The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

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07/11/08

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Two Ages of Abundance

I promised that I’d do a post discussing one of the weaknesses of Brink Lindsay’s The Age of Abundance. In particular, it felt like it was really two separate books that were stitched together in one volume. Both halves were good, but they didn’t cohere as nicely as one might like. The first half of the book, which covers the 20th century up to about 1980, is a rich and colorful discussion of Americans social and cultural evolution. The second half of the book, which focuses on the last quarter-century or so, is more a technical economics discussion, focusing on the effects of globalization, changes in consumption and inequality, etc.

To pick just one example at random, the book mentions Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Madonna. But there is no mention of, say, Nirvana, arguably the most popular band of the 1990s. Indeed, as far as I can recall, the book doesn’t mention any bands that became popular after about 1985.

I can think of several possible reasons for this. The most obvious is that Lindsey may simply be writing what he knows. As a youngish Baby Boomer, he was presumably paying more attention to pop music between about 1965 and 1985 than since then. Conversely, over the last couple of decades he’s been more immersed in debates about politics and economics, and so not surprisingly he focuses more on those aspects of recent debates.

The shift may also be a consequence of one of the trends Lindsey identifies in the book: the astonishing increase in the diversity of American culture. One could make a plausible case that Nirvana is to the early 1990s what the Beatles were to the mid-1960s. But at the same time, I think it’s clear that no band in the 1990s achieved the same level of fame. And indeed, it’s not clear that it was in the 1990s, or ever will be again, possible to reach that kind of stratospheric social success. The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show drew an estimated 73 million viewers, about half the country. No television show today comes close to attracting half the country to view it.

Which means it might be impossible to write a cultural history of late-20th-century America as coherent as the one Lindsey writes about the cultural trends of the 50s and 60s. A cultural history of the 1990s would either come across as a laundry list (with separate sections for pop music, country, jazz, hip hop, gospel, R&B, metal, and dozens of smaller genres and sub-genres) or it would necessarily be selective, discussing whichever parts of the culture the author happens to be acquainted with.

A final possibility is that it’s not yet possible to write a definitive cultural history of the last couple of decades because we don’t have enough perspective to see which trends proved to be really important. The rise of evangelical Christianity began in the 1940s and 1950s, but a writer in 1970 might not have appreciated its significance, given that politicians didn’t start courting evangelical voters in earnest until Jimmy Carter ran as an evangelical in 1976. Similarly, the social movements that will shape popular culture in the next couple of decades are almost certainly in our midst today, but we won’t be able to identify them until they achieve the kind of success the evangelical movement did in the 70s and 80s. The more technical and tentative tenor of the second half of The Age of Abundance may reflect hesitation of Lindsey’s part to discuss cultural trends that are still in progress and may turn out very differently than anyone expects.

Personally, I found the first half more interesting than the second. I think that’s partly because the second half draws more on the work of libertarian thinkers whose work I’m already familiar with. It’s also because the best writing is often about good storytelling, and there are a lot more fun stories in the first half of the book. The whole thing is excellent, though, and I encourage you to check it out.

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06/27/08

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The Age of Abundance

I’ve just finished reading The Age of Abundance, by Brink Lindsey (full disclosure: Brink is one of the people who oversees my work as an adjunct scholar at Cato). This social and economic history of the post-war period is an engaging and thought-provoking read.

The centerpiece of the book is an exploration of the consensus of the 1950s and the way that consensus was upended by the turmoils of the 1960s. I’m just young enough that the social convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s had just recently been added to the history books I read in school, and they got short shrift from my history teacher who had been teaching the same course since the 1950s. Likewise, when I started paying serious attention to politics in the late 1990s, the aftershocks of the 1960s were still being felt (I remember Bill Clinton’s pot smoking-being discussed by friends in high school, for example) but the issues still being debated from that era felt increasingly stale. I had heard plenty about the 60s, but most of what I’d heard had been random and fragmentary.

