As long as this is now CypherCesspit and not CypherPunks, I might as well play

Perry Metzger wrote: the game. Thinking of game theory, couldn't the prisoner's dilemma apply to this; where what is best for the group is not necessarily best for the individual.

Every year since World War II, expenditures in real dollars have increased per pupil at the government schools. Every year, average class size has gone down in the government schools.

I would be curious to know your source for this information. The information I have indicates that in California when Ronald Reagan became governor, 80% of the funding for state universities such as UC Berkeley and UCLA came from the public purse. Last year, only 24% of the funding came from the government. I would have trouble believing that the overall school system was radically different. The teenage children of a visiting Brazilian professor commented that no other country was like Canada in the sense that people here received a low cost education and did not go destitute. Contrast this to their situation in Brazil where off duty police officers are often hired by merchants to get rid of the street urchins that disrupt their businesses. See current edition of french Photo magazine (cover Ayrton Sennas ex girl friend) for a pictorial. Scientific American (June 1995) has an article entitled The Arithmetics of Mutual Help - Computer experiments show how cooperation rather than exploitation can dominate in the Darwinian struggle for survival. To paraphrase, cooperation arises naturally in most biological systems. Lone defectors do well, but by spreading, defeat themselves. (See: CypherCessPool for example). I appreciate my free public education. I might not have been so forward thinking if I had to go deeply into debt to finance it myself.

Actually, I believe most people on this list argue for no government or so little that its decisions hardly matter.

I agree. Unfortunately, that would seem to put me in the minority. James

Perry

jbugden@alis.com What we do not understand, we do not possess. - Goethe