I think was is interesting about this article remembering the founder of the Orange County Register is not that the founder believed public schools are immoral, but that the writer of the article bemoans the fact that these arguments are not made more often. Of course, in California, student fees at public universities have been raised over 30 percent. California is not nearly as liberal as the popular media likes to assert. California has term limits, 2/3 requirements on budgets and taxes, and various propositions that prohibit tax increases. Likewise,
California has had a Republican Governor for 30 out of the past 42 years.The scary thing is that even today the right wing still clings to and celebrates these radical beliefs notwithstanding the fact that most developed nations provide some form of public education to their citizens. Heck, most advanced nations provide universal health care of some form or another. Yet, right wingers dream wistfully of some Somalia like utopia of limited government and maximum individual liberty, and libety typically means freedom from taxes and gun control.
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/hoiles-220534-government-schools.html
Schools established and operated by the government, run by government employees and paid for with involuntary taxes collected by the government aren't public schools. They are government schools.
But to admit that much would have meant Hoiles' opponents would have lost a significant battle in the war he waged against mandatory government schools. The euphemism – public schools – portrays the villain in kinder, softer, less-ominous terms. Hoiles, a publisher of dozens of newspapers, recognized the power of words. Sometimes he was even more blunt, referring to them as "gun-run schools."
Government, of course, has no money of its own. To spend, it must first take money from others. And government, of course, doesn't ask for voluntary contributions. It enforces its tax laws essentially at the point of a gun. Government demands, or else. Try not paying your taxes, and discover this unpleasant fact of life.
Once this coercive nature of so-called public schools is conceded by calling them what they, in truth, are – arms of the government – it is much more difficult to refute Hoiles' arguments against the system.
"I believe that tax-supported, government schools violate the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence," Hoiles said on more than one occasion.
* * *
The issue of government schools is at root a moral matter, he steadfastly insisted. He was right, of course. Regretfully, we hear even less of this argument today than in his day, when it wasn't exactly a watchword, either.
Mandatory taxes supporting government schools aren't legitimized by fleeting popular support that may be mustered at a given point, he stressed. A man clearly has no legitimate authority to impose on another a tax to pay for what the second man morally opposes, Hoiles frequently argued.
"I believe, just as every signer of the Declaration of Independence believed, in government with the consent of the governed, with the consent of the individual, for only the individual can give his own consent," Hoiles said during the 1952 debate. "These signers pledged their own lives and fortunes to defend their ideas, not someone else's lives and fortunes."
It seems so lucid in retrospect, we wonder why the argument isn't made more often today.
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