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Government Schooling and Supermarkets

Posted: 20 Jan 2020 04:05 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Someone recently wrote to me asking for a reference to something that Id
written comparing the way that we Americans purchase groceries to the way
that most of us purchase K-12 schooling. On May 5th, 2011, I published an
essay on this topic in the Wall Street Journal, but a search of Cafe Hayek
reveals that I have yet to reproduce here that essay in its entirety.

Here it is:

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces cant
supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system —
politicized and monopolistic — will do the trick. Yet Americans would find
that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education.
Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half
of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build
and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular
supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its
weekly allotment of groceries — for free — from its neighborhood public
supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket
outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court
decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that
charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families,
however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in
families choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of
commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of
public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are
assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public
supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality
of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people — entitled
in principle to excellent supermarkets — would in fact suffer unusually
poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers
and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course
they wouldnt organize themselves efficiently to meet customers demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for supermarket
choice fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously
opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing
supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers
poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of
trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice,
it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public
supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need
for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket
and state — well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial
devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the
provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions
would use their significant resources for lobbying — in favor of
public-supermarkets monopoly power and against any suggestion that market
forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries.
Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the
insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as customers, on the grounds
that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving
groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to
be discussed in terms of commerce.

Recognizing that the erosion of their monopoly would stop the gravy train
that pays their members handsome salaries without requiring them to satisfy
paying customers, unions would ensure that any grass-roots effort to
introduce supermarket choice meets fierce political opposition.

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are
distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets
responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education — the
unions self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and a
senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 20 Jan 2020 03:17 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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are the closing lines (found on page 185 of the original edition) of James
M. Buchanan’s and Richard E. Wagner’s important 1977 book, Democracy in
Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes:

On the one side, there lies the falsely attractive path toward national
economic planning, a choice that would have us allow government to go
beyond traditional bounds because it has failed even to fulfill its more
limited promises. On the other side, there is the way of the free society,
of men and women living within a constitutional contract that also keeps
governments in well-chosen harness. This way, so well understood by
Americans two centuries past, has been obscured by the underbrush of
burgeoning bureaucracy. Will we, like Robert Frost’s traveler, choose the
road less traveled by?

DBx: In 1977, Buchanan and Wagner were warning against the pretensions
mostly of professors, pundits, and politicians on the political left. In
2020 these same people remain sufficiently perhaps even more pretentious
and, thus, we should continue to beware of them and their mix of hubris,
economic and historical ignorance, and wild fantasies.

But in 2020 Buchanan’s and Wagner’s warning is increasingly applicable also
to self-identified American conservatives people such as Marco Rubio, Josh
Hawley, Tucker Carlson, Daniel McCarthy, and Oren Cass. Despite some
differences that separate each from the other, and that separate each from
self-identified Progressives, conservative who support interventions such
as industrial policy are, no less than their Progressive counterparts,
ignorant of history, clueless about economics, naive about human nature,
uncritical of pop and potted accounts of recent events, dismissive of much
of what they profess to respect (including the U.S. Constitution),
contemptuous of principles, and stupidly trusting of those in their tribe
who possess state power.

Like Progressives, these conservatives too often mistake the unavoidable
making of inescapable trade-offs as manifestations of problems solvable’ by
state intervention. They also and also like their Progressive
counterparts mistake their ability to imagine splendid social and economic
outcomes, or to describe such outcomes on paper, as sufficient evidence
that such outcomes can realistically be engineered into existence by the
state, and will be so engineered if only we entrust the right officials
with sufficient power.

These conservatives and Progressives would have us lose touch with reality.
Looking down one path, they see reality, and they dislike it. Looking down
the other path they see only beautiful mirages conjured by their
imaginations. Believing the latter to be real, they recommend the latter
path. Reality-based people do not follow them willingly down this path,
because behind the mirages is a reality far worse a reality more
impoverished and more filled with oppression than the other path.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 19 Jan 2020 11:59 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 31 of the original edition of Lee Francis Lybarger’s 1914
book, The Tariff (which I just received as a generous gift from David
Henderson) (original emphases):

But the word [protectionism] as used in the Tariff has the very opposite
meaning. It does not protect the people from extortion. It subjects them to
extortion, by leaving them to the tender mercies of only one set of
sellers. It does not protect the people from high prices. It exposes them
to such conditions as make prices high. That is its purpose. The only way a
Protective Tariff can possibly operate is to increase the price of the
things on which it is levied.




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