Check out this story, broken yesterday by the Chicago Tribune,
illustrating why "equality" isn't all it's cracked up to be. Unlike
medicine, elementary and secondary education in the U.S. is already
almost completely under political control. Defenders of this
arrangement justify it in the name of equality. They do not claim the
current system achieves that ideal, but they do insist that efforts to
reduce political control via vouchers and other forms of privatization
would make inequality worse.
But the Tribune story shows that political control introduces its own
kind of inequality, to benefit the political class:
While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their
children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help
through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former
schools chief Arne Duncan.
Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the
city's premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list
maintained over several years in Duncan's office and obtained by the
Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now
secretary of education under President Barack Obama.
The log is a compilation of politicians and influential business
people who interceded on behalf of children during Duncan's tenure. It
includes 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard Daley's office, House Speaker
Michael Madigan, his daughter Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan,
former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers and former U.S.
Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.
Non-connected parents, such as those who sought spots for their
special-needs child or who were new to the city, also appear on the
log. But the politically connected make up about three-quarters of
those making requests in the documents obtained by the Tribune.
This is "the aristocracy of pull," in Ayn Rand's memorable phrase. Its
existence is probably inevitable inasmuch as government's is, but its
extent can only increase with the power and reach of government.
If you and Larry Summers both get sick and need a treatment that the
Medicare Advisory Commission (dysphemistically known as the Death
Panel) deems too expensive, what are the odds that you'll find a way
to get it anyway and he won't? How about the other way around? In the
Soviet Union, those privileged by political connections were called
the nomenklatura. Here, we can call it the Obamaklatura.
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