Education Vouchers; G. North

EducationalVouchers: The l:re i}~ ~r{ ';i:~~~tl GARY NORTH All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907) WE ARE CONTINUALLY BOMBARDED by newspaper and magazine head lines informing us of the continu ing "crisis in education," which actually is a crisis in government operated education. Virtually all the available data reveal that the crisis is accelerating. Inner-city schools have hecome literal battle fields between rival gangs, between teachers and students, between ad ministrators and increasingly vo ciferous faculty unions, and most important, between outraged par ents and the whole system. Yet the crisis is in no way confined to inner-city schools. The suburban schools of the white middle class are burdened with the multiple plagues of student boredom, drug addiction, and rapidly increasing Dr. North is President of the Institute for Christian Economics.

alcoholism. A dozen years of fall ing scores on the college entrance examination reveal the steady na ture of the erosion, despite the acceleration of costs associated with the public schools. Educators cannot bring them selves to admit that the crisis is anything more than a temporary aberration-an aberration from the "normal" which itself was dead long hefore today's administrators were born. The theories multiply, the explanations proliferate, and the crisis gets worse. What the last decade has brought is an un derstanding on the part of the public and a minority of govern ment school employees (unten ured, generally) that there is no answer. Like the sinking ship which fi nally takes on too much water, the 259 260 THE FREEMAN May government education system is irretrievable. It will be useful in the future only as scrap. But what about those millions of students who will go through the system before it finally sinks? Will they too become useful only as scrap?

Parents are becoming aware of the discussion syndrome. The end less discussions in half-empty halls between a few parents and. local administrators have not altered anything. The teacher conferences, the administrator conferences, the PTA conferences, and all the other conferences have proved useful only for the cataloguing of the unsolved and increasingly unsolv able problems connected with gov ernment education. Solutions have not emerged from conferences or at least no solutions acceptable to parents, administrators, school boards, students, state legislators, and an angry group of levy-reject ing voters. If there are no solu tions, why pay higher taxes? This is the reasoning of the voters. The reasoning of the school adminis trators is different. They only want to discover a new source of tax money that will be acceptable to the voters, or better yet, that will not be subject to public elec tions at all.

The Root of the Crisis The problems of American pub lic education are the problems associated with any system of gov ernment-enforced, tax-supported coercive wealth redistribution: the system of financing conflicts with the expressly stated goals of the planning agencies. This conflct be tween the method of financing and the stated goals of education has been with us since the days of the Puritans of New England who set up compulsory education which was to be financed, in part, by money collected by the local prop erty tax assessor. There is no education apart from conformity of thought. One thing is true and another is not. Education requires indoctrination. But the conformity of thought which is basic to all education cre ates conflicts when parents of dif fering first principles are required either to finance a hostile educa tional system or to send their chil dren to it. The Puritans' solution was to enforce conformity by· ex pelling hostile families from the community. The modern bureau crat's solution is to force parents to finance an alternative school system as well as the government system, and then to take control of the private system later on.

Sidney E. Mead, in his impor tant book, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (1963), has argued per ceptively that the public school system is America's only estab1976 EDUCATIONALVOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 261 lished church. His point is well taken. Like all systems of estab lished worship, some people are forced to finance doctrines and principles that they do not agree with. They resent this fact, but instead of seeking for the separa tion of "church" and state, the modern parent only seeks to "re capture" the public education sys tem. So deeply rooted is the idea of the necessity of public-financed education that those who are be ing destroyed by the system - who are losing their children to the system - cannot bring themselves to abandon it on principle. If the moral answer of the free man to the socialist's policies of coercive wealth redistribution is "not yours to give," then the moral answer to those who would somehow take over the public school system is "not yours to recapture."

