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Feb. 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:01
84 Public Schools (Part 3 - Vouchers)

The moral and practical effects of school vouchers

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Good morning everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 8.30 on Friday the 3rd of February 2006 and I am going to hopefully top off some conversations that we've been having about Education, and I'm also trying to do a slightly quieter mic.
I was listening to Education Part 2 last night as I drifted off to Slumberland and noticed that it was peaking a little bit in the vocals.
So I'm going to try cranking it down a little.
I have had a request or two to up the quality from 32 bits to something higher, maybe 48 or 64, if you feel that.
I don't find it to be too much of a problem.
I also don't find there to be too much background noise, other than that generated by me in general.
Burps and belches and sips of coffee.
But if you do find that the quality is too poor, then just let me know and I'll be happy to save it in a higher format.
I save them sort of for my own pleasure at 320, but just upload them at
32k but just let me know if it's not a quality that's a quality that's good enough for you and I will do my best to figure out how to make it sound better but this I think I think 32 is not too bad that's what I listen to my audiobooks at I think if I can get the mixer settings right and I'm trying to find different ways of positioning the microphone so it doesn't you don't get that that comes when I take a sharp breath so hopefully we'll be able to figure that that out and make it work
So, I'd like to chat this morning, just to sort of top off public school, at least the primary school side of things, and mention, you know, my sort of two bits worth on the vouchers debate.
And it's sort of important to understand what vouchers are and what vouchers aren't, right?
Vouchers, the way that the school vouchers, the way that they're contemplated, will sort of work along the following lines.
You will get a voucher which will allow you to take government money and apply it to the public or private school of your choice.
And through that, you know, there's this hope that a kind of competition A kind of market competition will enter into the fray and it will cause unions to perhaps lessen some of their power or at the very least education to get better.
And that really is this idea behind public school vouchers.
Now of course one of the problems that is faced is that many of the younger people don't really understand Just how bad public education is relative to what it was, say, 40 years ago.
One of the big things that happened in 1963 was that teachers got the right to unionize.
But before, unions were considered to be a purely private sector phenomenon.
There was no need for union in the public sector because A private sector employer was driven by profit, of course, and because he or she was driven by profit, there was always the problem of wanting to underpay workers.
But in the public sector, nobody is driven by profit, and therefore it didn't make any sense for most sort of people to to consider the idea that there would be such a thing as a union in the public sector.
But of course, as unions began to become redundant, as I talked about in Unions Part 1 and 2, as they began to become redundant in the private sector, they began to turn their tender concerns towards the public sector and started fighting for the right there.
there, a lot of the Marxists really despised the idea of the unions, and a lot of leftists and so on despised the idea of unions in the public sector, because this is back when they were not interested in supporting the power of the mixed economy state, but because this is back when they were not interested in supporting the power of the mixed economy state, but actually had some concern for the workers that they And so one of the reasons they disliked unionism
In the private sector if you get an increase in wages, all that happens is that it gets taken out of the excess profits of the capitalist.
So that's good, right?
As a sort of lefty Marxist, that's good in your frame of thinking.
But if you get a raise in the public sector, all that happens is that Taxes get raised on everybody else so you know instead of it coming out of the Big pile of gold that all capitalists are fantasized about sitting on It instead comes out of the taxes of other workers, and that's not good.
That's double-plus un-good.
And so they really disliked the idea of unions in the public sector, because of the reasons mentioned.
So what happened was they fought long and hard against unionization in the public sector, and then it began.
In 1963, they got the right to unionize in the public sector, and in education in particular.
And in 1964, Like clockwork, exactly as you would expect and anticipate, in 1964, the long, slow, grim decline in the SAT scores begins.
You know, which is not shocking to anyone with any understanding of human nature.
I mean, not even a sophisticated understanding of human nature.
You know, if you can't get fired, how good are you at your job?
I mean, it's sort of a basic question that most sane human beings don't have any problem answering.
If you can't get fired...
How good do you need to be at your job?
If you have this incredible grievance process that goes on, which requires, you know, two years of paperwork to get you fired, and a union that's going to fight every step of the way, well, of course you're going to give up.
Of course you're going to become lazy.
And you're not just going to do that because you don't, you know, human beings are innately lazy.
I mean, at a biological level, we are, right?
I mean, the goal of our biology is for us to Expend as few calories as possible and conserve as many as possible.
But it's not so much that.
It's that there are always those people who are hanging on by a thread, who just kind of give up.
They're hanging by a thread.
They're not very good teachers.
Nobody really likes them.
And then once they get the right to never be fired, they completely give up because they were never any good to begin with.
And there's enough of those to begin to change the culture.
And then anybody who tries to excel It's viewed resentfully by the troglodytes who remain squatting and smoking and smirking and snarling in the teacher's lounge.
It's just a change of culture.
It's not that it turns everyone into a lazy underachiever.
Although it does seem to have happened within the span of a single year, but you just kind of give up, right?
Once you can't be fired, your job becomes more of a kind of thing to get through, to get through to other things.
And, you know, it's not something you... I mean, you don't hate it usually, you know, but it's not part of your creative fire, right?
It doesn't rouse excellence in you, and we know that, just because of the free market, right?
Where you don't have incentive and disincentive, you don't have excellence.
I don't think that's anything too controversial.
So, you know, of course, as the SAT scores and as the general scores have declined precipitously, I have these statistics, but of course I'm driving, so maybe I'll read them just on my way home.
Sorry, just before I leave for my way home.
Where I also have to produce a correction for the Supertramp misreference of yesterday.
So I don't think it's really possible for people to understand just how bad public school systems have become and how ridiculously profitable those same systems have become to unions and to bureaucrats.
So, you know, the idea that this entity is going to sort of surrender and roll over to something like school vouchers is a complete fantasy.
The only way that The public sector is going to accept, and politicians are going to accept, school vouchers is because through school vouchers they can control or eliminate private schools.
They don't like private schools.
Well, they do and they don't like private schools.
In the same way that the people who drive the public roads here do and don't like The 407, the tall highway that I use.
They don't like it because they think that they feel resentful because they feel other people, if they have enough money, like me, can drive this tall highway and they don't get any benefits and boy, they wish they could be on my tall highway so that they could drive so much faster.
So they have this sort of immature, sort of intellectually stunted approach full of resentment and desire.
Towards the private sector or, you know, towards this road.
You know, the people who don't understand on the public roads the relationship between the public and private roads would feel a lot less resentful if they sort of thought about it for two seconds and thought, well, everyone who's driving on the private roads is not driving on the public roads and therefore I am getting a tertiary benefit.
A significant tertiary benefit.
I mean, the public roads are pretty slow.
One private road does like the job of three public roads in terms of transporting people because they don't do any construction during rush hour or during the day.
I think I've never seen it.
And so if those people weren't on the private roads they would be on the public roads and everybody would grind to a complete halt.
So it's sort of important for people to understand that.
In the same way unions dislike private schools Because they make public schools look bad.
But, you know, fundamentally, who cares about that?
You just get some president up there talking about the fundamental value of education in a democracy and, you know, we all give up, sigh, roll over and play dead because, you know, we haven't yet found the courage as a community to expose lies for what they are.
So we still believe there's some sort of faint echo of virtue in wanting public education and therefore The price of that is that our children's minds are mutilated, right?
The price of illusion is always destruction.
And the price of our illusion as adults in relation to the public sector education is the result that our children's minds get completely shredded and destroyed.
So, it's a very sad, sad situation and something that we should really take a look in the mirror at if we want to sort of figure out how best to save our children or save the children of our children.
Then, you know, we really need to become more courageous in our exposure of lies, falsehoods, and this sort of pious cover for violence that the state always represents.
So they dislike the private schools because they make the union schools look bad, but at the same time they love the private schools because the private schools take students out of the public school mix without affecting the income.
I mean, let's say that you're running a tech support line and you get paid, I don't know, $100,000 a year regardless of how many tech support calls you actually have to take or how many clients your company has.
Well, I mean, Oh, and your bonus would increase the fewer clients that there were within the tech support.
Well, of course, you would probably be nice, but you wouldn't have a strong incentive to retain these clients.
You wouldn't sort of outright say, you know, quit so I can get a raise.
You would say, oh, I'll get back to you, and you'd forget about it, or you'd drag your feet, or you'd send them the wrong information, or you'd do that sort of passive-aggressive thing until your clients just kind of gave up and went elsewhere.
Which is, of course, exactly what happens in the public school system.
In the public school system, they love private schools because they get to dump students onto the private school system and students that, frankly, their own teachers are just far too stupid and incompetent to teach.
So, but their funding remains the same, right?
So, they're overjoyed that they can offload their work to someone else and still retain all the income.
So, I mean, but overall, the public sector only likes the private sector schools because of that, right?
So if you take that away, it will be an outright war.
The simple economic facts of the situation is that the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that unions take in, and public sector unions in particular, because I think private sector unions are like 6% of the workforce, the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, I think it's $175 billion a year, that the unions take in in forced union dues, they can turn any sort of significant portion of that over to political parties.
And, you know, you really can't withstand that kind of tsunami bribe or the landslide bribe of that kind of money.
And no group of parents and no private schools will ever be able to match those kinds of funds.
And since we have a dollar democracy, there's just no zero, zero.
I can just tell you absolutely get it out of your head.
It is a zero possibility.
It is a zero-chance possibility that the politicians will not respond to the cash-flooded unions, as opposed to the somewhat tentative, already taken care of, and cash-poor parents' associations and the private and cash-poor parents' associations and the private schools or whatever, right?
So, it's a non-starter.
It's never going to happen.
It's never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to happen while there is the current system in place.
And if you want to work for it, by all means.
But I'm telling you, it's worse than a waste of your time.
You're actually aiding the enemy.
And why are you aiding the enemy?
Well, I'll sort of talk about the morals and then I'll talk about the practical limitation of a voucher system and why it would fail.
In ways that would be worse than the system that we have now.
Well, of course, the reason that it would be completely immoral to advocate a voucher system is that you're leaving the existence of state violence in place.
But you're adding another layer to it.
Another layer of bureaucracy.
So you're saying, OK, well, taxation is fine, and public school education is fine, and, you know, holding guns to people's necks to get them to cough over their money and their children is OK, but, you know, we're going to introduce a small amount of choice at the end.
Right, so, you know, it's sort of like saying, well, it's not sort of like, it's exactly like saying, well, slavery is fine.
But, you can choose between these three slave masters.
So, you're a slave, and you're on the auction block, but it's not going to be, you know, we're going to introduce some choice right at the very end, and we're going to say, you can choose from these three slave masters, you can choose.
So, there may be some competition among those three slave masters for slightly better conditions, but, you know, the fundamental evil of slavery is still in place.
And by searching for a sort of less offensive alternative at the tail end of slavery, you are tacitly supporting and encouraging slavery.
And by searching for a less offensive and tiny level of choice at the end of the brutality of state taxation and coercion and regulation, you are tacitly agreeing that all of that stuff is fine, we'd just like to tweak it a little.
There's a reason why I'm an anarcho-capitalist.
There's a reason why I view the state as a moral cancer on the face of the world.
And it's not because I'm contrary, and it's not because I love arguing things that nobody who's supposedly in their right mind would ever agree with.
It's simply because I'm not going to waste my time dealing with the little stuff.
I'm not going to waste my life and my intellectual energy spouting out about stuff that's not going to make any difference.
So, you know, this idea that... and Harry Brown, all due respect to the grand old gentleman of libertarian thought, the man is brilliant and a great communicator and was the one who most helped me get over my addiction to war.
But the idea that the United States is ever going to return Anything close to its original constitutional size or limits is a complete fantasy, and I can understand why he would believe that.
Because it gives him a lot of agreement.
He gets to use the word Constitution, and he doesn't have to worry about explaining away society without a government.
I fully understand and magnificently respect the work that he's done with his life, and assume that he is no more full of error than I am, and that there will be people who come after me who say, Yeah, that guy did some pretty good podcasts, but man was he wrong on this, that, or the other!
So, this isn't from any sense of innate superiority, but, you know, to use Harry's phrase, the fact of the matter is that there's simply no chance of that occurring.
As long as there is the capacity to bribe and to bully, then it will occur.
And you're not going to solve it by saying there should be less bribery and bullying.
And, I mean, Harry does have an answer which says, you know, he doesn't have any beef with those who say get rid of government entirely.
Once we have got government shrunk down to whatever size constitutional limits, we can all have a big party and discuss about whether we should get rid of it completely.
But that's never going to happen.
The only thing that's going to help, in my view, is the government is going to collapse, and these ideas better be out there.
And you better have talked to people about these ideas, so when the government collapses, we can look at a much more viable alternative, which is, let's get rid of the government piece by piece, or as quickly as possible, and not sort of say, let's just reduce it, and so on.
Because all that will happen is, we will diminish it for a short time, but within a generation it will be right back where it started.
But freedom will have less credibility each time.
