Is SCHIP Analogous to Public Schools?
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Harold Meyerson sees — well, "invents" would be a better word — a contradiction in the president's veto of expanded SCHIP coverage:
There is a fundamental, and in Myerson's case thesis-killing, distinction between public education and socialized medicine: The justification for public education is not that there is a "right to an education." There is of course no such right. The justification for public education is that there are positive externalities — large, objective, measurable positive externalities — to universal elementary and secondary education.
There are no — zero — positive externalities to socialized medicine generally and SCHIP specifically. It's just socialism: warm fuzzy feeling demands by "enlightened" folks like Myerson who wish to express their compassion for children via other people's wallets. How charitable of them.
The discussion could end there of course, but there are other reasons why SCHIP is hardly the economic, or moral, equivalent of public education.
For starters, public education is — well, was — locally funded via property taxes in almost all jurisdictions. The people who benefited from public education paid for it (net of the pesky problem of people without children paying for those who do, but that circles back to the externality argument, which is stronger the more localized the taxation is). SCHIP cannot make that claim: it is a federal entitlement, QED.
Similarly, public education is at least somewhat competitive. When a couple with or contemplating children decides to move, what is often the first question they ask of potential new homes? "What are the schools like?" Offset, naturally, by "What are the taxes like?" Again, SCHIP cannot make that claim: it is a federal entitlement, QED.
Likewise, people can, as my parents recently did, flee a local tax-for-schools regime that they find undesirable for their circumstance. It is much harder, and less reasonable to demand, that people flee the federal income tax, whether over No Child Left Behind or SCHIP.
To summarize: Public education* is a public good; health care — even health care for children — is not. Public education is not welfare; SCHIP is. Public education is not provided because it is a "right;" neither is SCHIP.
Like I said: Nice try.
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There are far less "nice" tries in Myerson's piece: Health care for veterans is a public good (in the same sense that the military itself is a public good), so that's wholly inapposite to the SCHIP debate. And Medicare, qua a compulsory tax-and-participate scheme, is most definitely socialized medicine. It is pompous, insolent sophistry to suggest otherwise. Oh, and it's a fiscal disaster. Yet people like Myerson (and Hillary Clinton) somehow consider Medicare a "counterargument"? Utterly mind-boggling.
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*By which I of course mean public financing of elementary and secondary education, not public provision. And since there are no externalities to higher education, there should consequently be no — zero — taxpayer subsidization of colleges or college students.
Beyond question, there are parents in Fairfax and Montgomery who could easily afford to send their kids to private schools but who send them nonetheless to the excellent public schools in their neighborhoods They thus increase government spending and withhold revenue from the private-school industry, but I've never heard anyone complain about that. A free public education is a right, or, if you prefer, an entitlement in America, because the nation long ago decided that an educated population is a national good.Nice try.
You might think that the same logic would apply to providing children with health care, that the gains to the nation from having a healthy population would outweigh those of bolstering private health insurance companies in the name of laissez-faire ideology. According to President Bush and the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, though, you'd be sadly mistaken. Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own (it costs about $11,000 a year for a family of four) would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care."
There is a fundamental, and in Myerson's case thesis-killing, distinction between public education and socialized medicine: The justification for public education is not that there is a "right to an education." There is of course no such right. The justification for public education is that there are positive externalities — large, objective, measurable positive externalities — to universal elementary and secondary education.
There are no — zero — positive externalities to socialized medicine generally and SCHIP specifically. It's just socialism: warm fuzzy feeling demands by "enlightened" folks like Myerson who wish to express their compassion for children via other people's wallets. How charitable of them.
The discussion could end there of course, but there are other reasons why SCHIP is hardly the economic, or moral, equivalent of public education.
For starters, public education is — well, was — locally funded via property taxes in almost all jurisdictions. The people who benefited from public education paid for it (net of the pesky problem of people without children paying for those who do, but that circles back to the externality argument, which is stronger the more localized the taxation is). SCHIP cannot make that claim: it is a federal entitlement, QED.
Similarly, public education is at least somewhat competitive. When a couple with or contemplating children decides to move, what is often the first question they ask of potential new homes? "What are the schools like?" Offset, naturally, by "What are the taxes like?" Again, SCHIP cannot make that claim: it is a federal entitlement, QED.
Likewise, people can, as my parents recently did, flee a local tax-for-schools regime that they find undesirable for their circumstance. It is much harder, and less reasonable to demand, that people flee the federal income tax, whether over No Child Left Behind or SCHIP.
To summarize: Public education* is a public good; health care — even health care for children — is not. Public education is not welfare; SCHIP is. Public education is not provided because it is a "right;" neither is SCHIP.
Like I said: Nice try.
---
There are far less "nice" tries in Myerson's piece: Health care for veterans is a public good (in the same sense that the military itself is a public good), so that's wholly inapposite to the SCHIP debate. And Medicare, qua a compulsory tax-and-participate scheme, is most definitely socialized medicine. It is pompous, insolent sophistry to suggest otherwise. Oh, and it's a fiscal disaster. Yet people like Myerson (and Hillary Clinton) somehow consider Medicare a "counterargument"? Utterly mind-boggling.
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*By which I of course mean public financing of elementary and secondary education, not public provision. And since there are no externalities to higher education, there should consequently be no — zero — taxpayer subsidization of colleges or college students.
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3 October 2007
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