The religious nature of the con flict has been noted by R. J. Rush doany : "The state is [seen as] the order of liberty, and the school is the means whereby citizens are prepared for the good life. The state has become the saving insti tution, and the function of the school has been to proclaim a new gospel of salvation. Education in this -era is a messianic and uto pian movement, a facet of the Enlightenment hope of regenerat ing man in terms of the promises of science and that new social order to be achieved in the state."l Yet precisely because the new state religious establishment has become messianic, it has also be come the center of men's criticism. Education today occupies an equiv ocal position in contemporary life, functioning both as a scapegoat for every failure and as a catch-all for every hope and expectation of society. The schools and colleges are ,berated for extending their authority beyond the fundamentals of learning into a program which envelopes the whole child or the whole man, and, at the same time, are given additional re sponsibilities which can only extend their scope even further. Funda mental to this unhappy and contra dictory approach is a messianic ex pectation of education coupled with a messianic attitude on the part of edu cators. The attitude of people towards education is that it is a god that has failed and yet a god who can perhaps still be whipped into fulfilling his mission. 2 The decade which has just passed - one which began only a few months after these words were published - has brought a massive disillusionment concern ing education. Nevertheless, the public's faith in government-fi nanced and administered educa1 Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Jl!lessianic Character of American Education (Nut ley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963), p. 4.

2 Ibid., p. 6.

262 THE FREEMAN May tion still persists, at least to the extent that people think the sys tem can still be reformed, trans formed, or recaptured. The pluralism of American life is now, and always has been, in direct opposition to a philosophy of public education. Yet the irre concilable conflict between these two principles has never been faced by the vast bulk of our citi zens and virtually any of its edu cational theorists. The financing of a pluralistic culture must be voluntary, springing from the deeply felt needs of the various religious, intellectual, and cultural groups. Three centuries of conflict over the control, content, and financing of public education serve as a tes timony to the futility of combin ing a system of tax-financed schools with a pluralistic culture financed by free men. The system of education is elitist, as all pro fessional systems must be, but with taxation as its base, the sys tem is in conflict with democratic principles. It leads to a system of minority rule. Weber was quite correct when he argued that bu reaucracy is antidemocratic by nature; control is separated from those who bear the financial bur dens. 3 Tenure and civil service 3 Max Weber, "Bureaucracy," From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

protection assure that control and financing are kept separate. The Assumption of Neutrality An implicit schizophrenia under mines every system of public edu cation. On the one hand, a primary justification for the existence of government-financed education is that the nation needs citizens who are educated for the responsibil ities of democratic participation in the political processes. The schools are to' educate men in terms of the "ethics of democracy" or "democratic values" or just plain "patriotism." Schools must inculcate "values," although the more vague these are, the better for the administrators. On the other hand, in order to ward off criticism from various religious and ideological groups, public education is simultaneously defended as a system which incul cates no religious or ideological values whatsoever. Public educa tion is simply technical, making possible a better, more productive, and more profitable life for all of its students. The stated goals of democratic education and strictly vocational or technical training are in absolute opposition to each other. The first absolutely affirms the value-laden nature of public education, while the second abso lutely denies it.

The schizophrenia of public edu1976 EDUCATIONALVOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 263 cation can be seen in the doctrine of academic freedom. The doctrine was first developed by the profes sors employed by the Prussian uni versities that were the products of state financing. (Prussia invented the kindergarten and the graduate seminar, two of the least produc tive educational developments ,on record.) The universities were supposed to be extensions of the Prussian state, and they were un derstood as' such by everyone, but professors wanted to be exempted from any form of censorship or control by the agents of the state. Thus, they invented the idea of academic freedom - the freedom of inquiry belonging to any certified scholar in his area of expertise. He is to be entirely neutral, however; his instruction must be based only on facts. He must not indulge in propaganda. Yet, steadily, as the implications of epistemology have been recog nized, the idea that "facts" some how create a neutral world of scholarship has been abandoned.

