John Stossel is a libertarian. He is also a great writer. In this article, he takes on big government and the failure of government education:
In the true Hamiltonian spirit, [David] Brooks also doesn’t trust the market — which means he doesn’t trust free, peaceful individuals and private property. He writes, “We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives [I assume Brooks has libertarians like me in mind] because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital.”
Now David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.”
Excuse me, but why is that the market’s fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition.
Brooks writes that Hamiltonians like him “think government should help people get the tools they need to compete.” But when has government ever been good at that?
He claims the state can “increase the quality of human capital” by, for example, providing “Quality preschool [to] help young children from … disorganized homes. … ”
Really? What is the chance that it would be “quality” preschool if government runs it? Even the acclaimed Head Start has not been shown to have any lasting effect on academic performance.
Why does Brooks think the government is competent enough to “help … people compete”? He writes that liberals’ “programs haven’t worked out,” but then proposes his own. When I challenged him on that, he said his ideas are in a “different category” and argued that some intervention is effective and necessary.
Please. When I asked Brooks why a government that performed as ineptly as FEMA did after Hurricane Katrina will be better at running preschools, he said, “Some lives are so screwed up, it’s hard to make them worse.”
Government coercion almost always makes things worse. It discourages individual effort, and sucks capital away from more productive uses.
Brooks, like a good Hamiltonian, favors coercive government micromanagement. He says, “Bigger child tax credits and increasing the earned income tax credit [welfare] can reduce the economic strain on young families. … [G]overnment should increase funding for basic research, especially in math, engineering and physics.
“The list could go on.”
That’s what I’m afraid of.
If David Brooks is truly interested in improving “human capital,” he needs to stop lobbying for more government intervention and truly let the market go to work. The market has been removed from the education of American youth for decades. The money spent per student has risen while the test scores have dropped.
Anything the government touches they will generally make worse. The market can provide a better service, if it is just given a chance.
