The Responsible Puppet recently announced his support for the various school levies in his area. I have no doubt that they passed, few Minnesotans have ever seen a tax they didn’t like. Very well, let us consider his justifications:
1. Teachers are generally good people and they aren’t paid enough.
2. It is the government’s job to pay for schooling K-12. And our nation is better because it does.
3. There are poor or uneducated people who can’t home-school.
4. Our school systems need to be improved, and not funding them is not going to help.
1. Teachers are massively overpaid. Other than politicians, there is no group of people who work so little, to so little positive effect, and are so handsomely overcompensated.
2. It is not the government’s job to pay for schooling. The high priority that Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler placed on government-funded, government-controlled schooling should suffice to demonstrate that in this regard, our nation can only be considered better off if you are a Communist or National Socialist.
3. This does not mean that government schools are the only option.
4. The US public school system is one of the most richly funded in the world and also happens to be one of the worst performing educational systems in the world. This absurd logic is no different than arguing that the Vikings should cure their quarterback problem by increasing the salaries of Tarvaris Jackson, Brooks Bollinger and Kelly Holcomb.