The Philosophy of Freedom

by Caleb Nelson

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  No one would dispute the absolute necessity of education for a happy and fulfilling life, yet to force it by government fiat remains immoral.

  Note: Nothing in this section should be construed as an attack against individual teachers, many of whom are talented, passionate, inspiring, and under-appreciated. In fact, much of this section is written with the view that a principled approach to education would be more rewarding, spiritually and financially, for the great many master teachers out there. While there are many excellent teachers in our schools, they are trapped by an immoral system, perpetuated by their unions and governmental control. Many only support this system because they see no other alternative.

  GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS

  Public education is a misnomer. It is more appropriate to call it government education. The false dichotomy of private vs. public causes confusion and clouds the real issues. “Public” implies that these schools are open to everyone. They are not. Ever tried to get permission to attend a public school aside from the one assigned by the government? Your request will most likely get denied. People have even been sued by the government for lying about where they live in order to try and improve the educational environment for their children. Private schools would be more aptly named “public” schools because they are truly open and available to the public. The “public” education system today is run by, paid via, and monitored through the government.

  Our current system of government education violates individual rights; this causes, in its wake, a cascade of other broken principles. The effects of all these violated laws combined together give us the sorry effects we see today—ballooning debt, many poor teachers (whether in quality or pay scale), a high percentage of failing schools, and ignorant students. “In some of America’s larger cities,” Andrew Bernstein reports, “fewer than half the students earn a high school diploma; in Detroit, only one quarter do. Roughly one million children drop out of school each year. Forty-five million Americans are marginally illiterate. Twenty-one million cannot read at all.”

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  Let’s be specific about the effects of the violation of principle. By having a system which claims responsibility and authority to educate children, many parents feel little responsibility for educating their children.

  Market safeguards are also removed by making education a government entity. A free market protects consumers in a number of ways. First, under government supervision quality is curtailed. In a free education market, quality would soar, the range of options would increase, competition would abound, and prices would steeply drop. There would be new kinds of educational options which don’t exist yet. In a free market there would be more available products.

  There would be an increase in the number of different types of schools which teach critical thinking skills, specific trades, or used a non-Progressive teaching philosophy such as the Montessori method. Total school time could be reduced by years (there are school children who have their high school diplomas as young as fourteen years old

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  Schools could offer specializations to cater to the needs of families. Does your child need special education for exceptional needs or handicaps? You would be able to “shop” around to find the school that provided what you needed. Do you want flexible hours to better fit your work schedule and avoid hiring a sitter? Looking for an inexpensive alternative to college to increase your skills for a specific career? The market would provide these specializations and services and many more that we can’t even conceive of. Many companies currently offer daycare as a benefit to employees. What if they also offered school? In addition to babysitters, they could hire private teachers for the children of employees! No one knew they wanted an iPad until it was invented. There would be innovative educational opportunities we currently can’t imagine, and they would become available for all price ranges.

  Many families cannot afford to send their children to private schools, especially while paying taxes to also support government schools. They don’t have the means to pay for education twice.

  Many truancy laws require students to attend school until a certain age. These factors make the issue of education one of coercion, where families are being forced to attend public schools.

  Remember that most of all, regardless of any cost/benefit analysis of government-run education; it is immoral because it violates the property rights of taxpayers, and the rights of parents and teachers to freely act on their own judgment and enter into contract for mutual benefit.

  THE SOLUTION

  The fix to the problems in state-run education is the same fix for every other problem caused by statism: the removal of forceful violation of rights and a shift to privatization.

  A fully private school system would recognize and protect the rights of everyone involved—educators, taxpayers, students, and customers. Before we deal will some possible ways such a school system should come about, let’s briefly address some major objections to such a system.

  One major objection is that parents don’t value their children’s education enough to pay for it. However, the great majority of parents do value their children’s education. Education will not be a priority for everyone, and some people will choose to spend their money on cigarettes instead of tuition. That is their choice, and they will have to live with the consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, so will their children.

  The good news is that children are not mindless copies of their parents. As they grow into adults they can make very different choices than that of their parents. They will be free to pursue whatever educational options they desire. The United States had one President who didn’t learn the basics of grammar, reading, or math until he was married and earning a living at age seventeen.

