txmatt wrote: And to those that keep bringing up how important education is, I don't think anyone here is disagreeing with that. Around these parts we spend over $8,000 per pupil per year. And the education they get is very much subpar as far as I can tell. It's the lack of a real education that upsets me, and then having to pay for this lack of education. I really think parents would push their kids harder to make the most out of school if they were paying for it.
Here's the problem, TXMatt.
Parents are paying for it. All of them are. Well, all of them who are not homeless in Texas are in fact paying for it, either directly through property taxes on property they own, or indirectly through rent for property owned by someone else who has to pay those property taxes. But the majority of people either don't understand that they are paying for it, or they don't care. The homeowner with no children and a half-million dollar house who is a couple of years from retirement could care less about that property tax bill. It's the least of this guy's worries. And the single mom with four kids renting a one-bedroom apartment for $600/months and working two jobs to try and make ends meet cannot possibly be expected to understand that part of her rent is paying the property taxes which provide the inferior school her children attend, any more than she can be expected to have any idea what the kids are doing or being taught anyway because she is never at home. If she understood economics enough to get this, then she would not have had four kids she can't afford to raise.
The problem is that you say that some noble "democratic process" is in force with respect to public schools in Texas. But one of two things has to be true in that case. Either there is really no functional democratic process in effect, or the majority of voters prefer the inferior, overpriced public schools we have now. You cannot suggest that there is this pie-in-the-sky democratic process whereby the wisdom of the collective drives public education such that it magically meets the needs of all people, and then also say that the piece of junk school system we have now is the result of such a benevolent system.
So you have to conclude either that people prefer this junk, or that the system is indeed not in effect as you see it. I leave it to you to decide which is true. Either you have no faith in your fellow man, in which case I suggest you do not support a democratic system, or you have no faith in politicians to carry forth the will of the people, in which case you still can't reasonably support a democratic system. In either case, the flaw in the system is the very concept of a democratic system actually working. Democracy doesn't work much better than socialism. That's why this country was not founded as a Democracy.
So since I can't trust the system, either because all of the voters are idiots or because the elected do not represent my interests, then I demand to be able to make choices on my own without the government interfering. That would be freedom.
Vouchers are not the right way to solve this problem, but they are the only politically-viable way to get closer to a solution available at this time.
And FWIW, it doesn't really affect me, or you, or any other individual, if we don't educate everyone else. Except if we are then forced to feed them, or to clothe and house them, or to otherwise bail them out of their poor choice of not acquiring their own education. See, the seed of socialism evolves from Democracy that decides that we are providing something, anything, "for the common good"... it rapidly follows, "to each according to his need", and then you know the rest. Of course if we assume socialism, and then remove public education from our near-socialism at hand, then it is clearly defective. But again, the defect is socialism or near-socialism, and not freedom. Freedom is the solution, not the problem. Introducing freedom into our system reveals the sad state that we have allowed it to achieve.