Many people claim that private education can’t work and the only way to ensure everybody receives a good quality education is for the government to provide it. Of course these people don’t stop to realize that the government isn’t providing the education we are through our tax dollars. What if other markets were run like public education? What if grocery stores were run like public education:
Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)
Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.
Sounds pretty goofy doesn’t it. Likewise if grocery stores were run like public education people would be allowed to patronize private stores but alas would still be paying for public ones:
Of course, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.
This is one of the things that really gets me about how public education is run in this country, like most government programs there is no means of opting out. Even if you don’t utilize the public education you’re required to pay for it at the point of a gun. There is no option to avoid paying for it even if you chose to seek a better education for your child elsewhere.
Most people in the United States wouldn’t be OK with other markets being run in this manner so it confuses me why they’re OK with the education market being run this way.