>>1, The third best public policy provides neither education nor
children's
>>allowances from the public revenue. This policy creates and
perpetuates
>>"third world" societies where-in only the children of the
wealthy, healthy,
>>intelligent, and powerful (WHIPs) members of the society are
adequately
>>educated and supported.
>With regard to my comment above, this assumes that all poor
>parents don't care about their children's education and wouldn't
>even bother unless government did it for them.
As far as I can see, WesBurt's argument is based on no such necessary
premise. In a marketized education system, that which systematically
separates poor and rich parents is levels of money, not levels of caring.
A fully public system of educational financing aims to minimize tuition
payments and equalize resources--pure and simple. It leaves us more free
to separate family issues of caring (=emotional support) and money
(=financial support), which you, Sanford, seem to want to identify--as if
caring WAS money! Is that your assumption in this argument? On what
grounds would you defend it, if so? (I wonder, incidentally, how much fun
the British students I know are having in paying the neat new tuition bills
that the Blair government has recently come up with. From what I
understand, enrollments are already down and bank loan applications are
up...it'd be interesting to hear from you all if the field reports I've
gotten are correct!)
>On the surface, this looks harmless enough. The massive
>bureacracy required to administer it would be very costly. There
>lies the flaw. Why would anyone want to have their hard-earned
>money forcibly taken by a government, given to thousands of
>government workers, and have a small part of it given back to them
>later? It's a great deal for public policy-makers and other
>hangers-on, and a bad deal for the people who are robbed of their
>wages.
I suspect that you are wrong also on the facts at issue--the philosophical
discussion is partly a separate one, but we can leave that aside for now.
In the Nordic countries at least, where socialist parties have
traditionally been strong and social security systems have been extensive,
only a very small part of social expenditure is spent on
administration--most of it goes back to households, quite opposite to what
you are claiming above. The statistics below pertain to social security
transfers rather than education, so they are not strictly speaking relevant
to the arguments being made here. Social services are, after all, more
labour intensive--but the labour here goes into teaching as well, not just
bureaucracy and shuffling papers around. For social security transfer
expenditure, administrative expenses as a percentage of all expenditure
looked as follows in 1993 (Nordic Committee on Social Statistics, 1995):
Iceland 2.23
Norway 2.00
Sweden 1.83
Denmark 2.59
Finland 2.78
>From the figures I have from insurance company actuaries at the Swedish
company of Folksam, there are no indications that privately administered
pension insurance is cheaper to administer than public pensions--in fact
again, quite the opposite. Private bureaucrats cost money to feed also,
though this fact doesn't seem to interest neo-liberal critics of the
welfare state--and the work of private bureaucrats is proportionately more
expensive, given the costs involved in marketing and custom-tailored
records keeping. For private pension insurance companies in Sweden,
administrative costs as a percent of the total premiums paid in can vary
between 15 and 30 percent. In Sweden, of course, these higher shares also
depend on the limited amounts of money going around in these markets--they
thus do not demonstrate what the shares would be in a completely marketized
system. What they do demonstrate is that also private paternalism and
administration costs money--a fact which Sanford Smith seems to prefer
ignoring.
I wonder why?
sinc.,
Eero Carroll
SOFI, Stockholm
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