What is the common good? Should a person or couple with no children have to pay taxes to support public education? It seems to have to come this.
Here is Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic:
The Times’ Dan Barry reported on a situation in the tiny town of Croydon, New Hampshire, where a right-wing anti-government freako named Ian Underwood moved to cut the local school budget in half, from $1.7 million to $800,000. He and his wife—who presides over the school board, no less!—moved to New Hampshire as part of the “Free State” movement, a conscious effort by right-wingers to populate the Granite State with as many like-minded extremists as possible, the better to turn the state into some kind of von Miseian paradise where there is, essentially, no state. The Underwoods are childless, and Ian Underwood is quoted in the article as asking rhetorically: “Why is that guy paying for that guy’s kids to be educated?” Â
I’ve actually been wondering for many years when the right was going to get around to this line of attack. As matters stand in the United States of America, and as far as I know more or less everywhere in the developed world, education is paid for by the state—either mostly by local governments (the United States), or the national government (France). This web page gives a good summary of how public education is funded around the globe. It’s a fairly recent consensus in historical terms—only in the last half of the twentieth century have countries like Brazil, India, and Colombia come to accept that they have to pay the freight for universal education. But accept it they have. As a result, educational inequality around the world has decreased dramatically.
In the U.S., of course, public education is mostly funded by property taxes and financed by local governments. There are problems with this, as there are with any system invented by imperfect human beings, the main one being that rich districts have a lot more money and thus much better schools; but even still, the good part is that we as a society accept the idea that we all have to contribute. It does not matter whether you have children in the schools. The principle is that even if you are childless, or your children have grown and gone to college, or you send them to private school, or school them yourself at home, you still pay, and you pay because you benefit from a well-educated populace.
I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, home to great schools and high taxes. My daughter happens to go to a public school that is excellent (and happily just up the street). But even if I had no daughter, or sent her to a private school, I would still agree that it was my responsibility to pay for the great public schools my county offers children. It makes for a better county, a better class of citizen, a better nation.
This is a core principle of civilized society: We all contribute to certain activities that have clear universal social benefit. To use Underwood’s sick terminology, that guy pays for that guy’s child to be educated because the first guy benefits when the second guy’s kid is learning math and science and pondering Hamlet’s soliloquy and being prepared for responsible, productive adulthood. Anyone who can’t see that connection is a selfish prick. And if nothing else, even selfish pricks ought to be able to see that good schools increase the value of their homes.
The question of political philosophy is this: What is the common good—what must it include, and what is each citizen’s responsibility toward securing it? We decided in the U.S. a little more than a century ago that universal public education, free to every child and paid for by all of us, was central to any definition of a common good. The world, as I noted above, has largely come to agree. An educated populace serves all of us. Debates about curricula are another issue, and those debates are legitimate, as long as people aren’t lying (my daughter, who just finished sixth grade in a quite liberal school district, reports that yes, she’s learned all about Rosa Parks and so on, but no teacher has ever tried to make her feel guilty about being white). But even both sides in that debate accept that the public schools are a common good; they just disagree about what should be taught.
More broadly, conservatives have been trying to undermine public education for 70 years now.Â
Read the rest here.
Welcome to Libertarianism, where there is no “common” good, only “individual” goods and a virtually exclusive focus on me, myself, and mine alone. That such a philosophy should attract many Evangelicals is a sad outcome of the decline of classical Christianity and a reflection of the cultural takeover of the Faith.
Many hotbutton issues for the right are animated by this “me, me!” attitude… Take guns… all the arguments I’ve ever heard from pro-gun people come down to “me! my rights; what, I’m supposed to care how that might affect others! Nah, not going to think about that”.
Another one, religious liberty. Does the religious right ever think of other’s rights or preferences? No, most of them are only thinking of themselves when they talk about religious liberty.
It was precisely this “selfish” jerkdom that first began to push me away from my fundamentalist/conservative roots… and one el Rushbo was primary in that transition. It finally dawned on me that he was just a great big “selfish prick”… and I, a claiming Christian wouldn’t want to be around such a man, or let alone emulate… so why would I want to listen to him? Getting off that malignant, common good-hating drug was the start of saving my life, at least spiritually/culturally…
Yes. Not only do I pay my taxes for the schools that my daughter went to and before she was born and after she graduated. I also vote yes on every school bond that has come my way. Right now we live in a district that was sought after because of the good schools. But sadly now the last bond was voted down and a radical right wing anti common good candidate was just elected to the school board.