So, the government schools are simply so wretched, and the unions are so rich, and the power imbalance is so great, that there's just no way that any sort of effective voucher system which would allow choice would ever be allowed to occur.
And if you're out there advocating school vouchers, you're taking, frankly, a chicken crap route to solving the problems of coercion.
You do not modify coercion at the end.
You do not tweak violence and hope to turn it to some slightly better end at the end of its bloody course.
You don't take a reign of terror and try and tweak it.
It's like putting knee pads in front of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.
You do not sanction violence or irrationality or coercion in any way, shape, or form.
If you want to, go ahead.
I'm not going to stop you by any means, but I am absolutely going to condemn you as a morally corrupt, hypocritical, evil person.
Because if you've listened this far in the podcast, and you haven't written to me to prove that I'm wrong, then I would guess to some degree you've accepted a good chunk of what I'm saying.
And I think that's only reasonable, because I'm trying to be as rational as possible.
I'm certainly not trying to get you to obey me, because I don't really matter at all in the equation.
I'm trying to get you to respect rationality in reality.
And it's really not that complicated.
Violence is bad.
Violence is evil.
And anything that you do which tacitly, implicitly, or explicitly supports the use of violence, when you know better, is evil.
I don't know, some kindergarten teacher two years from retirement who has never heard anything like, oh gee, you know, state education is evil and corrupt because it's based on coercion and regulation.
Then I can understand that you would have this view that, oh well, maybe vouchers would be nice for my grandkids or whatever.
But you now know, you know, having listened to, I don't know, the three million hours of podcasting that I've put out in the last couple of months, Given that you've heard this far, you're now completely responsible for knowing what is coercion and what is not.
And if you're interested in approving of vouchers, then you better stop listening to this stuff right now, because you are absolutely breaking from any kind of logical or moral consistency and slithering like a ferret into the camp of the enemy when you know better.
And don't look to me for punishment.
I mean, I don't even know who you are!
But your conscience is going to get you something fierce.
Once you have opened your eyes, to then voluntarily blind them again, and to return to even the soft advocation of violence, is going to just turn you into a miserable and neurotic wreck of a human being.
There is no path back from where we are.
You can either go on, or you can be corrupt, but you cannot turn back.
So, that's my sort of, I guess, mild admonition to you.
If you're tempted to sort of try an easier route, what seems like an easier route, and say, let's get into vouchers, or, you know, we should modify welfare, so this and that, you have to oppose evil at its root.
Opposing the effects of evil is supporting the root of evil.
And so, don't do it.
For your own sake.
I mean, you don't care about me.
What the hell do my opinions matter?
But don't do it for your own sake, because you will end up very unhappy.
If you're going to take up this sword, you can never put it back down again, and you better learn how to use it well.
And there's no point throwing yourself on it by supporting school vouchers.
So that's my sort of moral lecture of the morning.
So let's take a slightly different view of vouchers, and let's say that by some bizarre miracle they were enforced or enacted as possibilities.
How would that look?
What would happen?
I can tell you exactly what would happen.
But first I'm going to take a page from Steve Martin, who is a comedian I enjoyed quite a bit when I was younger.
So if you're younger, you'll probably enjoy looking up some of his older MP3s.
But he had this great thing he said...
You know, the great thing about getting older is you get to be prejudiced.
The great thing about getting older is that you no longer have to worry about going down every possible or exploring every possible option.
So, you know, you think of life as a series of... it's a long corridor with a series of doors on either side and as you get older you just get to slam doors because you've been there before and you've done it and you know what it's all about and so you don't have to worry about re-exploring it.
So, you know, the great thing about getting older is someone comes along and says, uh, hey, let's go camping!
And you're like...
I'm sorry, we're closed.
And I think that's just a wonderful way of expressing some of the wisdom that comes with age.
And what it means in the libertarian context, of course, is that, well, you know what's going to happen with school vouchers once you've seen a couple dozen of state programs and what happens in them.
It's as predictable as sunrise to know exactly what's going to happen, even if If the laws of economics completely reversed themselves for a year or two, and human nature completely reversed itself for a year or two, and the political process completely inverted its values, or lack of values, to values, and a voucher system was implemented, I can tell you exactly what would happen.
It's no brain surgery to plot the path of this misadventure.
Well, so we've got voucher system, so everybody gets something in the mail, which is like, I don't know, three grand or twenty five hundred bucks or whatever, which they can apply to the school of their choice.
And we think that a wonderful free market is now going to be created in the realm of the voucher system.
Well, what is the union going to do?
Well, the union is immediately going to start saying, look, it's not a school unless the teachers are unionized and we are the union head.
So, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to pour all of their efforts into unionizing the private schools.
Oh, how could they unionize the private schools?
Well, I tell you, when you've got $175 billion a year and you've got the Mafia, you can kind of get stuff done, I guess you could say.
You can get stuff done.
So, don't worry about that.
They'll have absolutely no problem unionizing the private schools in about six months, maximum.
Probably would be closer to three.
Because they will simply bribe anybody who's open to bribery or open to economic advantage.
And it will be like, I will give you five million dollars if your school is unionized.
And if they can't do that openly, they'll do it secretively.
And if they can't do that at all, or somebody stands on principle, then all that will happen is that the school will get burnt down.
Or, you know, the teachers will be terrorized.
Or, you know, the students will be terrorized.
Or the parents of the students who go there will be terrorized.
And, you know, there will be snipers.
And there will be, you know, guys out with baseball bats.
I mean, as you may or may not know, In the United States, you cannot prosecute a union for violent acts.
I mean, I'm not sure if you're awake.
It's the Bacon Harvest Act or something like that.
But if you are a union and you beat people up, or you shoot at people, or you shoot people, you really can't be prosecuted for supporting this action, as long as it's in, quote, the legitimate pursuit of union business.
So, you know, the unions exist as a state of nature.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why they're so powerful, right?
It's not only the money, and not only the mafia connections, but also because they are, you know, they're simply above the law.
I mean, that's right there in the books.
If you want to look it up, feel free.
So the unions will absolutely unionize all of the private sector schools, and so all of the mindless zombie union school teachers will simply pour in and displace all of the private school teachers, and basically the private schools will end up being a bunch more public schools in essence, and the unions will get even more powerful.
So that's one thing that will happen, and don't worry about that.
That's a completely predictable event.
So what else will happen?
What will also happen is that there'll be a bunch of scam artists, right?
We'll just call them scam artists, although that wouldn't always be the case.
But let's just say everybody gets these vouchers.
And so I rent a Legion Hall during the day, and I say, I'm running a school, bring your vouchers to me, and then I get a bunch of plastic seats and a teacher with a whiteboard, and I call it a school.
And maybe they get taught stuff, maybe they don't, but it doesn't really matter because I'm cashing in.
I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars or at least tens of thousands of dollars a year for coming up with this pseudo school.
And so the media will dutifully go in and photograph all of these poor children with only chalk blackboards and no pencils and all this sort of stuff.
And the children will look sad and uneducated, and they'll say, Oh, you see, this is what happens when the free market takes over education, and oh, it's so terrible, and we have to have regulations in place because, you know, sort of scam private schools are sort of springing up all over the country, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And it will, you know...
When examined, it will be a kickback scheme where you give your $3,000 voucher to the school and that school will then return $1,500 to you as the parent.
Or $2,000.
The other guy will take $500 and they'll use $500 per student to rent the Union Hall and throw some library books in there.
This is not a function of the free market, although there are of course scams in the free market.
It's a distortion of school vouchers, right?
That everyone gets this money to spend and, you know, not everyone spends money wisely, as the history of most lottery winners will show.
So, that's going to be the inevitable next step, which will be a hue and cry and many letters to the editor of shocked and appalled citizens who are actually union people in drag and bureaucrats and so on, regulators.
And so it will become very clear that, you know, well, it's great that there are school vouchers and we're a big fan of private schools, but hey, there have to be some standards.
Like, as soon as you hear someone say, there have to be some standards, I guarantee you, you know, one hand is closing around your wallet and another hand is closing around your neck.
Because, you know, whenever people say, there have to be standards, you know, what they're saying is, you have to obey and pay me money or I'm gonna shoot you in the neck.
And so, you will start to get the promulgation of standards of education.
So, a teacher has to be unionized, and you have to teach this curriculum, and you have to have this stuff on hand, and you have to do it this way, and you have to have this many square foot per student, and you have to have this kind of student-teacher ratio, and you have to have this kind of test, and all the... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, basically, all that will happen is private schools now, which have a certain amount of independence, Based on the fact that they're not owned by unions or the state.
Actually, I don't know if private schools are owned by unions.
You'll have to let me know if you know the facts about that.
