To the extent that society has any legitimate role at all in taking money from some people in order to give it to others, there are some rules that really ought to be followed when doing it.
The first rule should be: Don’t give it to people who can get along without it.
The second rule should be: Don’t use it to pay for things (education) you don’t actually get.
The third rule should be: Don’t appropriate money for one thing (education), and then let people spend it on something else (day care, therapy, hobbies, food, etc.).
The fourth rule should be: Don’t let discussions of ‘fairness’ get sidetracked into being about what gets spent, rather than about what gets provided.
So those are the rules. But before we can follow them, we first have to recognize that the cause of almost all our problems with the ‘education system’ is that we think of it as a system, when we shouldn’t.
Until we get past that misguided notion, we’re not going to get anywhere.
