ALL OF US DIE BUT SOME OF US ARE NEVER DEAD DEAD

Milton Friedman died almost two decades ago but his voice continues to ring out. He speaks beyond the grave and, therefore, although he’s dead he’s definitely not dead dead. His imprimatur can still be found on countless legislative proposals, and he remains the twentieth century’s greatest saint of neoliberal economics.

Indeed, another undead economist—John Maynard Keynes— recognized how, even after they die, some achieve such an iconic status that they remain influential and anything but dead dead.

Here’s how Keynes put it:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Friedman is one of those who are “more powerfully than is commonly understood” and continues to shape the thinking of “practical” men and women who might appear to the rest of us —and sometimes even to themselves— as mushroom people, as people who sort of just spring up and who are free of the “intellectual influence” of the “academic scribblers” that preceded them.

More to the point of this blog: The contemporary push for, and justification of, “school choice” and “vouchers” has Friedman’s fingerprints all over it. His 1955 article, “The Role of Government in Education,” is rightly viewed as the magna carta of the modern day school choice/voucher movement and, furthermore, an examination of that “document” provides compelling reasons why that movement ought to be seen as part of a long-range strategy to whittle down the public sector to the size of a knub.

FRIEDMAN’S FIGHT FOR VOUCHERS

In his 1955 article, Friedman immediately names what he sees as the primary problem plaguing the broader political economy, namely, the alleged twin tendencies toward greater government intervention in the market and a growing threat of “collectivism.” To hear Friedman tell it, the sphere of education has been on a trajectory that’s characterized by increasing governmental control:

Education is today largely paid for and almost entirely administered by governmental bodies or non-profit institutions. This situation has developed gradually and is now taken so much for granted that little explicit attention is any longer directed to the reasons for the special treatment of education even in countries that are predominantly free enterprise in organization and philosophy. The result has been an indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility

Lurking behind this putative “indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility” is that nasty and muscular ghost of collectivism that threatens individual sovereignty. For Friedman, then, the goal is to vanquish the ghost of collectivism, and then is best done by ensuring that markets are competitive, that individuals are free to choose in accordance with their tastes and preferences, and that goverment’s role is limited to preserving “the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free.”

With regard to education, then, government’s role is to foster and support the development of market-like conditions wherein schools have to compete for students and wherein parents are free to choose from the wide variety of educational offerings that’ll supposedly be spawned by a marketized educational space. Parents should be free to choose between public and private schools and between religious and secular schools. The name of the game, again, is competition and choice.

Friedman justifies the issuance of vouchers by noting that education generates “neighborhood effects” or what economists typically refer to as positive externalities. By this, he means that a literate population contributes to social stability and, furthermore, that an educated person not only contribute to such goods as economic growth but that they also make better neighborhoods. In other words, the benefits of education are not only experienced by the family and the child who receives the education. The benefits “spill-over” and positively impacts the rest of us.

Here’s how Friedman puts it:

A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but to other members of the society; the education of my child contributes to other people's welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society. Yet it is not feasible to identify the particular individuals (or families) benefited or the money value of the benefit and so to charge for the services rendered. There is therefore a significant "neighborhood effect."

Because the “gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or his parents but to other members of the society,” it’s permissible for government—the public— to share in the cost of that education. Thus, government is justified in providing vouchers to help families defray the cost of education.

But—and this is important to remember— government ought not to provide funding assistance through taxation dedicated to the upkeep and improvement of the public school system. Friedman, as mentioned above, wants to bust up what he sees as the government’s monopoly and replace it with voucher holding households on the hunt in a marketized educational space for any school of their choice. Government helps to finance the cost of education but does not administer that educational space.

Choice, freedom, competition, individual sovereignty all combined to paint a picture that any citizen would find reasonable, right? I mean, after all, how could anyone possibly take exception to people being supplied with money to go on an educational shopping spree? Who could object to a competitive process that would kill off persistently poor performing schools and allow the cream to rise to the top?

The problem, though, is that once you peer deep enough and long enough behind the rhetoric, you find that the voucher and school choice movement is part of a larger strategy to whittle the size of government down to a knub and to uphold some of the most pernicious assaults on human dignity imaginable.

FRIEDMAN’S FOOTNOTE

Friedman’s landmark article cited above—The Role of Government in Education— dropped one year after the Supreme Court’s ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregating students in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. In response to the Court’s decision, southern White political leaders made it clear that they planned to engage in a pattern of “massive resistance,” an aggressive push back against the possibility that their little pumpkins would end up having to share classroom space with the children of a people that they deemed to be inherently inferior.

Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, would end up shutting down the entire public school system —for five consecutive years!— to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education. Vouchers were provided to White families so that their children could attend segregated private schools, schools that were not subject to the Court’s ruling.

And what did Friedman think about the use of vouchers to subsidize the educational dreams of White supremacists and racists?

Insight into these and related questions are buried in a long but revealing footnote —footnote #2—that’s attached to the article. Friedman begins by acknowledging that he’s aware of how southern states had already seized upon vouchers as a tool for resisting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown. He writes:

Essentially this proposal— public financing but private operation of education— has recently been suggested in several southern states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation.”

Interestingly enough, he notes that the racial ramification of his voucher proposal didn’t really cross his mind until a colleague raised the issue after the article was largely completed. This suggest, as historian Nancy MacLean and others have pointed out, a certain level of detachment from, or obliviousness to, the assault against the citizenship rights of Black folks. One could be forgiven for thinking that this would have been front and center on the mind of someone who was proposing a policy that White supremacists had already contemplated using as a tool to uphold racial apartheid.

Upon having this issue clarified and brough to his attention, Friedman claims that his initial response was to think that this—the use of vouchers to circumvent the Court’s decision in Brown— “counted against” using public funds to finance the private operation of education. But, upon “further thought,” Friedman arrived at the following conclusion:

Further thought has led me to reverse my initial reaction. Principles can be tested most clearly by extreme cases. Willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one agrees is hardly evidence of devotion to the principle of free speech; the relevant test is willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one thoroughly disagrees. Similarly, the relevant test of the belief in individual freedom is the willingness to oppose state intervention even when it is designed to prevent individual activity of a kind one thoroughly dislikes. I deplore segregation and racial prejudice; pursuant to the principles set forth at the outset of the paper, it is clearly an appropriate function of the state to prevent the use of violence and physical coercion by one group on another; equally clearly, it is not an appropriate function of the state to try to force individuals to act in accordance with my--or anyone else's--views, whether about racial prejudice or the party to vote for, so long as the action of any one individual affects mostly himself.

He continues:

These are the grounds on which I oppose the proposed Fair Employment Practices Commissions; and they lead me equally to oppose forced nonsegregation. However, the same grounds also lead me to oppose forced segregation. Yet, so long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser. The fact that I must make this choice is a reflection of the basic weakness of a publicly operated school system. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma. They make unnecessary either choice. Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to. The appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed, and a gradual transition will take place. So long as the school system is publicly operated, only drastic change is possible; one must go from one extreme to the other; it is a great virtue of the private arrangement that it permits a gradual transition.

There’s a lot going on here, but it essentially boils down to one thing: For Friedman, there’s no value that trumps the freedom to choose. Everything takes second place to choice. This is why he opposes both “forced segregation” and what he calls “forced nonsegregation.” Both are considered equally evil. Why? Because they violate the individual’s right to freely choose. I might not like the fact that someone is choosing a White segregationist academy but, says Friedman, I have no right to interfere with the way in which that right is being excercised. People must be free to choose either segregation or desegregation— or any other alternative that might be able to imagine. As long as the choice is voluntary, everything’s cool.

If you have a problem with the choices that people are making, then according to Friedman your option is to use your powers of persuasion to convince them of the evils of their ways. Thus, although he claims to deplore racial discrimination, he makes it clear that he’d never “force” the discriminator to cease discrimination. He would never support the implementation and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws that twists the arm of discriminators in an effort to force them to change their ways. If someone refuses to serve me because I’m Black or because I’m LGBTQIA, the proper response is not to enact and enforce laws forcing the discriminator to serve Blacks and members of the LGBTQIA communities.

Nope. That’s violating their right to make choices consistent with their tastes and preferences. The proper thing to do, again, is to use the powers of persuasion to get that person to choose otherwise.

You see where this is going, right?

If White supremacists are using vouchers to support schools knee deep in racial apartheid, then if you find this morally odious, the thing to do is to convince them of the wrongness of their choice. To the extent that you’re successful in getting White supremacists to stop being White supremacists, then schools characterized by “forced segregation” will become a thing of the past.

PERSONAL CHOICE AIN’T THE ONLY VALUE AND PUBLIC COINS SHOULD’NT BE USED TO FINANCE PRIVATE PREJUDICES

But here’s something that ought not to be overlooked, although it seems pretty obvious when someone acknowledges it aloud: Competition and choice are not the summum bonum values that Friedman makes them out to be. Choice, in particular, ought not —and in the minds of many, do not— trump human rights. It would seem that a decent society, at the very least, would find it morally odious to embrace choices that are grounded in the exclusion and demeaning of others. We ought never to adopt a caviler attitude toward decisions that result in preventing some from fully accessing their civil, social, and economic rights. The manner in which some of the southern states used vouchers as a vehicle for supporting educational apartheid deserves to be condemned and that moral condemnation ought to rise to the level where public’s dollars are not used to finance the prejudiced and racist decisions that private citizens might engage in. This is always an ever present danger when, as in the case of vouchers and school choice, public funds ultimately end up in the hands of institutions that are unaccountable to the public itself. As the late Oliver Hill, the Richmond-based attorney who helped win the Brown decision, once put it: “No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”

More importantly, it behooves us not to forget that the push for vouchers and school choice is part of a larger long-run project. Politicians and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)— as well as neoliberal economists— have a concern that both incorporates and goes beyond education. They want to pulverize the public, they want to disinvest from the public good— and vouchers are one of the vehicles that these forces are using to withdraw from a public that they have no interest in supporting.

Friedman, if anything, was transparent about this, even if contemporary disciples are not. “In my ideal world,” Friedman said before an ALEC gathering, “government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.”

And then there was this: Shortly before his death in 2006, he remarked that “the ideal way [to give parents control of their children’s education] would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that we pay for it” [see MacLean’s reporting of this remark in an important piece on Friedman and the privatization of the public by clicking here ].

Again, we’d be well served to listen closely to this economist—Milton Friedman— who, although dead, is far from dead dead.