John Stossel’s latest column explores the impact of the “virtual government monopoly” on American K-12 education.
Conventional wisdom is that government must run the schools. But government monopolies don’t do anything well. They fail because they have no real competition. Yet competition is what gives us better phones, movies, cars — everything that’s good.
If governments produced cars, we’d have terrible cars. Actually, governments once did produce cars. The Soviet bloc puts its best engineers to work and came up with the Yugo, the Volga and the Trabant. The Trabant was the best — the pride of the Eastern Bloc. It was produced by actual German engineers — known for their brilliance. Yet even the Trabant was a terrible car. Drivers had to put the oil and gas in separately and then shake the car to mix them. Trabants broke down and spewed pollution. When government runs things, consumers suffer.
Our school system is like the Trabant.