The so-called sociology of knowl edge (sociology of prejudice) indi cates that men can investigate only a tiny fraction of the infinite number of facts, gleaning facts and assembling them in terms of a philosophical framework. Pre suppositions therefore influence interpretations, and interpreta tions are now recognized as ultimately reIigious in nature, i.e., they are accepted as unchallenge able first principles. While few students recognized this fact as recently as the early 1960's, the effects of the Vietnam war and the counter culture have reversed this. The students, and many of their professors, now acknowledge what has always been true: edu cation is not neutral. But if edu cation cannot be neutral, then the public school system's legal pillar - the assumption of neutrality is exposed as a false justification for the maintenance of an estab lished church and a tenured priest hood.

The Locus 01 Sovereignty The ultimate source of the edu cational crisis stems from an error in first principles. Once committed to this error, the public education system has floundered repeatedly. To locate the source of the error, men need only ask themselves a single question: Who is respon sible for the education of a child? The answers, of course, are varied: the parents, the church, the civil government, or a combination of the three. The conflicts in education are in fact conflicts over a much more fundamental issue: the locus of sovereignty, and hence, the locus of personal responsibili ty. The person or institution which pos264 THE FREEMAN May sesses sovereignty must be the one which takes on the responsibility. By affirming the legitimacy of tax supported education, voters have attempted to transfer their respon sibilities for the education of their children to another agency, the state. Yet at the same time, they affirm their own sovereignty over the content and structure of the educational system. That they have lost almost every battle in their war with tenured, state-supported educational bureaucrats, is the direct result of the public's ab dication of personal responsibility, family by family, for the educa tion of their children. The war was lost on the day that parents, as voters, decided to transfer the financial responsibilities of educat ing their own children to other members of the body politic. While Horace Mann can be regarded as the general who was victorious over private education in Massa chusetts, he was only conducting mopping-up operations. The end had been determined two centuries earlier when the Puritans of Mas sachusetts affirmed the principle of tax-supported education.

Any system of education must ultimately be the reflection of and prod uct of the philosophical prin ciples of those who finance the system. The decision about the fi nancing of any institution ines capably determines the shape and content of that institution. Mod ern men, being secular, now recog nize this fact when applied to the institution of the church. They see that a state-supported church is antithetical to the principle of freedom of conscience. They see, and religious zealots like Roger Williams see, that state-financed churches become the tools of the state which supplies the funds. But modern men do not see that this strict relationship between fi nancing and operations applies equally well to government school systems. Somehow, the relation ship is ad hoc; it works when churches are involved, but it is irrelevant in the field of public ed ucation. Like the established churchmen of two centuries ago, today's priests and parishioners of the public schools refuse to recognize the nature of their rela tionship to the state.

Who Pays? Do men finance their children's educations directly, through the personal financial sacrifice of the family unit? If so, then the fam ily is sovereign over education. The school is then merely an ex tension of the family. The family makes use of the efficiencies asso ciated with the division of labor. Parents hire professional educa tors to train their children, but those who are hired are. paid to 1976 EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 265 adapt their ed!1cational skills to the needs of the families that are financing the education. This can be done directly, through family controlled school boards, but it can also be accomplished through the indirect means of the market. The family hires the tutor, or the school, in the same way that it hires any other servant. The par ents are directly responsible for their children, and the selection of a school is an act of responsible stewardship. The family has not delegated the responsibility of ed ucating the children to anyone else. It controls the purse strings -the ultimate affirmation of earth ly sovereignty.

The more distant the source of the school's funds from the family, the less control the family has over the selection of the teachers and eguipment. If the church fi nances the education of its mem bers' children, then a layer of in stitutional bureaucracy is inter posed between parents and teach ers. This may be agreeable. to many parents, but if church mem bers other than the parents are expected to finance the school (as is the case in most instances), then they too have a legitimate right to determine school policies. By transferring some of the burdens of financing education to other church members, the family thereby relinquishes a portion of its sovereignty over the educators. The educators then serve someone other than the parents, or at least in addition to the parents: the deacons, the elders, the minister, the school committee, or whatever. By diluting sovereignty, the edu cational bureaucrats gain more autonomy, since they can playoff one church faction against another until everyone gives up and grants more autonomy to the administra tors.

