JEFFREY REIMAN: Well I mean look, let's address
this question.
What do you say about the children of people
who have made bad economic decisions or have
had bad luck, got sick, signed up for education
in a field that disappeared.
I mean, I hope none of you is planning to
be a travel agent or a photo enlarger: those
things are gone.
And if you oriented your education toward
that, you made a big mistake.
Well, maybe you should pay for that mistake.
But what about your kids, who enter the market
at a disadvantage compared to the kids of
people who were luckier?
How are you going to deal with that?
BRANDON TURNER: Steve…
STEVEN HORWITZ: How are we going to deal with
the children of parents who made really good
decisions and benefited them, right?
I mean, it seems to me that if there’s some
kind of case that one is problematic then
the other should be problematic, too.
But at the end of the day, it’s parents
who are in the best situation to judge what
they believe is best for their kids.
If they make mistakes, they make mistakes.
We do, I think, have processes and mechanisms
in civil society to help those who have fallen
into that situation.
I think that we also want to be sure to make
sure we have an education system that offers
even the children of the poor opportunities
to improve themselves, because perhaps their
parents have made mistakes.
But we can't prevent people from making mistakes,
and we can't prevent those from having consequences
for their children.
The question then is, sort of, empirically
what do we do, right?
How do we try to make sure that the kids of
the parents who have made those kinds of mistakes
still have the best opportunities possible?
I just don’t believe that government is
necessarily the best way to do that, and I
think we’ve got evidence to suggest that
as well.
REIMAN: Look, I mean you want to have better
education.
Well, it’s going to be hard to do that without
government.
And you want to have some kind of system that
helps those people who fall into a bad situation
for reasons outside of their control.
Maybe you can do that without government.
I suspect that you’re going to need government
for that.
So I think government is unavoidable.
I am suspicious of it myself, but I think
just saying, well, something else will work
better—maybe.
It’s highly speculative.
HORWITZ: Then why do you think so many parents
of poor kids are choosing to opt out of the
public schools and want opportunities like
school vouchers and school choice?
REIMAN: School vouchers are still provided
by the government, I mean—
HORWITZ: There’s multiple ways you can do
it.
REIMAN: Sure.
But, I mean, it’s not going to come from
the poor people's own money, because they’re
poor.
And so you’re going to have to do it in
some way that’s mandated.
And that’s going to require you to use government.
I’m not saying government is the best provider
of education; I’m just saying government
is very hard to do without.
HORWITZ: There’s some interesting examples
of places across the world, India for example,
that have opportunities for private schooling
that poor folks are easily able to take advantage
of that.
I’m not so convinced that you can't get
it done if you think creatively and if the
barriers, the competition—
REIMAN: I think it’s an empirical question,
but one that I think raises the serious question
of whether you can do without government at
all.
Let me just throw one other thing: I’m sure
we’ll disagree about this, and that is,
I don't see that it’s so bad to take away
some of the unfair advantage that rich kids
get.
What’s wrong with that?
I mean, I’m sorry about that because I know
that they’ll be disappointed.
But if we think that people ought to start
off on a similar baseline, then make it happen.
Why allow the bequeathing of millions of dollars
from one generation to another?
