For nearly four decades, since the Reagan administration, some among America’s “school choice” movement have advocated for the use of “voucher” systems to give parents more control over their children’s education. Various jurisdictions around the country have implemented the concept, with varying (and much-debated) results.

Most opposition to vouchers comes, as one might imagine, from supporters of government-run, aka “public,” schools for the vast majority of  students. Their concerns include loss of funding for those public schools as students migrate to private alternatives, the destruction of America’s secular character if church-operated schools gain market share, and perhaps even loss of national identity/cohesion as curricula move in different directions.

My own opposition comes from a very different direction: I’m against vouchers not because they might damage, or fail to replicate, the existing system, but because they threaten to make “private” alternatives more LIKE that system.

We’ve already seen this phenomenon play out in our colleges and universities. Government funding, whether it be in the form of the GI Bill, student loan guarantees and Pell Grants, research grants from government institutions, etc., always comes with strings attached.

Even if we like the content of some of those strings (non-discrimination requirements, for example), it is a simple fact that strings in general result in a loss of variety in our higher education options. “Elite” private universities may be able to afford more well-credentialed faculty and nicer buildings, but their curricula and their classroom environments have, over time, lost a lot of what made them different. When you take the King’s Shilling, you must henceforth take the King’s Orders as well.

The history of public education in America is an ugly thing.

You may have been taught that universal public education was implemented for the purpose of increasing literacy, numeracy, critical thinking and so forth among an uneducated populace.

In fact, our system was imported from Prussia and its goal has always been to turn out “good citizens” — drones who get educated enough to turn raw materials into finished goods on an assembly line, or aim an artillery piece on command, but not so well-educated that they might get uppity and question or rebel against the foundations of the system they live under.

It shouldn’t be surprising that such a system would devolve, as ours has, into a gulag archipelago of combination daycare centers / day prisons, many graduating inmates of which emerge barely qualified to press the picture of the cheeseburger on the cash register and count out the amount of change that flashes on the screen.

I’m not interested in saving our broken system. I oppose ideas that threaten to let that system absorb the alternatives to it. Vouchers are just such an idea.

Homeschooling, small cooperative schools funded and operated by groups of like-minded parents, and truly private academies, on the other hand, are our future — if we have a future.

If we’re really interested in reclaiming our birthright of literacy, numeracy, and free thought, it’s time to separate school and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Nothing,” economist Milton Friedman once observed, “is so permanent as a temporary government program.” And nothing makes a government’s programs — or, more importantly, changes in its core values — more permanent than the loss of collective memory that comes with generational changes.

We’re hitting a big one soon. It worries me.

Next year, the first generation of Americans who weren’t yet born on September 11, 2001 will come of age. They’ll graduate high school. They’ll get jobs. They’ll vote.

What they will not do, because they can’t, is remember: Remember a time before the 9/11 attacks, or the changes in American society that took place in the aftermath of those attacks. They won’t be equipped to yearn for better days that they’ve only heard about at second hand from their parents and grandparents.

They won’t remember a time when one could walk into an airport and get on an airplane without risking sexual assault in public by employees of the Transportation Security Administration.

They won’t remember a time before the domestic national security state was consolidated under an overtly nationalist label more appropriate to its creators’ police state aspirations: The Department of Homeland Security.

They won’t remember an era when the news wasn’t dotted with reports of American troops killed in Afghanistan, which the US has occupied since before they took their first steps.

They won’t notice that the US Border Patrol is twice as large now (20,000 employees) as it was when they were born and four times as large as it was in 1995. Or that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, roughly the same size, wasn’t even created until shortly after they were born to replace the smaller and slightly less Darth-Vaderish Immigration and Naturalization Service.

They won’t remember a time when the incidence of police “checkpoints” conducting unconstitutional searches in the name of stopping DUIs and drug trafficking ranged from exceedingly rare to non-existent (and when they were fewer than now for immigration enforcement in the 100-mile wide “constitution-free zone” on the borders and coastlines), or when there weren’t cameras at every intersection and scattered between to watch them whenever they left their homes.

Because they won’t remember those days, all the evils we’ve allowed the state to impose upon us since 2001 will seem, well, normal to them. And from normality follows permanence.

We’ve failed this next generation. Let’s hope they do a better job of saving themselves than we did of saving them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Say what you will about President Donald J. Trump — his politics, his policies, his business dealings, his personal peccadilloes — the man  demonstrated possession of a heart when he commuted the sentence of grandmother Alice Johnson 21 years into her life term for non-violent drug offenses. He’s asked protesting NFL players to send him a list of people who deserve clemency in lieu of continuing to kneel in protest during the national anthem. It’s encouraging to find mercy among his many and varied qualities.

On July 3, the Libertarian Party’s national convention unanimously requested that President Trump exercise that mercy in the case of Ross William Ulbricht.

In 2015, Ulbricht — better known to the public as “Dread Pirate Roberts” — was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for creating and operating the Silk Road “darknet market” web site.

Please set aside for the moment your opinion of Silk Road — whether or not it was moral, or beneficial, or legal, to operate a web site facilitating the sale and purchase of illegal drugs — and of Ulbricht’s guilt or innocence, to consider the bigger issues.

Ulbricht’s trial was clearly unfair. His defense team was denied access to information on the state’s investigative methodology and not allowed to present an alternative theory as to the identity of “Dread Pirate Roberts.” They were forbidden to reference the fact that at least two of the federal agents investigating Silk Road (who had access which might have allowed them to fabricate evidence) were themselves caught in corrupt activities and are now in prison. The trial was a railroad job from beginning to end.

Ulbricht’s sentence is also clearly unreasonable.  Having poisoned the jury pool with claims of murder-for-hire schemes on Ulbricht’s part, the prosecution then dropped the charges. But the trial judge nonetheless factored those unproven claims into her sentencing.

As of this coming October, Ulbricht will have spent five years behind bars. He’s appealed his conviction and sentence all the way to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case on June 28. At this point, presidential clemency would seem to be his only hope of ever walking free again.

There is no universe in which life without the possibility of parole is a reasonable penalty for the crime of running a web site. Especially a web site which arguably reduced both drug-related street crime and death by drug overdose.

Mr. President: Please set Ross Ulbricht free.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Libertarian Party Urges Trump to Pardon Silk Board Founder Ross Ulbricht,” by Lester Coleman, CCN, 07/10/18