I was just on the tube a few moments ago and happened to eavesdrop on a conversation 2 fellows were having regarding education. When one of them confronted his friend with the familiar egalitarian argument that only the rich would be able to afford private education to send their kids to places like Eaton and Harrow, while everybody else would be left out without public education, inserting even that this would be socially inefficient.
His friend came back with what I thought was quite a thoughtful and intelligent reply(indeed it's a little strange that I didn't characteristically join in this conversation myself). He said that as things stand, the rich can still afford to pay the taxes and send their kids to private school. This made me think, in a sense education for the rich could be considered a more inelastic good, whereas for the poor their funds for education are bled more dry by tax contributions to public education, even inspite of the fact that the rich generally contribute more in total. Hence privatising education would actually enable poor families more to be able to afford alternative education. It might also go towards explaining why a private education market has not developed as much here in the UK for ordinary people, especially in comparison to other places(e.g. India).
What do you think?
"When the King is far the people are happy." Chinese proverb
For Alexander Zinoviev and the free market there is a shared delight:
"Where there are problems there is life."
I think that privatizing education would currently lead to a huge boom in internet courses, which will lead to a huge number of alternatives being available for students and parents. The chances are that these courses would be very cheap, and it would also be very easy to have competition between them. I don't know what would become of traditional schooling, I don't know how affordable it could be made to normal people, except that a rudimentary education consisting of little other than reading, writing, and practical math, can be given by just about anybody.
If this happened then I think that the entire college experience might well take on an entirely new role in society.
With something like education it is very hard to predict exactly what would happen, it depends upon the general attitude and what children are being taught, there is actually a lot to be said for a large amount of society initially receiving a small amount of education for the first few years of their lives, going into some sort of job, and then deciding what they want to do from there, a society which promoted unschooling would also certainly be a possibility.
Government schools are crap. They are crap everywhere in the world. No government gets it "right." And it's a myth that the "rich" pay for government schools... landowners (at least in the US) pay for government schools and most landowners are far, far from rich... almost all of them end up sending their kids to the very schools which they are paying for. As usual, the costs of housing just go up and the poor pay for it in higher rents.
And my latest pet peeve is this whole idea that "the rich pay more taxes than the poor". It may be true that the upper middle class pays more taxes than the lower middle class and poor but the wealthy (in the Chris Rock sense... YouTube it) are wealthy precisely because they benefit from tax revenues. That explains the great mystery of how all the ultra-wealthy are pro-tax, pro-government when they are supposedly "paying more in taxes" than the rest of us. The ultra-wealthy eventually seize or have long held the levers of power and become the primary beneficiaries of public revenues. The more taxes the Federal government collects, the better the Rockefeller family does, whatever the tax rate may be on the businesses they own which the US government has permission under the law to tax. This is true in every country and, I believe, it is more or less true at every level of government. In other words, there are families that benefit from the local taxes by far more than they lose out... for example, a family who owns construction companies that gets a large share of the road maintenance contracts in the local region. Increases in the tax rate on "the wealthy" in the local region will be promoted by such a family if the increase in public spending on road maintenance increases by more than the tax losses they will suffer.
People just have no ability to think about things from the point of view of others. STOP. THINK.
If you want to understand why the wealthy do what they do, you have to imagine what it is like to be in their shoes. Imagine waking up in the morning and being David Rockefeller. What would you do with yourself? How would you go about your day? Given the wealth that you control, what would you do with it? You'd give it away? Why, so it can be squandered on vices by sluggards and imbeciles? Scratch that option. Would you donate it to the government? Why, so they can bomb more goat-herders? Scratch that option. Would you open soup kitchens and feed the homeless? Perhaps, but what about when the Vanderbilts start bribing local government officials to get them to seize your lands in Scranton PA under the pretext of them being a national heritage? Once all your properties have been parceled out by the vultures, you won't have anything left with which to feed the homeless. So, it turns out you have no option but to play The Game. If you want to hold onto the land in Scranton PA that is as much yours as the next-door farmer's land is his, you're going to have to get your hands dirty and start bribing local politicians to seize Vanderbilt lands in Pahrump, NV. All of a sudden, you've got the attention of Mr. Vanderbilt and now you can work out an amicable agreement. Now scale that up 1000x and you have a glimpse of how things really work in the world of the Elites. This is how things have always worked. It's catch as catch can and whatever you can't keep ahold of will be taken from you.
This populist nonsense that "the wealthy" pay progressively more taxes on their "income" than "the poor" is a bunch of lobotomized, child-safe, fairy-tale mumbo-jumbo. Money is taken from productive people by the Elites and used to fund their pet monopoly schools. The Elites are not funding their schools for our children because they love us and want us to have a wonderful life. The Elites do it because it benefits them, it ensures a steady stream of obedient workers (nod to George Carlin, he explains it all far more eloquently than I can here).
Clayton -
He said that as things stand, the rich can still afford to pay the taxes and send their kids to private school. This made me think, in a sense education for the rich could be considered a more inelastic good, whereas for the poor their funds for education are bled more dry by tax contributions to public education, even inspite of the fact that the rich generally contribute more in total. Hence privatising education would actually enable poor families more to be able to afford alternative education.
Oh, you don't know the half of it! Without the crowding out effects of state schooling, private education would be utterly affordable. It would be abundant and everyone could easily afford it. We have to quit dignifying this nonsense that the poor can't afford stuff in a free market. Can't the poor afford cell phones, video games, cars and light bulbs? In a free market the price of everything tends towards zero. That would have happened with education as well if the state did not prevent it from happening. Interestingly, health care and education are the only products that have become more expensive in recent decades. Exactly those products where there's lots of government intervention to make sure "the poor" can afford it. The more the government intervenes the higher prices are and the less the poor can afford it. It's so blatantly obvious that it is incredible that anyone ever thinks otherwise. In fact, I think it is quite obvious that state schooling makes sure that proper education stays a privilege of the rich. If the peasants could get cheaply educated in a free market, they would outperform the kids of the rich in no time! The whole "what about the poor" reason for state schooling is an excuse anyways. If it was just about financing education, why does the state have to run the schools? Why force all the rich kids to go to state school, instead of just those who actually can't afford it? Why have the state determine the curriculum too? I think every leftist is on some level aware that state schooling is more about conditioning than about people not being able to afford it.
That explains the great mystery of how all the ultra-wealthy are pro-tax, pro-government when they are supposedly "paying more in taxes" than the rest of us. The ultra-wealthy eventually seize or have long held the levers of power and become the primary beneficiaries of public revenues. The more taxes the Federal government collects, the better the Rockefeller family does, whatever the tax rate may be on the businesses they own which the US government has permission under the law to tax.
Yeah. And it also explains why we need government schools to keep the peasants economically illiterate. Because if they ever figured this stuff out they'd quickly put an end to this beautiful aristocracy. The opposite-world economics that most people believe in is the best way to make sure that well-intentioned liberals will unintentionally act in the interest of the rich. In many ways the modern left is an outgrowth of corporatist indoctrination in state schools that has taken on a life of it's own and became a self-perpetuating meme.
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Pretty sure no one will suffer too much.