The JLF doesn?t pursue government grant money, and for good reason, I suspect. If it did, we could eventually come to ?expect? that money, and eventually argue that that?s just the way all nonprofits operate.
The reason JLF stays away from that trough is too clear. No one thinks it would/could be the same organization on the public dole as it is now, or do they?
I agree that the perfect should not be a foil for the good, but neither should the bad be raised as a defense against a hypothetical worse. Literacy rates were very high in the early history of the U.S., as E.G. West and others have documented. So it wasn’t the failure of private individuals to educate that led to the expansion of the state’s role?it was more like the failure to homogenize that was found offensive.
Private excellence in education hasn’t stemmed the expansion of the welfare or any other part of the state’s activity. The argument that poor results or low literacy are likely outcomes without state-sponsored education turns the facts on their head. Good results in the private sector don’t stem the government control/spending tide. The state expands because its mission isn’t about quality, its about control.
In a second-best world, we might hope the money government spends gets sopped up in relatively innocuous and ineffective projects, ones that don’t interfere unduly with our non-monetary freedoms. Fine. You might give your dog your old shoes to chew up, just to keep him away from the new ones, but what happens when he finishes off the old pair? Don’t bet that he’s not moving on, quality issues notwithstanding.
Are we really arguing that tyranny succeeds, wherever it arises, because the system in place wasn’t efficient enough? Or that it must clearly have been preferred?evidenced by the “look, it must be better because we’ve got it in place” argument?
If people want freedom, they have to argue for freedom, not for efficiency. And if efficiency has to suffer in the struggle to release restraints on freedom, as disruptions in former Soviet economies show in their transition experiences, then I say so be it.
