Vouchers - Robbing Peter To Pay Paul (And Everyone Loses)

Here's the deal - Frank Corte is a right-wing legislator (I use the term legislator a little loosely here) who is supported almost completely by a guy named James Leininger, a hospital-bed magnate. His biggest issue is school vouchers - so big, in fact, that he issued privately-funded vouchers to poor families in an impoverished school district in San Antonio. Of course, that effort was pretty much a failure, and the whole issue has gone underground in San Antonio; but Frank Corte doggedly, every session, tries to introduce the idea in one form or another. He is such a crappy legislator, though, that he hasn't been successful in making vouchers a part of the law here - yet. Neither he not Leininger are about to give up. He is so bad a legislator that Texas monthly has twice named him worst legislator of the year. (To read the articles you must be a subscriber, but you can see the "winners" at the link.)

Instead of really showing us in cold, hard numbers why vouchers are such a good idea, these folks are doing this - they are doing all they can to make public education fail, rather than helping school systems adjust to a new millenium; then they propose vouchers that support private, often for-profit schools to "fix" the problems they created by not doing their jobs in funding education. For legislators like this, this is actually easier than proving vouchers will do what they say vouchers will do. Because vouchers will not do what they say they will. Vouchers will not get anybody off welfare, educate those kids with problems, or get kids into college. Nor will it help anybody get work - except private companies who have fooled some folks into thinking that privatizing everything makes everything work better. It usually only works better in enriching for-profit enterprises.

This controversy serves to illustrate the big, underlying problem in Texas and all over America. It is that we have been conditioned to think our personal good, our personal values, our personal desires should always be the highest priority of government. What we seem to have forgotten is that this country was founded in order to allow us as many personal freedoms as are consistent with the common good. And the idea of the common good that was so obvious when I was a kid, disappeared, somewhere in time - around, say, 1980. Greed became good, government became bad. It became so bad, in fact, that I am surprised that so many people who hate it, are making it their life's work.