Some thought starters from Ben Peter Terpstra’s blog Weekend Libertarian:
1. Government schools aren’t necessarily public schools. BP quotes from an article by John Stossel:
Politicians claim that education and health care are different — too important to leave to market competition. Patients and parents aren’t real consumers because they don’t have the expertise to know which hospital or school is best. That’s why they must be centrally planned by government “experts.”
They should be called government or union schools, because those are the two groups whose interests come first, and in whose ideas and values your children will be inculcated, rather than those of ordinary people – the public.
More from John Stossel:
Teachers’ hourly wages exceed what most architects, accountants and nurses make. (Unions and government) .. constantly demand more money, but tripling spending and vastly increasing the ratio of staff to student have brought no improvement.
They claim that public education is “the great equalizer.” Rich and poor and different races mix and learn together. It’s a beautiful concept. But it is a lie. Rich parents buy homes in neighborhoods with better schools. As a result, public — I mean, government — schools are now more racially segregated than private schools. One survey found that public schools were significantly more likely to be almost entirely white or entirely minority. Another found that at private schools, students of different races were more likely to sit together.
James Tooley spends most of his time in the poorest parts of Africa, India and China. Those countries copied America’s “free public education,” and Tooley wanted to see how that’s worked out. What he learned is that in India and China, where kids outperform American kids on tests, it’s not because they attend the government’s free schools.
Government schools are horrible. So even in the worst slums, parents try to send their kids to private, for-profit schools. How can the world’s poorest people afford tuition? And why would they pay for what their governments offer for free?
Tooley says parents with meager resources still sacrifice to send their kids to private schools because the private owner does something that’s virtually impossible in government schools: replace teachers who do not teach. Government teachers in India and Africa have jobs for life, just like American teachers. Many sleep on the job. Some don’t even show up for work. As a result, says Tooley, “the majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school.” Even small villages have as many as six private schools, “and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost.”
It has never been clear to me why government needs to be involved in the delivery of medical and educational services at all, except perhaps in very small or remote communities. They don’t do a very good job of either.
2. On the religion of organic food. Quoting from an article by David Leyonhjelm in The Land:
It is assumed that organic food is free of pesticides. In fact, certain pesticides are permitted under the various organic codes and many organically grown plants produce endogenous pesticides that are chemically similar to man-made pesticides. And there are also occasional organic farmers who are forced to apply pesticides to save their crops. Not surprisingly, they don’t talk about that much.
It is assumed that organic production is better for the environment. That this is false is shown by the approach to controlling weeds. A conventional farmer will use herbicides to kill weeds and avoid disturbing the soil to conserve moisture, minimise erosion and preserve topsoil organic matter. Organic farmers are not permitted to use herbicides, so they have to use cultivation.
I remember reading somewhere that while ‘organic’ food constitutes about 5% of total food supply in the UK, it accounts for some 25% of food poisoning cases, because of the far higher incidence of highly allergenic mould and insect residues. It is all very well for cosy well-off Westerners to talk about the importance of being organic, but if everyone did as they asked, half the world would starve. Modern scientific agriculture, with its very carefully applied and non-toxic fertilisers and pesticides, allows high levels of productivity which provide affordable food for the majority of the world’s people. But I guess they don’t figure for the organophiles.
3. On gay divorce and gay marriage; an article worth reading in full. A couple of sample paragraphs:
In the National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke writes, “In Norway, male same-sex marriages are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages, and female same-sex marriages are an astonishing 167 percent more likely to be dissolved. In Sweden, the divorce risk for male-male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages, and the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men.”
This is important to note, for many reasons, if one values children’s welfare. But first, and most obviously, it appears as though many gay-marriage activists don’t respect society’s time-honoured institution of marriage, period. After the honeymoon period, they fly. Within only years, many divorcing gays, in media-approved progressive nations are already beating broken straights to Splitsville.
The claim that high rates of infidelity, divorce and domestic abuse among homosexual couples don’t matter because those things happen in heterosexual relationships as well, is so dishonest as to be farcical. Rates of infidelity, violence and breakup are not just slightly higher in homosexual relationships; they are much higher. It is monstrously wrong to refuse to consider this when placing children for adoption.
Just one little note on marriage breakup. It is sometimes claimed that 50% of all marriages now end in divorce. This is (almost) true. But it is also highly misleading. Only (only! – still far too high!) one quarter to one fifth of marriages between previously unmarried heterosexual partners will end in divorce. If you and your spouse have never been married before, the chances are very good that you will be together for life. The overall figures for divorce are dragged into disproportion by serial divorcers – those who divorce and remarry more than twice.
