Nontrivial Pursuits

Choosing Quality Over Cheap Alternatives

It is an objective truth that government organizations are usually less efficient than privately-owned enterprises (private enterprises that operate in price competitive markets, that is). We end up paying a premium for government services because of those inefficiencies. But as any savvy consumer knows, price is only one of the variables that one considers when making a purchase. One lesson we all eventually learn as consumers is that you get what you pay for. When government is our choice, it is usually because we can clearly see that the government can produce a higher-quality product that the private sector simply cannot match. Quality the private sector cannot match? Is such a thing possible?

Well, consider what it would be like if we were to rely on the private sector instead of the government for our highways & sewer systems. We’d find ourselves having to put up with certain ‘inconveniences’, like toll booths every few miles. A Private Sector alternative to this would be a privately-owned monopoly, but privately-owned monopolies are no more efficient than government monopolies. If you want to have privately-owned highway & sewerage industries in order to reap great cost savings from them, then they are going to have to be price-competitive industries. But the only way that is going to happen is if there are multiple firms in those industries and they are all building parallel highways & sewer lines. This would result in an incredibly inefficient use of land resources. Worse, it would provide us with a quality-of-product that is far inferior to that which we now enjoy.

We could similarly rely on private fire-fighting companies to provide us with fire-fighting services. But competing fire-fighting firms would only provide their services to those who had been paying their monthly bills. What if your neighbor’s house caught fire one night but the owner had not paid for fire-fighting services? There is a chance that your house might also end up burning to the ground as a consequence simply because your neighbor was not able to pay her bill. Likewise, private sector police departments would not provide police protection to those who could not afford to pay for the service that they provide. If you called the police, they would first have to establish whether or not you had been paying for their protection before providing you with any of their services.

These examples show us that the quality-of-product that we seek when we ask the government to provide certain services is a special level of security and convenience that can be enjoyed only when universal coverage is provided as a right-of-citizenship. Yes, the private sector can produce a cheaper alternative that costs society less, but that cheaper cost can only be had if you are willing to accept an inferior level of quality. The great mystery of our day is why the citizens of wealthy, economically advanced nations settle for austerity-level services when they don’t need to?

Consumers demonstrate every day that they are quite willing to pay the higher prices charged at convenience stores because they value convenience that much. They become very annoyed whenever they have to wait in long lines. We expect to pay more for the higher-quality services that we buy from the private sector. So why should any of us be surprised to discover that it is necessarily going to cost us more to enjoy the higher-quality services the government can provide for us?

Underfunding Government Services

The security and convenience benefits of right-of-citizenship services are certainly desirable, but why is it that we still hear anti-government zealots insist that the government ‘naturally’ produces a poorer quality product than the private sector does? To make their point, they’ll remind listeners of the last time they had to wait in line to see some bureaucrat for a government service. They insinuate that the reason for the poor service is the inherent indolence of government bureaucrats and the inadequacy of government organizations in general. Are they right? No, not at all. While there is no denying the fact that many government agencies do not provide the quality-of-service that we would like to see, the reason for it is understaffing; not some kind of imaginary ‘government disease.’

When there is a chronic problem with long wait times for government services, it is always because there is a chronic problem with understaffing, given the level of demand that exists for services. Why are government agencies understaffed? Because they are under-funded. You can only hire additional staff if you have the funds to pay them. Ultimately, the primary blame for understaffed, ‘poor quality’ government agencies belongs with the elected officials who appropriate funds and raise the revenue that is needed. During the past several decades, anti-government politicians have been successful in tarnishing The Government’s reputation for Quality by denying them the funding that they need to provide quality services.

So even though government organizations have the potential to provide services of the highest quality to society, it is still possible for anti-government political parties to sabotage that potentiality through deliberate underfunding. Politicians who deliberately underfund are actively seeking to deny citizens the quality product they desire. They want people to be unhappy with the government’s quality-of-service. They truly are enemies of the public interest. They may only be guilty of managerial incompetence, but that incompetence deserves the public’s scorn. By failing to adequately fund, they are responsible for squandering the investment that taxpayers have been making.

