think of the possibilities… No more law enforcement, traffic enforcement, laws, or courts. Heck, who needs fire protection? All highways and interstates would be toll roads since private companies have each bought a particular road or bridge. With no city or county governments, private companies would flourish providing water and sewer services.
No more public hospitals, even the VA Hospital system would cease to exist. Even city and county EMT services would disappear.
Social Security? What’s that? It’s gone with the federal government.
No more armed forces. No more National Guard.
No more Weather Service. We would have to pay to get the weather forecast if we want one.
No more zoning restrictions or environmental protections. Private companies are free to put a hog farm or a slaughter house in the middle of residential areas. Private companies can pour pollutants into our water supply and ground.
Utility companies are no longer regulated. They can set their own rates. Think the oil companies make obscene profits? The power companies will put the oil companies to shame. They aren’t called the “power company” without good reason.
Wow, what a wonderful world that would be! From now on, it is everyman for himself.
Thank you for sharing your no government approach. That’s a great idea. No government, no taxes, no service.
PS:
With no government, there would be no elected officials, no Republican party or Democrat party. No more lobbyist. No more special interest.
Do you think this is the first time I have encountered some fan of Big Government who create absurd straw men because they couldn’t contemplate, much less discuss, reforming our government toward its ideal, or original design?
Life is so simple when you let those people calling themselves “the government” set their world and tell you how to live in it. Some people prefer that to freedom and responsibility.
I’ll let you have the last word. Life is too short to be stuck in an endless debate.
But could you please give me your views on government?
1) Should there be a federal government? If so, what, in your view, should the federal government do?
2) Should there be a state government? What, in your view, should state government do?
3) Should there be a county government? What should county government do?
4) Should there be a city government? Again, what should city government do?
Given the top to bottom opportunity to reform government, what will it be after you are finished?
1. Yes, a federal government limited to its explicit powers enumerated in the Constitution, for all people in the Nation, and standardize and ensure honest trade across state borders.
2. State governments are to keep the peace and ensure honest trade within its borders.
The freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution are the minimum which the states can guarantee, not the ceiling.
3. County governments use elected sheriffs to enforce state laws. They provide for some common services, such as parks, roads, bridges, and maybe sewers and water at the county level.
It may require a few ordinances for its unique characteristics, but it does not have the right to restrict freedom just just on a whim of a mayor or majority.
4. City governments maintain the streets and sewers within an incorporated area. It may hire police, all of whom are below the elected sheriff. It may require a few ordinances for its unique characteristics, but it does not have the right to restrict freedom just just on a whim of a mayor or majority.
It is not the proper role of government to supply everything that the market does not supply because people don’t want to pay what it costs. Government is supposed to do those things which require impartial resolution between individuals and businesses, not to compete with them.
Anything which businesses are providing (groceries, prepared food, entertainment, education, housing, clothing) are obviously not areas where government is NECESSARY as another competitor. So anytime the government proposes to get into these businesses, we should ask why, especially since they lack the incentives to provide good service at a competitive price.