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Teri Adams, Head of Independence Hall Tea Party and School Voucher Activist:

Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.

In other words, Adams would like education to be, along with medical care, available only to those who can pony up the cash for it.

The article I’ve linked to includes a few quotes from people speculating about what drives the American right’s hostility towards public education. The ban on teacher-led prayer is invoked, along with the mercenary desire to funnel the money now paid into public schools into private hands.

I suspect it’s much more simple than that. Without universal education, the far right wouldn’t have to contend with so many pesky arguments about the facts of history, math, science, etc.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

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Libertarian logic says that the government's taxation at gunpoint (or threat of incarceration, whatever) = violence. The problem with this is that any taxation is violence, including the bare minimum needed to operate any kind of government. The logical conclusion to this is that any form of government is violence, which is essentially advocating anarchy.

Edited 2011-07-16 19:39 (UTC)

Yep. It's pretty insane.

The abolition of direct, individual, chattel slavery once faced the same "reasonable" objection.

That's nice.

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As well as the irony that it was the CSA that used libertarian arguments to validate itself economically.....

I've come to see libertarianism as Marxism without a Lenin. Like the Marxists a real-world libertarian state would never be run by True Scotsmen and like Marxist states it'd be a vicious bloodthirsty militarized state with a lot of useful idiots.

The Libertarian argument is that people are inherently good and will voluntarily work together without being forced to, in general. That we only don't have that now because people have been strongarmed into believing that we need a leader/ruler to set the rules for us because people won't behave otherwise, and that may have been true in the past, but isn't true now.

Which is akin to the Communist argument that people are basically good and that it is the State as guarantor of property that corrupts them.

The same way that socialists believe it. I don't know.

And to clarify, "Libertarian" includes a range of beliefs based on the same basic premise. What I've described is what montecristo holds to, which is the anarchic end of the range. Rasilio and I are on the minarchist part of the scale, which is that we acknowledge that not all people are good, so that there needs to be some kind of gov't and rules, but that it needs to be as small as possible and only doing things to protect individual rights and freedoms.

there are many who are so selfish that they would dominate the weaker within a short time.

There are no weaker. Everyone has exactly identical amount of power. Someone is only "stronger" because others are loaning them their power and because the "weaker" don't think they have the power they do have.

My God, this is Marxism's Bizarro cousin. This is the exact arguments Marxists use to say Stalinism and Leninism had nothing to do with Marx's 19th Century writings.

It's observably true.

If I could link you to my brain I would. It's my own conclusion from observation of the world in total. I am not in power and I recognize power dynamics just fine, and they all fit with this model.

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Close, it is not quite that I think government is necessary but that it is inevitable. There will always be enough people actively desiring to transfer some of their power and responsibility to a leader to see to it that a government forms

Actually no, it didn't. The abolition of slavery faced the objection that slavery was divinely ordained and a civilizing force, and that in the USA removal of slavery damned the South to race war and racial amalgamation (not that planters raping their slaves counted, typically). Slavery was economically justified, to be sure, as property like any other and the government abolishing it considered a monstrous transgression of property rights.

Ah yes. But forcibly restraining someone from trespassing, theft ISN'T violence.

They Could Always Go Work in Factories

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft

Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft