The other day, I was asked to review a draft slate of pro‐innovation proposals that might be put before the next presidential administration (regardless of who heads it). I went down the list, typing again and again, “Education policy is not a federal role.”
The rather amateurish list was packed with ideas for injecting book‐learnin’ into our economy. It betrayed little awareness of how our constitutional republic is structured, including the absence of federal authority over education. I guess some books are better than others…
It occurred to me as I typed that people coming after me to look over the innovation proposals might think I was an idiot.
“Look right there! There is a federal Education Department. Don’t deny it!” they might say.
When I say education policy is not a federal role, I am saying something normative, about how things should be. As a present‐day literal matter, there is rather obviously a federal role in education. And the sooner we restore authority to localities and especially parents, the better.
That how‐things‐could‐be lens, though, is how to look at a self‐described “thought experiment” on Slate called “Let’s Nationalize Facebook.”
It would be better to have a national privacy commissioner with real authority, some stringent privacy standards set at the federal level, and programs for making good use of some of the socially valuable data mining that firms like Facebook do. … Facebook would have to rise to First Amendment standards rather than their own terms of service. The company could be regulated the way public utilities often are.
It’s thinking far more magical than my statements about education policy.
Were Facebook nationalized, its privacy problems would not evaporate. They would double. The obscure (and, for some, concerning) uses Facebook makes of data in commerce would be joined by secret uses of data and equivocal denials by military spymasters.
Would Facebook be prevented from “serving authoritarian interests”? Tell that to the activist/whistleblower who has been driven into the arms of Ecuador, of all countries, because he fears extradition to the United States.
Public utility regulation of social media has already been made mincemeat. Nationalizing Facebook is indeed a nonstarter.
“If only we elected the right people,” our friends on the left seem to think, “things would be better. If only our elected officials dedicated their lives to careful balancing of our precious American values, if we got a real regulator in there, if only they didn’t come under outside pressure…” If only, if only, if only.
It is quite conceivable to have some wise and neutral authority make better decisions about how every organ of society might operate. I think this dream is what brings our friends on the left to believe so strongly in increasing government control over society.
The thing is, it is quite impossible for that wise and neutral authority ever to exist.
We can go to the aphorisms—“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”; we can go to school: the public choice school of economics, specifically; or we can go to the lessons of history to show that there is not a beneficent government in the kitchen, lovingly brewing coffee for you, when you wake from your ‘democratic’ dream.
My dream of having education policy restored to its rightful place with localities and families is more likely—well, I’ll put it this way—less unlikely than a powerful, all‐seeing, yet benign central government.
