Liberty Alone

I have been wondering the same question. Probably because it was originally Milton Friedman’s idea, and Liberal Democrats have absorbed the socialist propaganda about him being in the extreme Right, etc.

Joe: But that’s false. Considering the rich pay more taxes and are already paying taxes for their child’s education.
They are merely getting the benefits promised by the government when they paid their taxes.
Its a nice emotional argument, but doesn’t have any basis in

Also, we’re giving opportunity to the poor. We’re giving them the opportunity to go to private schools. We’re expanding opportunity for the poor, that has to be more important than stinging the rich surely?

Not everything the Tories talk about is to redistribute from the poor to the rich, if it was why on earth were they elected by working class people throughout the 20th century?
Again, you are resorting to cheap politics rather than actually looking at the issue.
(as a side note, funny how social mobility was greater under Thatcher than under Labour… perhaps Thatcher was concerned about the poor, just not from the socialist position which does as much as it can to damage their prospects).

I just think we need to be able to discuss various forms of empowerment- and choice-driven improvements to education without being intimidated by Labour - and the Tories and the educational establishment - into being closed-minded on the subject.

Here’s a chunk of David Laws’ Brighton speech, because he says it better than I do. He starts by saying you couldn’t design a system that discriminates more against the disadvantaged than the current one.

“Our aim, of course, must be a good local school in every single neighbourhood. But that is an excellent aspiration, it is not a policy. The challenge is how you get high quality local schools in every area.

First, you devolve power. Second, you empower. Third, you give school leaders the freedom to innovate. (…) We must replace Labour’s “Localism Lite” with real Liberal Democrat devolution.But, as liberals, it cannot be enough only to move power down from national politicians to local politicians.

Our vision is not merely “the empowered local politician in the enabling state”, it is for the “empowered citizen.”

(…)Schools shouldn’t have the soft option of picking the best pupils. It should be the parents and pupils who are empowered to choose their schools. If we believe in empowering parents and pupils, part of that empowerment is choice. Choice is not a dirty word: it is one of the essential freedoms in a liberal society. And it is a liberal way of promoting real diversity, innovation, and higher standards.”

Tristan: False? Rubbish!

Subsidising public schools has a deadweight cost. We don’t do it now (much), if we did there would be a cost. You might not like it, but surely you can do better than just saying “false”.

And it would redistribute from the poor to the rich, or more accurately from everybody who doesn’t use private schools to those who currently do. Relative to the status quo. That the status quo includes some progressive taxation doesn’t alter the effect of the voucher.

Not everything the Tories talk about is redistribution from the poor to the rich, right, but much of what they actually do is.

This shouldn’t rule out vouchers, but any policy of vouchers should be honest about the distributional change and increase in public spending it involves, and perhaps make up for it with changes elsewhere in the tax system.

Frankly, if this is cheap politics, then ignoring the downside as you are doing, is free politics, as in beer.

Anon, no I’m not thinking that.

Tristan,

I’m guessing you aren’t a parent, or if you are you are one of the privileged few with a selection of excellent and free schools nearby.

For most of the country outside of a few niches in the nicer parts of London and Surry, “choice” of Schools, Hospitals, etc is a myth - just as we can’t choose our water supplier, we can’t really choose a school or hospital.

For instance, the only significant hospital in Cornwall is Treliske, for any serious illness, emergancy or injury it’s my only real option, the next nearest alternative is Derriford, near Plymouth, in Devon that’s a 3 hour round trip from Truro (by car), or up to 6 hours (by car) further into cornwall - using public transport would make the round trip 8 or more hours.

So where’s the choice there?

Same applies to schools - all our local schools are oversubscribed, it simply isn’t rational to travel more than an hour each way to take your child to school, and once your child is at a school, changing your decision simply isn’t workable without major disruption and negative impact on the child.

Some things are natural monopolies - mains water supplies, schools and hospitals, for instance. Trying to make these work through ‘competition’ or ‘the market’ is like nailing jelly to a window - you end up with no benefits and a dangerous mess.

The only way to make hospitals and schools work well is to make them directly and locally accountable, the same applies to the Quango’s that thrive around them.

The free market solution of having a rubbish school nearby and a good school 300 miles away with a 4 year waiting list and entrance exam isn’t a solution at all - it’s not a choice any rational person would want to have to make.

“Considering the rich pay more taxes and are already paying taxes for their child’s education.
They are merely getting the benefits promised by the government when they paid their taxes.”

