All of this happened, the government says, because Microsoft wanted to kill the competition. The dispute is over something economists call a forced sale. It's also something to ponder as the nation faces still another monopoly. For even as schools in places such as the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill., and affluent Fairfax County, Va., lavish a first-class education on their students, the U.S. remains saddled with a system that cannot provide the technical minds it needs. Students from inner cities, rural areas, even relatively well-off suburbs too often turn out young men and women utterly incapable of performing the tasks society needs them to do.
Few predicaments cry out for competition more.
But the administration that assembled such a brilliant assault against a private monopoly shows no interest in lending even moral support to school voucher programs in heavily Democratic cities such as Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee, each of which has taken its first, cautious steps toward intellectual freedom. The political thinker John Stuart Mill expressed the problem with characteristic aplomb more than 100 years ago. Public education isn't merely often mediocre, he wrote, but fraught with attitudes and philosophies many find flat-out offensive. The mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government . . . By making every taxpayer foot the bill for public schools, public servants make people who think differently pay twice.