Picking up the mail this morning, I got very jealous of my boss. He had received a letter from David Friedman – THE David Friedman. I felt better when I opened it, because he wanted money. That is not a bad thing. It’s just that I have more of a rational selfish interest in giving my money to the IRS right now. Anyway, as Friedman plugged his mum and dad’s foundation for school choice, I should have expected he would give me cause to smile:
[Socialism] does not work quite as badly applied to education in America as it did applied to agriculture in the Soviet Union, but it works badly enough that, over the years, expenditure and staffing of the public schools have steadily risen while the quality of the education they provide has not.
Note: David Friedman has a special place in my heart because he is the first economist I ever read that made sense.