So it was fun to read a coherent, lively account of what happened during that turbulent decade. I don’t think I appreciated what a radical, violent, and exciting decade it was. And I learned a number of things I didn’t realize before. That the evangelical movement was born in the 1940s and was widespread by the 1960s, but had a strongly apolitical character until the late 1970s, for example.

I was also impressed by the way Brink uses recent social history to frame the contemporary political landscape. In his telling, the contemporary right and left are the intellectual descendants of the counterculture (which arose during the 1960s in response to the smug, liberal conformism of the 1950s) on the one hand and the Goldwater conservatives (which arose in response to the counterculture) on the other. He suggests that each side is trapped in an ideological confusion that is the mirror image of the other. The countercultural left hated capitalism, even as it embraced the liberating social changes—feminism, greater sexual openness, environmentalism, and greater free speech and tolerance—that could not have happened without the affluence capitalism produced. The movement that emerged from the Goldwater campaign, in contrast, staunchly defended capitalism while defended a traditionalist morality that capitalism was steadily undermining.

And this, of course, makes libertarianism the ideology of the responsible center: supporters of both capitalism and the liberal social changes it produces. And while few independent voters self-identify as libertarians (much less Libertarians), they’re libertarian insofar as they reject the left’s antipathy to capitalism and the right’s antipathy to social tolerance. There is, of course, an element of the pundit’s fallacy here, but I think there’s a lot of truth here too. Over the last four decades, public attitudes have shifted dramatically rightward on economic issues (even with a sweeping Democratic victory this fall, it’s hard to imagine a return to the 1970s’ levels of taxes, regulations, unionization, or monetary expansion) and leftward on social issues (feminism, gay rights, and sexual openness have all made great strides). I think it’s pretty clear that the left has been gradually winning on social issues while the right has mostly won on economic issues. While neither side has been all that libertarian, the net effect has been to push things in a libertarian direction.

I also think it would be helpful if more libertarians talked about things in these terms. Too many libertarians seem to define libertarianism as a very specific and restrictive political program: as a laundry list of government programs to be abolished, or equivalently as a very short list of government programs that won’t be abolished. By that measure, libertarianism is nowhere close to successful. But if we define libertarianism more broadly as a set of general ideas and attitudes—pro-market, pro-tolerance, skeptical of authority—the last few decades look a lot better from a libertarian perspective. Few major government programs have been abolished, but the role of market in the economy has expanded dramatically, and partly as a consequence people are freer than they’ve ever been to live their lives as they seem fit without interference from those in authority.

It was a great read and I recommend you pick up a copy. In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss one of the book’s few weaknesses.

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01/10/08

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Ron Paul and Racism

Since I’ve mentioned Ron Paul a few times in this space, I wanted to mention that after appalling examples of racist and anti-gay sentiments from his newsletters came to light, I would no longer characterize myself as a Ron Paul supporter. Before Tuesday, the only evidence of Paul’s racism I’d seen was one issue of the newsletter. I took Paul at his word that the comments in question were written without his knowledge or approval, and that the writer was let go when they were brought to his attention. But now it appears that at least a dozen issues of his newsletter over a period of some 5 years contained similarly appalling comments. I no longer find Paul’s rationalizations plausible. Whether Paul wrote the newsletters himself is irrelevant. If he is not a bigot himself, he had no qualms about associating with bigots over the course of many years. I have more thoughts on Paul’s newsletters here and here.

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01/ 7/08

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Huckabee's Underrated Electability

One of the things that’s baffled me about recent primary punditry is the constant belittling of Huckabee’s chances. Matt Yglesias, for example, thinks that Huckabee couldn’t win a general election because he’s a “white evangelical identity politics candidate.” I’ve heard others express similar views.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. To start with, Huckabee is the most talented campaigner in the Republican field. He’s personable, quick on his feet and knows how to use self-deprecating humor to his advantage.

The rap against Huckabee seems to be that he’s the second coming of Pat Robertson and will therefore scare off independents with his right-wing social views. I think this critique misfires for a couple of reasons. In the first place, every Republican candidate other than Rudy holds (or at least pretends to hold) substantive views on social issues that are quite similar to Huckabee’s. Every serious Republican candidate (by which I exclude Rudy) is pro-life and anti-gay. Voters for whom those issues are deal-breakers just aren’t going to vote Republican no matter who the nominee is. So Huckabee’s not at a disadvantage on that score.

