Wall Street Journal Opinion Writer Compares Schools To Supermarkets And Schoolchildren To Corn Flakes

All to sell the American public on free market schools! And evil, evil teachers unions!

Here is the piece in full, because it's behind a paywall:

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools
What if groceries were paid for by taxes, and you were assigned a store based on where you live?
By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system—politicized and monopolistic—will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets' monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as "customers," on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce.

Recognizing that the erosion of their monopoly would stop the gravy train that pays their members handsome salaries without requiring them to satisfy paying customers, unions would ensure that any grass-roots effort to introduce supermarket choice meets fierce political opposition.

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions' self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Now here are some of the comments left by readers:

Can't imagine what you see as "missed." That this man teaches anywhere is the greatest indictment of education in America. Comparing education...or police forces, fire departments, or any other public service to free market industries is something that could only come from a Libertarian think tank...oh, wait, that is what he represents.

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Seriously, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Next we'll read about competitive markets making your stroke care better.

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Leave to the WSJ to publish tripe like this, accusing teachers of raking in huge salaries at the public's expense and comparing children to boxes of corn flakes and food commodities. Seriously. there is no shame at the WSJ.

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This analogy is fundamentally flawed in that people are biologically programmed to feel hunger when they need food, but the desire to learn comes from internal and external motivation (being able to get a job and feed yourself comes to mind). How easy it is for a grocery stores to convince families to buy food! But imagine if parents never taught their children how to feel hunger. Imagine if buying food was never a priority in a child's home, so the child never understood that eating food leads to a healthy life. Imagine if the child was living in poverty and was never around food much, so the supermarket manager had to show them how to chew and how to swallow. Now imagine that the supermarket alone is held accountable for children's nourishment.

I am a public school teacher in a high poverty school. Every day I try to teach my students how to crave knowledge. Many of them do. They see that education is the means through which they will make a better life for themself. Others don't see it. They're just kids, after all. They haven't thought through the consequences of not graduating high school. They're also frustrated because, due to circumstances out of their control, they were given a late start. Maybe they moved around a lot, so they missed a lot of school; maybe English is their second language; maybe their parents never read with them when they were younger; maybe they're too busy being the parents to younger siblings that school becomes a second priority. Too many have never felt success before and so have given up on the idea that they ever will. I try to show them that this doesn't have to be true.

There's a reason why we don't hear about "all those failing public schools in wealthy neighborhoods." It's because education is a social and economic issue. I challenge critics of public schools to go visit some one day. Come see the difference we are making in the lives of kids. Come see the challenges we face every day and the challenges we overcome. Come see our kids learn.

The fetishization of free markets continues unabated.

If the writer of the article wants to see a monopoly at work, he ought to take a close look at how the Gates Foundation and Pearson Education are promoting a national curriculum with national testing.

Or how Comcast/NBC now provides 70% of the country with cable.

Or how Sony owns nearly every record company in the world.

Or how there will be just three cell phone companies in the US after AT&T complete their payoffs to the Obama administration and get their merger with T-Mobile.

Or how Monsanto owns the seed market (TM).

In NYC, Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX 5, FOX News, FOX Business, the NY Post and Channel 9. Bloomberg owns Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Two oligarchs in one city own 10 different media outlets.

I know I'm missing a whole bunch of monopolies, but the point is this - the free market is NOT free or competitive. The big players either crush the little ones or buy them up, corner the market, pay off the gov't regulators and politicians, and rake in the bucks.

More and more consolidation, less and less choice.

That's what the "free" market is these days.