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May 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:27
228 The Perils of Politics and Public Education

The many lessons to be learned from a 13-year court battle...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
Well, I'm back in the saddle again.
Well, after a horribly early morning, as you all know, I'm not much of a morning person.
I get up at 6.30 this morning to get to a meeting at the Department of Education in the fabulous and exciting yet still strangely grimy city of New York.
So, I did that meeting.
I think it's interesting...
I'm not going to talk about the justifications, sort of pro and con, regarding my involvement in making money from the state.
Because we had a podcast this weekend about just that very topic.
And I certainly put forward my position there, as I have in previous podcasts.
So I hope that that's comprehensible to you.
The sort of fundamental thing that I would invite you to ponder is the degree to which my involvement or non-involvement in the state is going to have anything to do with the state sort of succeeding or failing.
And to ask yourself if you have ever applied for a tax refund.
And if you have, then you're willing to take money back from the state just on the state's terms, whereas you feel that if it's voluntarily sort of outside what the state is going to offer and blah blah blah, that's morally different.
And I just say that I don't really think it matters at all.
There was a comment on the board, nobody's perfect.
There's no such thing as perfect moral consistency.
I reject that completely and totally, because I don't believe that it is a question of moral consistency whether you get I don't think that has anything to do with moral consistency.
It is not a situation where morality can apply any more than if you're in a concentration camp and there's a limited number of bread, loaves of bread, and if you don't get yours and then the other guy gets his, then you die.
None of those situations have anything to do with ethics.
The whole point is to prevent situations like that from coming about rather than trying to figure out what you do when you're in them So I feel no problems at all with my approach to the state, but of course it is a debatable issue, and I know that there's a lot of people out there who disagree, so feel free to keep doing so.
The only thing I suggest is that in the realm of freedom, I'm going to fight pretty hard for the options to participate within state activity and to profit from state activity.
And I'm going to fight pretty hard against the idea that it's morally compromising to participate in a system that you neither created nor agree with.
I don't think that's a moral issue at all, but by all means, continue with the conversation.
I'll tell you a little bit about – I'm not going to tell you about this meeting because I'm sure that the meeting itself is not of that much interest to you.
But I'll tell you a little bit about what I learned about why we were called by the New York State to go down to this meeting.
It's very interesting because you don't often get calls from the government or from any client from that matter that says, you know, come on down – And, you know, I mean, unless you're Microsoft or SAP or something, you really don't get those calls.
It's like I can't really think of any other time in my career, maybe one other time, where a client has called up and says, come and meet us.
Normally you're hounding them for a meeting and it takes months and so on and this and that.
And so I did some research into why it may be that they were calling me to come down.
And I'll tell you a little bit about what I learned, because I think it's instructive on many levels when you look at these kinds of political situations.
So, my goodness, I guess this is really close to contemporary topic.
Oh, my goodness.
It's not abstract, it's not about my own childhood, and it's not me...
Sort of supplying my mommy issues to people by talking about my own mater.
But it is something close to contemporary political issues.
So let's pretend that this is a current events program and you have a somewhat ill-informed host.
If you know more about this situation, I mean, please let me know.
I'd be more than happy to hear. More details, but I think this is an important thing to understand, just how violence creeps in and subverts everybody's thinking and reasoning in a very fundamental way.
So, the issue is this, that the New York school boards say that they are enormously underfunded, and that the state...
Of New York, right?
So, Bloomberg is the mayor of New York, and he says that Governor Patakis, who is the governor of the state of New York, he says that you people are underfunding our schools really badly, to the tunes of billions and billions of dollars.
And that's why our schools are falling apart.
So, in 19...
Ooh, let's go back.
Let's go back entirely, my friends.
See, this is why I really don't need a special effects board, because I can really cut my hand over my mouth when I do a podcast.
But... We're going back to 1993.
1993. The year that the city of New York launched a lawsuit against the state of New York saying that according to the state constitution...
