More government? More spending?

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”- Albert Einstein

Today I’ll jump from the heat of a volcano to the heat of politics. An editorial by Radley Balko at Reason.com describes the problem I fear today – “more government is better government”.

In the private sector failure leads to obsolescence (unless you happen to work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, … the government claims it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government.

It’s a nifty trick. The right does it with national security. The fact that we haven’t had a major terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 proves that the Bush administration’s heavy-handed, high-security approach to fighting terrorism worked! But if we had suffered another attack, the same people would have been arguing that we need to surrender more of our civil liberties to the security state. Two sides. Same coin."

When the Benard Madoff ponzi scheme collapsed, congressman said we need MORE regulation to prevent this from occurring again. But in reality several complaints had been made to the FEC that something fishy was going on. They ignored some of the complaints and when they did bother to investigate, the FEC found nothing wrong and decided to trust the claims made by Madoff.

Because the American Primary education system is so dysfunctional, teacher unions and politicians say we need to spend MORE money “for the children”. In 2008, 23% of students failed to graduate rate from high school. But according to a 2005 report from the OECD, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student on its public schools, with each country spending more than $11,000 (in U.S. currency) per student. Yet despite spending the most, U.S. public schools lag behind other developed countries in the areas of reading, math, and science. The Washington D.C. public school district spends $12,979 per student per year, third highest in the nation, but results rank lower than the national average.

For decades now, the US has been spending ever more on education with nothing to show for the extra expense. The “children” need better education, not a more costly one. As one blogger quipped, When congress discovers a successful way to run the schools in DC, THEN it can tell the rest of the nation what to to. But don’t export a losing system.

During the 2006–2007 school year, a private school in Chicago founded by Marva Collins charged $5,500 for tuition, and parents said that the school did a much better job than the Chicago public school system. At the same time Chicago public school officials claimed that a budget of $11,300 per student was not enough.

Imagine a car company that said, “We spend more than our competitors on making each and every car but we rank last in quality. So our solution is to hire more managers and to spend even more money on each car for the sake of our customers.” Such a company would go out of business (or would have except for recent government bailouts.)

Bottom Line

Don’t buy the line that government or public service needs to spend more money for your benefit. In New Jersey the new governor, Christie, is battling the Teacher Unions to control costs. He asked voters to reject any school plan where the teachers did NOT agree to a one-year wage freeze. In an historic election last week, many voters agreed with him and half the school budgets failed to pass. The governor is receiving death threats from teachers and commercials warn that he is endangering “the children”. Baloney!

A study by the Cato Institute in 1996 found that private schools provided superior education at $3,116, per child per year, half of then national average of $6,857. Free enterprise trumps government planning every time. With government, more is NOT better.