Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Mention “schools,” and everyone always thinks teachers, classrooms & buses. Those things are very expensive, partially, if not completely, because they are government-run, which means political. Everywhere there’s lots of money combined with sanctimony, especially with no one keeping tabs, exploitation runs rampant: public schools, and their tremendously powerfully teachers unions and toady school boards, are possibly the biggest example of this. The best solution for the problem has been known for decades: vouchers, where every student is given an allotment of government money to apply to whatever learning institution or method they want that works best for them. In the beginning, most students will probably still select traditional schooling but a lot will choose a modern alternative technique for learning, which more students will adopt as the advantages become apparent.

Funding vouchers is just as important a consideration for such a total re-haul of education. Currently, local property taxes & levees pay for schools, but that's a regressive form of taxation, meaning everybody pays the same, no matter their income; regressive taxes concentrate wealth to the wealthy. Instead, subsidize or supplant that with increased federal grants, which already cover about 10% of education's cost. Federal money comes from progressive taxation, meaning from people who have lots of money. However, we do have to be careful because there's the problem of perverse incentives: when prisons were converted in this way, they began advocating for more prisoners, and public building project bids are sometimes burdened with ideological motives or cronyism; so we’ll have to keep an eye out for such exploitation of vouchers.