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Public schools, public supermarkets

May 31st, 2011 by John LaPlante

We have public schools. What if we had “public supermarkets?”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Blog Posts, Education, John La Plante. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Public schools, public supermarkets”

  1. sbanicki says:
    June 1, 2011 at 8:56 am

    I assume these talking heads also want the “private market” to run our military. We have a national army because we believe it is in the “public interest” to have one.

    What we need to decide is what kind of “control” we want. Free Markets should support a thriving society and government. That leg is Free Markets and in our country they are becoming less and less free. Without free markets goods and services cost more, there is less innovation, resources are allocated inappropriately, income disparity rises and society deteriorates over all.

    Conservatives in this country lambaste a central government, like China, having too much control over its industry and economic markets. They sight history saying when power gets too centralized, it is too far removed from the marketplace and citizens to make decisions in the best interest of society as a whole. Their personal self interest overrides the country that they are serving. http://goo.gl/Rl4sI

  2. John LaPlante says:
    June 1, 2011 at 10:57 am

    The problem that conservatives have with China is that it has too much power over its industry and economic markets? No. I think the primary problem that conservatives see in China is that it oppresses its people. The profit motive is certainly alive in China, although the government his hardly a neutral umpire, what with various state-owned enterprises.

    The comparison between education and the military is absurd, except that, come to think of it, public schools and the military both are currently entities of the state, filled with bureaucracy, and therefore in many ways dysfunctional. We haven’t come up with a decent alternative to the military, so we live with it. On the other hand, getting the state out of running schools shows a great deal of promise. See the record of private schools in this country, both those who participate in school choice programs and those who don’t.

    As for the value of free markets, I’m in agreement. But calling for more government involvement is, to invoke an infamous statement of the Vietnam conflict, an act of destroying the market to save it.

  3. sbanicki says:
    June 1, 2011 at 2:02 pm

    So you believe that education is not critical to the long term future of this country and the military is. I agree with the military being critical. It sounds like you do not have enough confidence in free markets to let the military be free from the shackles of government.

  4. John LaPlante says:
    June 6, 2011 at 8:49 pm

    Some things are too important to the future of this country to be controlled by government.

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