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I would add a corollary to this...when facts are posited in support of this ideology, you should be highly suspicious of them. Because more often then not the g
by avs733 5y ago
I would add a corollary to this...when facts are posited in support of this ideology, you should be highly suspicious of them. Because more often then not the guy who built the house is telling you the foundation was irrelevant.
Private industry often has the option to NOT do something. When they leverage that option, if the thing really does need to be done, it is typically left to government. That puts government led initiatives at an inherent disadvantage when private industry also dictates the metrics of success. Government is forced into doing things that private industry doesn't want to or cannot do - and we point to the government like its a failure. See USPS vs. FedEx/UPS - USPS treats its employees well, delivers to everyone, and controls prices to make basic services accessible to all citizens. Private versions do none of those things but we view them as more successful because 'they don't lose money'.
Example from when I used to live in Arizona:
* they introduced a school voucher program
* theoretically, charter schools could not discriminate against students with disabilities
* students with disabilities are more expensive to educate, in a public school the ratio of able bodied to disabled students helps lessen the burden of those costs
* shockingly, Charter schools in practice wildly discriminated against students with serious disabilities. They used the language of 'would not succeed in our rigorous academic environment'
* Students with major disabilities (e.g., Down's Syndrome) became enormously overrepresented in public schools
* For public schools - costs per student went up, relative test scores went down.
Some argued that this was proof that public education was failing and they needed to expand the voucher program and grow the number of Charter schools. I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory.
Space-X and Blue Origin and [insert space startup here] exists because of NASA in the 60s and 70s and everyday since. It isn't just that NASA did the early parts and now industry can do now. NASA literally used that time to write the standards that all of these companies now rely on. They generated the knowledge base required to succeed in spaceflight. They literally generated the standards - e.g., 3D printed spaceflight parts https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/msfcstd3716baseline.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/msfcstd... that are a starting point for anything they do.
- mch82 5y agoQuite an insightful comment!
- e4e78a06 5y ago> See USPS vs. FedEx/UPS - USPS treats its employees well, delivers to everyone, and controls prices to make basic services accessible to all citizens UPS is unionized and notorious for paying very good wages. The difference is that UPS doesn't deliver to a lot of rural (unprofitable) areas. That _is_ something the government should be funding through USPS. On the other hand the travesty that is the USPS delivery vehicle procurement process shows maybe we shouldn't always rely on government for everything. > I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory. In this case industry also created a market where there previously wasn't one for your educational funds. Your local school district no longer has a monopoly on tax revenue for schools and is forced to improve to compete. I would argue we should be explicitly subsidizing those disabled students you're talking about rather than implicitly have everyone else pay for them. Then you can split out necessary costs (accessibility, etc.) vs. costs that need to be cut (school is paying admin too much, etc.)
- avs733 5y agothank god the government no longer has a monopoly on...checks notes...the money I give the government to provide government services. Now we can...check notes...collect more tax dollars so that disabled students have access to segregated education and somehow that will show us who is making too much money. You have invented the idea of accounting and presume that it is impossible that it will not show you are right. I hear this type of logic a lot. If you don't start with an assumption that the ideology is true and therefore the outcomes from the ideology are better then what comes out is functionally incoherent. It begins with the assumption that public organizations are poorly run and then uses that assumption to conclude they are poorly run. That's not thinking, its not argumentation, and it should not be respected as a serious viewpoint. When the charter schools get to pick the students they want and leave the the more expensive students to the group that is required by law to educate them they haven't improved. They haven't innovated, they've stolen from the public and claimed their moral superiority for doing so. This comment is representative of the fucking inanity (not insanity) of this ideology.