TLDR: State bad Free Market Good. Hello everyone this is an essay I wrote on education and the State which I will be turning in for a college course with a few weeks. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!
Education and the State
There are numerous issues with State education some of which are obvious and some of which not many think of, but what are the best solutions that fix these issues while giving the people as much freedom as possible? Public schools, colleges, and the state itself are all currently hinderances on both freedom and people as a whole. Why do we continue to let our lives be run in this way when the current education system is clearly out of hand? How do we get back on the proper track towards freedom in the realm of education? These and more are all great questions I will both present and tackle in the best manner I see possible. Freedom from violence is necessary for the development of a person’s reasoning and personality, however, the State’s very existence rests on the back of its ability to (legally) use violence. This is having the child grow up under the tutelage of an institution with a monopoly on violence and restrictions. (Rothbard 2017) This is about the farthest from real freedom as you can get when it comes to education. Not many people see the government as a forced monopoly on education, but as you will discover it is that and much more. This want for freedom rests well on the shoulders of the concept of universally preferable behavior and simple non-violence. The only natural right people have is the right to not have themselves or their property aggressed upon by anyone including government. These are the pillars upon which freedom exists along with the argument against State involvement in education.
Public primary school is something almost everyone ends up in at some point in their lives and its filled with some of the most disastrous concepts one can imagine, yet most continue to send their kids to these state schools on the daily. To begin talking about the issues the State causes in the realm of public schools I offer a short anecdote directly from a public school teacher who outdid the State through his own voluntary volition. Funding was cut, and he couldn’t find the money to pay for practice placement tests for his students that he felt were definitely necessary. So, rather than rely on the coercion of the State he went out and began selling advertisements on his test papers. Within a few days he had over 75 email requests to place ads which helped him generate $350 in revenue which was more than enough for the practice tests. Over half of these ads were in fact inspirational messages paid for by parents while others were the stereotypical business ads. This goes to show how the free market can help voluntarily provide for need even when the hungry, savage dog known as government is watching at every little turn with severe hindering regulations. Everyone benefits from this situation. Students benefit from better education, parents are happy their children have improved test scores due to practice, and these businesses not only benefit from more customers but a better educated labor force. (Armstrong 2008)
This is but one issue caused by the State that was solved through voluntary means that does not require a gun to anyone’s head to extort their money for funding even with the severe government overwatch and regulation. Public school is forced down the throats of the people while other options are looked upon as lesser options and a waste of money when in fact the cost of each student at a private school is severely less than at a public school even with all the government regulation. This fact is “hidden” by the clouds that public school is “free” when in fact it’s the farthest thing from it. The fact it seems to the average person that they’re “not paying” for it is one of the greatest scams of the modern day. Not just in education, but in everything the government does. It’s all funded through the coercion of taxation. I’ll be talking about this more in depth later. I must now, however, congratulate whoever came up with this scam though, for it is pure ingenious. Your average person isn’t smart enough or willing enough to see through this sham. While some that “see through it” are then trapped and convinced to advocate pawning the coercion off on “the rich”. “This coercion and theft done by the State is okay as long as its not happening to me!” These are the people who are just as immoral as those who have no problem with taxation in general since they are clearly still advocating State violence its just they don’t want it done to themselves. Peak hypocrisy and irony. Simply put, public school isn’t implemented through voluntary means therefore it’s not only immoral but nonsensical.
Public school is vastly anti-individual as well. This is by design from the start. The State controls all public school curriculums. Why would they ever have anything whatsoever that went against the State even if its economically and morally right? This is another huge issue with public schools in that what is learned almost never benefits the student let alone having to do with what they’re interested in. This is what causes the old “kids hate school” mentality which is true and reigns on to this day. Kids are always complaining about classes and parts of school they don’t like or don’t do well in. There are simply not enough private, free market options out there to fill in any sort of gap. State regulations and forcing public schools to be funded in every area greatly impedes this further. If this were completely eliminated countless new free market school options would pop up and kids would have better and cheaper education. Kids would be treated as individuals instead of future State tax cattle. This would also help get rid of the “kids hate school” mentality with schools dedicated to whatever they want to study and allow their creativity to expand instead of being stunted. Instead of uselessly pouring money (stolen through State extortion) into struggling schools this would actually solve the problem.
