Question

A question to puzzle me for later. I've have just read a snippet from a prominent libertarian arguing that a school voucher program is just as statist as any other form of public education. He argues that it is an attempt to allow government to start regulating private schools. He also lambastes Milton Friedman a bit. Gary North is the name I believe.

Here is a slightly different question about school vouchers:

Should everyone is a given school district still be required to pay taxes to support the school system or should it simply be those with children. In other words, no voucher program, but simply parents using their own money to pay for schools. One logical follow-up to this is then should education be mandatory? The purist libertarian argument would be no it should not be mandatory and that people should have to pay their own money if they want their children to go to school.

For the time being though, my thoughts rest on the Mrs. Lovejoy argument to think of the children. There are plenty of adults out there who would not provide their children with any education (home school or public) at all for the sake of saving the money. I've heard of plenty of examples from teachers about parents who neglect their children in every other basic way, so it would not be a stretch to guess that they would skimp on the really big bill of school tuition if they had a choice. This is why I would break from the purist tradition. There are parents out there who would not let their children go to school and this would punish children who have no control over the situation in the short term and likely punish society as a whole once these kids are old enough to choose between getting a job and starting trouble.

I just don't like where the logic would lead in such a system because it would likely lead to a perpetual class of uneducated people. In a technological sophisticated society, this is a recipe for disaster. Some would argue, and I could agree, that we have such an uneducated class now as a result of poor quality public schools. I would agree, but my inclination would be first to go to vouchers. If education every became so cheap that anyone could afford it, then we wouldn't need to spread the costs on everyone, just the people with schoolchildren.

Slow Day - so I will pick on public school teachers

The vast majority of what I hear from public school teachers is that they are not paid enough. And they have done a great job convincing everyone else, even those without health insurance or pensions, that they are not paid enough. I frequently remember being told specifically by many of my teachers that they were not paid enough through either the direct appeal or your garden variety grumbling.

The question that we were not allowed to ask, of course, is why these incredibly talented underpaid pour souls didn't quit teaching to get jobs where they would be paid well for the extremely valuable skill set. After all, they weren't being forced to be teachers were they? Were they? Oh, that's right, society would fall apart without them and since they invested all that time and effort into getting a teaching certificate, they owed it to society to continue teaching.

Here's a question though. How many men and women do you know in the 20s and 30s who have teaching certificates that are still doing substitution work after 10 years because there aren't enough full-time teaching positions available? Here's an economic question: if there are people who want to do a job than there are openings for that type of job, is it is an indication that the wages and benefits of the job are too low? If I believed my teachers for the twelve years they complained about their paychecks, I would have to assume that every new teacher I met must either be some kind of moron or masochist. The couldn't be that dumb though, right, they have a teaching certificate. They must be masochists!

Now, of course, the argument could be made that the shortage is artificially caused by the school boards and taxpayers who are not giving enough money to the schools to hire the correct amount of teacher to achieve the right level of student-teacher ratio in the classrooms. Then I, the partial owner of a standard 20 year old suburban house with 2.4 kids who are not yet of school age look at my annual tax bill of $4,000 and wonder how much money could possibly be enough. And, of course, my school taxes just went up again this year.

There may be some other arguments out there to explain why we have such an abundance of 20 and 30 year-olds looking for full-time employment in a job that apparently pays so little, but I'll have to ask a few more people for that.