Example: Socialized Medicine

Americans can learn a couple of important lessons on the trade-offs that exist between quality & efficiency from Great Britain’s experience with its National Health Service (NHS). The NHS is the purest example of Socialized Medicine that one can find among economically advanced nations. Throughout its history, economic conservatives have argued that the NHS is too costly, too bureaucratic, too inefficient, and too lacking in quality of care service. Now, 50+ years since its inception, we can see just how fat and bloated and costly and wasteful it has become. Well…maybe not. Instead of becoming a ‘money pit’ that continually sucked more and more taxpayer money into its ‘black hole’ bureaucracy, the NHS has actually become one of the least costly quality health care systems in the civilized world.

By most measures of ‘health’, the citizens of the UK are either healthier than Americans, or nearly as healthy. The Brits have a higher life expectancy rate and a lower infant mortality rate and almost as many doctors per thousand as Americans have (2 vs. 2.4). In spite of roughly equal ‘health outcomes’, America’s private health care system costs Americans more than twice as much as the NHS costs the citizens of the UK. In spite of everything you’ve heard, empirical evidence—-hard numbers—-tell us that Socialized Medicine in England is far, far more efficient* (see below) than America’s private sector alternative. If efficiency in delivering health care and cost control are more important to Americans than the quality of health care they receive, then they should definitely copy the Socialized Medicine model established by Great Britain.

Of course, efficiency & cost control are not the issues that matter to us the most when it comes to health care. Quality matters more. While the Brits enjoy a quality of health care that is superior to that enjoyed by Americans in many respects (no insurance policy headaches, no frustrating discussions of ability-to-pay prior to the provision of health services, no paperwork hassles) the quality of their health service lags behind America’s in one important respect: they must put up with far longer waiting times for elective surgery. Of course, part of the reason for this is that many poorer Americans are not on any waiting list for elective surgery because they cannot afford to pay for it. Even so, the excessive wait times are a serious quality flaw in the NHS. The good news is that it is (A) the only flaw of any significance in the NHS that one can point to, and (B) it is one that can be easily fixed.

The problem is not that British bureaucrats are inefficiently running their health care system. The statistical evidence mentioned above (available from the OECD) tells us that the opposite is true. The real problem is that the NHS is underfunded. In 2002, UK citizens spent only about 8% of their GDP on health care ($2,160 per citizen). This compares to the approximately 15% of GDP that Americans spent on health care that year ($5,267 per citizen). It doesn’t take a genius to see that if the British were to double the amount of money that they spend on health care, they would be able to dramatically increase the quality of the health care that the British people receive by increasing the supply of health services.

Reducing wait times for elective surgery is simply a matter of paying for more surgeons & operating rooms & equipment & recovery facilities. If the Brits started spending as much of their national income on health care as Americans do, their Socialized Medicine health care system would be the model and envy of the world. Their health care product would not only be the highest quality product in the world, it would also be the greatest value in health care in the world (quality produced with optimal efficiency).

Lessons

So what lessons do we learn from Britain’s experience with Socialized Medicine? First, that we don’t have to worry about government right-of-citizenship services becoming ‘too costly’ because conservative politicians can be counted on to always act to keep government programs underfunded. We also learn that because this is true society should always be far more concerned about the quality deficiencies caused by understaffing than the ‘waste’ caused by overstaffing.

We also learn that opponents of Socialized Medicine are flat out wrong when they suggest that a Private Sector Health Care Industry is needed in order to control health care costs. This is essentially because (A) cost-controlling price competition does not exist in America’s private health care industry for clearly identifiable reasons (private insurance, patents, & restricted entry into the ‘doctor’s guild’), and (B) the private sector alternative is not desirable because it puts constant pressure on providers to compromise the quality of health care in the name of efficiency and cost control (see Managed Care in America).

