We’ve been talking (in comments) about Ian’s great comments (Ian Underwood). They are almost always thought-provoking, which is the point of comments. Yeah, we like the sark, snide, and sarcasm, too, but the intellectual journey demands people be willing to get pushed out of their comfort zones.
We all have them, and Ian does a very nice job of approaching problems from angles most people have not considered. This was such a great example of that, pointing to numerous other examples or past clarifications, and I wasn’t certain Ian was going to reshare it as content, so I grabbed it so you could all see it (I realize a majority of readers don’t do or read comments).
Here it is.
Kids need to get out of public schools, that’s for sure. But schools are the way they are because they’re funded with taxes, and therefore are inherently political in nature:
The same is true of EFAs, although it will take a while to see exactly how that plays out. (For example, at some point using your ‘freedom’ account may require hiring only ‘certified’ teachers like Mx. Munz, or undergoing periodic ‘mental health safety checks’ on your kids.)
Everyone who would be in favor of putting the government in charge of — or even giving it a significant role in — the private ownership of guns, raise your hand. Anyone? No one?
Being armed and being educated are the two principal mechanism for resisting government overreach. Why would we want government involved in either of them?
Note that, whatever value EFAs might have, the arguments most commonly made by proponents are false, and need to be set aside in favor of open, honest discussions about exactly what their purpose is supposed to be:
By the way, the idea that using taxes to fund education is about ‘helping the parents’ is another big reason for the situation we currently find ourselves in. According to Article 3 of the state constitution, you can take my money only if you use it to protect my other rights. And Article 10 specifically prohibits taking money from everyone to ‘help’ one class of people, like parents.
For a long time, parents have treated ‘public schools’ like some kind of birthright, to be funded at everyone else’s expense. Now some other special interest group has learned how to use those stolen funds to promote its agenda, and the parents are upset about that. Loot is loot, no matter who is spending in on whom.
Tax-funded education is supposed to be about the taxpayers ensuring that citizens are literate, numerate, and rational enough to avoid voting away their own rights, along with the rights of everyone else:
https://www.bareminimumbook…
https://www.bareminimumbook…
If we took that seriously, we’d have a very, very different system in place.
