Simon Buckingham wrote: Replying to LO16772 -- (snip)
> Currently the model is and has been for
> 50 years that the government is the primary and overwhelming provider of
> these services. It is also a fact that the government has not proven
> itself successful at delivering these services in a high quality manner.
Simon, where is your data? The issue with public health is that it and
not private medicine has created the health that we all share and enjoy.
Public sanitation, agriculture and diet have all been the catalysts that
corrected the Laisse Faire abuses in the 18th and 19th centuries that
caused the health problems of cities.
Better to take the deregulation of the Airlines and Rail instead. They
have been wonderful for business but terrible for the individuals and
cities. The costs of Air travel at peak times to see Grandparents can run
to $6,000 for three from New York to Oklahoma if made a month in advance.
If the airport still exists at all. What seems a success has been an
urban and cultural disaster. Family rituals are destroyed and children
are alienated from their Elders. Society suffers and nobody notices,
unless you have to fly to Knoxville or Tulsa. While in the Governments of
Europe they have high speed commuter trains.
As for education. Until the whites left the inner cities because of
racial integration 44 years ago, our public schools were some of the best
in the world. Today if we compared the quantitative upper level of the
public schools, say LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts in New
York with any and I stress ANY private school in existence the private
schools simply don't measure up. The reason has nothing to do with public
or private, but with the exclusivity that auditions apply to admissions as
well as a 1 million student pool to draw from. The same is true for the
Stuyvesant, Bronx and Brooklyn tech science High Schools. So the interior
reasons for things have to be looked at from the whole picture and over
more than the last fifty years of a race war in America's schools.
My daughter applied and studies at LaGuardia (NYCity Performing Arts HS)
and was accepted at the Bronx High School of Science as well. She went to
a Magnet Middle school in the worst drug neighborhood in Manhattan but her
parents made sure that she did her homework, worked and got a well rounded
education beyond her regular school.
IMHO this has nothing to do with private or public education but with
parents willing to spend the time necessary to get the work done.
In point of fact I have a private school in my own company and have taught
in Summerhill Schools, Catholic Church Schools K-12 and in two out of
three of the most prestigious Music Conservatories in NYCity as well as
lecturing at Teacher's College Columbia.
I think the private schools help the public and vice-versa but the public
schools have been downgraded over the last forty years for venal and
political reasons and have gotten a totally bum rap as far as I'm
concerned.
The truth of the matter IMO is that no private source would ever do what
the public has done because it's too hard and isn't ultimately (over the
long haul) profitable. I find it very strange that business depends so
much on the free source of trained talent that the public schools provide
but are pushing a private alternative that is bound to raise their labor
costs and lower their management quality.
Not only that, but the issues of economics are not philosophically
applicable to the "Public Goods" sector. It is bad theory and bad
economics IMHO.
> To realize such noble ends, I advocate the use of private sector rather
> than public sector provision of education, health services etc. to
> stimulate the incentives conferred by market forces and stimulate a wide
> variety of choices for different people with different inclinations-
> vocational/ practical courses, home-based distance learning, technology
> colleges and so on.
Incentives in the private sector are monetary. Incentives in the public
sector are skill and talent oriented. If you paid for the real cost of
what you get in the Public Sector, you couldn't afford to have it and your
profits in the private sector would be severely curtailed.
That is what is called in "Public Goods" (like the Fine Arts,)
"Productivity lag." Your expertise needs are too high for the availble
funds potential. It cannot possibly be profitable and maintain its
integrity as a product. The same is true in National Defense and the
Police Force. Those private hell hole prisons can only exist if you have
a Gulag and a Gulag is a Gulag whether it is Siberia or Texas.
That is the reason for the problem with the teacher's union. You can't
afford to pay them what their educational expertise demands or what they
would make in private industry for a lot less hassle and abuse and so you
have to brow beat them. That lowers morale and you then have a highly
educated professional who can't stand you, believes you to be an idiot and
doesn't want to teach your child anything. That is really good management
to build such an attitude in an underpaid workforce, dont you think?
Look Simon, we just have to face the fact that there are people who work
for money and people who work for growth, fulfillment and personal
satisfaction of their psycho-physical personality talent structure. The
former can be moved from job to job in a flexible manner. The latter has
to work a lifetime to achieve minimal prominence. (Now that is real
competition Ben) Business continually uses Performing Arts and Sports
metaphors, but business could never afford to pay the cost of maintaining
such a competitive atmosphere.
Society does take advantage in a shameless fashion of the second group in
public health, education, the arts etc.... But to both under-pay and
abuse to the point of poor morale is IMO one of the definitions of poor
management judgment faculties.
The private market requires raw materials that can be manufactured into a
useful commodity and reproduced cheaply after an initial R & D expense. I
see no application of that principle to public health, education, culture,
spiritual practice or theoretical science. Anything other than a balance
between public and private seems a recipe for failure. Im not a
socialist. I dont like authority over creativity, but your recipe seems
bound for market failure in my opinion. Once that happens then the swing
to "Government everything" will be bad for us all. I think you should
rethink your premises.
Regards,
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
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