The bureaucrats gain their greatest control in tax-supported systems. Sovereignty is so diluted at the level of the individual citi zen that the expertise of the pro fessional and tenured bureaucrats is overwhelmingly powerful. But their power .is not tied to a per sonal relationship with the chil dren (as it is with a parent), nor is it linked to a financial depend ence on the parents, nor is it even Hnked to a community of shared values, as in the case of a church school. Their power stems from the unwillingness of legisla tors to turn off the funds. And the legislators' unwillingness to inter fere stems from two primary facts of political life: 1) the experts have an aura of invincibility about them, plus tenure; 2) the voters still beHeve in the establishment of the public school church. It is easier to give speeches than to take action, so legislators give 266 THE FREEMAN May speeches. Most of them are re elected most of the time, so the policy pays off in the coin of the political realm: votes.

The crisis of education is there fore a crisis in the realm of val ues, with the values of the parents coming into conflict with the val ues, philosophies,and incompe tence of those in control of the tax-supported educational system. If the parents continue to capitu late to the philosophy of public ed ucation, then they will continue to be defeated in their attempts to gain the kind of education they want for their children. There is only one way that all parents can gain such satisfaction: they must pay for the education of their chil dren. They can earn the money or they can convince some third par ty to give them or their children the necessary funds on a voluntary basis, but the parents must pay. If they want to get what they pay for, they must pay directly, rather than paying through the coercive means of state taxation. Until men are willing to cut off the political funding of the estab lished church of America, they will see the educational crisis escalate.

The visible sign of sovereignty is the ability to pay for a service and the willingness to do so. Nothing short of this will suffice to solve the crisis in the schools, for the educational crisis is ultimately a conflict over sovereignty. He who pays with his own funds will win; he who continues to pay by voting cannot possibly win. Pseudo-market Schemes Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago is one of the most technically proficient economists in America. As a de fender of the principle of market efficiency, he has been able to gain many adherents within the eco nomics profession. He has been especially successful inchalleng ing the inefficiencies of the Fed eral regulatory commissions. His most popular and widely read book, Capitalism and Freedom (1962), was a landmark of the 1960's, for it was popularly writ ten by a professional economist who had long before established his technical proficiency before his peers. Some of the policy recom mendations of the book, such as the abolition of occupationallicen sure by civil governments, have not been taken seriously by most economists .and certainly not by professionals who now hold occu pational licenses from the civiI government. Yet from the point of view of those who are convinced of the technical superiority of the free mar ket over governmental regulation, it is this kind of un compromising stand taken by Prof. Friedman which is most val1976 EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 267 uable in the defense of freedom, not to mention capitalism.

The problem that many free market advocates have with some of Prof. Friedman's policy recom menda tions is that too often he spends many pages in devising in genious schemes that would make government programs more effici ent and, Prof. Friedman fervently hopes, less burdensome to the tax payers, businessmen, and innocent citizens of the land. These policy recommendations have one feature in common: they are pseudo-mar ket devices. They would create a kind of shadow market - "almost a free market" - that could pro vide success indicators analogous to those provided by a truly free market. In doing so, he argues, these pseudo-market alterations would make government more responsive to the needs of citizens. Economic Calculation Back in 1920, Professor Ludwig von Mises wrote the most famous essay of his acaden1ic career, "Economic Calculation in a Social ist Commonwealth." Mises argued tha t the inescapable weakness of all systems of central planning is the inability of the planners to assess the actual value of any product or service in the economy.

