Let's not kid ourselves. Voucher advocates are simply advocating for a food-stamp model in education. It's no more innovative than that.
And while it's a good thing to avoid monopolistic government-owned institutions, that's where the advantages of vouchers end. In spite of this, school voucher advocates have long pushed the policy by claiming that a voucher system will somehow wean people off government money for education over time. And yet, there's no evidence to suggest this would actually happen. The use of vouchers for food has only gone up over time, because that's what government spending programs usually do.
Choice is good, but unless the plan also reduces the overall role of government spending in schooling, no meaningful difference will occur in terms of state dominance of the industry. We'll still be facing an enormous number of workers and institutions who will depend on government taxation and spending.
After all, if most everyone is shopping at ostensibly private grocery stores using government vouchers does it really matter if the store if technically privately owned? No real marketplace would exist because most consumer spending would depend on government vouchers. As William Anderson writes:
Vouchers are nothing more than another rendition of Oskar Lange’s "market socialism." They are an attempt to "play market" using socialist hardware...
The same is true of schooling, and vouchers may simply result in adding a patina of "marketness" to a system that remains driven by government spending.
"Voucher-ization" Can Only Cut Government If Overall Spending Is Cut
To bring any meaningful change to schooling, education vouchers would have to be reduced to just a small part of the schooling marketplace. If they are not, then we end up with a situation akin to one in which everyone receives a housing voucher or food voucher from the government each month.
Were that the reality, the grocery industries and housing industries would be almost totally reliant on government subsidies. They would become essentially government industries, just as — thanks to government defense spending — aerospace and military contractors are essentially government industries today. Massive amounts of income and wealth would have to be confiscated, processed, allocated, and then spent by consumers — after government bureaucrats take their cut. Wealth would be funneled from other industries into these favored industries, crowding out other industries, goods, and services. Prices of intermediate goods and services used by schools would be inflated by the increased government demand.
All of this occurs regardless of whether education spending is done through vouchers or direct spending on government schools. The main problem is the spending, not the means by which it is distributed.
The only antidote to this is to actually cut government spending and to reduce its relevance in the education marketplace.
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