government vs. the people

I have been wanting to write something about the Supreme Court's poor decision in the Gonzales v. Raich decision but due to fire school, I haven't yet have the time.  I hope to get to it.  But in the mean time, here is Paul Jacob's take on it.  It brings up the most important  of the things I wanted to get across: The commerce clause is not carte blanche for the Federal Government to be all-powerful in all material respects.  Quite a while back I wrote another xanga entry concerning this, but I would eventually like to pick apart this particular Supreme Court opinion since it is far more current than the wheat case of the thirties that I addressed in that one.

Additionally, Jeff Jacoby wrote an interesting take entitled «Separating school and state», which discusses the most obvious solution to all the "what schools should and should not teach" debates across the country.  As I read it, I first had to think and consider this:  Why are school administrators, school boards, and bureaucrats being allowed to override parents?

The answer is twofold, really.  One is political and the second is economical.

The political answer is that even many school boards (and especially departments of education) are unintereted in what parents think or believe, and are so far removed from them that they have no serious repercussions from failing to obey the will of those they are supposed to serve and reperesent.  This is unacceptable.

This leads me to the economical half.  Without competition, there is no inspiration for the schools to try to actually improve or to actually satisfy the parents' concerns and complaints.  In fact, there is no need to do so at all.  Especially as long as private schooling costs on top of school taxes, which is an underhanded system any way you slice it.  Without basic competition and actually having to get students to get their pay, the public schools will continue to ignore public and parental concerns.

The solution?

I don't know for sure.  Some semblance of ownership, be it actual ownership or just control, of the parents over the school is a must.  This can be direct control, or the control that actual choice allows (by levelling the cost playing field between public and private schools, in whatever way that would be executed). 

Personally, I like the idea of some sort of competition.  It makes marketplaces thrive and competitors compete to be more desirable than the other.  This means constant competition rather than temporary, and it means that if one slacks off they actually have to answer to the marketplace for it.

Common sense?  I like to think so.  But you would be amazed the lack of common sense that is shown by socialized programs in most cases.  There are three basic economic ideas that must be observed in order to maintain both quality, quantity, and price:

Without competition, costs go up.
Without competition, quality goes down.
When competition is precluded by governments, the above two reasons cannot be cured by the creation of competition.

And no, private schools are not "competition".  The parents and others still have to pay tuition for the private schools and school taxes for the public schools they do not use, which is a corrupt system of funding.  Takes away the inspiration of public schools to compete for the parents to put their students in the public school that doesn't care what parents think anyway, wouldn't you say?