On the other hand, as Huckabee frequently points out, he’s very good at defending conservative views without sounding angry about it. He’s very conservative on social issues, but he doesn’t sound that conservative when he’s on the campaign trail. For voters who aren’t paying very close attention (and that includes a lot of swing voters) Huckabee is likely to sound like the kind of candidate they’re comfortable with.

I think a lot of members of the liberal (and libertarian) secular elite have a weird blind spot when it comes to religion and religious rhetoric in politics. They tend to find sincere religious sentiments so alien that anyone who is conversant with the language of faith sounds nutty to them. But like it or not, this is still a predominantly religious country, and lots of voters respond well to religious rhetoric of the non-angry variety. I personally find it every bit as off-putting as Matt does, but we’re in the minority.

Most importantly, as Matt himself points out, of all the Republican candidates, Huckabee is most in touch with the political mood of the country in 2008. Huckabee’s populist rhetoric has the potential to appeal to the same sorts of disaffected voters that gave Ross Perot 19 percent of the vote in 1992. This is something that Rudy McRomney, would be simply incapable of doing. And his lack of establishment ties makes him the only Republican (other than Ron Paul) who could plausibly distance himself from the Bush administration, which will be a large advantage in the general election.

If I were a Democratic strategist, I would be far more worried about a Mike Huckabee nomination than about running against Rudy McRomney.

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12/18/07

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Guest Workers in Singapore

Reason cover story next month is an excellent piece on guest worker programs by Kerry Howley. It has an emphasis on Singapore, which has a stunning 43 percent foreign-born workforce, most of them participating in the country’s guest worker program. Singapore’s guest worker program can only be described as draconian. Workers aren’t permitted to switch jobs, they’re required to leave the country within seven days if they lose their jobs, they can’t marry natives, and they face deportation or mandatory abortions if they get pregnant.

And yet Kerry makes a poignant case that this program is better than no guest worker program at all. Most immigrants see a massive boost in their earning power when they come to Singapore, and they’re able to remit significant sums back to their families, or to raise the capital necessary to start a business back home. Immigrants obviously aren’t thrilled with the restrictions placed on them, but they’re still grateful for the opportunity to improve their economic conditions.

However, it’s not clear how relevant Singapore’s experience is to the American immigration debate. The big difference is that Singapore is an authoritarian regime that isn’t too worried about equality or civil liberties, nor does it have to worry as much about short-term political expediency. A Singapore-style guest worker program simply wouldn’t fly here because our government doesn’t have the necessary ruthlessness (not that I’d want it to). We lack the political will to deport the millions of immigrants in the country now, and I suspect we’d be equally squeamish about some of the more draconian aspects of Singapore’s program.

Moreover, while I think a guest worker program for America would, on the margin, be a good thing for both Americans and immigrants, I think the real question is how much pro-immigration interests should be willing to give up to get a guest worker program. Last summer’s immigration bill, for example, included a dramatic expansion of the federal government’s authority over employment for citizens and immigrants alike, harsher penalties for employers who hired illegal immigrants, and a wall across our Southern border. The idea was that we would “trade” these things for a guest worker program (and “amnesty”). But although I think a guest worker program, by itself, would be worth supporting, I think we found out last session that it’s not “politically viable” unless it’s combined with a lot of anti-immigrant nonsense that makes the whole package a bad idea.

I think this is especially true because in the absence of new legislation, the long-run trends are working in favor of more liberal immigration policies. As Hispanic immigrants become more deeply embedded in the American economy (and as more of their children become voters), the climate for pro-immigration reforms will only improve. The same liberal tendencies that makes a Singapore-style guest worker program impractical also makes de facto amnesty all but inevitable in the absence of new legislation. We’re too generous and egalitarian a people to undertake the draconian measures that it would take to enforce our current immigration laws. So while I think a guest worker program would be a good idea, I don’t think it’s worth accepting new restrictions on immigration to get it.