Students are deserving of being provided with an education of quality and substance and all these other weasel words that are in there which can never be measured and everybody can sort of duck out of whenever they want.
And they're saying, look...
You are just not giving us the kind of money that we need to get the job done.
It's terrible. Schools are underfunded, they're falling apart, blah, blah, blah.
And so they have now been to court a serious number of times.
And this is why it's so funny to me, just sort of by the mind.
This is sort of one of the wrinkles in this story.
People talk about, you know, without the state court system, people's disputes would never get resolved.
Well, this is kind of funny, right?
Because here, this has been going on for 13 years.
For 13 years they have been trying to deal with this issue which they feel is constitutionally mandated to provide students with a certain quality of education and they've taken that to mean the facilities as well as the content of the instruction.
And so they've been trying to get the money out of the state and this has been going on for 13 years without resolution.
So pretty much in the entire time it takes from somebody to go from kindergarten all the way to graduate from high school, which I believe at this point about 2.5% of New York students do in certain neighborhoods.
Maybe it's a little higher than that, but it's not far from that.
The whole time it takes you to go from kindergarten to graduate from high school.
This battle has been going on in the courts.
Now, in 2001, an appellate court found or ruled that...
This is great.
It ruled that the city of New York was only obligated to provide up to an eighth grade level of education to students.
And I'm guessing that the city of New York public school system, much like the public school system in the rest of the world, figured that they were, in fact, only going to provide an 8th grade education, but they were going to somehow stretch it out for another couple of grades to grade 12 or whatever.
So I thought that was kind of funny.
So then they went back to court again.
Now, last month, I believe it was, the court has come down with a ruling.
It's a 3-2 ruling.
And it says the following.
1. Schools are enormously underfunded.
2. The governor of New York, Patakis, should provide an additional $4.6 to $5.63 billion in annual operating expenses to maintain the schools, plus a $9 billion fund used for capital projects.
In business, there's operational or sometimes called...
There's capital and operational, right?
So the operational budget is like in your house, right?
You own a house. Your operational budget is like your heating and your water and, you know, all of that kind of stuff.
The stuff that just goes into your regular kind of day-to-day activities.
And the capital is sort of the, oh, my heavens, I've got to replace the roof.
I want to refinish the basement.
I want to put some landscaping in.
The stuff which is sort of not...
Not occurring all the time is somewhat optional and can be deferred but sort of has to get it done at some point.
It's like maintenance on your car, right?
Oil and gas, oil changes and gas is your operational budget or your maintenance budget and your capital budget would be you got to get your brakes replaced and so it's hard to predict.
So our software deals with the capital side of things just in case you were wondering.
So the court ruled three to two that the governor had to provide these funds.
However, There's no cheering from the New York school side yet, because the court has also said, in order to maintain a separation in the powers of government, we are going to suggest that this be done, but we cannot force the governor, we cannot set a budgetary policy for the governor, because that would be a violation of the separation of government powers, and we know, based on the Patriot Act, exactly how important that is to the state, so this is all just kind of funny, right?
And so, both sides, I mean this is amazing, this is what you get from a situation of state, quote, justice, right?
Both sides, it's true, this is right in the paper, right?
Both sides immediately say, it's a victory for our side, we are completely vindicated.
This ruling couldn't have been more in our favor.
Both sides issue press releases saying that it is absolutely in their favor and they're enormously pleased with the verdict.
And both sides separately issue press releases saying that they're considering an appeal.
I mean, this is state justice, right?
This is what you get when the government runs a justice system, and that's why I really don't think it's anything that people will miss in a DRO society, and that's why I find it funny when people go, oh, the DROs won't do this, and DROs might do that, and DROs might do the other, and it's like, what are you comparing it to, you know? It's like somebody who's got gangrene saying, well, if I take penicillin, I might have a reaction, even though I've been tested.
So, anyway, I just think it's kind of funny, and I would say that it's important to keep these kinds of things in perspective.
You don't compare DROs to some perfect ideal system of justice where nobody ever gets hurt and nothing ever goes wrong, and everybody's perfectly protected because such a thing does not exist.