But for sure, The next thing that's going to happen is all of these sad-eyed children stuck in the Legion Hall with a couple of over-marked library books and only one washroom facility, you know, whatever it is, right?
The smell of stale Legionnaire smoke hanging in the air.
Anyway, so that's the next thing that would happen is the curriculum from the public schools would come in to the private schools.
And then what would happen is the same brain-dead curriculum and brain-dead teachers would simply flow like an infection, like a virus from the public system to the private system.
There's no extreme brain prizes for predicting this sequence of events.
And so the next thing that would happen is that there would begin to be complaints that from the public sector or, you know, people supposedly in the private sector but actually just friends for public sector interests.
And they would say, well, heavens to Betsy, you know, we really can't compare public schools with private schools because, you know, they're still teaching different stuff and they're still taking different tests.
And so, basically, because you would have to meet these minimum standards in order to legitimately be allowed to use your vouchers, right?
Because they're not yours.
Remember that.
They're not yours.
They're given to you by the state.
They're like a tax credit.
It's not yours.
It's just something that's given to you, like an allowance.
You have no right to it, because it's not your property.
It's just something that the state can choose to mail you or choose not to mail you.
And if they don't mail you, you're hosed, because you're still paying the taxes, even if they don't give you the credits.
So all that's going to happen next is the people are going to say, well, I think my school is great.
And other people are going to say, well, I think that the private school my kids are going to is not giving them a quality education.
How am I supposed to know?
Oh, dear government representative who was so helpful in education for the past 140 years.
Well, all that's going to happen then is that they're going to have to say, well, we're going to have to have standardized tests, you know, so we're going to have to have standardized tests so that we can tell whether the private schools are good enough and so on, right?
And it's never going to be the other way, right?
It's never going to be that the private sector schools are going to be doing such a great job that everyone's going to say, well, you know, we have to have tests built by the private sector and put into the public sector so that we can figure out Whether the public sector schools are good enough?
No, no, no.
It'll always be the other way, because that's how the power flows.
So, of course, once you have standardized testing across the public and private sector, then you really don't have any difference at all between the schools.
So you have now, you know, this will be within a year or two, and they'll have to do it quick, and they know they'll have to do it quick, because otherwise the students are going to wake up and their brains are going to start firing again, and that's going to be a pretty bad thing.
So they're going to move quickly and expend all of their resources of finances and violence to achieve this end.
So then, sort of the unholy trinity of public sector education has now been transferred to private sector education.
So, you know, you have no possibility of a private sector school without public sector union employees, and grievance processes, and bureaucracies, and overhead, and contracts, and blah, blah, blah.
So, of course, you're going to have the private sector is not going to be able to offer any significant benefits.
Like, hey, you don't have to worry about putting your kids someplace useful for two months a year in the summer.
You're actually going to, and maybe we'll do school from 9 to 5, so that you don't have this ridiculous situation where everybody who works works 9 to 5, and all the students are in from 9 to 3, or 9 to 3.15.
Which obviously is completely counterproductive and can only exist in the public sector because it's so ridiculously inconvenient to everybody.
And again, I'm talking mostly about the poor here, right?
I mean, the poor who have to work two jobs or who have single moms, right?
They should have... It should be a school slash daycare, right?
Where you do your school and then if you have homework, you should do your homework.
And of course, homework... Ugh, anyway, we'll come back to that.
There's one last one that I want to do.
This afternoon about education, which is, you know, how do we even know that a school is the most beneficial way to teach people?
We have no idea because it's in the public sector.
So you have these sort of union zombies in control of your children in the private sector.
You have the same curriculum which is promulgated from the public sector to the private sector.
And last but not least you have the same tests promulgated from the public sector to the private sector.
So now there's going to be absolutely no difference really between public sector schools and private sector schools.
All that's happened is that you've actually increased union power.
Which is, you know, sort of what you were trying not to do.
You've increased union power and you've reduced The choice that parents have.
See, before, let's say they were willing to bite the bullet and actually send their kids to private school and, you know, double pay into the tax system, but at least they had a choice, assuming that they had some minimal level of income.
They could at least choose a private sector school that was different from a public sector school.
But as soon as you have union vouchers, within a year or two, you will have eliminated that choice.
I mean, at the moment, there is a free market, so to speak, in education.
And the free market is simply this.
If you choose to pay twice, you have an option.
But if you introduce something like vouchers, then all you're doing is completely totalitarianizing the educational system to the point where there's simply no choice.
At all.
