“Is school choice bankrupting Arizona?” Jason Bedrick and Corey DeAngelis dispute claims to that effect by governor Katie Hobbs and State Representative Andrés Cano; their own viewpoint is in the title of their Wall Street Journal op-ed “School Choice Saves Arizona Money” (June 5).

It will come as no surprise that Hobbs and Cano are Democrats, or that Bedrick and DeAngelis are conservatives, fellows at the Heritage Foundation and the American Federation for Children (affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council rather than a youth brigade of the American Federation of Teachers).  But how closely do the predictable lines on the issue really align with the sides’ averred principles?

After all, liberals trace their philosophical roots to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which suggested that government “leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children.”  Mill’s observation that exceeding such a relatively modest involvement in schooling does “now convert the subject into a mere battlefield for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been spent in educating to be wasted in quarrelling about education” sounds like it was written this week rather than in 1859.

And if modern liberals have shed the scruples about government spending of even moderate classical liberals like Mill, it’s hard for them to object to it being misspent.  If they agree with George Lakoff that “taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America,” then America — or a part of it like Arizona — gets to spend it as foolishly as its members allow it to, until they give up their membership. Some being spent via nominally private means doesn’t change the underlying caveat emptor.

Meanwhile, heavy subsidization has long become the status quo in education, crowding out more innovative approaches — as well as, ironically, more traditional parochial schools (and homeschoolers on both extremes). Bedrick and DeAngelis tout the partial control granted to parents over “a portion of their child’s state education funds” by so-called “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.”  Yet wouldn’t the truly fiscally conservative way to empower scholarship be simply not taxing that money away from parents in the first place?

It was far-leftists like Alexis Ferm who foresaw that schools might only be truly public if they were “sponsored by the groups that want to use them.” Joel Spring notes in Education and the Rise of the Corporate State that such self-funding was “precisely how the Modern School was organized” by Ferm’s comrades in the early twentieth century as “a model for the type of education center the radicals were to create as an alternative to the existing system.”

Their discoveries — and the rediscoveries of Spring’s generation of New Leftist scholars — have been ignored.  Yet the way forward out of today’s education quagmire may be indicated by the meeting of Freedom Avenue and Justice Street in Piscataway, New Jersey on the forgotten site of the Modern School.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Spending or Saving, Only Free Choice Can Make School Choice a Real Choice” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 8, 2023

Is “cutthroat economic libertarianism” force-feeding Americans a “homogenized corporate culture?”  New York Times opinion columnist Matthew Walther thinks so (“Shopping for ‘Woke-Free’ Beer? Read This,” May 1).

Walther correctly notes that current culture wars over beer brands like Bud Light have largely ignored how many of them are owned by a handful of larger companies — and how all of them operate in a larger marketplace dominated by “generic large-scale corporate profit-seeking.” But is this really “economic libertarianism?”

Walther observes that in the less consolidated industry of the 1970s, regional brewer Coors had real clout to enforce its owners’ union-busting conservatism despite being shunned by “respectable middle-class liberal social circles.” True enough, but the Coors-hauling outlaws of Smokey and the Bandit aren’t so tidily relegated to the same “right-wing” extreme.

After all, the Burt Reynolds vehicle wasn’t the only 1977 blockbuster in which rural restlessness and speedy smuggling defies domineering, corrupt authorities. Yet the Galactic Empire of Star Wars was inspired by the administration of the same Richard Nixon whom the Coors family considered a “squish”  (meanwhile, the outlaw truckers on the Seventies screen were a nod to real-life convoys at odds with union bosses not for “feckless paternalism” but for compromising negotiations with plain old bosses).

The distrust of culinary as well as cultural homogenization was less a forerunner of the here’s-the-beef presidency of Coors favorite Ronald Reagan than an echo of the hippies busted for improper disposal of a communal meal in Alice’s Restaurant — or, for that matter, a parallel to the peanut seller then in the Oval Office decriminalizing homebrews.

Walther borrows the name of the 1980 book Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale to denote the antithesis of the globalized economy. Yet Sale’s less-remembered-than-its-title tome argued that the “growth of conglomerates and ogliopolies” would be halted if “the myriad government supports favoring large (and therefore largely unresponsive) businesses were withdrawn.”

The impersonality of commerce might seem to make the pursuit of any value system an exercise in futility. While Anheuser-Busch’s all-Americanism is diluted by the merger with Belgian Interbrew and Brazilian AmBev, groovy Ben & Jerry’s has been gobbled up by the equally multinational Unilever.  Even the “staid Midwestern brands” and built-in-the-USA autos which Walther recalls as having been the acceptable alternatives to the Coors can and the “foreign car” were built from the raw materials of a worldwide market.

Yet the very tendency to enmesh consumers into webs more far-flung than they can trace is in fact a strength. As Milton Friedman put it: “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Smokey Versus the Market” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 5, 2023
2. “Smokey versus the market” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], May 5, 2023
3. “Smokey versus the market” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times and Democrat [Orangeburg, South Carolina], May 11, 2023

A group of people dwindling at nameless hands for unrevealed reasons is a great setup for suspenseful fiction like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It’s not so entertaining when it happens in reality.

Christie is back in the news nearly half a century after her passing. Dozens of headlines in media outlets worldwide announce revisions to her classic mysteries which prune vocabulary described as anywhere from “potentially offensive” to outright “racist.” (The original title of And Then There Were None was undoubtedly the latter, while some of the other altered verbiage didn’t actually offend anyone.)

With current editions exhuming past authors from Ian Fleming to Roald Dahl, putting new words in their mouths (while not consulting such collaborators as nonagenarian Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake), it may seem like the only British book that won’t be more like George Orwell’s 1984 by 2024 is, well, 1984.

In Christie’s Death on the Nile, Hercule Poirot noted the need to “clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth.” Yet the author’s retroactive editors should heed her detective’s warning in the same novel against lapsing into shortcuts “to escape the strain of having to think.”

As Eric Frank Russell put it: “Nothing can defeat an idea — except a better one.” Like Christie, Russell used the title “And Then There Were None” to convey a relentless erosion of governmental enforcement of order. Russell’s tale was set on a distant planet where an invading spaceship crew steadily declines, not from deadly weaponry but via peaceful resistance crumbling their resolve. No furtive mastermind is the culprit; that world’s egalitarian society has no clearly designated ruler, and turns out to not require political leadership at all.

Escaping the Thought Police doesn’t require travel to the isolated island of Christie’s And Then There Were None, let alone following Russell out of the solar system. It doesn’t even require mandates to preserve textual integrity. It’s enough to make a stand on the right to use our brains to solve the perplexing problems of our times as freely as Christie’s sleuths employed theirs.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The Mysterious Un-Flair of Style” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 3, 2023
2. “The mysterious un-flair of style” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], April 6, 2023