In his 1973 book For a New Liberty, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard describes a thought experiment. He analogized the American system of public education with a hypothetical American system of government news.
What then would we think of a proposal for the government, federal or state, to use the taxpayers’ money to set up a nationwide chain of public magazines or newspapers, and then to compel all people, or all children, to read them? Further, what would we think of the government outlawing all other newspapers and magazines, or at the very least outlawing all newspapers or magazines that do not come up to certain “standards” of what a government commission thinks children ought to read?1
Rothbard used this thought experiment to argue a point: that a government institution retaining a monopoly over the press not only would likely invoke a public outcry about individual liberty and freedom of the press. It would also let the government control the dissemination of information in dangerous ways. Yet the structure of his thought experiment, he argued, is virtually the same as the structure of American public schooling, where governments create their own tax-funded schools to which all students must go unless their family can pay private tuition to one of the few private schools the government certifies as meeting its own regulatory standards. “In fact,” argued Rothbard, “the suppression of free schooling should be regarded with even greater horror than the suppression of a free press, since here the tender and unformed minds of children are more directly involved.”2
Perhaps we can see, in Rothbard’s analogy, a larger point: while the government’s quasi-monopoly over the schooling of the young should be seen as a more serious blow to individual liberty than its establishment of a news monopoly, the very real school system doesn’t seem to evoke as much outcry as the hypothetical (yet similar) “public news system.” In other words, Rothbard’s thought experiment denaturalizes the rules of the American (and most other) school system(s) by applying those rules to a very different situation, in order to take a fresh look at familiar issues. If the fictitious scenario of a monopolistic government news service seems objectionable, why don’t the same concerns apply to the monopolistic public school system objectionable?
Of course, to Rothbard, this would have been a purely rhetorical question. A government quasi-monopoly on news would violate the same individual liberty by denying individual choice, and invite the same abuse by the monopolists as our quasi-monopolistic system of public education does.
What was the preferred alternative? What would restore individual liberty to the people (by giving them choice) and reduce or eliminate the potential for abuse and inefficiency that monopolies carry? Like all of the libertarian subjects in this work, Rothbard supported free markets in education services (the possible exception being Albert Jay Nock, who was skeptical of both government-provided and market-provided education). Like the current system of news delivery, where people can choose the private news service that best suits their needs within a competitive market, Rothbard argued that people should be able to choose the schooling they thought best for their children and that schools should compete for business the same way news services do.
This is a history of pro-market arguments about American education—the idea that we should reject the current public education system and replace it with a market in educational services that allows producers to offer competing schooling options and consumers to choose those that work best for them. The intellectuals I profile in this history vary in their opinions of the roles the government should play in this market; Rothbard, an anarchist, left no room for government in education markets, where Milton Friedman and Myron Lieberman (the subjects of the final two chapters) wanted governments to provide people with vouchers with which to purchase schooling and possibly set some minimal standards. Despite these differences (and others, such as the differing rationale each had for supporting markets in education), each intellectual profiled in these pages argued that the then-current public education system (for various reasons) was dangerous and markets in education were a potential solution.
The subjects in this book are what I will call market libertarians. I use the term market libertarian in reference to those who hold a political position that goods and services should be bought and sold in free markets as opposed to being provided by governments. Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan describes the basics of the libertarian position this way: “Libertarians believe respect for individual liberty is the central requirement of justice. They believe human relationships should be based on mutual consent. Libertarians advocate a free society of cooperation, tolerance, and mutual respect.”3 Because of this respect for individual liberty—defined in its “negative” sense where people have liberty to the extent that others are not coercing them4—libertarians believe that government should be constrained only to functions that cannot arise in other, voluntary, ways.5 In seeking to minimize government authority, libertarians look to markets of buyers and sellers as a more effective way to allocate goods and services between people, largely because markets are voluntary and allow individuals to make choices about their own lives. “Libertarians,” says Brennan, “believe economic freedom is necessary if people are to be authors of their own lives.”6
While libertarians vary in degree, libertarians agree that governments should leave markets as free as possible, avoiding regulations on production and consumption and redistribution of wealth within markets. Libertarians are also concerned that governments do not usurp markets by producing goods and services the market can provide. Schooling is one such area of concern for many libertarians. Libertarians, as we will see, have consistently argued that education is essentially a private affair and that, for various reasons and in various ways, markets of private producers will do a much better job than governments at producing education in a way that is responsive to “consumer” demand.
Given that school choice has been advocated at various times by those of various political stripes—libertarians being only one—why write a history focusing primarily on market libertarian arguments? There are several reasons. First, in today’s political climate, “school choice” has become more and more associated with a conservative position and, according to its opponents, to a segregationist position. In a recent op-ed, the President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten was able to admonish us to recognize the segregationist history of school choice: “make no mistake: The real “pioneers” of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration.”7 Similarly, historian of education Diane Ravitch writes that:
During the 1950’s and 1960’s, the term “school choice” was stigmatized as a dodge, invented to permit white students to escape to all-white public schools or to all-white segregated academies. For someone like me, raised in the south and opposed to racism and segregation, the word “choice” and the phrase “freedom of choice,” became tainted. We knew they were being used as a conscious strategy to maintain state-sponsored segregation.8
Likewise, legal scholar James Forman (who has written a history school choice’s roots in progressive politics) complains that “choice is associated with free-market economist Milton Friedman, attempts to defy Brown [vs. Board of Education] wealthy conservative philanthropists, and the attacks on the public school bureaucracy by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.”9
To be sure, school choice—specifically in the form of vouchers families can use to attend the school of their choice—played a significant part in segregationist attempts to obviate Brown vs. Board and the forced integration of public schools. Several Southern states and counties sought to close public schools and replace them with vouchers parents can use to attend (segregated, it was hoped) private schools.10
One reason, then, to focus this history specifically on market libertarian arguments for school choice is that libertarian advocacy of school choice predates these massive resistance and segregationist plans, and are generally quite devoid of appeals to racism and segregation. Instead, they appeal to philosophical and economic arguments about the superiority of a market system to a public system. One could, of course, suggest that racism or segregation might have covertly motivated these libertarian arguments, but neither the arguments not the history of their authors, as we shall see, supports such an uncharitable reading. Looking at these market libertarian arguments for school choice, then, should complicate the arguably dominant cultural story that school choice has its roots bound up in segregationists’ desire to avoid public school integration.
Another reason to examine these market libertarian arguments for school choice is that while libertarians have always been a political minority in the United States, they have arguably had a larger impact than their numbers suggest. Several libertarian figures in this book, for instance—from perhaps the most famous school choice advocate Milton Friedman to economists James Buchanan and Friedrich Hayek—ha...