A young man who liked the idea of cutting defense spending took issue with my insistence that any funds that are cut should be returned to taxpayers, not redirected into other government departments and spending. In particular, he thinks that charter schools are a good idea. He writes “While it is obvious that the government has wasted money on education in the past, charter schools are proving to be a very effective use of  public funds that would otherwise not have been directed towards educating our youth by the private sector.”

I’m not going to get into how effective a use of funds this is by examining results, because such results are unobtainable when funding is coerced as in this case. There are no prices and no profits that can measure results, so the failure of calculation criticism of such forced spending applies. And I certainly cannot say, and neither can the writer, that the funds forced into charter schools would otherwise have not been directed at all into education. Taxpayer funds all go into a pool and they are not identified as to their source by the government. No one knows what specific goods within private sector spending are abridged because of taxes. The resulting pooled monies then are directed by government into various objects, again without identifying where they came from.  Hence, his argument fails alone on that score.

However, what I dashed off to him was on moral lines. It went like this:

I meant what I said. Anything financed by FORCE (as through taxes) is not generating reproductive capital. Instead it’s always extracting capital. It’s always consumption.

Imagine that you and some others get together to create a charter school. How will you fund this school? Will you pay for it yourselves? Will all those who subscribe to it pay the fees? Will you seek some charitable funding? All of these are proper in my book.

Or will you do something like this? [The link is to Charter School Funding in California by public funds.] That’s the typical funding method. It’s to make other people pay for your school. That is not proper in my book.

Do you believe in government by consent? I do. Right down the line, to the point where government should be voluntarily chosen. If I don’t want to make other people pay for the government of my choice that I arrange with others (hypothetically of course), I sure don’t want to make other people pay for my schooling or that of my children. I don’t FORCE other people to pay for my car or house or meals either.

This is my moral objection to publicly-funded charter schools.

Now if I make an exception to the use of FORCE to fund schools, then you can make an exception to the use of FORCE to free the people of Iraq or to pay someone’s medical bills or any number of other possibilities. These exceptions if made the rule create a society of people all attempting to make each other pay for what they want done. This cannot possibly work out well, now can it? Doing the immoral thing is also doing the wrong thing in practical terms of the consequences.

You can argue until you’re blue in the face that YOUR particular favorite object of these FORCED FUNDS has benefits or augments capital or whatever, but you have no market test of it because you are taxing the funds out of people remote from the enterprise you favor. If it’s such a good project, why isn’t it a paying proposition? Why do you require to fund it by coercion?

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff