I recently had a discussion with someone who would describe herself as a “conservative” and general believer in the concepts behind free markets, but also as someone who supports government expropriation to fund education. So she is cleary not a libertarian/ancap.
I had a few statements that made this person re-think her views. One was to start by asking: “Under what circumstances is it OK to take something from someone else (which is rightfully and undeniably his property) against his will?”
After some back and forth, her response was that education is an end-goal for which expropriation is justified. She said that everyone must have access to a publicly funded education, otherwise there would be a “cycle of poverty” where low income earners would only be able to afford a low quality private school, and thus their children would be low income earners, and so on and so forth.
My first response was that this is not moral justification to take someone else’s property against his or her will. But that didn’t cause her to change her opinion. She simply responded that she believes it is OK to take someone else’s property because the end goal is to get people out of this “poverty cycle.”
So not being able to convince her of the immoral nature of expropriation, I tried to go the route of explaining why public education (or public anything) does not actually get rid of this “poverty cycle” she was describing, and that creating a government monoply on education will do mainly 2 things: increase the price of education, and decrease the quality (teachers, buildings, spectrum of offerings, supplies, extracirriculars). After this, she said “Well, OK, but what about a base level of education? Can’t we have government funded education to make sure that everyone has at least a base level?” And her argument goes back to the poverty cycle - that without this base level, no one would be able to ever acquire a better-paying job, and no one could increase their standard of living.
So I asked her why all of her same arguments wouldn’t apply to food. And I asked her to replace the word ‘education’ with ‘food’ in her argument. So it would sound something like this: “the government must tax (steal) in order to provide food AND must run the grocery stores, because low income earners may not be able to afford food, and thus they may die (far worse than receiving a poor education). And even if they do not die, they may not be able to support their children with enough food, and their children may die. Therefore, we must have government-funded grocery stores so that everyone has a base level of food to survive.” And yet, I said, the government in the US does not run the grocery stores (as they do with public education), and low income earners do a far better job of feeding their families than educating their families. And no one in the US can put together any coherent case for why grocery stores should be taken out of the hands of private property and run by the government. Therefore, if you support government-funded education, the same arguments must hold true for government-funded grocery stores (or government funded-_____ ). Yet even this was not enough to change her opinion.
Ultimately I’m upset that I was not able to convince this person that public education (or public anything) is both immoral and economically inefficient. Anyone have comments on how better to handle this? Is there anything more convincing I could have said? Any strong empirical evidence I could have cited? Thanks for any help.