Liberalism

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Thu Jun 20 13:29:58 PDT 2002



>
> >So should a truly liberal state allow parents to educate their children
> >free
> >from coercion, including economic coercion, by providing vouchers for
> >education as they see fit?
>
>-Remind me why should pay for Mary Elizabeth's Catholic education? There's
>a
>-tradeoff of coercion here. Sure, we require ME to go to school, meaning we
>-send the truant officer after her if she doesn't. That's coercion. But if
>I
>-pay taxes that are spent by her parents on vouchers for a Catholic school,
>-that's backed by coercion too. So we have to choose here, and on balance
>IO
>-think the liberal choice is to keep the state out of the church.
>
>You just made a big leap from liberalism to libertarianism here. Are taxes
>coercive?

No, but 26 U.S.C.A. § 7201 (tax evasion),and its enforcement si. People have been sent to jail from my court for tax evasion and making false falsements on tax firms. Likewise, schools aren't coercive, but truant officers are. The analogy was precise. I was real careful, nathan, give me somecredit.

That assumes property is a right that is absolutely independent of
>society and thus society has no just claim on that property to sustain the
>mechanisms that made that prosperity possible.

As you know, I reject this and have repeatedly done so expressly in print.


>
>So having to pay for Mary Elizabeth's Catholic education is not coercive on
>you, unless you also buy into the whole "right not to speak" idea,which is
>a
>modern and I think degenerate first amendment approach. More and greater
>diversity of speech pictured as coercion is not a tenable liberal position.

But having the state support ME's Catholic education violates the establishment clause, which is also part of the 1A. Or so sez I.


>
>
>Mill actually did worry about abuse of power by parents as well, since he
>thought education was a good absolutely required for a liberal society, so
>he saw state-paid education as not something a parent should be able to
>refuse on behalf of the child, but he did think that once standards were
>set
>for education, parents should be able to send children to whatever
>denominational school they wished within that framework.

But he lived in a statew ith an established church,a nd never gave that a thought that I know of.


>
>The status of the child, the object of education and inculcation of values,
>is the soft underbelly of liberalism--

True. There's still no better alternative.

a point that Plato made in
>highlighting control of education as the key to his despotic Republic.
>

jks

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