Shopping for School Choice

Syms, once a famous clothing store in NY City, advertised itself by repeating the following statement: An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer. As all Americans know, education counts. What's more, when it comes to education, almost every parent knows something about the quality of the nearest public school, especially if the parent has a child attending the school.

Why, I wonder, is there such agony over public school education? Why is there such relentless effort put into spreading the notion that only the state can handle the education of the population. Why do people accept public schools as they are when private schools have been doing a better job of educating kids since, since, forever?

Our higher education system is a combination of state and private colleges and universities. There are some excellent state schools. But is there any doubt that the best colleges and universities are the private institutions? Still, there's no call to close the public institutions. Why? Because they compete on price.

In fact, when the student is attending a state university in his home state, the student pays far less than an out-of-state student. In other words, the student receives a voucher. Thus we know voucher programs work well at the college level, which means we can conclude they would work just as well for those in K-12 public schools.

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

What if groceries were paid for by taxes, and you were assigned a store based on where you live

By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system—politicized and monopolistic—will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets' monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as "customers," on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce.

Recognizing that the erosion of their monopoly would stop the gravy train that pays their members handsome salaries without requiring them to satisfy paying customers, unions would ensure that any grass-roots effort to introduce supermarket choice meets fierce political opposition.

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions' self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

The Peter Principle Updated by Obama

President Obama is not in charge. It is beginning to appear that some people are noticing. For a long time he disguised it well, but despite his manner of speech, he's a bumbler. Whether the problem is oil leaking in the Gulf of Mexico or muslims who want to destroy Israel and drive all Jews out of the middle east, his inability to project power has convinced the worst people in theworld that he is an incompetent wimp.

Spill reveals Obama's lack of executive experience

In mid-February 2008, fresh from winning a bunch of Super Tuesday primaries, Barack Obama granted an interview to "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Croft. "When you sit down and you look at [your] resume," Croft said to Obama, "there's no executive experience, and in fact, correct if I'm wrong, the only thing that you've actually run was the Harvard Law Review."

"Well, I've run my Senate office, and I've run this campaign," Obama said.

Seven months later, after receiving the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama talked with CNN's Anderson Cooper. At the time, the news was dominated by Hurricane Gustav, which was headed toward New Orleans and threatening to become a Katrina-like disaster. "Some of your Republican critics have said you don't have the experience to handle a situation like this," Cooper said to Obama. "They in fact have said that Governor Palin has more executive experience. ..."

"Governor Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees," Obama answered. "We have got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So, I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute, I think, has been made clear over the last couple of years."

Obama ignored Palin's experience as governor of Alaska, which was considerably bigger than the Obama campaign. But his point was clear: If you're worried about my lack of my executive experience, look at my campaign. Running a first-rate campaign, Obama and his supporters argued, showed that Obama could run the federal government, even at its most testing moments. He could set goals, demand accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, bend the sprawling federal bureaucracy to his will.

Fast forward to 2010. The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing out of control. The Obama administration is at first slow to see the seriousness of the accident. Then, as the crisis becomes clear, the federal bureaucracy becomes entangled in itself trying to deal with the problem. "At least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response," the New York Times reports, "making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes."

For example, it took the Department of Homeland Security more than a week to classify the spill as an event calling for the highest level of federal action. And when state officials in Louisiana tried over and over to win federal permission to build sand barriers to protect fragile coastal wetlands from the oil, they got nowhere. "For three weeks, as the giant slick crept closer to shore," the Times reports, "officials from the White House, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Environmental Protection Agency debated the best approach."

The bureaucracy wasn't bending to anyone's will. The direction from the top was not clear. And accountability? So far, the only head that has rolled during the Gulf crisis has been that of Minerals Management Service chief Elizabeth Birnbaum.

But during a May 27 news conference, Obama admitted he didn't even know whether she had resigned or been fired. "I found out about it this morning, so I don't yet know the circumstances," the president said. "And [Interior Secretary] Ken Salazar's been in testimony on the Hill." Obama's answer revealed that he hadn't fired Birnbaum, and he couldn't reach a member of his Cabinet who was a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Given all that, perhaps candidates in future presidential races will think twice before arguing that running their campaign counts as executive experience.

A few days before Obama won the White House, Bill Clinton joined him for a late-night rally in Kissimmee, Fla. Clinton, who became president after 12 years as a governor, told the crowd not to worry about Obama's lack of executive background. Given the brilliance of Obama's campaign, Clinton said -- and here the former president uncharacteristically mangled his words a bit -- a President Obama would be "the chief executor of good intentions as president."

Chief executor of good intentions? Perhaps that's what Obama is now. But with oil gushing into the Gulf, that's just not good enough.