(OT) Private vs. Public education - was Re: [OT] Iraq

Judson McClendon <judmc@sunvaley0.com> wrote in message
news:vzTKi.80824$Lu.54221@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
>
>
> You have misrepresented what I was trying to say. No system is perfect.
> I'm saying that market forces would compel private education to be much
> better than public education. It already does so today, why would you
> think it wouldn't do so in the scenario I described above?
> --
> Judson McClendon      judmc@sunvaley0.com (remove zero)
>

What >>I<< was trying to point out is that private enterprise is just as
ridden with dishonesty and incompetence as is the public system.

Nor do I have any faith in market forces.  "Market forces" are actually
individual people making individual choices, not some sentient and potent
entity (I call this the fallacy of thinking with collective nouns).
Individual people as a rule don't act effectively as players in unrestricted
free enterprise circumstances: they have miniscule clout as buyers compared
with the collective power of the sellers. Unrestricted free enterprise
ALWAYS leads to monopolies (or a small group of sellers acting together as a
monopoly).  The first case turns up where different products are available:
think computers, operating systems; where they're all selling the same thing
you get a group - insurance, banks, oil companies.  I'm not aware of any
product or service for which the number of competitors in actually
increasing.

And that's the ultimate failing point of your argument.  A monopoly or
cartel providing education will set the standards and the costs leaving the
consumer no choice.  Better to have a public monopoly: then at least we know
the head office address in Washington DC (or Ottawa, Ontario) instead of the
Bahamas, or Lichtenstein, etc.

PL