RE: Modern Education Is Anything But Modern
If the market could regulate things as efficiently as you wish it could, it would have regulated governments out of existence by now. I hope you realize that the private toll road system is a setup that would restrict trade and would leave a lot of people without proper roads since they would be too small of markets to expect a decent profit from. There were places where it was implemented and it was a total pain in the ass, that's why places like the UK got rid of it. The market is as good at defending a land from foreign invaders as it is good at building roads or providing education - not at all.
I understand why this libertarian idea is so attractive and why it's so popular stateside, but you have to try to look at failures and successes from all over the world to see that a lot of things are much more nuanced. A lot of things that I'm sure you will say cannot be achieved through increasing government are getting done by governments around the world, you just have to look at the whole sample that humanity has to offer and draw pragmatic conclusions based on the data available, not just on the beliefs you have about the world.
Let me be absolutely honest here as I would be when talking to a close friend, I really think that the idea of the free market building roads better than governments is quite frankly delusional. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
regarding tollroads..I'm not saying "would"...I'm saying "Does"..toll roads are better than gubment roads...I've been over enough of them to have a qualified opinion.
The reason the free market hasn't won out?
Well it's not a free market.
In the US, currently, there are ten MILLION rules and regulations on business. How is that free?
Government, is by definition...a monopoly on violence. Either you do what they say...or they kill you. Pretty simple.
Gubement is stoopid...they have NO idea what to do...so they do stoopid thing..and YOU must do stoopid things too. If you don't..they kill you.
There...that pretty much explains everything...any more questions?
So how are current toll roads a good example then? Private toll roads might work well right now ONLY because they are a part of a taxpayer supported network of roads that allow you to get to them and to live normally in the meantime getting from A to B and from Lambda to another unpopular and therefore unprofitable destination so you could afford to drive on them. If the WHOLE system had to be private, it would be a very different story. It's the same thing with education - go fully private and deregulated and watch it all crumble for the majority of the population.
Anyway, I would rather have a government threating to kill me if I kill someone else instead of having somebody actually kill me so they can take my house, land and profit on the truly free market from them. You know the saying, democracy is the worst form of government known to man bar everything else. (Sorry if the wording here is off, English is not my native language)
I agree, governments around the world do a lot of stupid stuff, but they do get a few things right from time to time, don't they?
I agree, governments around the world do a lot of stupid stuff, but they do get a few things right from time to time, don't they?
nope..they don't.
They TAKE CREDIT when someone else (private enterprise) does it...then rewrite the history to make it seem that they did it themselves..
I see that you ignored everything I said about Toll roads...convenient that..
yeah but...
I'm sorry, I'm rereading your comments and I can't find the toll road points you raised I didn't share my opinion on. I surely didn't ignore everything and I'm sorry the connection between what you wrote and what I wrote isn't clear enough.
I think you mentioned the high quality on US toll roads and I think I explained my view that toll roads can thrive only when they are supported by a network of public roads to bring them customers and that if there were only toll roads, the road system on the whole would be of much lower quality than it is now.
Or you meant your aircars comment? I felt that this was too much of a tangent on the topic of education and didn't feel like going down that rabbit hole where everything is even more hypothetical while we obviously have very different assumptions about the world. My short opinion on that would be that if everything was deregulated and run by the free market only (especially with science and education falling into that category) and there was no public spending, we would be further away from technological progress, not closer. But there isn't much chance of the two of us seeing eye to eye on that, right?
I agree that governments and more precisely politicians and the puppeteers that run them love taking credit for other people's achievements and they often claim credit for things that were developed in the free market because of competition. I don't disagree on that and I don't disagree that a free market is a great driving force of progress. I just think that there are areas where public spending and regulation are needed. I don't think it's a bad thing that corporations are prohibited from polluting the drinking water for instance and I'm not sure the free market has the mechanism to correct for that. There are a lot of public interest issues like the ones we're discussing that need some form of government. I see the idea that a truly free market could fix everything as baseless. It's great for many things, but not for everything, that's all.