But you compare it to sort of the existing standard of state corruption and decay and decadence and so on.
And so, you know, I mean, the court judges don't want to get killed, right?
That's why they're giving all of these vague statements, right?
Because they don't want to lose their jobs at best or sort of get rubbed out at worst, right?
I mean, that money is all earmarked to people in the mafia to keep building the roads at their tortuously snail pace, right?
So... So anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting if you look at that from a sort of system of justice.
I thought 13 years into it, they're still bickering back and forth and getting...
I just love the verdict where both sides can claim complete victory and also both sides say that they're strongly considering appealing.
I just think that's funny. That's the result of government justice.
Now, let's look at it from the point of view...
Of the schools.
Well, the schools are falling apart and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, they really are in a really bad shape.
And so they need money to build them up.
They don't have enough money because their tax base is pretty heavily taxed.
And then, of course, at the state tax, it goes at the state level, which is supposed to be returned.
To the local school districts, they can't just fund it all through property taxes anymore, blah, blah, blah.
So they say, well, look, you're taking all this money.
And the same thing goes on in Canada between the provinces and the federal government.
It's this exact same two-year-old with a lollipop bicker fest over everybody else's blood money.
So... The city is saying to the state, look, you're taxing all our citizens, you're hoovering up all this money, and you're the ones who guarantee the quality education, and we don't have enough money to provide this education, so you've got to give us some of this money back so we can help the poor children.
You're holding the children hostage.
You wouldn't believe, well, you would, I guess, believe the rhetoric that's flying around this issue.
I mean, it's just like a massive attack of helium, enormous helium balloons.
It's like Clash of the Zeppelins, which actually sounds like a...
It's not a group of bar bands having it out, but the rhetoric is just, you know, the future of the children preparing the children for the 21st century.
Oh, the future, like everybody's breaking into Whitney Houston songs all over.
And I just think it's hilarious, right?
It has nothing to do with the children at all.
In fact, the children for 13 years have not been mentioned except in terms of rhetoric.
So let's have a look at the other side of the coin, right?
So not just that the state is taxing the citizens and not returning the money to help with the education, but let's look at, say, if I was Patakis' lawyer, which I'm sure would give me even more evil emails about me evilly selling out my evil soul to evil, corrupt state power by people who I'm sure have no problem using their Ben Franklin's to buy a bushel of subsidized apples.
But hey, but...
If I have a Patakis lawyer, I'd say something like this.
I'd say, okay, let's look at the big picture here.
Oh, New York schooly people, let's have a look at some of the realities of your funding situation.
So, we really started tracking funding around 1970, sort of the end of the New Deal.
Sorry, the end of the Great Society programs and the LBJ administration.
They started tracking enrollment versus funding versus school, sort of the student scores on generalized tests, and so on.
Now, in real dollars, and per student, how much do you think that the funding for the New York school boards has increased in the last 30 or 40 years?
Well, everything's equal.
Numbers of students, We'll take out inflation.
We'll take out all of that kind of stuff.
How much has the funding increased for the schools as a whole?
Yes, anybody? Oh, yeah, you.
300%. Yes, that's right.
300%. The amount of funding has increased in real dollars by 300%.
Now, that's pretty significant.
I've got to tell you, that's not too bad at all.
I've got to think. Now, over the same time period, not that I was heavily employed in the early 70s when I was five, But my income, since I have started in my career, I first started about 12 years ago or maybe 10 years ago.
Lord knows who can remember. 12 years ago?
Something like that. And I was making 40k a year in my first job.
Don't get too excited. That's Canadian.
So... Then, now I make about $120 a year, so I've had a sort of 300% increase, and I've got to tell you, I can afford some more things.
Even with all the ridiculous taxes that I'm paying, I can afford some more things with that pay increase, and I live a more materially enriched life, and so on.
So, 300% not too shabby.
Now, of course, the question is, where has all this money gone?
