Author Archives: Stan Jester

Bureaucracies and central planning CAUSE market disequilibrium. That’s what we see in our public education system today and not food stamp program.This is why in command and control economies such as the Soviet Union in the 1930s and Venezuela today, you see “shortages”.
Note: Actually, the word shortage isn’t one economists would really use. We most accurately look at the supply and demand “at a given price”. If the market is allowed to “clear” – or come to equilibrium – in a free market system, there is no “shortage” in the economic sense.
America did have food and resource allocation “issues” as close back as WWII, when the government rationed certain products. But, still, the US government was wise enough not to set up a Food Delivery System. I guarantee you that if we set up a Government Food System, we would see Soviet/Venezuelan types of “shortages” and other inefficiencies that always happen absent a free flowing market.
Right now, we see what Soviet style delivery of education has yielded in the US and right here in DeKalb. The “demand” for seats at various programs is much higher than the supply. There are no market forces incentivizing the creation of programs parents and students want. There is no market force to drive these things, despite the clear signals provided by waiting lists.
Nope there are only self serving bureaucrats who think they know best, who have never known another way and never been educated in the fundamentals of economic principles.
Additionally, a careful review of history would show you that the USA had, at the beginning of the 20th century, over 100,000 school districts. Today, there are less than 14,000. There has been a massive consolidation of big-Ed, especially big bureaucracy. These mergers were not driven by the need to expand education. These governmental consolidations served to expand bureaucratic salaries and positions.
We have far more overhead today than when we had more actual districts. Actual percentages of public funds collected for education spent on instruction is lower. These things are not consistent with “expanding” education. They are consistent with what economists call “rent seeking” among bureaucrats. Even when government officials use the words “expand” or “enhance” or “provide” along with some group that they say will benefit from a new mandate, the legislation only serves as a Full Employment Act for Educational Bureaucrats. There is scant evidence that the “expansion” provided any benefit to society.
The Brookings Institute did a comprehensive study on Georgia and Oklahoma’s pre-K programs (the 2 most universal in the nation) and concluded “that the best available evidence raises serious doubts that a large public investment in the expansion of pre-k for four-year-olds will have the long-term effects that advocates tout.” So why do we still have this program – one variable in its success column is “rent seeking” of elected officials and bureaucrats alike. It’s always struck me as ironic that many “progressive” nations have a large percentage of students in publicly funded private education. If the idea is to educate the child, it needn’t mean the creation of a bureau, as we have done. It could mean the provision of the means to educate the child – just as we provide food stamps as a means to feed the child. I pray for more intellectual consistency in government. I know, that’s a prayer I’ll be praying for a long time.