Article by Colonel Nogov on Jan. 22, 2015
Tax Funded
The government schools are compulsory and “free”. Well not exactly free, somebody pays. A lot of somebodies. And those somebodies aren’t voluntary payers.
Taxes. Taxes pay for the government schools and taxes are extortion. Own a piece of land, pay taxes. Want to earn a living, pay taxes. If you refuse to pay taxes, just see if you still get to own your land or earn a living. You won’t. The government will take your property and put you in jail.
The government schools are already immoral by forcing children to attend through compulsory statutes. Add a second layer of immorality by forcing everybody to pay for them.
When taxes are used to fund or subsidize something it drives out private competition. This makes sense. Government has nearly unlimited funds while a private business has limited funds. How can a private business compete when it must charge consumers for its services while the government offers the same services to the consumers for “free”? It can’t. A private business must make profits or go out of business. A government project doesn’t have to make a profit. Usually the opposite is true. The worse a government project does, the more tax funding it gets.
Once the government drives out all the competitors it has a monopoly. Even the average statist realizes a monopoly is bad. Ironically, that’s why they ask government to break up private monopolies, not understanding that private monopolies can’t exist without government. It’s really quite humorous.
Monopolies are bad because they have a certain characteristic. When a monopoly exists, the price goes up and the quality goes down for the good or service in question. This also makes sense. Without competitors, what incentive is there to improve quality or lower prices? The opposite is true. There is every incentive to raise prices and lower quality(i.e. make more money and work less). The consumer has no other options.
This is why the government schools have such horrible track records when it comes to achievements. High drop out rates, Low literacy rates, etc. Every year the government schools get progressively worse, while at the same time costing more. This trend will continue. It cannot be stopped. I don’t care how much public outcry there is to fix, reform, or whatever the government school system, nothing can fix it. Monopolies are like cancer, they eat away at the host slowly, making the host sicker and sicker along the way until it finally drops dead.
The only thing that can fix the government school system is to abolish it. This doesn’t mean charter schools funded with taxes. It means no compulsory education statutes and no taxes used to fund education.