Well, it's a bureaucracy. So, it's a flushable hole with no bottom, right?
No matter how much money you pour into a bureaucracy, all it does is get bigger, more inefficient, and more poorly served.
The people that it's supposed to be serving.
That's an iron law of economics.
Wherever there's no competition, whatever you increase funding to will just get more inefficient.
It's a negative square law in terms of efficiency.
If I give you double your income, you can buy a better house.
But... In the inverse world of violence-fed bureaucracy, if you double their income, the people get served even worse, right?
For a wild number of reasons.
We can go into another time, but briefly.
Because, you know, people get drawn into that field.
You get more regulations, more bureaucracy.
You get political empires.
You get infighting. You get all of this kind of stuff that never...
I mean, it happens in private corporations, too, but to some degree gets weeded out, unless they're on permanent state contracts, gets weeded out.
Through competition. So, I mean, in the non-meccantilist field, which I guess is a steadily shrinking section of the economy, it's maybe 30%, 25%, 30% of the economy at the moment if you exclude the grey market and you exclude stuff which is directly funded by the government or is the government itself.
In that area, maybe 20% if you exclude mercantilist companies with state contracts, defense spending, and so on, in that area, okay, just the computer field, that's it.
It's only the computer field.
You get inefficiencies, right, but they get weeded out through competition.
But in a bureaucracy, that never happens.
So it just gets worse and worse, and the more money you pour into it, the worse things get.
The money's all gone into the bureaucracy.
I can tell you this. It certainly hasn't gone into the buildings.
It certainly hasn't gone into fixing or repairing the buildings.
Now, one of the problems that North American state agencies are facing quite a bit at the moment is that most buildings last about 50 years before they need some major work.
It's like your car times 5, right?
Or times 10. So, most buildings will last about 50 years, and lo and behold, we know That there was an enormous amount of building that went on in the 50s with the baby boomers and all the schools were built at that point.
And so they've been relatively cheap to maintain.
This is one of the things that's going to bring down the state, right?
I mean, this is one of the hidden things that is going to...
And I just know this sort of because of the field that I'm in.
That over the next five to fifteen years, actually starting now, actually even over the next ten to five years, five to ten years, all of these bills become due, right?
I mean, all of the stuff that was built, the enormous amount of post-war baby boom buildings that was going on, building that was going on, all comes due pretty much the same time, and it's all going to start falling apart, and it's just another one of the things that's going to break the back of the state.
And so that's just something to keep your eye on, right?
So where has the money gone?
Well, it's also gone, as you can well imagine, to teacher salaries.
And where teacher salaries have begun to seem exorbitant and they can't get anything more, then it has gone to teachers having time off.
So, for instance, the average New York City teacher Has a 5.5 hour workday.
That's not just time in the classroom.
That's their workday. Oh yes, and I know.
They have some homework to mark and this and that.
You know, cry me a river, people.
You also get two months off in the summer, so I think it's survivable.
I mean, if you work in a corporate job, you get an 8 or 9 hour workday and you still have work to take home.
And you have travel, which these people don't have.
So, let's not talk about how hard the teachers are working unless they want to trade...
We're the job in the corporate sector.
So, of course, you have five, and that's a full hour less than the teachers work in the LA Unified, the Los Angeles School Board.
So, they're not working too hard.
And secondly, there's a lot of time that they don't spend in the classroom.
So, if you have a five-and-a-half-hour workday, in some of the poorest schools in New York, the teachers actually spend 20% of their time not even in the classroom.
That's sort of professional development days and meetings and this and that and, you know, personal development days when napping?
I don't know. But so they have all of this ridiculously understaffed, underworked kinds of employees, which is exactly what you would expect from a union, right?
The union wants more and more people to be part of that union, so it wants to make each individual worker as inefficient as humanly possible.
And so that is something that you're really going to see wherever unions are going on.
So they're going to put all of these things in and say, oh, well, the teachers should be paid for this and teachers should be paid for that.
They should still get their two months off.
And now they're working five and a half hours a day and still getting there.
