Why Some Libertarians Oppose Ohio’s HB136 — A Big Increase In Tax Funded Vouchers For Private Schools

The House Education Committee in Ohio’s Assembly, recently recommended legislation, HB136, that provides for a radical expansion of Ohio’s EdChoice program. Currently, 60,000 Ohio students, from failing schools, may receive “vouchers” for tuition to attend private schools. Almost all of the eligible private schools are religious schools. HB136, if passed into law, will make over one million Ohio students eligible for vouchers, from all of Ohio school systems. Tax generated state funding now received by local public school systems will, instead, fund these vouchers for use in private schools.

Vouchers have long been a pet project of political thinkers who view themselves as “Libertarians,” but, in fact, there is a division in Libertarian thinking about the issue of vouchers, and some Libertarians are strongly opposed.  Libertarian thinker, Laurence M. Vance, for example, predicts, “Vouchers will make the present system worse. Rather than increasing educational opportunity, vouchers will increase the government’s grip on education, increase the costs of education, increase people’s dependency on the state, and increase the overall power of the state.”

The grandfather of voucher advocacy is Nobel prize winner, Milton Friedman. In this video clip, made in 2006, shortly before his death at age 94, Friedman condemns the deplorable state of public education as a “disgrace” that undermines a “decent free society,” and says the route to reforming the present system is to use the power of the free market:

It is not a public purpose is to build brick schools and have students there. The public purpose is to provide education. You are a producer,  producing a product. And if you want to subsidize the production of that product, there are two ways you can do it. You can subsidize the producer, or you can subsidize the consumer. In education we subsidize the producer, we subsidize the school. If you subsidize the student, instead, you would have competition.  The student would choose, which school he would go to. And that would force schools to improve.

Some Libertarian thinkers, however, like Vance, cited above, believe that, on this issue, the highly revered Friedman is flat wrong:

• Marshall Fritz in Can you say “en·ti’·tle·ment?” states, “Twelve percent of America’s schoolchildren are not on the school dole. Their parents are financially responsible for their children’s schooling, some at great personal sacrifice. The voucher approach will seduce many of them onto the school dole. … State-granted vouchers would make welfare recipients out of many of those 12% who have managed so far to resist the temptation to have others pay for their children’s education.”
• Marshall Fritz in What About Vouchers? states, “Vouchers are still state financing of schools, which comes with endless meddling, regulations, strings attached rules about what can be taught, said, displayed, who can be hired, testing requirements, not to mention continued dependence on government for our preparation for life. It wouldn’t be long before a private school system turned into another top-heavy, enslaved, mediocre government system. It’s the nature of the beast. “
• Jacob G. Hornberger, in Libertarian Paternalism, states, “Vouchers are the antithesis of libertarianism, whose genuine principles dictate a complete separation of school and state, just as libertarianism calls, for example, for a complete separation of church and state. After all, can you imagine libertarians calling for a mixed system of state churches, private churches, charter churches, and church vouchers and suggesting to people that that is what libertarianism is all about?”
• Ari Armstrong, in A Libertarian Case Against Vouchers, states, “But won’t private schools be better off with vouchers? No, they will merely become more regulated by the government. Entities that accept tax dollars are subject to government regulations — or they soon will be. Conservatives who doubt this need only imagine the public outcry when a school associated with Satanism, radical Islam, or David Koresh-style Christianity applies for tax dollars. Taxpayers will also demand that subsidized schools meet certain politically-determined academic standards. Tax subsidies very quickly turn into puppet strings.”

The constitutionality of Ohio’s present voucher system, originally limited to poverty schools in Cleveland, was established in a landmark Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in 2002, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, that held that the plan did not violate the Constitutions’ establishment of religion clause.

Justice Stevens in his dissent stated: “Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy.”

Justice Souter in his dissent, developed the Libertarian argument that vouchers will mean government control and a degradation of freedom in private schools.  He wrote, “When government aid goes up, so does reliance on it; the only thing likely to go down is independence.” He wrote:

In Ohio, for example, a condition of receiving government money under the program is that participating religious schools may not “discriminate on the basis of … religion,” Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §3313.976(A)(4) (West Supp. 2002), which means the school may not give admission preferences to children who are members of the patron faith; children of a parish are generally consigned to the same admission lotteries as non-believers, §§3313.977(A)(1)(c)—(d). This indeed was the exact object of a 1999 amendment repealing the portion of a predecessor statute that had allowed an admission preference for “[c]hildren … whose parents are affiliated with any organization that provides financial support to the school, at the discretion of the school.” §313.977(A)(1)(d) (West 1999). Nor is the State’s religious antidiscrimination restriction limited to student admission policies: by its terms, a participating religious school may well be forbidden to choose a member of its own clergy to serve as teacher or principal over a layperson of a different religion claiming equal qualification for the job.23  Cf. National Catholic Educational Association, Balance Sheet for Catholic Elementary Schools: 2001 Income and Expenses 25 (2001) (“31% of [reporting Catholic elementary and middle] schools had at least one full-time teacher who was a religious sister”). Indeed, a separate condition that “[t]he school … not … teach hatred of any person or group on the basis of … religion,” §3313.976(A)(6) (West Supp. 2002), could be understood (or subsequently broadened) to prohibit religions from teaching traditionally legitimate articles of faith as to the error, sinfulness, or ignorance of others,24  if they want government money for their schools.

 

Recent posts:

• Ohio’s Proposed Voucher Law HB136 — Should Tax Money Be Used To Fund Religious Education?, September 29th, 2011
• Kettering Treasurer Says Local Cost Of Voucher Plan, HB136, Is $2.5+ Million Yearly — 2+ Mills Of New Taxes, September 30th, 2011