This is one in an occasional series about how government agents cause or heighten animosity among people in society. See the previous parts.
There came news recently of how much it costs to keep one child in a government-run school for one year: nearly $25,000.00. Perhaps “year” is a bit generous; there are multiple vacations—especially a winter and summer break—to subtract. I have titled this “Schooling” because “Education” seemed too generous; half of the students do not even graduate. But I leave those alone in favor of my main point.
This causes conflict in society by taxing everyone to pay for the schooling of a few. Taxes are taken from childless singles and couples, grandparents, empty-nesters, and everyone in between and used to fund schooling for a percentage of the population. People with school-age children pay less than they otherwise would by having politicians take that money (“taxation”) from other people to spend on the schooling of their children. This causes resentment on the part of those who do not have school-age children and otherwise do not want to pay for the schooling of others, and it causes sentiments of false entitlement on the part of people with children in government-run schools.
In a free society forced redistribution of wealth would be seen for what it is: theft, or more precisely, robbery.
Common Objection. Educating children is a benefit to everyone to avoid roving bands of uneducated, unemployable people, who would harm everybody; therefore, everybody should pay for schooling. The first problem when a government runs a school is one of calculation. There is no way to know if everyone benefits from universal schooling, and for those who do, there is no way to know how much. Try to put an annual dollar value on how much you benefit from (your own and) everyone else’s children being schooled: $0.25? $36,532.00? There are too many variables to calculate such a figure. Politicians, tax assessors, and bureaucrats are just people; they have no special divining abilities you do not already possess. They may have access to more records about what was spent on schooling in recent years, but how can they know how effectively was spent those dollars? Furthermore, what bearing does that have on the future? Why stop at thirteen years of schooling?
As a quick exercise, why is schooling set aside as a benefit that must be borne by everybody? Toilet training is perhaps a greater benefit to everybody so we need not slog about in waste. Yet, I do not find people calling for a federal Department of Toilet Training. For that matter, when I plant some colorful flowers in a window box, everybody who passes by benefits from its beauty out of my hard work (portion of salary to buy soil and flowers; time and labor to plant them), yet I have no authority to collect a tax from my neighbors.
One way to do the calculation is the payback time. According to the Census Bureau (if you can believe them), the average salary for people age 25+ with a High School diploma (and no college), is around $25,000 per year. That means the ‘payback’ period is nearly infinite. Collecting $325,000 in taxes from those individuals is impossible, in fact, they will not pay anything like that in taxes across their entire lives. Since 75% of individuals, even with 4-year college degrees earn less than $50,000 per year, it’s hard to see any payback, ever. This is especially true if you add on $100,000 for a 4 year college degree.
In other words, it would take 15 years of the individual to have enough gross earnings to cover the cost of his or her education. If you count net earnings, it’s more like 30 years. In other words, most of your productive years are spent earning enough money to cover the cost of your education. That doesn’t make sense.
All of the above is only exacerbated by the fact that our education system is failing to teach proper science, arithmetic and history. Spending more and more on education has generated worse and worse results. Throwing more money at it will only make the problem worse, not better.
When a thing is free, most people don’t care about the quality…..