There's a tendency on the right--one which not surprisingly makes literally no sense--to call Norquist-style for the eradication of major and popular state-run institutions, and to be particularly loud about it when an institution in question isn't a top performer. Take public schools. Yesterday Jonah Goldberg offered the small suggestion that the public school system should be eliminated entirely. Today his colleague Mark Steyn seconds him:
I think the entire rationale for locally funded public education has vanished. America spends more per pupil than any advanced nation other than Switzerland, and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. By any reasonable audit, at least a third of the US education budget is entirely wasted.
Interestingly, in the middle of making the case against the whole public school system, he's pointed out the fact that state-run schools can be run successfully. They're run successfully in other countries, and, additionally, they're run successfully in plenty of municipalities around this country. What that means is that there are plenty of templates--and no shortage of data--that the government can use if it wants to actually fix (as opposed to grenade) the problems. That would, of course, be both simpler than privatizing everything and would allow us to avoid all the problems that would no doubt arise if we instituted the sort of voucher/magnet system which--similar data shows--is riddled with problems of its own.
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