It's Not About Freedom

You may have seen this meme floating about--

It's a pretty thought, but here's the problem. A bunch of people are going to look at this and think, "Well, I can already put my kids through college without debt, always have access to good health care, and get sick without going broke." These are the same folks who can always have access to good schools for their children, who never worry about affording food or shelter. If being free from fear is freedom, these folks feel pretty free already.

So their question is not, "How can we all be free like the Norwegians," but instead, "Why should I have to pay so that Those People can enjoy my kind of freedom? I deserve it, but what have they done to deserve the kind of power and privilege to which I am so rightly entitled?"

Taxpayer-funded school choice vouchers are not about empowering parents or unleashing parental rights. States have created laws that prioritize a private school's ability to charge what they wish, teach what they wish, exclude who they wish over any family's "right" to choose. "School choice" advocates have taken none of the steps needed to create an actual school choice system. 

Vouchers are about getting the government out of the education business and, by doing so, also get government out of the work of equity. Vouchers are about telling every family, "Your kid's education is now your problem, and nobody else's. Society has washed its hands of you. Good luck."

You can see the same philosophy in action in Trump's health care "plan"-- give the money to the consumers instead of the insurance companies and let the people go find their own health care with "health care savings accounts." It took him a whole decade to come up with what is essentially a school voucher plan for health care. Will your health care voucher be enough to get you the health care you needs, and couldn't you get more buying power by pooling your resources with others? Doesn't matter, because as RFK Jr repeatedly suggests that if you live right, you won't need health care that you can't afford (and if you end up dying, you deserved that, too-- hooray eugenics). 

Social safety net? Unnecessary. Just make good choices. If you do need help, get it from a church (which may not be equipped to help everyone, but may be well equipped to judge who deserves help and who does not).

The idea simmering under school choice and now bubbling up all around us is simple-- Why should I have to help take care of other people (particularly people of whom I disapprove, people who are not like me)? 

"Freedom" is a pretty word for dressing policies of abandonment. It gets traction because there is such a thing as levels of bureaucracy that can bind us in frustrating ways. But pretending that "freedom" is living life without any help or support but your own is myopic. "I saw that the car had spun off the road and slammed into a tree and I didn't want to take away the passenger's freedom to save themselves."

The freedom being advocated for is "freedom for me" or "freedom for those who deserve it." Or maybe "freedom from worrying about anyone else." It's the freedom that comes in a society that assumes that some people matter more than others, that all humans are not, in fact, created equal. We can do better than that.