Without freely fluctuating prices that are the product of the private ownership of both consumer and capital goods, there can be no means of imputing value accu rately by any of the p.articipants in the economy. What should any thing cost ? What is it worth? What should be given up to attain any particular goal? Without mar ket prices, meaning without open entry to markets by buyers and sellers, there can be only random guesses by the planning bodies. Randomness is not efficient, except on random occasions. Thus, con cluded Mises, the socialist com monwealth is of necessity ineffi cient. It cannot plan rationally. -So long as the monopoly character of the state-controlled markets con tinues, the planning authorities will remain blind to the true con ditions of supply and demand. 4 Understandably, Mises had no use for pseudo-market schemes of any kind. In fact, the most im portant (though ineffectual) reply to Mises from the socialist camp was made by Oskar Lange, and it consisted of a system of hypo thetical pseudo-market responses by central planners: artificial and arbi trary prices to be set by the planners, followed by adj ustments in the price system in order for planning agencies to stimulate the desired response from buyers and 4 Ludwig von Mises, "Economic Calcu lation in a Socialist Commonwealth"

(1920), in F. A. Hayek (ed.), Collectivi;t Economic Planning (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1935).

268 THE FREEMAN May producers. 5 The problem, as al ways, was the closed nature of the system. The planners could never be sure that they were not wasting resources in their attempt to at tain any goal. Those who set prices are sovereign, and in the case of the socialist commonwealth, the sovereign is economically blind. In short, the creation of a pseudo-market cannot guarantee increased government efficiency or increased economic power on the part of consumers. All that will be accomplished is the irrationali zation of the central economic plan by mixing it with non-socialist yet non-market elements. Lange's scheme was never adopted by the Polish planning agency he be longed to, nor have the Soviets adopted it. It is neither socialist nor market; it is only economically irrational. The Voucher Scheme Perhaps the most interesting of all of the pseudo-m,arket policy recommendations promoted by Prof. Friedman is his educational 5 Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York: McGraw-Hill, [1938] 1956).

For a reply, see T. J. B. Hoff, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society (Lon don: Hodge, 1949). Prof. Hayek's latest statement on the question of central economic planning appeared in The Morgan Guaranty Sur vey (Jan. 1976), and is available on re quest: 23 Wall St., New York, N.Y. 10015. voucher plan. Under such a school financing system, each family would receive one voucher for each school age child in the fam ily. The voucher would be redeem able in money upon presentation bya private school to the state or country government. Its value would be equal to the average per student cost of education in the district. (This figure, by the way, is seldom even calculated by school boards, for obvious political and public relations reasons, and when it is calculated, it virtually never includes such crucial items as the interest which the government might have earned had it sold off the school buildings and invested the money elsewhere, such as in the bank which would loan the purchase money to a local profit making school.) The parents could then send their students to a pub lic school or to a private school. If the cost of tuition were higher in the private school than the value of the voucher, the parents could make up the difference by paying more money.

The advantages of this scheme, argue the supporters of school vouchers, would be considerable. The parents gain back their lost sovereignty. They decide where the children will attend school. The public schools would be forced to compete for students, thereby increasing their efficiency. Private 1976 EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 269 , schools would spring up every where in response to the existence of vouchers. The diversity of edu cational opportunities would be fostered. The costs of administra tion would be very low. (One ad vocate back in 1962 - a respected libertarian philosopher - an nounced that it would only take a computer and four secretaries to run the whole system for the state of California. If this were true and it certainly is not true - it would insure the doom of the pro gram in the eyes of the most po tent group of special-interest pleaders in the sta te, the civiI service employees.) The state could establish specialty schools of all kinds to lure back parents and their vouchers. The authority of parents would be reestablished, and this would guarantee a truly progressive educational system.

There is no doubt that the logic of the voucher program is initially impressive. Parents would seem to have far more power in selecting educational alternatives under the voucher system. The below-market pricing monopoly of the state would be eliminated. The conform ity of bureaucratic education would be challenged by a new di versity. A new educational plural ism would be the creation of vouchers. It would save money and increase freedom. What more could we ask for? In any case, what more can we expect in an age of wealth redistribution? This is al w,ays the key argument in favor of the creation of pseudo-market schemes: no way exists to re-es tablish a truly free market, so this is the best we can hope for. The Locus of Sovereignty Revisited It all sounds so plausible. Yet it overlooks the fundamental prob lem of voucher-financed education. The question must still be asked: Where is the locus of sovereignty?