You know, making not too bad a coin.
So if you put together all of the benefits packages with the retirement plans, with the health care plans, With the job security, with the five and a half hours and the two months off in the summer, it really is becoming a ridiculously padded scam.
That's public schools, so to speak.
Not that I have any problems with people who work in the public schools.
More power to you. Just recognize that it is blood money and that you should fight the system wherever you can.
That's all I'm saying.
I'm not going to sit here in a glass house and throw stones.
I'm just saying, if you're working in the public school system, like our good friend Andrew on the call-in shows, then enjoy it.
Take the money. Don't fool yourself where it's coming from.
Don't fool yourself the methods by which your job security and pay and benefits are secured, right, to the point of a gun.
But it's okay. I mean, so what, right?
I mean, the roads that I sometimes drive on are also procured at the point of a gun, but it's not me who's holding it, and I'm opposing it wherever I can.
So that's my particular approach to it.
And so it's sort of hard to say, like if you're on the governor's side and the school boards are crying a river about all of the money that they need just to help the children to the 21st century provide a solid base for them.
I mean, all of this nonsense that's fairly talked about, and when you actually dig into the scenes, you sort of dig past the rhetoric, all the union rhetoric, right?
It's always the most beautiful words that hide the most evil of intentions.
You just see that it's all complete nonsense, right?
I mean, that they have a choice, right?
They have a choice. If you're a school board guy or you're sort of in charge of the school boards in New York, you have a choice.
You can either, A, when you get complaints about the quality of the schools, you can do one of two things, really.
I mean, really, it basically comes down to it because privatization is not even really on the table at the moment.
But let's just say, politically, you get to do two things.
Well, the first thing...
The first option you have, and see which way you would go if you're in this person's shoes.
The first option is you can take on the union.
Okay, so you can take on the union, which means your children are going to get kidnapped and harmed, your car is going to blow up, bad things are going to happen to you, and even if the union doesn't feel like doing that kind of stuff, let's say that they have a momentary burst of restraint, Then the other thing that's going to happen is the teachers are going to go on strike and the parents are going to just go completely ape crap and just, like, want your head on a step.
Because, you know, you've got two working parents.
It's what you need to live in New York.
And so if the teachers go on strike, the parents have nothing to do with their kids and can't make a living.
So, if you actually start taking on the unions, then the unions simply shut down the schools, right?
This is how impossible things become when you have a coercive monopoly like the state and public education.
Of course, if you have your kids in a private school and the private school teachers go on strike, right?
Then you just say, well, that's fine.
I'm not paying you anymore and I'm going to move my kids to another school and the other schools are all like, hey, bring them over here.
We'll give you two-thirds of the price and lure them in and so on.
And so the teachers are going to be somewhat limited in the demands they're going to make.
But of course, when you can shut down the education and basically the economy of an entire city by going on strike, nobody, but nobody, is going to want to take that on.
So there's the personal danger, there's the risk of violence, and even if the violence is not directed against you, but at sort of strike breakers or scabs or whatever, or the management, it's still, what's going to happen is, this is sort of the way that people...
Or I guess rather don't think in that, you know, you're the mayor of New York and you say, well, that's it.
I'm going to stand up to these darn public sector unions and I'm going to take on the teachers union and so on.
There's a strike. Well, people are just going to blame you, right?
You're seen to be the catalyst.
You're seen to be the precipitating actor who is creating these problems, right?
It's like if you hadn't stood up to, you know, it's like if you didn't talk back to your husband, you wouldn't get beaten or whatever, right?
So you blame the wife or the husband who's getting beaten or the child who's getting beaten.
I mean, this is where people's moral education is.
It's like, who's got the most power? Let's side with them and make whoever's provoking their violence stop!
So... So the violence that will come out of the situation, so people will blame you.
Oh, I've got no place to put my kid now, and I've got to get to work, and I'm doomed.
That would sort of be one problem.
The other problem will be there'll be blood on the streets, the union strikebreakers, violence, and this and that.
