Libertarians are full of shit (on this): School Vouchers

When I first voted Libertarian back in 1988, their position on education was basically to eliminate the Department of Education and devolve authority to its lowest level: the district, or even school. Some time during the 1990s, though, they added school vouchers to their list of reform policies for education, and I had my first serious, reasonably defensible objection to the party's platform. So with another round of elections coming up, and another LP candidate for Colorado governor, I thought I would add to this blog my objection to school vouchers.

The first problem with vouchers is the fundamental disconnect between taxes paid per child and actual expenses per child: per capita computation of costs in public education is a myth. It costs the same to build and maintain a school building, whether there are 1200 or 1199 students in it; it costs the same to pay a teacher, whether there are 30 or 29 students in his or her class; it costs the same to run buses, whether they pick up every child on the route or one less than every child. One more or less textbook does not represent the bulk of a school’s, or school district’s, budget: rather, it is the facility, payroll and other mass costs that do not vary with the addition or subtraction of a student. Costs are reduced at the school and district level only if an entire class can be eliminated, or if bus routes can be consolidated, which means the vouchers paid out on a student basis deplete the budget without equivalent reduction of costs for the absence of the child.

Further, public education is not primarily intended to educate my child, or your child, but to educate the electorate and the workforce. It is a public good from which we all derive benefit, regardless of whether or not we have school-aged children. After all, it behooves a democracy to have an electorate sufficiently educated to eschew dogma and demogogues; it behooves a free market to have individuals sufficiently educated to either work in the jobs available or run their own businesses. Arguably, those most requiring such instruction are those whose families could least afford to pay for it, which is why there must be provision for free public education. At any rate, it’s a given that some individuals contribute less, in property and other taxes, than the average per capita revenue, and the difference between the two values constitutes a subsidy, or welfare, for such individuals accepting a voucher.

It is at best problematic to collect taxes to provide a service that does not benefit all who pay the taxes on an equal basis, so a subsidy to one person’s child to give him or her an advantage over the other children we educate out of public necessity is questionable at best. Should we grant vouchers to pay for private security for those individual’s dissatisfied with our police? Should we grant vouchers to pay for private vehicles for individuals dissatisfied with the school bus? How about vouchers to pay for better copies of a text book than the school provides?

Public education represents an intersection of the citizen’s responsibility to support necessities and the parent’s responsibility to provide the best possible for his or her child. One parent’s dissatisfaction with what is publicly provided does not exempt him or her, as a citizen, from paying for it. If that parent wants more for his or her child, it’s quite frankly his or her problem, because the public school system was not created for his or her child alone.

What voucher proponents should do, instead of trying to support handouts to public school refugees, is sit in on school board meeting and even run for board themselves. I was told that the school board was the smallest unit of representative government in our system, a laboratory for viewing debate, compromise, and governance in action at a level of immediate importance to at least all of us with children. The problem is that many of the most arden voucher supporters want the money because they are hostile to science and objective analysis, and want their children instead to be inculcated with the dogma of their parents' beliefs. Those of us who went to public schools know that it is possible, of course, to fail and slip through the cracks; but it is also possible to achieve a thorough education, even in the worst of schools. Poor quality schools merely put the burden on the individual student (and, of course, the parents) to proactively exploit the resources of the school, rather than receiving enlightenment on a silver platter. The so-called crisis in public education has always been trumped up to justify public subsidy of private and home schooling. But vouchers are no different than food stamps or corporate welfare: it's just using money taken from you and me to benefit somebody else.

Stem-cell research, or "How I learned to use the veetoe," by G.W. Bush

Okay, I'm a bit behind. But I wanted to throw this out there, because proponents of the stem-cell research bill that Bush vetoed have been pissing me off for a while.

First of all, this administration, as abysmally un-scientific as it has been, has not actually forbidden stem-cell research: just federal funding of it. The federal government shouldn't be funding scientific research as a rule, for the very obvious reason that federal funding is inherently political. The military needs to continually improve it's weapons and counter-measures, and since we learned how to make synthetic diseases, the neutralization of such diseases is presumably part of that package. But apart from the rather narrow process of military procurement, and general governmental procurement, I can't justify federal research grants or any other such funding. State universities can do that, or municipalities, as their constitutions and charters allow. Inherently profitable enterprises are invariably undertaken without any governmental assistance (I should note that not all necessary enterprises are inherently profitable, at least not at the outset), as long as the government stays out of the way. There's more than enough money in American medicine -- that is, more than enough sick folk or relatives of sick folk whose wealth matches their desperation. So vetoing a bill to extend research funding is not really a bad thing.

