At 11:12 AM -0500 11/12/96, Ted Anderson wrote:
This concluding paragraph got me to thinking of something I read recently in "Bionomics" [1] about the public education problem. The point being made there is that injecting even a little real competition into a monopoly situation improves things tremendously. It is the counter argument to the objection that allowing students choice of schools will destroy the majority, as the "good" kids flee. What will happen instead is that most schools, seeing imminient flight, will take measures to avoid losing students (and taking their tuition with them). A few, that really can't adapt in time, fail and their students are forced to seek other schools. The result is that all schools, even "public" schools improve dramatically.
Many years ago, circa 1989 or so, I wrote a satirical essay which I called "Access to Food Must be Equal!" I can't seem to find it right now, so I may have moved it off my hard disks in one of my periodic housecleanings...I'll try to dig it up. The gist was that of an alternate reality in which supermarkets were not private, but were run the way the public schools were run. That is, each neighborhood was in some Food Distribution District, at which a household bought its food or even got it for free (I didn't flesh this point out, but the parallel with public schools is that the landowners would pay property taxes, but everyone would be able to get food for free, according to some ration or coupon system). (And if you think about it, food is pretty important, and supermarkets are roughly distributed the same way and in the same numbers as elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, etc. So it's not completely far-fetched to imagine America having taken a different turn a century ago, and including food distribution centers in the same system.) I even included mention of the important role the PGA (Parent-Grocer Association) played in ensuring the nutritive requirements of young bodies are met. And the need for "nutritional standards" to keep junk food off the shelves, and only bran muffins and similar digestives be in every meal. My piece was written as a rant about the dangers of the proposed talk of "privatizing food distribution points," about how this would result in a system where only the rich could get access to nutritional food, and how the poor would be made to suffer. And how this "caloric anarchy" would result in vicious monopolies, price wars, and deviation from Recommended Governmental Caloric Intake Rules. Think about this kind of parallel when privatization of schools is talked about. P.S. The "bionomics" stuff is just reworked ideas from a bunch of other fields, given new names, and packaged with seminars, training classes, and other multi-level marketing nonsense. I'm not impressed. --Tim May "The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology." [NYT, 1996-10-02] We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."