It’s becoming popular among school choice supporters to accuse Elizabeth Warren of hypocrisy, or inconsistency, or ‘failing her own purity test’, because she sent one of her children to an elite private school (and is doing the same thing for some of her grandchildren). This, I believe, is both a tactical and a strategic error.
Even publications like Reason, which should know better, are piling on, saying things like: ‘The problem comes when politicians like Warren try to deny that opportunity to parents who do not have as much money as they do.’
But wait a minute. She used her own money to send her own child to a school that she chose. And as far as I can tell, she hasn’t said a single thing, ever, about preventing other parents from doing the same thing. She’s not trying to deny that opportunity to anyone. So where’s the hypocrisy? The inconsistency? The lack of purity?
Where’s the beef?
The response from school choice activists is often some form of this question:
To which the most reasonable answer is another question:
Why should only rich kids get to live in nicer houses, eat better food, have a wider range of formative life experiences, wear better clothes, have access to better technology, get better medical care, and so on?
Wait, I know this one… Because they’re rich?
Rich people are always going to be able to better provide for their children. Being able to give their kids a head start, a leg up, a competitive edge, is one of the things that motivates people to get rich in the first place. Which is good for the rest of us, because they get rich by competing to provide us with goods and services that we want.
(If you have children of your own, ask yourself whether you would prefer that they have exactly the same opportunities as everyone else’s children, or better ones? And if your answer is better, does this mean you don’t want other children to have good opportunities? Are you being hypocritical, or inconsistent? Not at all.)
Or, we might answer it with another question: What other inequalities should we be mitigating by taking money from people who have it in order to spend it on people who don’t? Should we all have access to the same quality of everything? Is the fact that we don’t somehow unfair? And if so, is it the role of government to make things fair?
If Reason is correct, the fact that some people have more and better choices than others is a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved. And as we know, redistributing wealth is the government’s preferred solution to every problem.
If Reason is correct, maybe what we need to do is let people make whatever choices they want in every area of life, and then just have the bills sent to the government. Also, to empower that government to pay those bills with property seized from people who have too much of it (like multiple homes, or overly large bank accounts and stock portfolios). Because who are rich people to deny the opportunities that they have to people who do not have as much money as they do?
Attacking Warren on this issue, for this reason, is a tactical error because it isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. It will, however, make it easier for opponents of school choice to dismiss anything else that supporters are saying without bothering to listen to it. (‘Wow, they’re completely misstating her position. I’ll bet they’re doing the same thing with their other arguments.’)
More importantly, it’s a strategic error, because it endorses the use of jealousy as a justification for making public policy choices, which directly undermines the ideas of liberty and property rights and free markets.
Making this issue about jealousy serves only the interests of the current education establishment (which, assisted by politicians like Comrade Volinsky, uses jealousy like jet fuel, to power its continual expansion). By focusing on parity rather than adequacy, these snarky attacks on Warren move the discussion 180 degrees away from where it needs to be going.
But what’s worse is that they blaze a trail for making jealousy the basis for public policy in every other area of life. So ironically, while Warren isn’t really being hypocritical at all, supporters of school choice, if they keep going down this road, will find themselves open to future charges of hypocrisy when they have to explain, where other matters of choice are concerned, why ‘only rich people should be able to ___________’.
There are so many good reasons to oppose Warren’s candidacy, so many valid attacks on the lunacy of her positions, it seems counter-productive to waste ammunition on this one — which may score some minor rhetorical points on one issue, but only by implicitly endorsing her entire campaign.
