Anonymous asked: Communism can work. We have single payer healthcare and public schools and they're good. Why shouldn't the government take over everything else?
It can’t work, as the last century of history has repeatedly shown. Those government services cannot continue to function without enormous infusions of resources seized from the private sector. If the government takes over everything else, they’ll be in the situation of a parasite that has killed its host - starving to death inside the corpse of a once-functional economy.
can you imagine thinking public schools are good?
No, I can’t, frankly. I’m sure that was someone trying to troll me and I was tempted to just suggest he ask the state to give him a free helicopter ride but I thought I’d give it a concise but proper answer instead.
In rich white suburbs with just enough Asians, they’re fantastic.
I grew up in a place like that, and I wound up teaching in a couple of districts like that, and like, they’re still inefficient, wasteful bureaucratic messes that are needlessly abusive to children. They often spend several times per student in public funds what elite private schools charge in tuition and yet rarely achieve the same results.
They just post high test scores because their students were smart and well-cared-for before they ever stepped into a classroom, they’re swimming in so much money they can’t help but cover the basics, and Asian kids in particular tend to get sent to a lot of additional after-school tutoring where the real work gets done. The schools themselves can claim almost no credit for it if we’re being honest. If you swapped the student bodies of one of those schools with a ghetto school in a gang warzone, while holding the budget, staff, policies, and facilities constant, the high test scores would follow the students to the ghetto and the suburban school would fall apart within a week.