I just finished listening to a webinar by the School Funding Fairness Project. Their whole approach to ‘funding’ (which focuses on fairness in spending while totally ignoring fairness in education) is based on two misconceptions.
The first misconception is that the state constitution requires the state to provide each student with an adequate education.
The second is that the state constitution requires ‘uniform taxation.’
The first misconception, I’ve written about elsewhere, but to recap:
Article 83, which is the basis for the Claremont decisions and for the recent Conval decision, says that seminaries and public schools are to be ‘cherished.’ So if the state can’t fund, operate, or regulate seminaries, it can’t do those things for public schools either. Which is to say, the state has no financial responsibility to do anything about public schools, and, in fact, is prohibited from pretending that it does. That’s the sort of thing a fifth-grader can figure out but which routinely escapes law school graduates.
Also, Article 83 says that ‘Free and fair competition in the trades and industries is an inherent and essential right of the people and should be protected against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy it.’ The courts have decided that this means it’s the state’s job to fund, operate, and regulate a monopoly to destroy competition in the industry of education.
The second misconception is perhaps even more insidious. You can verify for yourself that the word ‘uniform’ appears nowhere in the state constitution, whether in reference to taxes or anything else. And note that even if the constitution did require taxes to be uniform, that just means that everyone pays the same amount.
But the court (1) pretends that there is a requirement for uniformity and (2) conflates a uniform tax with a uniform tax rate. Here’s the difference.
Consider three citizens: Manny, Moe, and Jack. They own properties worth $100 thousand, $1 million, and $10 million, respectively. Now imagine that there is a need to raise $3,000 by taxing them.
Under a uniform tax, each of them would pay $1,000.
Under a uniform tax rate, Manny would pay about $27, Moe would pay about $270, and Jack would pay about $2700. This is practically the opposite of a ‘uniform tax.’ (It is, in fact, Marxism. Remember back when that was something to be fought?)
So, to sum up. The courts have invented a fictional right to an education and elevated it above an actual right to free and fair competition; they have decided that the best way to protect people against monopolies is to set one up; they have invented a fictional requirement for uniform taxes; and then decided that this requires uniform tax rates.
I got started in public speaking (and writing) by asking (a variant of) this question:
If the courts aren’t going to take the state constitution seriously, why should any of us — especially those of us who are serving in the legislature — take the courts seriously?
Shenanigans like this illustrate clearly and dramatically why we shouldn’t. And situations like this provide a perfect opportunity for the legislature to remind the courts that the branches are co-equal. The judicial branch is not, like the pigs at Animal Farm, more equal than the other branches.
A phrase you often hear among siblings is: You’re not the boss of me. This is exactly what the legislature needs to say to the courts. If you agree with me, contact your representatives and let them know that they have your support to tell the courts that the state constitution means what it says, not whatever the courts want it to.
The webinar ended with a plea for sympathetic listeners to ‘harass your representatives’ on this issue, specifically to do whatever the courts tell them to. So you know your representatives will be hearing from them. They need to hear from you, too.