Jonah Goldberg: Still an Idiot

As demonstrated (for the umpteenth time) by this piece in today's L.A. Times, advocating the abolition of public education.

Because, you know, private schools are just better. Milton Friedman says so.

You can get a sense of the sharpness of his argument from this Worst Analogy Ever candidate:

Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90% of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets.

Sure, Jonah...and nobody but Ron Paul believes that the government should run less than 100% of the restaurant, farm, and supermarket inspections. So what's your point?

Anyway, Jonah's argument crashes and burns if you consider a couple of elementary points:

1. To the extent that private schools 'perform better', they do so because they get to cherrypick their students. Make them deal with the same issues public schools deal with, and you'll see the same crappy performance.


2. The current crappy state of public schools is a direct result of the de-funding campaign by anti-tax fanatics (e.g., Proposition 13 in California, before which our schools were the best in the nation). And sure, Jonah has the standard glib response to this ("If you think more money will fix the schools, make your checks out to "cash" and send them to me."), which besides being hopelessly facile is also beside the point. If Jonah thinks de-funding schools doesn't make them drastically worse, he's welcome to turn over half his paycheck to me; after all, it couldn't possibly have any effect on his ability to function.

Besides the sheer stupidity of the thing, what impresses me most about this column is what an anachronism it is. It's as if the last six years hadn't happened--as if his contempt for the common good hadn't already been put into practice across the board, as if it hadn't proven a complete disaster, as if people (beyond the 27 percenters) still had an appetite for this sort of idiocy.

But then I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that Jonah is the last to get the memo.