Eugene Volokh notes that Dean Chemerinsky’s proposal to make school funding equal by eliminating all private schooling options is one with implications:
A clearer example of how an excessive focus on equality undermines liberty is hard to find…. [Chemerinsky’s] argument …could apply to many things. For instance, if wealthy people know that…they will have to use public defenders, then they will be more likely to ensure adequate funding of public defenders….There goes the right to choose your own lawyer, together with the right to choose a school for your child.
Likewise, one can argue that public libraries are underfunded, too. Maybe people should be limited in the number of books they can own, so that they will have to go to the public library instead, and thus have an incentive to vote to fund the libraries….
And of course people in poor, high-crime neighborhoods often don’t get enough police protection, …How about this: Let’s bar people from buying private housing, and instead require people to live in housing units run and randomly assigned by the government. …
Ellipses mine. The reason to pay attention to academic nonsense like this is that this sort of thing can go straight from academia to a creative legislative or White House staffer’s brain. So it should be mocked early and often.
Think this couldn’t happen here? I used to think that school funding wouldn’t be “equalized” across my home state of Oregon, either, in the name of equality. Then it happened.
Anyway, read the whole thing, it’s quite instructive.