manunderstress.com

Before I embraced Jesus, if by Jesus we mean that particular form of free market loving liberty, I too suffered from thinking the problems of the nation and of the world at large were because governments did too little, not too much. This is an understandable position for the political neophyte; when something has “gone wrong” who better to fix it than the federal government, whether it’s the economy, health care, or education. It never occurred to me that these problems may have been caused or greatly exacerbated by government in the first place.

Andrew Coulson in the Washington Post, on the folly of federal “standards” in education:

Standards advocates mistakenly assume that high external standards produce excellence, but in fact it is the competitive pursuit of excellence that produces high standards.

We understand this point implicitly in every field outside of education. We didn’t progress from four-inch black-and-white cathode ray tubes to four-foot flat panels because the federal government raised television standards. Apple did not increase the capacity of its iPod from 5 to 80 gigabytes in five years because of some bureaucratic mandate. And the Soviet Union did not collapse because the targets for its five-year plans were insufficiently ambitious.

Progress and innovation in these and almost all other human endeavors have been driven by market incentives: consumer choice, competition among providers, the profit motive. The absence of these incentives — as in the Soviet Union — has led to economic decline and collapse. Not surprisingly, the link between standards and performance in public schooling is noticeably weaker than it is in other areas, because government schooling is a monopoly, not a market.