It'll be like, oh, you see what happens when you take on these unions?
It's going to be associated with you.
And so people are going to sort of basically say stop.
So that's your one option. And I've got to tell you, I don't see it happening.
So, your other option, when people sort of phone you up and complain and say that the schools are falling apart and a piece of masonry felt on my dear little child and so on, then you say, yes, and you know who's to blame?
The governor! It's the governor's fault!
That damn governor!
Boy, if it wasn't for that governor...
We'd have a paradise.
The schools would be, there'd be chocolate fountains and gold streams and, you know, it would be milk and honey flowing down the corridors.
And so it's the governor's fault.
And let me tell you what I'm doing.
I'm going to take the governor to court and get the money that you deserve, that you pay to him, that he owes us, that he's not giving us, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so anytime anybody says, what are you doing about these damn schools?
I'm suing the governor!
I have an action plan.
I'm going to save these schools.
And, of course, it's complete nonsense, right?
All it's just doing is telling people, shut up!
Go away! I'm going to tell you some shite, and then I need you to swallow it and smile and say thank you.
I mean, that's really all that's going on.
I mean, this is sort of how politics works.
I mean, nobody has any intention of helping the kids.
It's kind of funny, right? And of course, nobody has any political courage or will to take on the unions.
And it would be a very helpful thing, of course, to take on the unions, in my humble opinion.
Because you want to see the violence and evil that these institutions represent.
And so I think it would be worthwhile.
But unfortunately, it would really be very harmful to the economy and people would lose their jobs and everything would take a huge hit.
And, you know, the funny thing is that, well, the education of the children will be compromised.
It's like, dudes, every day that they spend that they're not in a state school, their education is a lot better off.
Even if they're just sitting there watching MTV and playing Nintendo, then they're doing a lot better things to their brain than if they're in there getting all force-fed all of this socialist propaganda through the state schools, right?
So I think that's kind of funny to me.
Another thing that was funny too was that when I was down in this meeting, we started talking about the socialized medicine for a variety of reasons.
When I was flying on the way down yesterday, I was sitting next to a woman who worked in the pharmaceuticals industry.
Who was kind of pro-socialized medicine, so of course I was deconstructing her as much as humanly possible, given that I only had an hour and she was biting me trying to get away.
She was quite smart and I think enjoyed the points that I had to make.
And so we were talking about this for some reason as the meeting was warm.
You need all the warm-up, right?
When you're in business and you go and have these meetings, you need all these warm-up topics.
It's like the comedian who opens for the real comedian.
It's like the warm-up guy, right?
So I'm like the warm-up guy for my own show, so to speak.
So we were chatting about this kind of stuff, and they're all talking tough, right?
right?
Because they're New Yorkers and they, you know, these guys weren't exactly socialists, or if they were socialists, they were sort of specialized socialists, right?
So they were talking about how, you know, how bad it is for the public sector, you know, how you need privatized medicine, this, that, and the other, right?
And whether rightly or wrongly, and I think it was probably the right thing to do because I would, I would like to get this deal.
It would be a lot of money for me, which would be nice, and give me the chance to, to vault into Freedom Radio Radio full-time, which I think would do a heck of a lot more to Freedom than someone else getting the, the contract and using it to send their kids to Harvard or something.
So that's my, that's my justification, if you like, and you can let me know what you think of it as you like.
But, um, uh, So, of course, I was talking with these guys at the meeting, and, of course, they're, ah, socialized medicine, bad, bad, bad.
And, of course, part of me was saying, well, do you feel the same thing about education?
Because I feel the same way about education, right?
But that's not something that when you're looking to close a deal with a school...
A school board that you say, hey, you should all be privatized.
That's not to say that I won't have that conversation, but I won't have it the first time that I talk to them, right?
This is part of the prudence that I think is important to develop, right?
I am free to speak or not speak about politics, just as you are, but I think that if it comes to, and they were, you know, nice guys, right?
Like a lot of people who work in the government sector, they're not evil people, right?