ALL roads can be toll roads with the current electronic technology. All YOU got to do is get in and drive...the 'toll road billing blackbox' located in your car will locate you via GPS and send the milage to the appropriate road owners..dependent upon where you drive...you'll be charged a fee. I image that it would cost more to be driving on a road capable of speeds of 85mph (like the Texas Toll road about ten miles from me)..than it would be driving 15 mph on the residential streets.
At the end of the billing period...you pay.
No difference to you than paying a gas tax at the pump.
No guberment needed.
We already have ALL of that technology currently in play.
note..there are other uses for this tech...it would replace speed cops for example. The black box would KNOW how fast you are going..and what the speed limit is where you are at...if you go faster...you pay MORE...depending on how much faster you go..the more you pay.
No cops needed...no courts...no judges...it's a win/win/win.
How do you think this can be achieved without government and regulation? All black boxes on all cars should be compatible with all roads. And that's huge personal data collection that might be a huge gateway for government control overreach. Also, who would stop me from breaking the black box on my car to drive for free? Who chooses the exact type of technology implemented and who covers the cost of development or paying off patents?
Speed limits are not just about money I think but about safety. The fact that a billionaire feels like racing his Ferrari down the freeway while on drugs and has enough money to pay for it, doesn't make him safe for other drivers, it just allows the road owner to profit more while the road is temporarily less safe.
As everything that doesn't exist yet, the fact that it sounds good on paper, doesn't mean it will not be full of pitfalls and caveats, avenues for corruption and abuse and annoying complications requiring piles of regulation on top of regulation. Things are never that simple.
Unfortunately the "no cops, no courts and no judges" idea feels a bit naive. What happens when there are accidents, what happens when there are dangerous or drunk drivers, what happens when somobody dies because the owner of the road didn't take good care of it or didn't build it properly for higher speeds? No cops and judges, just an undertaker and a cleanup crew?
speaking of education.
notice the SAT scores are flat or down?
What..exactly..has the DOE accomplished?
Well, the US has gotten a lot of things wrong and a log of states (like Texas) seem to be actively working to thwart education, not encourage it. It's no surprise that the discipline that's suffering the most according to the graphic is Science. It's not just about the DOE, it's about the whole anti-science, anti-knowledge and anti-fact movement that you see.
Additionally, looking at SAT scores has it's own clear caveats, most importantly, the difficulty of the SATs each year is not 100% consistent and it gets slightly adjusted with time, so the described trends might be both in part or in full caused by change in the difficulty of some exams instead of a change in the actual abilities of the students. To determine if that's the case, one should look at the specific methodology used by this specific study. Additionally, is the Cato Institute a non-partial establishment? Seems to me that they have a very clear political agenda, so I'd look at other studies as well. Still, I don't think that it's unlikely that the data or at least the trends portrayed in the graph correspond to reality to a certain extent.
But this is just the US which is not the end all and be all of education. If things are not working, you don't need reinvent the wheel, you can start by looking at other countries that are doing better. Look at Finland, Estonia, The Netherlands and Switzerland, look at Japan, Singapore and South Korea or look at New Zealand. None of them left education to the free market and their educational systems are moping the floor with the US one. One should always try to look at reality and what is happening outside their own backyard and not let their own political beliefs inform everything. The world's current experience seems to show that you get the best educational results with a strong government supported public school system.
Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of the current educational models, a lot of them implemented in the countries mentioned above are archaic as pointed out by the original post we are commenting under. All education needs to improve drastically and a lot of the current concepts and dogma need to be uprooted. But government has to be forced to be a part of it, or change will simply not be expansive enough. Some places are moving in the right direction, but we are by no means there yet and there is a very long way to go.
I'm a fan of the idea of trying to create model schools that are a grass-roots testbed for new methods and approaches and I guess homeschooling can also be viewed as part of the same equation. With time a better model is expected to arise and keeping that perspective in mind, I surely understand the merits of your deregulation argument. The problem with absolute deregulation is that there will be schools that teach just nonsense, just religion or just hippie bs and students there would certainly be at a disadvantage taking the SATs that you mentioned as an example.
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