  [383] However, the parents of these children should be socially ostracized, and, when appropriate, prosecuted for child neglect; but, the existence of such people does not constitute a valid reason to violate the rights of the rest of Americans. There are also many parents who, under the public school system, care little for their children’s education. A change to a private system would not increase that number, but may, in fact, decrease it. Isabel Paterson observed that, “The practical skill by which the average man gets a living is not learned in school. There is no reason to suppose that children would remain untaught.”[384]

  Another objection is that if taxpayers were not forced to fund the educational system, some families would be unable to afford quality education. Ironically, “the coercively funded and operated government schools are precisely what make it impossible for customers to receive quality education,” answers Andrew Bernstein to this objection,

  “[And] with the government monolith slain, the property, income, and sales taxes that had been levied to sustain it could and should be repealed. With their tax burden substantially diminished, families would retain more of their income and be fully free to spend it on their children’s education . . . In a full private market for education, competition among private schools, teachers, and tutors would increase dramatically. This inevitably would drive prices down, making education increasingly affordable.

  “As for those families that somehow in a free market for education still could not afford to pay for any education for their children, observe that even today many private schools offer scholarships to worthy students who cannot meet the tuition. In a fully free market for education, such scholarships would increase and abound. Private schools are highly competitive with one another, and they all seek to showcase the value and superiority of their product. Consequently, it is in their rational self-interest to attract students who will make them shine. Scholarships are a crucial means of doing so.”

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  Scholarships and lower costs, in addition to billions of dollars already currently given annually to educational charities, would make for very few families who could not afford a quality education. (We will deal with those few shortly.) Also, the removal of government credit
and intervention in schools would decrease the costs because, as in the housing market, government incentives and subsidies have created an educational market bubble where costs continue to rise. One reporter observed that “Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.”

  [386] A major symptom of the problem is that this idea is considered “heretical.”

  There are several viable means of privatizing the government educational system. The most straightforward would be an auction of the schools and properties to the highest bidder. A transition period of some years would be necessary to give due notice to government-dependent families and time to adjust to a free market.

  Another possible method is more feasible in the near future, since a widespread auction would also require widespread recognition of the propriety of a private education system. Such recognition may not exist for quite some time yet. This other method involves the method of school choice which allows parents to choose how and where to spend their education dollars. There are two main categories of the school choice movement: school vouchers, and educational tax credits.

  SCHOOL VOUCHERS

  School vouchers consist of government giving each child a specified amount to be used to pay for their education. The parents are free to spend this amount at a school of their choice, provided that school meets certain government standards.

  While vouchers do offer some choice to parents and add some competition to an otherwise stagnant monopoly, this method poses some serious problems. The main principle is still the same for vouchers as for public schools: government is footing the bill and approving the decisions made with the money. Far from freeing the educational system from the coercive arm of government, this method extends that arm deeper into the private school system. For an example, let’s look to Sweden, which instituted a nationwide voucher program in 1991. These were the results reported by the Fraser Institute:

  “[Sweden’s] public vouchers have made independent schools dependent on public funding, and consequently, have given elected officials the power to make independent schools submit to public controls. The problem is not that the regulations imposed so far on admission of students and fees have impinged on the educational quality of many schools. Rather, the danger is that these central controls, which were minimal at first in Sweden, continue to multiply so that eventually independent schools are absorbed into the centrally controlled system.”

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  The result was that the private schools became, essentially, like the charter schools in America. Whoever is paying the bills sets the terms; in this case it’s the government. What we need in our transition to a private system is a school choice program where government plays no part in the financing of education.

  EDUCATION TAX CREDITS

  A tax credit is a reduction in what a person owes in taxes to offset a certain expense—in this case, education. For example, Mr. Smith receives a tax credit of $2,000 for his child each year, and spends $5,000 for private school tuition. He would receive a $2,000 deduction in that year’s tax liability, could send his child to a private school costing $5,000 per year, pay the school $5,000, and receive a full $2,000 reduction in that year’s tax liability. (This is different from a tax deduction, which only lowers the taxpayer’s taxable income.) The important part here is that the government never gets to touch the tuition dollars and cannot mandate how or where that money is spent.

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  Under this system, all taxpayers (parents, guardians, corporations, people without children) could claim tax credits for the purpose of funding the education of one or more children in grades K-12 for that year.

  The amount that could be retained as a credit would be determined by two figures. The first is their Education Tax Liability (ETL), which is the amount of money the government would otherwise take from the taxpayer for use in the government-run schools. This amount includes income taxes, property taxes, and any other feasibly calculable taxes that apply.