Ultimately, the opponents of Big Government do not really care about the poor quality-of-product generated by government programs they have underfunded. In fact, they like it that way because poor-quality government services are cheaper, and that means that they pay less in taxes to the government. Then, after they’ve succeeded in degrading the quality of government-provided services, they have the political opportunity to say, “Look!, I told you that the government always provides lousy service compared to the private sector!” Blaming government institutionalism for the poor results that they are responsible for, themselves, is a favorite political stratagem of anti-government zealots. A great example of this in economic history occurred during the Great Depression.

In the mid-term elections of 1938, Republican politicians pointed out that the Roosevelt administration had failed to end the depression in spite of the dramatic increase in government spending that had occurred during the previous five years. They pointed to this ‘failure’ as evidence that increases in government spending will not fix an economy that is mired in recession. Only a few years later, the inanity of that argument was revealed. When government spending skyrocketed during World War II, the Great Depression ended almost overnight. The reason why the Great Depression dragged on as long as it did was not because fiscal stimulus initiatives failed; it was because the dedicated efforts of the Republican opposition succeeded in limiting federal government spending increases to levels that were insufficient to restore the economy to full-employment spending levels. Today, we can see clearly that it was the Republican Party that was responsible for both the length and depth of the Great Depression.

If you happen to be a politician who believes in the virtues of government, it must be a matter of the highest priority that you not accept inadequate levels of funding for government programs. The time to throw down the gauntlet is when economic-conservatives start calling for a reduction in spending levels in order to combat government wastefulness. Those individuals need to be forced to admit then that what really bothers them is having to pay significantly higher taxes in order to fund government efforts intended to benefit others (and not themselves). That is when you can reveal the stupidity of their concerns about higher taxes and focus their attention on the very real benefits that accrue to them when they choose to heavily tax themselves. When they do this to provide the less-well-off with a wonderful government-provided service like Socialized Medicine, they are actually doing themselves a tremendous favor.

After all, when they look out at the international community, they would be able to brag [indirectly, of course] to the rich people of other countries about what they have done for their poor people. Rich people everywhere have to ‘deal with’ the poor, one way or another. They can either settle themselves into a siege mentality, where they worry constantly about the poorer classes ‘storming the gates’ or they can bring peace to the ‘class warfare’ battlefield by simply committing themselves to initiatives that earn them the deep gratitude of the lower classes. It might take some getting-used-to, but I think they would find it rather enjoyable to notice that the lower classes do not begrudge them their wealth, but actually view them with approval and appreciation. That is an enhancement of the quality-of-life of rich people that is worth paying for. And the truly amazing thing about it is, it wouldn’t really cost them anything!

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(Efficient*: Even though price-competitive industries have lower ‘bureaucratic inefficiency costs’ than governments do, much of that cost is compensated for by cost-reductions obtained through various economies of scale. Lower total costs are achieved through volume aggregation, reduced duplication, and cost-sharing practices. It may even be true that these cost savings are more than enough to compensate for increased bureaucratic inefficiency costs. The lower overall cost of health care in England seems to suggest that this is true. But even so, it must still be acknowledged that bureaucratic inefficiency is still is one of the necessary costs that taxpayers must pay for if they want to enjoy the enhanced quality-of-product that governments are able to provide via universal coverage.)<—56e7182eb4d1a39c49cabe84cd933f54—>

Nontrivial Pursuits links of interest:
Republican Nemesis
Economic Justice

Recognizing that John Edwards has a decent chance of becoming the Democrats’ nominee in 2008, conservative pundit George Will decided to use his March 5th Washington Post column to take an early swipe at Edward’s campaign to help the nation’s poor. His answer to Edwards? Poor people are poor because they bring it on themselves. In his column, he claimed that poverty results from “…individuals’ nonmaterial deficits…from a scarcity of certain habits and mores—punctuality, hygiene, industriousness, deferral of gratification…” Yes, it’s the old Personal Responsibility argument, one that Senator Edwards will need to respond to effectively if he is ever going to prevail against his Republican opposition.

