School Vouchers: The Double Tax

Gary North reports:

Those parents who want their children out of the government-operated schools (which their taxes support) will also be paying for the operation of voucher-supported, state-licensed schools. These parents must turn down the first subsidy (free public education in a government school), turn down a second subsidy (vouchers for government-licensed schools), and come up with after-tax income to finance their children's education in a truly independent school.

This is assuming they can find such a school. To do so, they must locate other parents equally committed religiously and ideologically to the principle of independent education, and also financially able to put their preference into action. How many concerned parents will do this? How many private school administrators will be able to operate a school while denying admittance to those who would pay with vouchers? How many of these schools with total commitment to private education will there be? I can tell you: very, very few.

Not until the blight so obvious in the government-operated schools has spread to the government-licensed voucher schools will parents even consider bearing the second tax (vouchers) and find money to pay for an independent education. In short: vouchers are the most promising tool for the suppression of independent private education now at the disposal of state educational bureaucrats.

What will the price be? What may not have been clear to Prof. Friedman back in the early 1960's is clear to us now. We will have HEW guidelines operating in every voucher-using school -- equal opportunity policies, quota systems of every kind, teacher hiring and firing policies, racially and religiously mixed student bodies. There will be a whole army of Federal bureaucrats, not to mention state bureaucrats, policing every private school. The so-called private educational system will be swallowed up in a mountain of red tape. How much imagination does it take to see what is coming? Isn't it sufficient to look at what our independent private colleges are now going through? Can you imagine the kinds of controls in store for schools that are set up to permit an escape hatch for the crumbling state educational monopoly -- the most horrendous visible failure of socialism in America?

The statist educators and politicians of Great Britain are calling for the abolition of all independent schools in Britain, not because they think the government schools will be improved, but because it is intolerable in a society guided by the politics of envy to let any class, any family, any religious group escape the blight of the socialist educational system. If the sons and daughters of the laboring class must suffer the terrors of the government school system, why should the sons and daughters of the rich be permitted to escape? The logic is impeccable. After the Civil War we abolished the right of men to buy their way out of conscription by paying the government a fine sufficient to enlist another man. This practice was thought to be undemocratic.

This long article is well worth your time.