Hi Tristan,

I don’t have kids, but pay taxes that are spent on other people’s kids’ education – how do I get the benefit promised to me?

What you say would be true if you were setting this system up from scratch, but we’re not doing that. At the moment the cost of a private education comes in two parts: the fees that are paid directly to the school AND a (hidden) premium paid in tax to cross-subsidise the state education sector.

Introducing a voucher scheme would inevitably allow parents putting their children into private education to recover some of that premium (as, indeed, you suggest). To be fiscally neutral, that would mean raising taxes generally, and result in a transfer from anyone without a child in private education to those who do, which almost certainly means from the less well off to the better off.

Of course, what is more likely – and worse – is that rather than raising taxes to compensate, the education budget would remain the same, effectively paying for a TAX CUT for rich parents by CUTTING spending on state schools. There would be some benefit for children at the margins whose parents are just wealthy enough with the addition of a voucher to get them to a private school. But the poorest families, who are never going to be able to afford private and almost by definition are the ones most in need of the opportunity of better education are going to be left in a system with less funding.

While recognising that there is SOME unfairness in a system that double charges those rich enough to educate their kids privately, it is grotesquely MORE unfair to penalise poor kids in order to correct that.

The answer to my question, of course, is that we all benefit indirectly from a better educated nation – e.g. better education leads to stronger economy leads to larger tax base leads to more spending and/or lower taxes for everyone. That is what the rich (and everyone else) are paying taxes for, NOT a personal gift of education for their child.

Bestest,
R

Aaron, please look at the Netherlands. There has been a system similar to school vouchers for over 90 years, and it has increased, not decreased, the choice of least privileged families. No children in the Netherlands are left without education, and the Dutch society is much more equal (and free!) than the British one. The facts speak for themselves. Schools and hospitals aren’t natural monopolies, except perhaps the most sparsely populated areas, but that doesn’t justify denying the choice from other areas, as well. And even in a less sparsely populated area you could choose your hospital, if it’s not a case of emergency. You know that it always isn’t. (As for the water, a council could tender the water supply, and whoever makes the winning offer, would lead its water to the pipes.)

To Matthew Huntbach I don’t even bother to answer. He is just repeating his dogmatic socialist mantra and refuses to listen what others have to say. I think others would be wise to ignore him aswell, maybe he would then get the point.

Anonymous - typical neo-Trot behaviour. Anyone who isn’t 100% for us, who even quibbles about details, is one of the enemy and isn’t even worth talking with. To the old Trots I’m a dyed-in-the-wool evil capitalist, to the neo-Trots I’m an evil socialist. Yawn, talk about closed minds.

Tristan - will come back later on your points, don’t have time now.

I will add something to what Richard said that might be of interest to libertarians.

Although people who use private schools are currently paying twice for education, the second payment is voluntary - they are choosing to spend that money rather than use a community school. The voucher proposal is to replace that voluntary payment with a compulsory payment raised by taxation.

Joe Otten, you are clearly mistaken about many things. Libertarians oppose taxes in general, because they aren’t voluntary.

However, if there is an obligatory payment for the education, or for health care, people should at least be able to decide where they get the services they have already paid for. Now they aren’t. The very rich can afford to pay twice, but people with middle or low income can’t. School vouchers would enable also people with middle or low income to choose the school for their children. And they should have that right, because they have already paid for it.

Tristan - ‘”the poor are too stupid” argument’:

If you believe there are no handicaps to getting a decent education involved with coming from a background of poverty and little contact with educated society, then how do you account for the fact that there is a massive correlation between schools that have bad results and poor areas, and schools that have good results and wealthy areas? If you put it down to just the school being good or bad, you must suppose this is just a coincidence, and it might equally have worked out that the “bad” schools were in the wealthy areas and the “good” schools were in the poor areas. I do not know if you are any sort of statistician, but even if you are not, I am sure you can see the probability that what we are observing is just a coincidence is vanishingly small.

I know from my own life experiences that for every poor child who has parents who are pushing them and know how and where to push them, there are many whose parents don’t know how or don’t care to push them, or who get trapped into the whole anti-education culture that is so predominant amongst poorer people in this country. It’s your failure even to acknowledge this as a factor which is condescending, or maybe just ignorant, I don’t know enough about your own life background to be sure on that.