The simply put solution of this, which I will expand on greatly further into the essay, will come in two basic phases. This “phase one” as mentioned above is the first set of things that would occur in the absence of public schools. The short sighted would see this phase as bad since teachers lose their jobs while the former public school building and land is sold to the highest bidder. However, the article goes into the “phase two” of the situation which is the end goal set forth. All sorts of cheaper free market education options will spring up feeding the demand for education of children with practically endless options. (Rockwell 2008) This solution not only works here, but for practically every problem we face today. The government has done a great job (for once) at masking that they in fact are the real problem in countless situations where people wrongly blame the rich, the market, or whatever they’re told to by the State. This final defeat of public primary schools can wake up many more people to how the free market actually operates and succeeds when government is tossed out of the window.
When one thinks of education in this day and age secondary education has become quite engrained into it. College education problems are perhaps the greatest issue not being dealt with when it comes to State interference in education. Not only are these institutions stealing from people through the guns of the State to gain funding, but they are in most cases straight up lying to attendees about how they operate while being very misleading. Private colleges are not exempt from these scrutinies either. All of this is by design and on purpose, however, the root of the problem here is in fact not these college institutions, but the State and government itself. This is the mistake many people make when complaining about college tuition and other issues. They simply either are not capable, never been told or thought about it, or are purposely ignoring looking at the real problem causing all this nonsensical grief.
Some of the major issues with today’s college education include the problems of subsidies, professional privileges, HR hiring policies, induced entitlement attitudes and lack of market alternatives. The Higher Education Act of 1965 which mistakenly began to change the view of college as some sort of “human right” is one major starting source of all of this. This act, in turn, left things wide open for the federal government to stick its nose into things even more which also lead to the more so pro-government and anti-freedom mindsets embedded in many colleges around the country. The law also created the ability of the federal government to give out financial “assistance” for literally any reason which led to this rise in debt. This subsidization quite obviously leads institutions to increase their prices alongside creating an utterly monumental student debt while alternatives have been shunned for decades. The colleges simply raise their prices since the federal government is giving out “free” money. This makes sense from a business standpoint, yet people whine about college tuition prices not government subsidies. These colleges can get away with exuberant prices since they are mostly clouded behind the smoke screens of these readily available student loans and government handouts.
Modern education is focused on maximum conformity and control while having very minimal quality. The present methods are quite obviously flatlining horribly in one giant circle of subsidization from the colleges to a lot of the teachers and professors to the FCC license (required by law) holding news stations that all push for this failing idea simply because they are on that government subsidy pay roll. The internet and library are practically the only places you will find any intelligent opposition to this. Even with all these government caused problems the mainstream is still proposing solutions of more money and more central planning as if this won’t be even more catastrophic. “What we need is more of what has already failed!” This is the problem in many such cases where government involvement has caused chaos. Lots of its followers will simply beg for more government boots on their neck to solve the issue of a government boot on their neck. Anyone with any semblance of intellect can see this is a monumental issue. College scholarships, as well, are a problem that not many discover as an issue to begin with. “It’s just free money what’s the problem?” That all seems like a great deal until one fully unpacks the situation that it’s simply a con game in order to attract as many subsidy bringing students as possible along with a slogan of “Discounts for everyone! No one pays full price!” (Seachman 2018)
While books and lectures are often not relevant or personally challenging or have anything relevant to do with one’s field of study the idea is to recognize how much college isn’t necessary for a huge majority of people and fields while most classes forced onto students will neither increase their market value or relevant knowledge in their chosen field. This not only contributes to the stunting of the learning of the individuals with an above average IQ but hinders the capability of those with below average IQs as well while simply annoying the average IQ students while still sending all 3 categories of intellect into massive debt.
These days there are countless useless degrees on the college market. Most people jump into a pile of debt simply because the State has brainwashed a majority of people into thinking “just get a degree it doesn’t matter in what that piece of paper is important!” Most degrees are simply impractical. These days you can get a degree in basically anything you can think of from drawing to theology to gender studies. A heavy majority of these degrees are for the most part a useless waste of time especially anything in the fine arts. That’s one of the major fields of study that tricks a lot of people into wasting their time and money on a degree. In fact, I personally was almost baffled into going into debt for an utterly useless fine arts degree in film production. The way I see it, if you’re not getting a degree in STEM or business you are more than likely wasting both your time and money on something you could learn cheaper elsewhere or even for free on the internet.
Now that the two giant cash cows of public school and college are out of the way there are some miscellaneous ideas and points I would like to get into that simply did not fit directly into either of those headlines. The first is an issue that arises whenever a libertarian, voluntaryist, anarcho-capitalist, or what have you brings up the idea that “hey I don’t think we should extort people for money through using the guns of the State to do our biding!” And that’s the whole “but (insert thing funded through theft by the State) is a human right!” First off, the only natural human right one is born with is the right to not have themselves or their property aggressed upon by others. Everything else is simply a fairy tale “right” made up by the State. Sure, one’s idea of aggression may differ a bit from the next person, but for all intents and purposes we’ll be following what is known as universally preferable behavior. Simply put, violence is not acceptable unless in self-defense of oneself, one’s property, or someone else. Even if this violence is done by the State for “the greater good”. With all that precursor out of the way, the overall point in this paragraph can be made and that is that education is not a right.