One of the first things Edwards would acknowledge right up front to any of his critics is that Personal Responsibility is a factor that contributes to the poverty that some individuals experience. The key question is how much of a factor? The Republicans would have us believe that it is 98% of the problem. They encourage this belief because they really don’t want to be bothered to do anything about poverty. Not if it might mean that they’d have to give up a few bucks to help someone else out. Supporters of John Edwards obviously feel differently about this.

It’s impossible to go out and measure how much of a factor Personal Responsibility is in the current calculus of poverty, but there is something that Congress could do to eliminate competing possibilities. If Congress were to create and maintain a jobs environment where there are more jobs available than there are people to fill them, then you would see even people like me adding my voice to George Will’s in chiding those who are (1) unemployed, (2) in need of income, and (3) able to perform productive work.

Poverty exists in America for one very fundamental reason: there are insufficient jobs available to eliminate it. You see, it takes more than just having ‘enough’ jobs for everyone. In order to put upward market pressure on wages and benefits for poor people and improve their lives in significant ways, we need to create and maintain a true labor shortage. For the first time, the working poor would experience real economic security. (Maybe not job security, but at least income security. Jobs would still be lost, but new jobs would always be easy to find.)

When people are working for the income they are spending, they are actually doing something that benefits everyone else. This is because those who are not working do not stop consuming; they just aren’t producing any of the stuff they consume. Somebody else is. As a society, we all become richer—-in real terms—-when all those who are idle become productive. If part of your productive output is no longer needed to provide for the basic consumption needs of the unemployed (because they are now producing for themselves), then that means more of your output becomes available for your own consumption. When/if we employ all those who are able-bodied and able-minded in real wealth producing activities, everyone else automatically gets a pay raise IN REAL TERMS.

It’s a happy outcome that Congress could bring about by simply spending more on investments in our nation’s infrastructure. You see, there is one economic truth above all others that we must never forget: all incomes (and therefore all jobs) in the economy are dependent on the SPENDING of others. When there is a recession, it is because aggregate spending (GDP) has dropped. Whenever an economy has recovered from a recession, it is because aggregate spending has increased. If Congress were to increase spending sufficiently, at some point all unemployment would be eliminated and an actual Labor Shortage would exist. That’s when the poor would begin to receive all of the benefits that John Edwards would like to provide for them. (Worried about inflation? Read this.)

Create a sustained labor shortage in this country, George Will, and I will be more than happy to take a seat right next to you on the Personal Responsibility Bandwagon. Let’s end the debate forever by embracing a grand social experiment. Instead of simply claiming that Personal Responsibility failures are the key to poverty, let’s go ahead and give the poor an ideal labor market to work with and see what they do with it. If you’re right, then you will be able to crow about how wise and prescient you were and all thoughtful bleeding heart Democrats will have no choice but to admit that you were right. You’re not going to live forever, George. Why not be clever and let the bleeding hearts out there have all the rope they need to hang themselves? You do believe you’re right, don’t you?

James Kroeger

I guess it’s not surprising that the Republican Party proposes that we deal with poor quality educational outcomes in many of America’s public schools by (A) threatening teachers if they do not produce better results (AKA `testing’), and by (B) giving parents the option of putting their children in `better’ private schools instead of the `bad’ public schools (AKA `vouchers’). It fits right in with their ongoing campaign to demonize all government institutions as inherently defective in their ability to produce a quality product. Like most Republican proposals on most issues, these ideas on how to fix public schools are simplistic and stupid.

There are two fundamental reasons why public schools (in general) fail to produce the same quality educational outcomes that many private schools are able to produce. Neither of these reasons has anything to do with the ‘government-ness’ of public schools, as Republican politicians like to suggest. One reason centers around the economics of public schools; the other has to do with discipline matters. Today I want to just focus on the economic needs of public schools that are not being met.

