education Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

If you would like to ask me a question, you can submit it here.

If you would like to ask me a question, you can submit it here.

In a heartbreaking New York Times column, Nicholas Kristoff describes how the Supplemental Security Income program is incentivizing parents to stop their children from learning:

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.

Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a$698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.

“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

Do they backfire? That depends on their goal. If their goal is to cure poverty, then surely they do. But that has been clear at least since the War on Poverty. Who was it who defined insanity as doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result? Our political leaders (and the intellectuals who urge the growth of the entitlement state) are not insane.

So what is their actual goal? Here’s one possibility: precisely to turn Americans in soul-crushed dependents, which is the precondition for increasing their own power.

(HT: Harry Binswanger)

Are Republicans becoming champions of wealth redistribution? The Atlantic’sDavid Graham says yes, and along the way he links to a piece by former National Review writer Josh Barro who argues that Republicans had better get on board since inequality is rising.

That inequality is rising may or may not be true. But, conceding the point for the moment, my response is to go ahead and echo Yaron: Who cares? If my neighbor’s income doubles and mine only goes up 20%, why should I be upset? Why should relative wealth matter to anyone not suffering from a severe case of envy? Barro gives two answers to that question.

Reason 1:

The problem with rising inequality is not that lower-income families can’t afford ever-cheaper electronics; it’s that they can’t keep pace with the rising costs of health care, education and (in certain parts of the country) housing.

Non sequitur, unless Barro is arguing that inequality is causing rising costs in health care, education, and housing—something that doesn’t seem prima facie very plausible.

What is plausible is that there is a real problem if the cost of certain big ticket items keep astronomically rising while many people’s incomes aren’t rising or aren’t rising as fast. But the problem doesn’t concern relative incomes.

And, it turns out, those rising prices are primarily due to government intervention. See Free Market Revolution, especially chapters 4 and 13. (If you don’t have a copy of FMR handy, well, go buy it, but also check out this post from Dan Mitchell.) If you got the government to reduce its distortion of market forces rather than increase it, you would not see spiraling costs for health care, education, or housing—and you would see a rising standard of living for all productive individuals.

Reason 2:

There’s also no reason to think that, whatever standard of living we start from, an economy where nearly all the improvements accrue to a small fraction of families is either politically sustainable or morally acceptable.

Again, plausible. But only because it packages together earned inequality and unearned inequality.

Earned inequality means inequality that results from the fact that, on a free market, different people create vastly different amounts of wealth. Steve Jobs produced way more wealth than I have, and so it’s morally right that he had a much higher income.

Unearned inequality results whenever people use political power to defy the market and fill their coffers. When Hugo Chavez seizes the meager incomes of his citizens, leaving them in squalor, or when Jeff Immelt uses GE’s political connections to gobble up billions of taxpayer dollars via subsidies and other special government favors, then of course the inequality that results is immoral.

The principle is: If people get what they earn then whatever level of equality or inequality results is absolutely fair; if not, then whatever level of equality or inequality results is immoral. The amount of inequality itself is irrelevant to the matter.

So, then, what’s been happening with inequality in America over the last half century? Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t think anyone really knows. There are statistics showing a significant rise in inequality, but they are problematic, as we have cataloged again and again and again. But what is clear is that the government has distorted market forces such that it’s impossible to say precisely how much of whatever inequality does exist is earned and how much is unearned.

What is also clear is that, however much inequality exists in the US, the problem is not the inequality and the solution is not more of the same interventionist poison. The problem is government intervention and the solution is to free individuals to earn what they can and to keep what they earn. Inequality is a diversion.

Joshua, a reader, asks, “Why shouldn’t the government be involved in education if it is so important to the pursuit of happiness of the individual?”

You could of course ask the same question about food. You couldn’t live or be happy without it, so shouldn’t the government recognize a right to food and provide it to everyone?

The answer to all such questions is: Rights protect your freedom of action. The right to the pursuit of happiness, in Ayn Rand’s words,  “means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others. It means that Man cannot be forced to devote his life to the happiness of another man nor of any number of other men.”

Rights do not and cannot guarantee you products or services. Both food and schooling have to be created by human beings. To treat those values as “rights” to be handed out by government means that some people must be forced to work without recompense, to provide those goods and services to others. But you cannot claim the right to violate someone else’s rights.

Yes, education is in an important sense a precondition for life and happiness. Indeed, the fact that education is so important is one reason why we should want to keep education free from government intervention. Government doesn’t improve education, it destroys it. The evidence for that, tragically, is all around us today.