Despite what “conventional wisdom” suggests education along with other things like healthcare is not a right. The definition of economic goods being that they are scarce and satisfy needs and wants of consumers. To make the point clearer there are two sub sections of rights known as “positive and negative rights”. Fundamentally, positive rights require others to provide you with either a good or service. A negative right, on the other hand, only requires others to abstain from interfering with your actions. If we are free and equal by nature, and if we believe in negative rights, any positive rights would have to be grounded in consensual arrangements. Since the start of the USA welfare state these “positive” rights have become weird sacred pillars in that people believe the idea that the state must steal from people in order to involuntarily fund these things. (Nino 2018)
Politicians, public school teachers, college professors, and many others still like to say that public education is some sort of pillar of society and without it we’d all be uneducated savages and all the innovations such as the internet wouldn’t be possible without the state provided education pipeline. To quote from the great Frederic Bastiat, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” When people are allowed to keep their money, they garner the ability to create their own educational arrangement on the free market without government interference. In that lies the beauty of actual freedom and a free market economy free of any government coercion. Education is simply just another market service such as grocery stores where there is a demand for workers. There already exists market solutions to some of these issues with the educational institutes of Coursera, Khan Academy, and Lynda. Even in the midst of State regulation and interference the free market still peaks its head. This gives one a small preview of what an actual free market would be able to provide in terms of great education at low competitive prices. When the state garners a part of the economy it both monopolizes it and destroys any chance of economic calculation. The Department of Education’s spending which began at 14.5 billion in 1979 and has since rocketed to 70 billion or 100 billion when including different programs such as Head Start and school breakfast and lunch. Continuing this path of underperforming educational systems is simply nonsensical. We still use the stone age State coercion to provide this below sub-par education when a free people could bring free market education to the masses at a fraction of the cost without the guns of the State to the head of every citizen. Free enterprise responds to its consumers and can be held accountable and go out of business if their services are not to consumer standards, however, with government comes violent coercion and a monopoly on a service that cannot be reasoned with. (Nino 2018)
To further extend this point let’s look at a simple hypothetical. If the government suddenly declared that shoes are a necessity of life, and that there are people who cannot pay for the best shoes in the free market, would we then support a "shoe tax" to allow the government to make shoes “free” of charge to everyone? People could still buy shoes from other companies but would still be forced to pay their share of the "shoe tax". Since the citizens are already paying for these government shoes (through taxation), the demand for these free market shoes would be low. Then, due to this government interference, any of those consumers who would like to have better or different shoes would be forced to pay prices that are far above those prices prior to government shoes. (Armstrong 2008) The average person then would, after seeing the high price tag on privately made shoes, would then start to think that they really do need government shoes because only “the rich” could afford private shoes. This is the trap the government sets up and ensnares countless people with that fail to step back and think for a moment. (Armstrong 2008)
The final major point I would like to briefly touch on that has been alluded throughout this essay is that taxation is both theft and extortion and it is not moral for education to be funded by it. This is necessary to have my position completely defended from all sides. I could talk for ever on this one topic, but since it is a side note to the greater overall topic at hand I will simply quickly address the two most often used “arguments” against this statement which are “but who would build the roads” and “if you don’t like it leave”. There are many variations to these two mostly involving “but who would (insert currently State funding thing)” or “move to Somalia”. The first question is answered quite simply with that the free market has, is and always will be able to provide things easier and cheaper than the State. Private roads can simply be voluntarily funded by businesses who want customers or what have you. People tend to also bring up that “but then every road would be a toll road”. Every road is already a toll road it is just that the concept is blurred. Also, businesses that have roads to their place of operation could even perhaps not charge for road use to incentivize more customers to come to them. That said, the key word here is voluntary. Taxation is simply not voluntary due to the fact if you do not pay it State henchmen will come to your house and kidnap you and put you in a cage and if you resist this immoral action they will kill you.
The 2nd “argument is one most people in favor of taxation will use as their “end all be all” statement. “If you don’t like it leave!” These kinds of “arguments” tend to be thrown at those of us who think all interactions should be voluntary and no one should force their will on others through the barrel of the State’s gun. People tend to think of human societies as if they were clubs we decided to join at one point and once we become dissatisfied with the club's ways, we can just void our membership. This, however, is an atrocious attempt at an analogy. This issue has to do with the basic features of life among human beings as human beings not as club members. What exactly is a society supposed to be like to be suitable to human life as such? As in this idea of universally preferable behavior. This is not about some specific form of human life such as athletics, commerce, academics, religious or what have you, but it is about human community life in general. This question of must be answered before the more in-depth questions can be asked about specific communities within society itself. For example, if it turns out that the answer to this question includes a non-allowance of slavery, then it will also follow that any community within society may not include the enslavement of people. So, then, what is it that a proper human community should be like? Here those of us who champion individual rights to life, liberty and property maintain that such a society may never, for any purpose, involve any coercive actions and policies. Human nature consists, fundamentally, of our capacity to freely choose our conduct and so be responsible for how we have chosen to act. Nothing may be imposed other than to what may keep people from destroying the freedom of others. It is this answer we must give to the question of politics that precedes such policies such as confiscating people's belongings (taxation), involuntary servitude, censoring their ideas, regimenting their way of life, and so forth. So, when it is noticed that the laws of one's community do not respect such prohibitions, the retort to that cannot reasonably be, “Well, then just go live somewhere else? We have decided that such confiscation is perfectly OK!” This is reasonable about a club, from which one can withdraw and still enjoy one's liberty in the wider society if, indeed, it is a free one. But if the wider society is like a club and one must leave it to be free, where is one to go? In a just human society the basic principles need to be adhered to and protected and it is no defense of their violation that, well, “you can always leave”. That is a confession that the society is, in fact, unjust. (Machan 2003) A fantastic example of these concepts in real life is the town of Cheran located in Mexico. They’ve kicked out not only the police, but all semblances of government while the entire town is peaceful and is one of the freest and safest places in the world. I won’t ramble on too much about Cheran, however, it is a real world example of how the ideals presented here work and work incessantly better than any government or State. (Berwick 2018) The Youtube channel TheAnarchast has done interviews with both residents, visitors, and a film crew making a documentary on the town and if you the reader are intrigued I highly recommend giving them a listen to learn how easily this can be implemented into the real world.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “well what are the solutions to this problem?” The super condensed version is to get the government 100% out of education. No subsidies to public primary schools or colleges. No tuition loans of any kind. No regulation of any kind on anything education related. Let the free market work as with other sectors of it. Granted, there is still heavy government interference in the market, so technically it’s not a completely free market in things like groceries and car dealerships. However, if we free the education market up and see how things fix themselves other areas will follow suit. There are two phases to this entire elimination of State involvement in education. Phase one is the one that will more than likely anger people who have no concept of actual economics and want to solve everything with a bigger and bigger government boot on the necks of the people. Teachers lose their jobs while the former public school buildings and land is sold to the highest bidder. However, after this initial phase one we make it to phase two where all sorts of cheaper free market education options will spring up feeding the demand for education of children with practically endless options. (Rockwell 2008) Not to mention, those without kids or with long since grown up children won’t have to be stuck subsidizing the ones of others. After this has all settled into daily life the people will be able to experience some semblance of actual freedom albeit in only one facet of their lives. Although, this will still show them that the State is a harmful parasite that needs extinguished completely. If the town of Cheran, Mexico can eliminate the need for any sort of State in their lives we here in the United States can certainly follow in their footsteps and spawn a society in which the individual is truly, completely, and utterly free. As the people there like to say, “don’t be afraid to take the boot off your neck”.
References
K. (2008, December 09). Free-Market Education | Briggs Armstrong. Retrieved from
https://mises.org/library/free-market-education
K. (2008, April 06). What If Public Schools Were Abolished? | Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Retrieved from https://mises.org/library/what-if-public-schools-were-abolished
Machan, T. R. (2003, October 28). If You Don't Like It, Leave!' Retrieved from
http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/machan/machan7.html
R. (2018, September 01). Education Is Not a Right | José Niño. Retrieved from
https://mises.org/wire/education-not-right
Seachman, S. (2018, June 08). College Alternatives, Part 1: Watch Out for 'Debt-Dealers'
and the 'Scholarship' Game. Retrieved from
http://www.strike-the-root.com/college-alternatives-part-1-watch-out-for-debt-dealers- and-scholarship-game
T. (2017, June 26). The Danger of "Public" Education | Murray N. Rothbard. Retrieved from
https://mises.org/wire/danger-public-education
T. (2018, September 24). You Have To Hear About This Anarchist Town in Mexico Who
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