There are people (including readers of GraniteGrok) who claim that a school choice program that is funded by taxes is a ‘free market solution’ to the problem of educating children.
I find this odd. Whether you think school choice is a good idea or a bad one, as long as taxes are involved, it cannot sensibly be called a ‘free market solution.’
Why?
There are lots of possible ways of defining ‘free market.’ Here is Milton Friedman, for example:
The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it.
So people will say: The exchange of school choice funds between a parent and a school or other provider of services is voluntary. That makes it a free market exchange, right?
Wrong. It leaves out a third party to the transaction: the taxpayers from whom the money was taken against their will. That is, it’s not a two-party transaction,
X purchases something from Y.
but rather a three-party transaction:
X purchases something from Y, using money taken (by the threat of force) from Z.
If all the parties aren’t participating voluntarily in the transaction, then it’s not a free market.
At least, that’s what I thought until recently. What I’ve realized, though, is that we’re seeing one of those redefinitions of terms that happen every so often and which turn things on their heads.
That is, the free in free market once referred to something like free will. It described the voluntary nature of an action. But now it refers to something like free lunch, where you don’t pay for something because someone else is paying for it.
Note that this makes robbery into a free market transaction. Suppose I take money from you through the threat of force, then give it to someone else in exchange for a meal. Or I give it to someone else, who then exchanges it for a meal. This is a pretty exact analogy to the free market transaction that we call ‘school choice.’
We’ve seen this kind of redefinition before, as when the word right ended up being used as a synonym for the word entitlement — which is actually the opposite of a right in that it requires rights to be violated in order to provide it.
For example, X’s ‘right’ to high-speed Internet or gender-affirming surgery requires violating Z’s right to property in order to pay for it.
It’s like using the word ‘customer’ when you really mean ‘beneficiary.’
There are good reasons to drop this line of argument entirely.
First, it’s misleading, which makes it hard to have sensible discussions about school choice. This is reason enough to avoid the use of the term.
But perhaps more importantly, when school choice fails to fix any of our actual problems — as all subsidies ultimately do — having spent years describing it as a ‘free market’ program will provide ammunition for people who want to argue that that free markets can’t work.
But if we want people to stop using free market to describe situations where one person is robbed in order to enable two other people to engage in commerce, we need to have a different term to describe those situations.
How about freebie market?