So even if you have lots of money, you simply can't choose.
I mean, I guess there would still be school systems that would be outside the voucher system, but there would be far fewer than those who, I mean, of course, there are schools.
Like there are doctors who simply refuse to get involved in Medicare and Medicaid, and you just pay cash and they save all the overhead.
And the same way there would still be schools who would not be interested in the voucher system and so on, but they would be very very much in the minority and would be so prohibitively expensive that, you know, it would be no choice for, you know, just about everybody.
So, I mean, that's sort of my take on vouchers.
They're completely immoral.
It's a completely immoral proposition to attempt to tart up or dress up brute coercive power with, you know, this pitiful, ridiculous little choice at the end.
It's also entirely serving those who advocate violence to try and modify or provide a sort of optional or illusory choice where there is none.
And also, practically, it's going to achieve the exact opposite of what is intended.
It is not going to raise the quality of the public schools.
That's impossible, because it's based on coercion and violence and unions.
Only going to destroy the quality of the private schools.
I mean, I gotta tell you, I mean, I don't know if this is gonna ring true or if it's gonna sit with you, but I tell you, it's a fundamental truth.
The use of violence will always achieve the exact opposite of what you claim you intend.
Always, always, always, always, always.
There are a million reasons for that, which we can go into in another podcast.
Violence will always achieve the opposite of what you intend.
I mean, things like the war on terror is completely obvious, right?
We want to protect ourselves, therefore we're going to invade a bunch of Muslim countries where people are prone to violent fanaticism.
And we're going to get rid of all of our rights in order to protect our freedoms.
I mean, it's a sick joke.
It always achieves the opposite of what you intend.
The war on drugs has made the world much more dangerous than it was, and it has not helped anybody who's addicted to drugs.
In fact, it's harmed them.
And it's given a huge boost to organized crime.
And it's made many more people addicted to drugs than beforehand.
Right?
Welfare has not ended poverty, but has in fact increased it.
So, the use of violence will always achieve the exact opposite of what you intend.
Once you really grasp, at a very deep level, that principle, then you're well on your way to becoming a wise human being.
So if you think that vouchers, which is sanctioning and extending the use of violence, is going to achieve a greater quality of education, or any improvement to the existing quality of education, even if you think it's going to arrest the continual decline in the quality of education, or even slow it down, You're wrong.
You're just wrong fundamentally wasting your time aiding the enemy, and you might as well just not even get up today, if you're going to get out and think that or speak it out loud.
Because if you don't really understand that violence achieves the exact opposite of what you intend, then you will always be prone to thinking that maybe the next scheme that is based on violence is going to achieve some sort of better end than every single scheme based on violence that ever existed in the past.
I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous.
It's like, you know, you're playing a game where everyone takes a gun that is loaded in all chambers, puts it up to their head and pulls the trigger.
And this has happened to a million people before you, and you get up and you say, well, maybe this one's going to be okay.
Maybe this one isn't going to hurt me.
Maybe this one is going to be good for me.
And, you know, if you don't sort of have the rigor and willpower and, you know, moral and emotional courage to simply say and understand that violence simply produces the opposite of what is claimed, then, you know, you're sort of missing something fundamental in your understanding of the world.
Or maybe you're just a violent person yourself, and you've found some way to make violence work.
In which case, you know, please let me know.
I'm certainly willing to examine new evidence.
But, you know, voucher systems, libertarians should just shut up about them and oppose them violently.
Because, or energetically I guess I should say, because they are a sanction of the use of violence.
And they will absolutely destroy even the remaining vestiges of a semi-vaguely, ridiculously half-decent education that remain.
Which is the private school system where, you know, dumb and uninformed parents at least have some say over dumb and uninformed teachers who are not crippled by state curriculum.
So, you know, the last sort of vague embers of educational quality will be completely snuffed out through a school voucher program, and if you are advocating it and get your way, then you are sort of morally responsible for the great sin of slaughtering the last minds of the young.
So, again, not for my sake or anything like that.
But for your own, for the sake of your own conscience, just recognize that violence is a fundamental evil, that it will never achieve what you claim it is going to achieve, or what people claim it's going to achieve, that it will always achieve the exact opposite, and it should never be sanctioned in any way, shape, or form.
So please let me know if this podcast sounds any better than the last ones.
I've tried taking the volume down so that hopefully there'll be less A sort of excess of static and noise.
So I hope that this sounds better and I hope that you're doing well.
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