And the answer must still be the same: the civil government. The voucher program violates the most important principle of education: parents are responsible for the financing of their children's edu cation. He who is responsible is also legally sovereign,and vice versa. Operationally, the source of the funding determines the locus of sovereignty. The goal of all those who would defend market arrangements must be to deter mine the moral locus of sovereign ty in any particular circumstance, and then see to it that the sov ereign agent be made legally and econonlically responsible for the exercise of his power. By failing to demand that parents be the source of funding for their own children's education, the promot ers of the voucher scheme have ab dicated their responsibility in ex tending the principle of voluntar270 THE FREEMAN May ism and its -concomitant, personal responsib ility.

In the voucher system, the source of the funding is still the taxation system. The financing is based on the princip1e that it is legitimate to use political power in order to grant benefits to one group at the expense of the other. The principle of coercion is still dominant. The dominant principle, over time, will thwart the elements of voluntarism in any pseudo-mar ket scheme. The state is still the operational sovereign over educa tion, simply because the threat of violellce, whi-ch is the state's legal monopoly, is the source of the funds for education. There is no doubt that Prof. Friedman recognizes this fact, yet he does not emphasize it. He be Iieves that the technical alteration of the way in which coercively col lected taxes ,are redistributed can overcome the sovereignty of the state. He acknowledges that the authority of the parents in a voucher scheme cannot be abso lute. The state-financed "educa tional diversity" under a voucher system is a diversity operating within government~est.ablished guidelines. Money spent by the state can never be ona "no strings attached" basis. There is always more demand for government money than there is money avail able to meet the demand (unless the purchasing power of govern ment money falls to zero). Those legally responsible· for the distri bution of tax money must have legal guidelines, or else rampant waste and dishonesty will instant ly appear, and the treasury will be emptied overnight. 6 This is why statist education must be bureau cra.tic edueation, with 'guidelines imposed from above, since the money comes from the state. There is no escape from the rules of bureaucracy in a voucher system.

Friedman acknowledges this fact: Governments could require a mini mum level of schooling financed by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on "approved" educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum they themselves provided on purchasing educational services from an "approved" institu tion of their own choice. 7 The key word, of course, is "ap proved." Why Prof. Friedman has chosen to put the word in quotes is not altogether clear. Does he mean "kind of approved"? Cer tainly, he is wise enough to know that when the state bureaucrats 6 Mises, Bureaucracy (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, [1944] 1969). 7 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Ereedom (Chicago: University of Chi cago Press, 1962), p. 89.

1976 EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 271 approve or disapprove, they do not hide their actions in quotation marks. They simply decide. They decide in terms of criteria appro priate to the continued function ing of the statist educational bu reaucracy. As Prof. Friedman writes: "Any subsidy should be granted to individuals to be spent at institutions of their own choos ing, provided only that the school ing is of a kind that it is desired to subsidize."s Desired by whom to subsidize? The parents? Hard ly; they are the ones to be dic tated to, not dictated by. The par ents will be told where they can freely spend their vouchers, and they have to that degree lost their sovereignty. The state provides the funds through its monopoly of coercion; the state shall deter mine, coercively, how and where those funds are to be spent. Controlling the Alternatives What the decades-long erosion of the government school systems has provided is a long list of rea sons why it would be profitable for each family to remove its chil dren from the subsidized schools.

A small but growing minority of par·ents is doing just that. The state bureaucrats are legally pro hibited from providing religious schools, ideologically prohibited 8 Ibid., p. 99. from providing free market edu cation, and apparently unable to provide competent instruction. They see their task as insuring standards, which means insuring educational conformity. The rise of an independent school system, which is replacing the declining number of Roman Catholic paro chial schools, is a threat to public school administrators. They are as hostile to alternative educational programs as the postal system's administrators are to United Par cel Service or anyone else carrying first-class mail. Private school administrators in Indiana were recently imprisoned temporarily for having cooperated with parents who attempted to re move their son from the public school system against his will. Parents in Ohio have been threat ened with the removal of their children to foster homes if they persist in sending their children to unaccredited schools. This is warfare, not some simple debate over financing. Technical solutions are insufficient to solve problems of ideological and religious warfare.

