From: isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: Questions about the TEN POINT PARTY PROGRAM.
Date: 2 Oct 92 19:47:38 GMT
	<ISBELL.92Sep25111138@panther.ai.mit.edu>
	<11206@platypus.uofs.uofs.edu>
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
In-reply-to: bill@prijat.cs.uofs.edu's message of 1 Oct 92 16:12:09 GMT

bill@prijat.cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
||> I've been unclear about what happens when too many people want to go
||> to the same school.  So, what happens?  Do those who live near get
||> priority?  Will we have tests for four year olds?  What?
||>                                    -/--\-

|What happens when you drive up to your favorite restaurant and the
|waiting line 
|is out the door and into the parking lot??  You go find another place to eat.

Well, that defeats the whole purpose of leaving in the first place,
doesn't it?

|Are you saying because a school does a good enough job that the
|demand for their 
|services is real high that the government should step in and decide
|who gets this better service??  

No, but what does?  If there is room for one car in a spot and and 562
cars rush for the spot *something* is going to happen.  For schools,
you must answer what happens in this case (or show that it won't
happen in practice) or else you haven't thought this through.

|I am nuch more concerned about the opposite.  What happens when a school is so
|bad that no one learns anything and the halls are merely a good place to deal
|drugs??  Under the current system, you force students to attend there
|anyway and you keep in operation with government subsidies.

|Which system seems better to you??

The one which works best in practice?

Look, try it this way: if I could show that vouchers do a *worse* job,
would you still support them on ideological grounds anyway?  If yoru
answer is yes, then there's no point in going any further (see the
anti-discrimination threads of the past.  Some said then that they
didn't care if people were discriminated against, so long as the
market is free; I find that icky, but it's a different concern than
the practical consequences of such actions.) because your concerns and
my concerns are divergent. If the answer is no, then we should figure
out the likely short-term problems and propose solutions to those.

I can't believe that any of the smart folks on the net actually can't
forsee any short term problems with this solution....  It is often
good practice, in any debate involving social problems and people, to
imagine the *problems* with your proposed solution and to try (perhaps
with a friend) to argue against your position.  If you can't do that,
then you don't understand the underlying problems or appreciate their
complexities.  But, of course, we all realize this.



--
Peace.
          "Until the lions have their historians,
           tales of the hunted will always glorify the hunter."
                        - African proverb
                                   -\--/-
    Don't just adopt opinions     |  \/  |       Some of you are homeboys
          develop them.           |  /\  | but only I am The Homeboy From hell
                                   -/--\-

Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian