#192 School Choice

The Christian Economist | Dave Arnott

School Choice: The rich already have the choice to send their children to any school they want. The poor should have the same choice. The rich should have a choice that the poor do not have. Really?! Think about it: The rich already HAVE school choice; they can send their kids to any expensive school they choose, but poor kids don’t have that choice. Shouldn’t we give them that choice? We live in Texas, where our legislature is trying to decide what to do about school vouchers. To a Christian Economist, this is pretty simple. As an economist, I think people should have the freedom to send their children to a school of their choice. As a Christian, it certainly seems like a person should be free to choose Christian education over secular education. So who disagrees with that? People who want power. They want power, not only over your decision but over the dollars you pay in taxes. First, they forcefully extract tax dollars from you, then when you want to direct the use of those dollars, they want to spend them on two monopoly providers. More on that in a minute. The Poor Will Always Be With You Jesus said that, because He knew we would not be able to keep the Biblical commandments to run a Biblical Economy. The school voucher issue is simply another example of it. People should be as free as possible to choose religious education over secular education. If people were better educated, production would increase, and our country would be richer. The productivity equation, after all, is what determines a country’s wealth. “Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” That’s from John 8:32, and it follows after a pretty interesting scripture as well. The preceding verse reads, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.” Oh, so teaching is pretty important to Jesus. So it’s through LEARNING that we find the truth. I don’t have the time today to deal with the philosophy of one truth or multiple truths, but don’t miss the point: The scripture clearly says THE truth shall make you free, the not truths, plural. In podcast #163 Who Owns Education?), I quoted Oprah Winfrey saying, “Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom.” Okay, so we’ve determined that people should have the freedom about how to unlock this key to freedom. I’ve often said, the intersection of Christianity and Economics is freedom. I guess that’s poignantly true in this podcast. Monopolies There are two monopolies at work here: The first one is quite obvious. Public schools don’t like to compete with private schools. They’re happiest when they have a monopoly on education in your town. I’m an academic, and one of the basic ideas is that no one knows it all. That’s why most academics study at various universities and then join the faculty at another university where they didn’t study. I’ve attended ten universities. But why? Why didn’t I get all my education at the same place? Because, no one and nothing, not even a University, has all the answers. You have to study broadly to gain different views of the world. When I started teaching Economics, I would teach Macro one semester, then Micro the next. My friend and co-author Sergiy Saydometov did the same thing. But that meant they either had two classes with me and none with Sergiy, or the opposite. But then, I camped on Macro, and he camped on Micro, specifically so that our students at Dallas Baptist University were forced to hear economic views from two different angles. That’s how you build a market for information. In contrast to the previously cited market where the intellectual capital of various people is poured in, the fallen nature always wants to reduce that market to a monopoly, and that’s what we have in lots of public education today. The school superintendent who complains about resources being moved from their monopoly to a competitive environment is wearing shoes that were bought in a competitive environment...