At Meet the Candidates Day in Croydon, one resident kept asking each candidate: Yes, or No, do you support the Free State movement? Do you support public education? Do you support the United States Constitution?
Here are three more questions that each of them should have been asked: Yes or No. Do you believe that people should respect the property and autonomy of others? Do you believe that people should pay for the services they use? Do you believe that people should be allowed to decide for themselves which charities to support and how much support to offer?
Because if you answer Yes to all three of these, then you do support the Free State movement, even if you don’t realize that. (Like Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere’s play The Bourgeois Gentleman, who is surprised to discover in his forties that he’s been speaking prose his whole life.)
And if you answer No to at least one of them, then maybe it’s you — rather than those awful Free Staters — that people should be afraid of.
Anyway, there were a lot of candidates for a lot of offices, so there wasn’t really time to ask the candidates for school board (the incumbent, Jody Underwood, and the leader of the Stand Up movement, Angi Beaulieu) a number of other questions that voters deserved to hear the answer to, including:
- Can you cite the particular sections of the state and federal constitutions that authorize taking money from people who don’t want to give it to you, in order to spend it on people who could afford to get along without it?
- Angi, you were recently featured in a documentary, standing next to what seemed to be a boat that belongs to you. If you sold that boat, you could have used the money to pay to send your kids to school, lessening the tax burden on the town. By letting the town pay for their schooling, didn’t you have the town effectively pay for that boat? That being the case, shouldn’t we all be able to come over and use it?
- The central tenets of Marxism are that we should take money from people who have more, just because they have it, and we should give that money to people who have less, just because they say they need it. Do you support either or both of those tenets? If so, then as a Marxist, in what sense do you ‘support’ the Constitution, as you said a moment ago? If not, then why did you put so much effort into the Stand Up campaign?
- The 377 people who voted Yes at the special meeting could have pooled the money they weren’t going to be paying in taxes and donated it to parents who needed help with tuition — as opposed to giving it to parents who could already afford to pay much or all of the cost for their own kids, who would then use the money to pay for things like boats, or extra real estate. Did you never consider that option, or did you consider it and deliberately reject it? If you never considered it, isn’t that the kind of failure of imagination that we can’t afford to have in our school board members? If you rejected it, what were your reasons?
- What is ‘your fair share’ of someone else’s property or money? And what is the process for determining that amount?
- Do you believe, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed? If so, why did you convene a special meeting whose purpose was to use government to take money from people without their consent?
[Follow-up] If you believe that majority rule is the same as consent, how do you square that with Article V of the federal constitution, which says that no state shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate without its consent? Also, if you believe that majority rule is the same as consent, how large a majority should suffice to make you give up one of your kidneys, if you wanted to keep it?
- If any individual uses the threat of force to take money from another individual against his will, you would say that he should be prosecuted. But when 377 people use the threat of force to take money from 300 other people, you say that it should be celebrated. So it would seem that there is some number between 1 and 377 at which robbery is transformed into democracy. What is that number?
[Follow-up] If such a number exists, what is your advice to people who would like to raise their children to believe that taking something from someone who doesn’t want to give it to you is wrong? How should they help those children understand that what is wrong for a person is okay for a large enough gang of people?
- If you had to choose between (1) the system we have now, in which well under half of students learn to read and do math at even the most basic level of proficiency, but have lots of opportunities to engage in hobbies and job training at public expense, and (2) some other system, in which nearly all students learn to read and do math with high proficiency, but have to engage in hobbies and job training at private expense, which would you pursue as a matter of school board policy? And why? No weaseling about how we can ‘do it all’, please, as half a century of experience shows that this is clearly not the case.
[Follow-up] If you prefer the latter, why did you put so much effort into convening a special meeting to fund the former?
- Twenty years ago, the state supreme court said that the justification for publicly funding education is to ensure the preservation of a free government, and so it is the state’s responsibility to provide each educable child with the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government. Others in the Stand Up movement have denounced this as a ‘crazy Free Stater idea’, have claimed that it ‘represents too narrow a view of public education’, have said that it is ‘detrimental to society’, and so on. Do you agree with the court — which, many would say, is the same as agreeing with the state constitution — or with those who reject the court’s view?
