Definitely status quo bias is at work, I agree.

As for commodification objections, yeah, I’m sure there’s that too. That sort of thing is also often said about organ markets, as I’m sure you know. I guess I just think that even public schools are guilty of commodification of children of some kind. No Child Left Behind sounded awfully Kantian/deontological, but, at the end of the day, stuff like standardized testing and ranking schools in terms of graduation rates is really all geared towards turning students into productive workers to grow the economy and not really about fully developing their human capacities or whatever.

Religion: School choice sometimes does end up getting entangled with religion (and I share your worry over this), but there can certainly be requirements imposed on where you can use your voucher or which schools’ tuitions are tax deductible. I could say alot more about this, maybe I will make a separate post in the future.

Consequentialism: I can respect that position, but there are good reasons to think that robust competition (even if not *totally* free-market) does promote good outcomes in both areas. So this just shifts the debate, although it’s still interesting and worthwhile to debate on consequentialist grounds. … Read More

Finally, I do see the respect in which the public option makes health care more analogous to the school system now. But I *object* to the school system now, and would actually favor a system in which the government subsidizes lower income people buying health insurance or health services (or education) privately and of their own choosing over a public option. The bigger issue is: what is the default assumption for provision of these essential services, the public or private sector? I say private, and maybe let the state interfere where necessary. Others seem to be saying that the state should be the default provider of these and maybe other goods and services. That makes me very uncomfortable on a variety of grounds.

I’d say two things about this. First, the public option in health care does not involve taxpayer funding of religion, while school choice, as I understand it, does. Secondly, as a consequentialist, I would object to the presumption that one needs to have a uniform position on competition simpliciter. Rather, why not ask whether, in this particular … Read Moresphere of activity, competition better serves our purposes. If it does, groovy. If not–and especially if it hinders or defeats our purposes, then whatever collective fetish we may have about competition ought to be set aside so that changes can be made that get the job done.

OK one more thing: If anything, adding a public option would make health care more closely analogous to the schools now, without school choice. If you’ve got the funds to send your kid to private school, you have that right; if you can’t afford it, the public schools are available to everyone as a matter of right. Adding a public health care option… Read More would still permit folks who can afford it to go the private route, while making it possible for everyone else to have insurance. School choice, then, would disrupt the analogy, because, unlike a public option in health care, the government would subsidize your choice of private providers of the service in question.

I think there’s also a worry that a really efficient market for education would result in super-dedicated capitalist drone laborers crowding Little Johnny out of the labor market. That’s why we need immigration quotas on Chinese migrants too.

There’s also a huge amount of status quo bias here, I think. Point out to these people that a lot of northern European countries have very competitive voucher systems and.… well, I don’t know, I’m curious what they’d come up with.