Schools are productive enterprises, just like any business. They bring together certain inputs and use them to create an output (product) that we call `education.’ As in any other productive enterprise, the quality of the educational product that students receive depends on the quality of the inputs that are used. If you want superior quality, you can’t skimp on the ingredients. It’s just that simple. Public schools that produce an inferior educational product do so because they lack the resources they need to be able to produce better educational outcomes.

What kind of resources are we talking about? Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have more computers, etc., but high-tech hardware is not the Number One resource that poorer public school districts are in dire need of. The one resource their teachers need in much greater quantities is time. It takes time to help students who do not regularly make the honor roll. The kids who make A’s all the time are `low-maintenance’ students who require only a minimal amount of explanation in order to get good grades. It’s the kids who are struggling who require more of a teacher’s time, and those are the kinds of students one sees more often in the poorer school districts.

Private schools are able to produce better educational outcomes largely because they are able to restrict admission to only those students who can afford to pay the high price of a private school education. For a number of reasons, these students tend to be of the `low-maintenance’ type. Given a certain amount of time to spend each day, teachers in private schools find it much easier to produce higher-quality educational outcomes overall than teachers in public schools (who have many more `high-maintenance’ students). Give the teachers in poorer school districts the time resources they need to teach more high-maintenance students and they will be able to produce much better results.

How do we give teachers more of the time they need to teach high-maintenance kids? Reduce the number of students that they must teach. Most parents and taxpayers don’t realize it, but teachers spend an enormous amount of time outside of the classroom grading tests/quizzes/projects and evaluating each child’s performance. Much individual instruction must also be provided after class hours. Interaction with the parents of every student is absolutely crucial and that is something that can only happen after class hours. If a teacher has twenty students or more in his class, then he is simply not going to have the time to spend on each child that he would have if he had half as many students.

I argue that parents would get the kind of quality educational outcomes that they want if the average class size nationally were reduced to between 7-8 students per teacher. The bottom line that should not be too shocking to any of us is this: if America wants to improve the quality of the education that American children receive in the nation’s public schools, it will have to pay more for it. We need more teachers and more classrooms in order to shrink student-to-teacher ratios. That costs money, the kind of money that the federal government could provide to local school districts.

Republican politicians tell us that we can get superior quality in education without paying more for it by simply getting tough with teachers and `demanding better results’ from them. It is yet another example of the general incompetence of Republican politicians at the art of governing. The sober reality they refuse to acknowledge is that teachers are doing all that they can with the limited resources they have to work with. In part two, I’ll discuss the things that local school districts can do to solve the discipline problem that teachers face in their classrooms.

(How To Pay For More Teachers.)

Nontrivial Pursuits links of interest:
Republican Nemesis
Economic Justice

Three years after he started the Iraq War, George Bush has made it known that America’s troops will be staying in Iraq for at least another three years. Although Democrats in Washington have been quick to complain about Bush’s conduct of the war and about the way he ‘lied us into it’, they still seem to be having a difficult time coming up with an alternative plan for getting our troops out of Iraq much sooner. They may not yet realize it yet, but there really is a ‘responsible’ way for America to end its occupation of Iraq in as little as 3-6 months. Here’s how you do it…

The reason why we can’t simply abandon Iraq is because possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die in the civil war that we’d be leaving behind us. But the fact that Iraq has crucial security needs right now does not establish the case for keeping U.S. troops stationed in the country, not when you realize that our presence there is one of the primary causes of the militarization of the Iraqi population.

How do we (A) remove one of the causes of the violence—-our presence there—-while (B) providing the Iraqi people with the security they need when we are gone? Answer: arrange to have some other ‘foreign troops’ occupy the country when we leave. The question is who do we get to take over such a thankless task?

One possibility would be the United Nations, but there is reason to believe that most of the nations that criticized our decision to go into Iraq (France, Germany, Russia, and China) would not be eager to send their own troops into the mess we created. So who else? Right now I’m thinking the best approach would be to arrange for some kind of Grand Coalition of Muslim Nations to take over the security duties. It’s the kind of challenge that a competent State Department would be able to pull off.