What we are witnessing is a conflict over sovereignty. Who is responsible for the training of children, the state or the parents? The lines are being drawn far more sharply today than at any time in this nation's history. Pseu-' do-market schemes cannot solve 272 THE FREEMAN questions of ultimate sovereignty, or at least they cannot solve them for the benefit of free market in stitu tions. State schools rest on a whole series of erroneous assumptions. First, that the state is ultimately sovereign in the field of education -the pseudo-parent of every child. Second, that state schools can teach children totally neutral val ues - universally acceptable prin ciples that all education must pro vide. Third, that it is the moral as well as legal obligation of taxpay ers to finance the school system. Fourth, that the professional, ten ured, and civil-service-protected officials of the educational monop oly are the people best prepared to operate the educational system.

Buying Off the Competition The voucher system challenges directly only the last of these as sumptions, and then only super ficially. (After all, state schools will still be permitted to operate.) The voucher system necessarily re quires the licensing of schools. For those who favor bureaucratic licensing of alternative education al systems by the state bureau crats whose jobs are threatened byalternati ve educational sys tems, I can only recommend chap ter 9 of Prof. Friedman's Capital ism and Freedom - the chapter on occupational licensing. As private schools continue to replace the disintegrating govern ment schools at the primary and secondary levels, the state's edu cational bureaucrats will have to take decisive action to protect their monopoly. One way to ac complish this is to refuse to cer tify any more schools. (I am as suming that outright abolition will not be tolerated politically or in the courts.) This approach may work for a time, since parents are concerned about quality schools.

By some peculiar twist of logic, the parents of private school chil dren somehow believe that the state licensing boards are compe tent to certify educational per formance, despite the fact that the schools that they themselves op erate are anathema to the parents in question. Private school administrators, who come to parents in the name of a superior educational program, are equally hypnotized by the boards of certification. The most intelligent response is that made by Robert Thoburn, principal and owner of the profit-making and highly successful Fairfax Chris tian School of Fairfax, Virginia: "If the bureaucrats want me to certify their schools, they can come to me and I'll look over their programs. That's my view of cer tification." If the certification ploy does not 1976 EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 273 work, then the last hope of state educational bureaucrats is the voucher system. If parents con tinue to send their children to un certified schools, then the state must find a way to convince pri vate school administrators that they must register with the state and conform their programs .to state educational standards. The voucher system is the most logical means of achieving this goaL Vouchers will create a second, pseudo-free market school system, using "free" in both senses: inde pendent and without c-ost to the users. The state-operated schools will then compete with the state licensed schools. Almost no third alternative will be economically possible.

Taxed Again and Again Those parents who want their children out of the government-op erated schools (which their taxes support) will also be paying for the operation of voucher-support ed, 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 gov ernment-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 com mitted religiously and ideologi cally to the principle of independ ent education, and also financially able to put their preference into action. How many concerned par ents will do this? How many pri vate school administrators will be able to operate a school while de nying admittance to those who would pay with vouchers? How many of these schools with total commitment to private education will there be? I can ten you: very, very few.

