Why conservatives and libertarians should support school vouchers.

• Author: Bast, Joseph L.
• Position: Controversy

Conservatives and libertarians generally approve of returning the production of goods and services to the private sector. Why, then, do some conservatives and libertarians oppose school vouchers?

School vouchers are certificates or chits issued by a government agency to parents of school-age children, good for some or all of the cost of tuition at participating schools. Instead of tax dollars going directly (and only) to government-run schools, those dollars go directly to parents who choose the schools, whether private or government run, their children attend. Classical liberals such as Adam Smith and Tom Paine as well as, more recently, libertarians such as Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams have advocated vouchers.

Some libertarians oppose vouchers on grounds that they don't go far enough. Like other forms of privatization such as contracting out and franchising, vouchers privatize the production of a service but leave government responsible for providing it (Savas 2000). Education, the opponents point out, remains an entitlement under a voucher plan, and libertarians (at least purist libertarians) oppose all entitlements.

Some conservatives, who do not necessarily oppose entitlements, reject vouchers for different reasons. They fear that vouchers would lead to increased regulation of the curriculum and hiring practices of religious schools or that vouchers would tempt parents who now enroll their children in religious schools or who teach them at home instead to enroll them in secular schools (Duffy 1995).

Antivoucher separationists' positions rest on beliefs and objections that do not withstand close scrutiny. (1) In this article, I hope to persuade libertarians and conservatives that school vouchers are consistent with their own beliefs and a necessary part of an effective strategy for accomplishing their own long-term objectives.

Not a New Entitlement

Antivoucher separationist Marshall Fritz (2001) contends that vouchers not only fail to challenge an existing entitlement, but also expand it by subsidizing parents who already choose private schools. In this way, vouchers lead those who would otherwise take responsibility for educating their children at their own expense to become "dependent" on the state.

The argument has several flaws. The current system of school finance is patently unfair: parents who choose private schools for their children are forced to pay twice for education, once for tuition at the private school and again through taxes for the government school they did not select. Vouchers relieve such families of one of those burdens by paying for tuition at the private school. Does relieving parents of an unjust financial burden really amount to creating a new entitlement?

Even purist libertarians believe in one entitlement: equal justice under the rule of law. School vouchers simply restore or make real the justice that all parents and taxpayers deserve as a matter of right. To oppose vouchers on the grounds that they create a new entitlement suggests, nonsensically, that libertarians should oppose the retraction of all unjust taxes and regulatory burdens because their repeal creates new "entitlements."

Forcing parents to pay twice for their children's education is also unjust on grounds of religious liberty. Education and religion have been deeply intertwined historically as well as institutionally, and most religious movements rely on schools to pass along their values and beliefs to each new generation. (In the United States, some 86 percent of private schools are religiously affiliated, with Catholic schools accounting for approximately 50 percent of total enrollment and Protestant schools another 28 percent [James and Levin 1988, 34].) Nearly nine out often parents who choose private schools do so out of religious conviction. They oppose the secular humanism taught in government schools and want their children to learn their own values and religious beliefs. It is a well-established legal principle that no one should be required to pay a tax penalty to exercise a constitutionally guaranteed right (Coons 1985, 513 ff). Vouchers correct this injustice.

Abolishing the Preexisting Entitlement

Some libertarians argue for ending all taxation for schooling on the grounds that taxation, being coercive, is no different from theft. Most libertarians would probably endorse a soft version of this doctrine, such as the one formulated recently by Edward Feser, that "taxation, though an injustice ... would be justified only when required to prevent even greater injustices--only, that is, to fund a minimal state" (Feser 2001, 262, emphasis in original). Most libertarians do not think schooling belongs on the list of a minimal state's duties.

Yet today many economists and political scientists, as well as the general public, view education as a public good whose positive neighborhood effects justify its public subsidization. President Bill Clinton was responding to opinion polls and focus groups when in all eight of his State of the Union addresses he called for increasing the federal government's role in education, and his successor, George W. Bush, did the same when he oversaw a 43 percent increase in federal spending on education in his first year in office. The posturing of presidents may signify many things, but in these cases the clear message is that the public and its elected representatives view education as a public good.

Perhaps they are not to be blamed. After all, subsidizing schooling, at least for the poor, was often among the tasks that classical liberals, including Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, and even Milton Friedman, assigned to the minimal state (Friedman 1962, 88). Relatively few libertarians today still include schooling in such lists. Friedman himself wrote in 1983, "the case for government financing is far weaker today, when literacy is nearly universal and the majority of the population can afford to pay directly for the schooling of their children if they are relieved of having to pay indirectly through taxes" (Friedman and Friedman 1983, 144). The robust growth of the for-profit education sector since the 1980s (Moe and Blodget 2000) and strong evidence that the individual benefits of schooling provide sufficient incentive for investment in it (Becket 1975) make the case for subsidies even weaker today.

The point of this brief detour into the history of libertarian thought on education is to suggest that although libertarians have always favored privatizing the production of education, the idea of ending the government's role in providing access to education is relatively new and, not surprisingly, more controversial. It may make good strategic sense to fashion political proposals that can point to two centuries of education and advocacy and to widespread support even among nonlibertarian experts, rather than proposals that require agreement on a more radical notion that is much farther from the political and intellectual mainstream. Vouchers, of course, fit the first definition, whereas calls to "abolish public education" fall under the second.

Vouchers do not abolish the preexisting entitlement to an education at public expense. They only alter or remove those provisions that punish parents who choose private schools or who seek...