The fear about vouchers scheme is that it’s just a way for the well-educated and privileged to get more tax-payers’ money into educating their kids, while shunting off to ever worse and hopeless facilities those kids whose parents don’t know or don’t care. It’ll be the middle classes who’ll set up the private schools you see flourishing under this system, whose kids will be nice and easy to educate, so the private schools will want to educate them, it’ll be the poor people whose kids are more challenging and expensive to educate who the private schools will say “sorry, it’s our freedom to decide who we want, and we don’t want you, you’re too much trouble for us”.

The point about Eton is that it does involve selection either by ability or by money, or by a bit of both - so the really clever poor kids can be used as an asset to help the less clever rich kids who pay higher fees. You haven’t denied this is how the voucher system you endorse would operate, so I assume that’s what you want. Thus it also means poor kids being turned away. The fear is that NO schools will be interested in educating children who have neither great ability nor top-up fees to offer, so they really will be shunted off to last-resort rubbishy facilities.

Nothing you have said suggests you care at all about this. But I will put this down to ignorance rather than malice.

Anonymous - yes I have been challenging people who endorse extreme free-market ideology and claim to be associated with the Liberal Democrat party. I did not realise until the leadership election prompted me to start looking at blogs just how many of this sort of person has invaded the party of which I have been an active member for 30 years. But I assume if people put up blogs it’s to promote discussion, and I have been discussing these issues with these people. I have been using my real name to do it, the name I have always gone by in my political activity, and my academic activity, I have nothing to hide.

Having said all this, I’ve noted that “vouchers” could mean all sorts of things, I’m not opposed to the idea altogether, but I am asking questions about how it works in question. It does not inspire confidence if the only reply I get from those who most strongly endorse the idea is abuse.

Matthew Huntbach: “yes I have been challenging people who endorse extreme free-market ideology and claim to be associated with the Liberal Democrat party…”

Now I see. The difference is, that when you are trying to purge party of people who don’t agree with you, its “challenging”, when other are doing it, they are “Trots”. Thank you for clarifying it to me.

BTW, I have lived in the Netherlands, and I can assure you, that the average people there don’t consider the system they have had for over 90 years as “extreme free-market ideology”. Actually, when I descbribed the British NHS to a moderate Left-leaning friend there, she rose her eyebrows and called it a “communist” system. Maybe living abroad for some time might broaden your views, as well.

More rubbish, sorry but I don’t have much time for it. ANyway, if you don’t know the theory of liberalism, you don’t know what is liberal and what isn’t, what has become already obvious by now. There are things which might work, but aren’t liberal, and there might be working liberal solutions as well, but if you don’t know your theory, how would you know about the liberal alternatives?

Enough of this, I will correct the misinformation about the Dutch school system you are spreading, so that others wouldn’t be misled.

“From what I know of the Netherlands schools system, schools are rigidly divided into Catholic ones, Protestant ones and Secular ones, and this division applies to much else in welfare provision in that country as well.”

You are refering to the pillarisation. However, the division isn’t that rigid anymore, your information seems to be sebveral decades old.

There are for instance so-called “samenwerkingsbasisschools”, which unite for instance a Catholic and a Protestant, or a religious and a secular (publicly or privately owned) school, and where most classes are tought in united groups, and religion in separate classes. Then many religious schools are popular among non-religious parents because the high quality of their classes, and they are obliged to take in also non-religious pupils, if they want to be part of the school voucher system. Etc. The division in other sectors of the society isn’t that rigid anymore, either.

“Well, this is interesting, given how much many Liberal Democrats hate faith schools and would wish to forcibly abolish them.”

I believe in religious freedom, and that also includes a right to practise the religion, and teach it to one’s children, as long as they aren’t totally excluded from other influences. Actually the Dutch system was born as a compromise between different religious groups after a fight which schools should have public and which shouldn’t. But the resilt is that also schools using some alternative educational method, like Montessori method or Dalton method, have flourished. Nowadays there are both religious and secular schools using these methods.

“But anyway, if you think the Netherlands system works, tell me why, I’m interested to hear.”

Could you elaborate what do you need to know? The Dutch system has been used for over 90 years, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt the pupils or put them in a more inequal position. You might be interested to read this short article about school vouchers.

“I think, however, they pay much higher taxes there than we do here, which some would say is illiberal.”

Not all of the higher taxes are spent to education, I’m sure that there would be many other things from where to cut. Of course given that a large part of the Netherlands is below the sea level, some money is also needed to build and keep the dams, and these taxes can’t be cut.

Anonymous - I believe there is more to freedom than freedom for money. Some of the “economic liberals” appear not to get that, and that is the root of concern when such people spout out their enthusiasm for vouchers.