I should actually be running everything

True, I lack a formal education. And I've never been farther away than Acapulco on a school trip, but I can get somebody for the foreign affairs stuff. My point is that I'm a nice guy with lots of common sense. So I would make good choices about lots of things--like what kids ought to learn in school, much better than their parents, in many cases.

Of course, there is a catch. I'm not exactly in a position to impose my will on others. I do not have the charisma to gather an army based on my words, and my physical presence is somewhat less than imposing. I own no tanks. So, in all likelihood, I am going to live in a society where all decisions are not made by me. It's a shame. But given the long odds on getting and holding supreme power personally, I have decided it is wisest for me to embrace a theory of government that limits the power anyone can wield over anyone else. 


So the highest good is that everyone make their own choices, so long as they do not impact others against their will. The highest good is that everyone be allowed to act according to their will, even when I am convinced I know better for them. Even if that impacts their children.


I say this to eliminate the "won't someone think of the children" defense for virtually any huge intrusion into the minutiae of people's lives. It doesn't matter whether it sounds sensible or not. Think about it for a moment; there are people whose lives seem to cry out for regulation in practically every detail. Some people are not, at least seen from the angle of my own vantage point, very good at living. Of course the people I can see can generally see me and may feel exactly the same way. 

So what you're hearing is a hard preference from me for not regulating, which necessarily means not paying.

Maybe its not clear how those go together, but they generally do. The reason is simple: when you buy as a group, you have to agree as a group. Anyone who likes anchovies on their pizza knows how well this works out for the minority. If you're lucky, you wind up eating cheese, because it's the least common denominator. More likely, you wind up eating pepperoni because it's what the rest of us schmucks enjoy. But you see the options here: something that no one wants much vs. something that everyone but you wants. 


Back to the school example: I've had my kids in public school in a couple of very different places. I was in a liberal community first and grew very tired of hearing the issue of the day presented as if it had been decided and the left held the only responsible position. Later I moved, and the dogma changed with the scenery. I was soon faced with teachers who found endless opportunities to quiz students on their religious beliefs and winked every time evolution was taught (as in, "we all know this is hogwash, but I have to teach it").


Gonna go out on a limb here and say I am not the only one annoyed with being limited to these two choices. Part of that is the nature of our current political scheme which is all either/or. Both left and right are ready to hand powers to the state that I think are absurd, but more on that another day.


Why are we stuck with this choice? In this particular case, its because we've mandated that every child must have an education and that it must be "free". Free in this case is a just a euphemism meaning not paid for directly, but out of our tax dollars, like the whole country is a kind of home owner's association with really hefty dues and we get school and roads instead of a pool and landscaping in the medians. 


The difference here is that you are legally obligated to swim. You can send your kids elsewhere, but you have to send them, and that "free" education?--yeah, it isn't, and you are still paying for it, whether you use it or not. So, unless you have the strongest convictions or deepest pockets, you wind up using the "free" one, cause you've already payed for it. 


Ok, so everyone has an education. But it's not a great one. And depending on your point of view, a pretty bad one. I submit though, that it can't be any other way if you're going to fund education through the sole vehicle of public schools. Because I'm not going to agree with everyone on every item. So the best I can hope for is to settle on a bland course that will offend few and likely bore all. In the end, we all feel like we're eating someone else's pepperoni when we want anchovies. 

The alternative, of course is to buy your own. That means not chipping in with the group that wants pepperoni. It also means finding others who like anchovies (because who can afford a whole pizza?), a task which might have been hard once but now, not so much. A Google search reveals over 4.6 million hits on the phrase "I like anchovies."

There's a lot of practical discussion in here that I'll have to come back to in another post, since I've strayed from my central point: I believe in the right of others to make their own choices and determine their own fate, even to their detriment. It is the only reasonable position of someone who wishes to retain their own freedom to choose. 


NOTE: These early posts sound a lot more certain than I intend the blog to be ultimately. That's largely because I'm laying out my postulates, the basis for the questions I'm asking myself these days. And just to make it clear that I really have some, here are some questions I'm asking myself today:


I enjoy the company of bright people. How much of that society is a product of public education? How would the things I enjoy have been achieved without it? Would eliminating education requirements and funding result in vast swaths of uneducated children? Is it better to be uniformly mediocre than to suffer vast differences based on things like income? 

Personal freedom is the highest good, but it's not the only one. Where do other imperatives stack up? 

There, that should undo it all nicely.

Something I Say a Lot

Governments rule with the threat of force and violence. I don't mean that to sound melodramatic. I mean just what I said. We grant our governments (more on the granting elsewhere) the power to enforce laws against our citizens. Such enforcement is built on the ability to do harm to us. If you doubt that, consider the course of a set of traffic violations. You are fined for parking or speeding or having a taillight out. Should you ignore the fines, your car will ultimately be taken from you. Should you resist strenuously enough, you could be jailed. Should you flee incarceration, attack those who seek to bring you under control, or be perceived as a threat, you may well be killed. That's only the most exaggerated example, because generally speaking, the government is so disproportionately strong that it doesn't need to kill you. It can pin you down and wait for you to cry uncle. 

My point is not that government shouldn't enforce laws or that its use of violence is necessarily corrupt. I am simply acknowledging that it is the threat of violence that gives government its power to accomplish even the most mundane of its tasks--from collecting taxes to collecting garbage to collecting dust on its oil reserves.  

So, I think we should be very careful about which tasks we decide will be carried out on that basis. If you don't think it matters, ask yourself whether the following two invitations are equivalent:
    "Would you like to have lunch with me?"
and
    "Have lunch with me or I will break your legs."

These strike me as very different interactions. I think we ought to save the threat of violence for some extremely special circumstances or mandates. So what should the government do, about a problem, a crisis, a plan for the future? We think about such things all the time, in a form something like "I think the government should provide free health care," or, "I think the government should pay teachers more." These are not uncommon or unreasonable sentiments. I do, however, think they sound a bit more ominous when rephrased accordingly: "I think that all citizens should be required, under the threat of violence, to provide free healthcare to their fellow citizens." 

Hmm.Well, maybe. 


"I think that all citizens should be required, under the threat of violence, to give more of their income to school teachers."


My point is not that there is a right or wrong answer to those questions, but that phrasing certainly changes the mood in the room. And I maintain that it's the right mood in which to answer these questions. Is the problem being addressed so severe, so dire, and so universally understood and agreed upon that it requires the forced consent of all citizens to address it?


Quick examples: 


Should everyone be forced to pay for an army?  I think yeah, probably.
Should everyone be forced to join the army?  Well, no, not most of the time. I think. 
Should everyone be forced to pay for encouraging others to join the army? And my head hurts. 

So no law currently forces you to join the army. But you do have to pay for it and you even have to pay to convince other people to join it, recruitment posters, whatever. But, especially in this day and age, all the activities of government are accompanied by PR and even advertising to convince you it really is a good idea. 


Solid answers? No, not at all but questions worth asking I think. Though doing so is completely optional, no threat of any kind implied by the author.