Stephen W. Carson: Would he abolish public schools? I hope I don’t need to remind anyone that that would be an astonishing act of centralized tyranny for a president to do.

An act of centralized tyranny against whom?

For something to count as an act of tyranny, it must have an identifiable victim. Whose individual rights would be violated by the President abolishing local government schools?

Arthur,

Again, I’m not denying that parents have a legitimate right to reclaim the money that is stolen from them in taxes, whether through education vouchers or through other means.

What I am saying is that voucher systems constitute a government subsidy to private schools, in virtue of forcing the parents to spend that reclaimed money within a cartel of government-approved private schools. There is nothing wrong with parents reclaiming stolen money through the voucher system, but the cartelized schools that financially benefit from federal patronage are still subject to the usual libertarian analysis and criticism offered against government subsidies.

There is no benefit that you could possibly get from a government voucher scheme that you could not get just as easily from a no-strings-attached tax break, and some specific evils that vouchers but not tax breaks would produce. So the question is, given the choice, why advocate the cockamamie transitional government scheme, rather than just advocating the simple libertarian measure?

No, “returning tax-payers’ money” is not a subsidy. But forcing the recipients to give the “returned” money to one of a select cartel of government-approved “private” schools is a government subsidy to those schools.

If you want to return tax-payers’ money, why not just advocate tax cuts?

Jonathan,

Everyone knows that the only true libertarians are those who support creating new transnational government trade bureaucracies and federal government subsidies for “private” schools. Didn’t you get the latest memo from HQ?