If the foreign troops that are occupying Iraq all come from Muslim nations, the fundamental cause of the current insurgency—-the presence of ‘Infidel’ troops in Muslim lands—-would no longer be stoking violent passions. Al Qaeda would finally be deprived of its Number One recruiting pitch (“Help us drive the Infidels out of Muslim lands!”). This would leave only the ‘sectarian violence’ between Sunni and Shiite for Muslim security forces to deal with.

In order to end the fighting between Sunni and Shiites in Iraq, it may be ultimately necessary to partition the country into two separate countries. Why two countries (Sunni and Shiite) and not three (Sunni Arab, Sunni Kurd and Shiite Arab)? Because an independent Kurdistan would provide Turkey with a strong incentive to send its troops into northern Iraq after we have left. If we can avoid that headache, we really should. It ought to be a lot easier for Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds to put together a working relationship than it is to bring all three factions together.

This particular two-state solution would, of course, inevitably lead to a close alliance between the new Arab Shiite nation and Iran. Maybe that would be a bad development or maybe it wouldn’t. The uncertainties of that direction are probably enough for us to make an earnest effort to maintain the status quo—-preserve Iraq’s current borders—-and hope that George Bush’s vision of a compromising ‘unity government’ might still have a chance to work, once our soldiers are no longer around, inciting the passions of all the parties involved.

If a one-state solution is to have any chance of succeeding, the Muslim occupation army that replaces us must be able to provide the Iraqi people with the kind of security that America’s tiny occupation army has thus far been unable to provide. Our forces in Iraq may be powerful enough to defeat any attacker, but we do not have anywhere near the kind of troop strength in Iraq that is necessary to disarm the population and end all insurgent activity.

If a Grand Coalition of Muslim Nations is to succeed where we have failed, they may very well need to station [for a limited period of time] as many as 1-2 million troops in Iraq in order to crush all militia activity. That’s how you end the kind of violence that we are seeing today in Iraq. You can’t ‘pussy-foot’ around. The sooner we can establish a massive and powerful presence of Muslim occupation troops throughout Iraq, the sooner the sectarian fighting will be brought to an end.

If America wants to succeed in preventing civil war when it pulls out its troops, it must be willing to pay the expenses (within reason) of the cost of the Muslim occupation army as a sort of penance for creating the mess. We just might find that the EU would be willing to help us with the bills since they would no longer have to feel embarrassed to be associated with us. We would be paying the Muslim Coalition to prevent the outbreak of civil war and to give Iraq’s politicians the time to put together some kind of viable government.

Removing ourselves physically from the region would not mean an end to our influence in the area. If America underwrites the expenses of a Muslim Coalition Occupation Army, it will still have a tremendous amount of influence on the decisions that are made by coalition members. We could always ‘sweeten the deal’ if the Muslim occupation authorities were to enable Iraq to actually put together some kind of democracy. We would want to strongly suggest that that a failure to enable the democratic process to continue could prompt America to cut off its funding of the occupation.

Set up in the proper way, a Grand Coalition of Muslim Nations would likely be seen by all Islam as a great opportunity to demonstrate to the world that they can succeed where America failed in bringing peace to the Iraqi people. Our soldiers wouldn’t be dying there and we would finally be able to put this embarrassing part of our history behind us. Just think of how nice it will be to once again enjoy the respect of the rest of the world.

James Kroeger

In a previous blog entry (Fixing Our Public Schools) I emphasized the importance of spending money on class size reduction to improve the quality of a public school education. But as important as I think it is for society to invest greater [time] resources in the educational process, I don’t think it is quite as important as fixing the discipline problem that we see in public schools. I’m going to argue today that the existence of discipline problems in the ‘higher grades’ (say, 7th grade and up) is due to a lack of freedom and choices.

You see, in most public schools today, there are kids who don’t want to be there. They don’t value being in a classroom. They want to do something—-anything—-else. They don’t care about how well they do in class, so they are disruptive. Their presence in the classroom is a harmful distraction to those students who would probably enjoy being in school a lot more if not for the presence of students who are making them think that perhaps they are “missing out on something.”

