Morris Dovey wrote:
Tim Daneliuk wrote:
Morris Dovey wrote:

Hang on a second here. Yes, education is expensive. Just how is
it cheaper if it is public? I'd argue that public education - if the
real and complete costs are tallied - is *more* expensive than
private because there is no market feedback to make it efficient.
By some estimates, the US now spends more per student, inflation
adjusted, than at any time since education went public, and the results
are declining on average. This is not a money problem.

'Scuse me but /you/ were the person who made it a tax-money issue. If
you'd like me to agree that we should be seeing a better result for the
money spent, I can go along with that...


Not quite. My argument is:

1) Government has no enumerated power to be in the education business
(at least the Federal govt doesn't).

2) Private is not more expensive than Public if honest accounting
is used.

3) You cannot get good results in a system that inherently has no
accountability or feedback.

Therefore schools should be private, not tax funded, and parents
ought to be held accountable for the education of their children.
For the rather small percentage of the population that actually
cannot afford to do this, there is considerable charity available ...
and there would be even more if the egregious taxation system
were eliminated.

Failing this plan, at the very least, we should kick the Federal
government out of the education space entirely - where, as I said
it has no legal authority to act - an demand that State and local
governments tax as necessary to carry their own water in these
matters.

But first, let's decide on what problem we'd like to solve.

Yabbut - in a democracy "rights" are what the people decide they are,
whether they make sense or seem appropriate to you or not. By choosing
to live in a democracy we accept a social contract to live by the rules
chosen by the majority. One of the good things about our democracy is
that we've incorporated mechanisms to change those rules whenever a
majority so elects.

Well again, hang on:

1) The "rights" everyone is trying to vote themselves are not
under the purview of the Federal government because it has
no enumerated power to grant such gifts. To legally elect
themselves these freebies, the Sheeple ought to change the
Constitution. They won't, moochers are never that honest.

There's no need for a specific constitutional authority, any more than
there is for, say, sanitation. It's sufficient that duly elected
legislators passed legislation authorizing expenditures.

Sorry, that is not the nature of the US Constitution as written and
intended. The *Federal* government was to be limited to a very few so
called "enumerated powers*. All other matters, by direct
Constitutional mandate, were to be managed by the individual citizens
or the several States. To grant the Federal government more power
legally requires a change to the Constitution.

However, ever since FDR, the moochers have been on the upswing and
have found all manner of non-existent Federal jurisdictions by flat
out fraudulent Constitutional interpretations. FDR himself
acknowledged this insofar as he new that the New (bad) Deal was itself
non-Constitutional in many ways. That's why he tried to pack the
Supreme Court. In short, if the population does not demand its
representatives act lawfully, then it makes very little difference
what is written down. Today's Federal leviathan would horrify the
Framers and lives in direct contradiction to the intent of the
Constitution to keep the Federal government small.




2) Some rights - the ones explicated in our Constitution - are
innate and freely distributed to all. My right to free speech
does not diminish your similar right. But the "rights" people
are inventing for themselves are not equally distributed.
They are "rights" granted to some citizens at the expense
of others. This is not a honest theory of rights, its just
stealing under mob rule masquerading as a "right".

The last time I looked around, public education was available to all -
and I didn't see any provision for exclusions. Are you aware of someone
who was denied access to that? If so, I'd be very interested in hearing
the story...

My child was denied the education I could afford to get them
privately because I could not pay for that private program AND
simultaneously be forced to continue to support the debauched
public program. Giving everyone equal access to the lowest common
denominator does not justify calling it an inherent "right". In
my case, my family's "rights" were diminished to the benefit of
another family's. This is a net imbalance in liberty wherein the
government chooses the winners and losers completely absent any
investigation of merit or appropriateness. More generally, any
activity of government beyond the defense of liberty and law itself
pretty much always yields and imbalance like this where there are
beneficiaries and (unwilling) benefactors, and it's always morally
wrong to do so.

Even more broadly, someone's need for something - no matter how real,
important, legitimate, or urgent - does not grant them the moral
permission to loot someone else's treasure - no matter how much that
other person has. A starving man does not have moral authority to
steal from the wealthy man. The starving mad has moral permission to
ask for help, offer to work when and if able, but there is no moral
get-out-of-jail-free card just because he needs something.

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Tim Daneliuk
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