Not to belabor the point about education and public goods, but Roy’s response is just not responsive. He says that we can’t even talk about an optimum level of government expenditure for education — since such a level can only be determined by a competitive market process. No, this is an entirely circular question-beginning exercise. I’ve been arguing all along that there is no price-based market feedback loop for the non-vocational aspects of education: its implications for representative government, for example, or for the avoidance of even-greater political demands for government transfers. The market has no answer to these questions, in other words. Thus, I say, the public sector needs to take some action to ensure some minimum amount of resources is spent on this purpose, while having no need to monpolize its provision.
Roy’s answer is that the government will never know how much to spend because of the absence of a market-derived optimum. Around and around we go, and I’m getting dizzy.
On Nozick and Rand, I agree with a natural-rights foundation for limited government. My argument is that such a limited government necessarily involves representative politics, which invites all of the issues and pressures I’m worried about, thus necessitating some kind of intervention. I like these two philosophers, but I don’t see them grappling with the real-world practical issues of governance I’m talking about, unlike Locke, Jefferson, Hayek, Friedman, etc.
My argument about vouchers and their protential risks and rewards remains precisely the same. Given the inevitability and, I argue, the advisability of government expenditures for public education, are we best off avoiding vouchers because of the possibility of corrupting the private education sector? Or are we best provide some limited, means-tested vouchers to ensure that private alternatives and competing choices are available to lower-income people? In the first case, I’m afraid, this will confine at least lower-income students to a government monpoly in perpetuity. I go with the second option, as long as we remain eagle-eyed about regulation.
Thanks, George, for the reference to the Mises Institute piece. I’d be more persuaded about the literacy rates of the 19th century before the advent of public education if I knew of a good set of consistent literacy statistics just since the 1960s.