What I see in this situation is a lack of structural incentives in the public school model. If all children are forced to attend classes whether they like it or not, then you’re going to end up with a class environment that is not optimal for serious students. For the sake of those students who like being in school (or would like being in school if things were different) we need to ‘cleanse’ the classroom environment of all malcontents. Instead of forcing teenagers to attend school when they really don’t want to be there, we should give them some choices.

Here are the choices they should be given: Children should understand that when they reach the age of approximately 14, they will have a choice to either (1) continually earn the privilege of attending school through earnest application of effort, (2) work full-time for some private/public employer that the state finds acceptable (working for a drug dealer wouldn’t be), or (3) go to the Other Place we will set up where they will work, anyway. Two options that would not be considered acceptable would be (A) staying home and watching TV, and (B) hanging out with your friends. “Idleness” in general would not be an option.

If a kid wants to work instead of going to school, then why not let her? It would certainly be better than putting her in a classroom where her discontent begins to affect others. Just because a kid chooses to go to work at the age of fourteen doesn’t mean that she would forever be forced to forsake the option of taking another shot at school later. That option should always be available to a citizen. Once a kid gets a good feel for what it’s like to work full-time for a living, she just might find she has some real incentive to study hard and seek to make some teacher pleased with her effort. This is just the kind of incentive that some kids need in order to resist the temptations of teenage social life and apply themselves to the challenges of being a successful student.

Teachers of teenagers should never have to deal with anything other than sporadic and mild disciplinary issues. School should be presented as a place of Special Privilege, that every child has a right to attend as long as she is willing to earnestly apply herself. If much individual instruction is required, then it should be provided (teachers/schools must be provided with the time resources they need). The ‘door should always be open’ to those who tried working for a while and decided that maybe they should try going back to school to achieve more with their young lives.

Those who choose not to go to school would have to be monitored by the state. Private employer jobs must be considered legitimate or the child will be forced to show up every work day at the Other Place we will set up. We won’t call it a Boot Camp; perhaps we’ll call it a Structured Day Center. Attendance will be compulsory. Their days will be tightly structured and they will work for a wage. Those who choose not to attend this Other Place voluntarily (or to go to school or work elsewhere) will be forced to stay in the ‘dorms’ we’ll set up. They’ll be allowed to see their parents on the weekends. (Such kids would be so ‘incorrigible’, their parents would probably thank the state for doing them the favor).

Yes, ultimately our freedom and our choices are limited. It’s important for us to have choices, but there are some individual choices that we as a society do not find acceptable, like killing those jerks who cut us off in traffic. To give teenagers more freedom than is granted within these parameters is to put society at unnecessary risk. Of course every effort should be made to ‘reform’ those teenagers who are ‘incentive-challenged.’ My recommendation is that we give teenagers more freedom than they currently have, but not, of course, unlimited freedom.

This kind of approach to public school organization would improve incentives at every level. The ‘good students’ will be delivered from the distractions of malcontents and will feel as though they are enjoying a special privilege that they are earning. The kids who don’t want to be in school will either become happier as productive citizens or they will discover from their experience of life’s other options that they just might want to ‘straighten up’ and get their butts back in school and behave themselves. Those kids who are ‘truly incorrigible’ will no longer be permitted to occupy themselves in ways that often end up being criminal in nature. Society as a whole, and certain neighborhoods in particular, would enjoy a welcome reduction in crime rates.

Ultimately, incentives matter a lot. I’m not sure how it is that our public schools became emasculated baby-sitters of our restless youth, but that has got to change. If we make it a privilege to attend school as a teenager, we will soon see that private schools no longer have an advantage over public schools. I’m quite confident that once we set up the proper incentives, the number of teenagers who choose to work (or be institutionalized) instead of being students will continue to shrink to very small numbers.

They will get the help that they need.