They're just uninformed, right?
Just ill-informed. And so if it ever does get to the point, and I like getting these relationships with clients where, you know, you go out for a beer and you sort of shoot the shite and you let your hair down a little, or some other metaphor for me, but you get to that kind of relationship where you sort of go to a strip club and do cocaine off a stripper's belly.
No, that's when I was younger.
But you'll sort of go out for a beer and you'll sort of talk a little bit more openly and get to know each other a little bit better.
That's, you know, when you're going into a long business relationship with someone, it's usually nice to have some sort of personal relationship with them.
Then I will absolutely talk about this and just say, you know, I say, I got this crazy idea.
And tell me just how crazy you think it is, right?
I mean, wouldn't you solve this whole thing by just privatizing it?
I mean, New York spends.
This is an amazing statistic. New York.
New York spends $14,000 per year per child on public school education, which really is quite lunatic when you think about it.
It is just an astounding amount of money, and I've got to be convinced, I really am convinced, that it would not be more than $2,000 to $4,000 in a private sector situation for a variety of reasons.
We can also go into another time.
But the amount of overhead is just ridiculous.
For instance, I think Finland, I think it's Finland and Quebec, Quebec being the annoying province of Canada, well, one of the annoying provinces in Canada, Quebec and Finland have about the same school population, and Finland has like 2% of the administrators that Quebec has, right?
Because obviously corruption goes in some other way or in some other manner.
So I think that stuff is just funny, right?
I mean, this level of bureaucracy is just lunatic.
As I mentioned in the call-in show, there's a mayor of Montreal at the moment who's thinking of taking on the public sector unions who are doing sort of road work and construction, and he's actually gotten to the point where he's hired private investigators to follow these people around.
Well, follow them around might be a bit overly generous because it doesn't seem like they move very much at all.
But he's following these people around, and this group of private investigators are figuring out just how busy these road crews are, right?
I find that they're operating at, I think it's like 18 to 28% productivity, right?
Which is really quite astounding.
It took like a crew of, you know, five guys.
It took them 90 hours to fill in like eight potholes or something like that.
It was just really funny, right?
And so... I just sort of say, you know, if I ever get to this relationship with these guys, and certainly if we go forward, we'll be working together for quite some time.
Well, at least until I quit and do Freedom Radio full-time.
But I say to them, yeah, I got this crazy idea.
You know, one way that I would solve this, you know, you guys talked about the free market in medicine.
I just wonder, what do you think it would look like, free market in education?
Let's just say. You know, snap her fingers tomorrow.
Just play for funsies.
Let's just say I've had one too many.
Just for funsies, you know, what do you think it would look like?
You guys know a lot about education.
What would it look like to have a free market in education?
What would be the benefits? What would be the drawbacks?
And I think that they would actually be, I sort of get the sense that they would be somewhat open to it.
I'm somewhat open to talking about it.
A lot of the emotional volatility of these kinds of situations, which I remember when I first started talking about this stuff 20 years ago, a lot of the emotional volatility has really gone out of these discussions.
You still get it with undergraduates and young people and so on.
But when you get older and you see the world a little bit more clearly, not through this lens of ideology, Which I think young libertarians are a lot more free of than most of the other ideologues.
But, you know, I certainly had it, and maybe you do too if you're younger.
And that's fine. It's a good thing, right?
But they used to say, I think they'd say, if you're a young man who's not a socialist, you have no heart.
And if you are an older man who's not a libertarian, you have no head.
I think it's kind of funny.
I don't think they're Liberty Conservative or something like that.
I can't remember, but I think quite a true statement.
But I will absolutely get a chance to get these people's opinions on how they think it might look to have a completely free market in education.
And I'd love to hear their objections.
So I'll certainly report to you on that conversation should it in fact occur.
So I hope you're doing well.
Thank you so much for listening. Freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D. Come and join the conversation.
Also, freedomainradio.com.
D-O-N-A-T-E. Please send me some money.
I really, really would appreciate it.
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