Not until the blight so obvious in the government-operated schools has spread to the government-li censed voucher schools will par ents even consider bearing the second tax (vouchers) and find money to pay for an independent education. In short: vouchers are the most promising tool lor the suppression 01 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 ev ery voucher-using school - equal opportunity policies, quota sys tems of every kind, teacher hiring and firing policies, racially and re ligiously mixed student bodies. There will be a whole army of Federal bureaucrats, not to men274 THE FREEMAN May tion state bureaucrats, policing every priv,ate 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 mo nopoly - the most horrendous vis ible failure of socialism in Amer ica? The statist educators and poli ticians of Great Britain are call ing for the abolition of all inde pendent schools in Britain, not be cause they think the government schools will be improved, but be caus,e it is intolerable in a society guided by the politics of envy to let any class, any family, any re ligious group escape the blight of the socialist educational system. If the sons and daughters of the laboring class must suffer the ter rors of the government school sys tem, 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 en list another man. This practice was" thought to be undemocratic.

The same will be true, I fear, for those who would escape conscrip tion into the public school system. Conclusion The state is not about to adopt pseudo-market schemes unless the bureaucrats believe that the adop tion of the scheme will remove competition from consistently in dependent private competitors. The state is not going to consider the latest pseudo-market proposal to come out of the graduate seminars of the pro-free market professors unless the scheme can be rewri t ten to enhance the sovereignty, power, and efficiency of those who would suppress the independence of private men. This should be the lesson of the age: statist ideo logues and their tenured hirelings do not commit suicide voluntarily. They do not abandon the ideology of the control economy simply be cause some new scheme promises to make the government benign or reduce the tax burden of the pub lic. Pseudo-market schemes, > pro moted in the name of the free market, are adopted by the ene mies of freedom for very specific purposes: to reduce the zones of freedom. Those who believe in in creasing all state sovereignty will adopt pseudo-market schemes only when they are convinced that the free market is too great a threat 1976 EDUCAT'IONAL VOUCHERS: THE DOUBLE TAX 275 to pure, uncompromising bureau cratic failure - the same reason why the Soviets allow semi-market pricing in a few restricted areas of the economy.

The state may adopt vouchers for education on an experimental basis, in order to test the scheme. If it does foster independent edu cation, vouchers will be scrapped. But they will not have to be scrapped. Vouchers may well be come a permanent fixture of our government education system. If so, it will be for a reason: the school voucher offers vast new powers of control over a vibrant and growing independent school system that threatens to undercut government schools. The great threat to freedom from school vouchers is that they strike at the heart of society: the family. As a pseudo-market de vice, they promise to be remark ably successful in destroying a tiny but im,portant pure free mar ket development. I am reminded of Lenin's dictum that if the com munists announced that all capi talists were to be hanged tomor row, the capitalists would trip over each other today trying to sell Lenin the rope. The profit system does not regard the origins of profits, at least short-run profits.

Men act to improve their positions in life. Private school administra- . tors and most of the private colleges have been eage.r to receive Federal aid; only a minority of a minority have held out against the lure of Federal money. (Their schools, it should be remembered, are very small and may grow smaller.) The lure of vouchers al most certainly will prove too great a temptation for thousands of our struggling little private schools. It may take another generation to recover from the defection of these schools, should that defec tion have an opportunity to mani fest itself. If vouchers are to be stopped, they will have to be stopped by parents who recognize the double taxation nature of the voucher scheme. Those who truly want in dependent schools and are willing to pay for them must not seek after vouchers, for vouchers are the very seal of doom for the in dependent school system. Pseudo market schemes generally lead to anti-market results. The opposi tion to vouchers must be made on principle and in opposition to the superficial logic of the pseudo market. He who is morally respon sible must pay. Abandon this prin ciple, and you abandon your sov ereignty as a free man. Good re sults stem from good principles.

Vouchers are an intellectual, mor al, and educational disaster. They will not work to expand the realm of freedom. , ANEW MESSAGE JACKSON PEMBERTON Mr. Pemberton graduated with honors in physics and mathematics, has a Masters de gree in business administration, has worked two years in Sweden, and now works as a professional systems analyst. He is a b~si nessman who is active in community and church affairs, is a free lance author, and is often called on to speak. He lives with his wife and children on a small farm just out side of Salt Lake City. All rights reserved. 276 Words of courage and coun sel from the hearts of the Founding Fathers to their children in a troubled na tion.