  The second is their Average Attendance Cost (AAC), which is the amount of money that would have been spent on the student in a government-run school that year.

  The program would be optional and any taxpayer who wished to participate could retain as much of their ETL as they choose and apply it to the educational expenses of any child in any school where that child is accepted. The limit on how much of the ETL could be used would be the child’s AAC. The taxpayer would be free to contribute to more than one child, up to their ETL; and the child could accept contributions from more than one source up to their AAC.

  Thus, a low-income couple with an ETL of $1,000 could find several friends and relatives willing to contribute their tax credits to make up the tuition cost of a particular private school. Parents could also claim tax credits for home schooling.

  The only role for government in such a program would be to calculate ETL and AAC, and continue funding government schools with such tax money as it receives. The government would have no say in which schools could accept the money or what constitutes a legitimate education expense.

  Private organizations and corporations could establish scholarship funds with their ETL’s. Any unused funds in such programs would be turned over to the government school system at the end of the year.

  A program of education tax credits would place control of education back where it belongs—with parents. With the increase in new customers and the lack of regulation, the private education sector would expand rapidly. The public sector would shrink—while remaining properly and proportionately funded. It would put America on track for a fully free educational system. It would lay the foundation for the separation of education and state, which must exist in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state. It would lead to the cessation of the violation of the rights of all taxpayers in this regard.

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  Review

  Q1: Is education a right? Why or why not?

  Q2: Why is free education not free?

  Q3: What problems arise from a government monopoly on education?

  Q4: What challenges would exist in a fully free market for education?

  Q5: What is the downside to school vouchers?

  Q6: Describe the Education Tax Credit program.

  Chapter 17: Welfare and Charity

  THE PRINCIPLES

  We’ve already identified the principles that government-run welfare violates throughout this book. The alleged need of some people does not constitute a valid claim on the rights of others. Welfare is not a right. Retirement is not a right. Rights are not entitlements to the products and services produced by others, but are principles protecting our prerogative to freedom of action. It is a violation of the proper role of government to take what belongs to one citizen for the purpose of redistributing it to another citizen.

  Some attempt to justify statist welfare through altruistic guilt, claiming it is our duty to love our fellow man. Coerced charity is immoral; involuntary charity is a contradiction and cannot be considered a moral virtue.

  When that doesn’t work, they will attempt to appeal to our “self-interest,” saying that it is better for us to submit to the minor demands of a screaming horde of cannibals, otherwise they will have us for breakfast. This is not a rational appeal to self-interest, it is a threat. An appeal to self-interest must be done by persuasion and education, since if it is truly good for us it must be possible to persuade us to do it without force or deception. Force is the thug’s way out—an argument for the person who has no rational argument to offer.

  The reality is that America has been violating these principles for a long time, and before progress can be made to a free, rights-respecting society, the consequences of such government action must be dealt with. Many people have come to expect and rely on government aid. The government has made promises to them upon which they have based major life decisions. Thus,
a transition period would be necessary (as we saw in the previous section on education) in order to phase out the government programs and move towards a full separation of charity and state.

  In a free society, every individual is responsible to provide for their needs and wants to the best of their abilities and ambitions. But what about those unable to help themselves—the poor, the disabled, and the helpless?

  In reality, the truly needy are an extremely small number of people. Most are able to support their life, and if capable, have a moral responsibility to do so.

  How would the poor, the disabled, and the helpless fare under capitalism?

  THE POOR

  “Poor” is a subjective term relative to culture and time period. In many periods of history being poor meant having one change of clothes, sleeping outside, and getting one meal a day if you were lucky. Much of the poor in America today live in at least a trailer or apartment with electricity, plumbing, television, and may even struggle with obesity; this is absolute luxury compared to the thousands of years that preceded it.

  There is an assumption in our culture that no one should be poor. This belief is flawed for a few reasons. First, since “poor” only refers to the lowest class of society, this is by definition impossible; in the future, being poor might mean having only one gold-plated rocket pack. Second, as long as someone is able to meet their own needs, there is nothing inherently wrong with being poor. While it would be preferable to be able to meet one’s wants as well as needs, it is only our materialistic culture that makes us believe possessions are the secret to happiness. While some studies have shown that having a certain level of income makes it easier to be happy, happiness is not dependent material goods.