Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Friday, March 7, 2008

Surely these are the words of a disciple of Hayek or Friedman, right?

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior...

...The real question for policy makers is how to protect those worthy borrowers who are struggling, without throwing out a system that works fine for the majority of its users (all of whom have freely chosen to use it). If the tub is more baby than bathwater, we should think twice about dumping everything out...

...Anguished at the fact that payday lending isn’t perfect, some people would outlaw the service entirely, or cap fees at such low levels that no lender will provide the service. Anyone who’s familiar with the law of unintended consequences should be able to guess what happens next...

... I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

Give up? How about George McGovern?

Ed Morrisey, writing at Hot Air, notes:

I find it fascinating that McGovern has transformed himself from a statist to a free-enterpriser simply because he left office. That isn’t a coincidence, and it explains why politicians tend to “grow in office” towards state-based solutions. After McGovern had to stop justifying his existence as a legislator, he discovered that legislators don’t need to intervene in the markets anywhere near as much as he presumed while in office.

As many PowerBlog readers will be aware, homeschooling is an educational choice that increasing numbers of parents are making. Once a fringe activity operating under the radar of the law, over the course of the last thirty years it has practically gone mainstream, being legalized de jure in most states and de facto in the others. No one has precise numbers (the government can’t track them!), but everyone agrees that the number of homeschooled children in the US has long passed the one million mark.

The practice has confronted severe legal challenges internationally—most notably in Germany—but the legal climate in the US seemed calm. Until now. Proof that liberty requires constant vigilance, this particular form of educational choice is under assault in California, where a judge has ruled that all teachers, including parents, must be “credentialed.”

Granted that the legal status of homeschooling in California was especially vulnerable to such an attack, this move adds fuel to a campaign by the main homeschooling legal action organization, HSLDA, to enact a federal constitutional amendment in defense of home education. I’m ambivalent. Leaving aside the question of tactics and political viability, I tend to oppose such campaigns on the belief that defenders of freedom concede important ground by rushing to alter the Constitution every time a threat is perceived. The right of parents to educate their children as they see fit (within certain limits, of course) exists and should be recognized. But that doesn’t mean it must be spelled out in the Constitution. We need to abandon the concept that every right must be explicitly enumerated constitutionally. Instead, we need to shift the burden of proof back to the government expansionists: If the Constitution doesn’t say that the state has the power to do it, then what’s your justification?

But as I say, the California ruling stokes the fires of those who think we do need such freedoms made explicit.

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Educational Freedom Under Attack

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