WALTER E. WILLIAMS COMMENTARY: Competition Or Monopoly

The libertarian economics professor writes: "There's abundant evidence that suggests consumers are better off when providers of goods and services are driven by the profit motive where survival requires a constant effort to get and keep customers. Under what conditions can businesses survive, providing shoddy services, fewer choices, at higher and higher costs, without pleasing customers? If you said, 'Where there's restricted competition and a government-sanctioned monopoly,' go to the head of the class. There's no better example of this than in the case of government education.....The solution to America's education problems is not more money, despite the claims of the education establishment. Instead, it's the introduction of competition that could be achieved through school choice. Most people agree there should be public financing of education, but there is absolutely no case to be made for public production of education. We agree there should be public financing of F-22 fighters, but that doesn't mean a case can be made for setting up a government F-22 factory. A school choice system, in the form of school vouchers or tuition tax credits, would go a long way toward providing the competition necessary to introduce accountability and quality into American education. What's wrong with parents having the right, along with the means, to enroll their children in schools of their choice?"