You've probably heard about this by now. Allison Benedikt is managing editor of something Slate calls "Double X" (I'm not sure I want to know), and it's all over the Internet the past day or two that she has declared anyone who sends their kids to a private school is a bad person.
The headline even says so: "If you send your kids to a private school, you are a bad person". It doesn't get any more straightforward than that, although she is nice enough to explain that she doesn't mean "murderer bad," so we can take comfort in knowing there is some ceiling on her judgmentalism.
But I don't want to join in piling on with more outrageously outraged outrage, since the arguments that Ms. Benedikt's column is garbage write themselves. I would rather shine a light on what she said as a pretty good summation of basic liberal thought in America. In fact, it's the same kind of thinking that gave us ObamaCare, as I will explain. Let's go to the money quote:
I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)
So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.
And parents have a lot of power. In many under-resourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in.
Sound familiar? All in! Why does everyone have to buy health insurance even if they don't want or need it? Because all in! It was even a term that was used by Obama's policy advisors as they were coming with the details of the law: Everybody in, nobody out. They want to make the health insurance market guarantee certain things to certain people, and in order to do that they need premium dollars from lots of people, including people who will absolutely not get their money's worth from said premium dollars. If you have the option of not buying, many of you won't because it's not in your best interests.
So you have to be forced to buy, because without your participation, the system doesn't work.
Liberals are big on "systems."
Liberals are big on "systems." They design highly detailed visions for how society should work and what everyone should do. As long as everyone does what the system says they should do, liberals are convinced the system can't fail. The problem is those pesky people who don't want to do what the system proscribes for them.
Public schools would work great if everyone attended them, but what's with these jerks who don't want to?
Big urban centers would be utopias if everyone lived in them, but what's with these bastards who pick up and move to the suburbs?
Everyone could have cheap health insurance if everyone bought it, but what's with these tools who think they don't need it?
Public transportation would be a smashing success if everyone took the bus. Get rid of your car, jerk!
See, the self-styled leaders of society have designed a societal model and there is a role for you to play. If you don't want to play that role, if you don't want to contribute what they say and receive benefits as they say, you are a bad person. You are messing up their plan, and when it fails, it won't be their fault for creating a flawed model. It will be your fault because if you had only done what they said you were supposed to do, it would have worked.
This informs their thinking about economics too. Take the current debate over fast-food wages. Point out to a liberal that raising fast-food wages will cause prices to rise, they argue that anyone should be happy to pay the higher prices. And why would I be happy to pay the higher prices? Because, they figure, I can afford it and it will benefit the common good. And when I don't want to pay the higher prices, I'm being a jerk.
The same is true with employer responses to ObamaCare. If you have to offer health insurance to everyone who works 30 hours a week or more, and you can't afford that, you have to cut some people back to 29.5 hours or less. Why? Because you can't run your business successfully if you are forced to absorb additional costs. Every time we hear about a business declaring it will make such a move, the left jumps on that company and demands that people boycott it. The business is merely doing what it can to protect its own interests, and what really bothers the left is that they don't think anyone should do that. They believe people should only act in the interests of the collective, or the "system," and if that conflicts with someone's individual best interests, the individual should have no hesitation about putting the system first.
They hate public school choice for the same reason. If the public school you're told to send your kids to is crappy, how dare you leave! That will only make it worse! The fact that your kids pay the price for that doesn't bother them at all. It's the needs of the system that matter.
Remember how Democrats used the phrase "We're all in this together" during the 2012 campaign? They differentiated it from what they said was the Republican philosophy of, "You're on your own." But the truth is the Democrats want to tell you, "You're in whether you like it or not." Even if you don't need what they're offering you, you still have to take it instead of pursuing something better on your own, because once you bail, the system is in jeopardy, and morality as they see it requires you to subjugate your own best interests to those of the collective system.
What Allison Benedikt has done here is tell the truth about how liberals really think. I guess we should thank her.