Bush should still be impeached, by the way.

Anyway, that's the first thing that's been irritating me about the bill's proponents. The main thing, though, is the kind of arguments they use in support of stem cell research funding by the federal government: essentially, that the ends justify the means. As one might guess from my stated views on abortion, I don't consider that embryos have the absolute right to exist, and I'd call on those who think they do to implant the things into their own damn uteruses. But rather than arguing that, these short-sighted fools say the status of the embryo doesn't matter, because the research can help so many other persons. If you don't go to the trouble of showing why the embryo's destruction is not a civil rights issue, then saying that the benefits outweigh that destruction isn't much different from saying that the individual can be sacrificed for the needs of the more numerous individuals in a specific group -- which is, after all, the root of all evil.

So Presidents should veto more research funding, and Congress shouldn't try to set scientific or economic agendas. And stem-cell research is not immoral -- so Kennedy et al. should hammer that point, rather than assuming that it is acceptable to advance the sacrifice of certain individuals for the benefit of others.

Darkies beware

My wife got pulled over for speeding the other day. You know the drill: following traffic on a multi-lane street on the morning's commute, last in the line of cars that pass a motorcycle cop -- 41 in a 30. Nothing surprising or unexpected there, and my wife was in the wrong for violating the speed limit.

But when the officer took her license and registration, he did something unexpected: he asked what state she was born in.

Of what possible relevance could that be? She's operating a legally registered vehicle with a valid license, and the law she violated is applied the same no matter where one is born -- as, indeed, almost all laws should be. The only information of relevance is all on the license and registration forms, and the only thing the officer needed to verify was whether or not the information was accurate.

So I should point out that my wife looks the Mexican-American that she is: dark brown hair, light brown skin, dark brown eyes (I'll probably catch hell for that last part, because her eyes are actually hazel). Walking down the street, she can be mistaken not only for Hispanic, but also North Indian and even indigenous American. Much as the voice in Poe's "Murders at Rue Morgue", her features evoke in observers any number of possible ethnicities. And, of course, in Colorado Springs, that means Mexican.

Does the officer's question make sense now? Not really, because even a foreign-born individual can be legally naturalized. But I think we can guess why he asked it. And the fact that he asked it calls into question why he chose to pull over my wife in the first place: was it just that she was the easiest to catch, as my assumption would be? Or did the cop see a possible illegal alien and wanted to enforce national immigration law?

I might quibble about jurisdiction on that question, or I might laud the officer's diligence. Except that the only thing my wife was doing was speeding, along with other cars on the road -- and that strange question asked by the officer implies that she would have been pulled over for driving the speed limit, more slowly than traffic: because that would have been suspicious.

Paranoid? Well, my wife has another anecdote. While looking for a friend's house at night in Sugarland, Texas, she was pulled over by a local cop and told to leave the area. That was just pure racism, and the racist assumption that a darkie could be interested only in committing a crime in that area. Most blacks probably have a passel of these stories. In fact, at Rice University, my wife's alma mater, black students complained of being stopped by campus security and asked to show identification every day ('cause, you know, they all look alike). This more recent occurrence is a little different, because the racism is used to presume that a crime has already been committed: violation of immigration laws. Just because she's the archeypical latina.

The personal advice columnist in Latina magazine (which my wife subscribes to; don't ask me why) recently wrote that she carries her passport everywhere, just in case she's stopped and asked to prove her citizenship. When my wife visits her folks in southern Texas, she carries her laminated birth certificate. I talked about this in an earlier post, but think of the ramifications. What if you were stopped by every cop who saw you, or any plain-closthed government agent, and required to prove you were a citizen. Not just once in a while, but every fucking day. Twice, three times a day, even. What if you had to prove your documents were legitimate, or had to wait while the officer so validated? How many such cases would you tolerate? As many cases as the 30000 individuals on the TSA watch list have had to tolerate?

I'm getting ahead of myself, though, with regard to my wife's speeding ticket. She was speeding, after all, and other than that she has not been so scrutinized (by law enforcement) here. But times are changing: states are passing laws that allow them to verify the citizenship of individuals in certain cases; local agencies have for years been getting federal money by trumpeting and trumping up security threats. With illegal immigration being equated to terrorism, can my wife and other darker-skinned Americans look forward to being stopped on the sidewalk or in their car by police officers required or itchin' to snag an illegal? My son is the kind of light-skinned hispanic that members of La Raza won't talk to, but what if our next one is more representative of the mestizo portion of his or her heritage?

And don't get me started on immigration.