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11/25/07

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Hammers, Nails, and Counterinsurgency

Matt notes that one of the subtexts of the Iraq war debate is an intra-military struggle between advocates of conventional warfighting capabilities and those who think the military needs to bulk up on counterinsurgency tactics. I agree that it’s disheartening to see the counterinsurgency folks being co-opted into supporting a longer Iraq war, but I don’t agree about this:

The trouble here is that though the counterinsurgency people are, I think, generally correct about the sort of scenarios we should be preparing our military for, Iraq is, at this point, completely lacking in strategic rationale. But the two ideas — should we be fighting in Iraq, versus should we be preparing more for stability operations rather than big state-to-state warfare — really ought to be considered separately.

I think it’s important not to underestimate the extent to which the existence of a government capability makes it more likely that that capability will be put to use. Clearly, the ease with which we won the first Gulf War, and the relatively large size of the US military made it easier for the Bush administration to make the case that we should invade Iraq. Had the military been smaller or had less advanced weaponry over the last couple of decades, proponents of war would have had to face tough questions about where they would find the personnel and hardware to launch a second war in Iraq before the war in Afghanistan was completed. Similarly, I think one of the major things holding the Bush administration back from a war in Iran is that even the hawks in the administration realize that we simply don’t have the troops necessary to do the job properly.

It seems to me that the same principle applies to a beefed-up counterinsurgency unit. Right now, one of the most potent arguments against nation building is that our military isn’t designed for it. Our military is trained to kill people and blow stuff up, and so if you stick them in a foreign country where they have to worry about the nuances of the local culture and avoid killing too many civilians, that creates some serious problems. But if we start training a special counterinsurgency corps, policymakers will naturally be more inclined to test those units out in places where they appear to be needed.

Now, obviously that wouldn’t be a problem if we had a counterinsurgency corps that was so effective that it always led to good outcomes. But I think it’s hard to draw from Iraq the lesson that the only problem was the lack of proper counterinsurgency training. Obviously, if our troops had been well trained in counterinsurgency tactics, the odds of success would have been higher. But they still would have been quite small. My understanding of the history of counterinsurgency is that they practically never work, and in the rare case where they do work the costs are often unacceptably high.

All of which is to say that it’s almost never a good idea to get ourselves into counter-insurgency operations. And indeed, if we get to the point where counter-insurgency forces seem desirable, that should be a sign that we ought to start looking for the exits. Creating a dedicated counterinsurgency unit will create institutional pressures for near-perpetual counterinsurgency operations. I suspect that most of the time even the best counterinsurgency efforts won’t be effective, but if we’ve got a hammer, we’ll be awfully tempted to keep pounding any nails we see.

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11/14/07

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Sunstein on the Second Amendment

Cass Sunstein has a great lecture on the Second Amendment. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen someone attempt to make an honest and sympathetic assessment of both sides of the Second Amendment debate. And I also found it one of the most compelling explanations of the pro-gun-control interpretation of the Second Amendment. In a nutshell, Sunstein argues that the Second Amendment was primarily about hostility toward standing armies, and the importance of an armed and organized citizenry to resist standing armies that become tyrannical. That’s obviously not the gloss that modern-day gun rights activists put on it.

With that said, I was struck by the extent to which constitutional interpretation becomes an exercise in indulging one’s political prejudices. Once we acknowledge that the historical understanding of a constitutional provision is out of step with the modern world, that by no means offers a clear answer about what to do about it. A lot of anti-gun folks want us to conclude, in essence, that since the Second Amendment’s literal original meaning isn’t relevant today, that we should simply ignore it altogether. But that’s not how we interpret any other provision of the Bill of Rights. For example, the literal meaning of the First Amendment’s establishment clause is a prohibition on Congress creating an official national church. Yet the courts have (correctly, in my view) taken this language an expanded it into a general principle that the state may not use its authority to help or hinder any particular religious views. Similarly, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t say anything about wiretapping, a technique which relates to a technology that hadn’t been invented yet. Yet the Supreme Court has (again, correctly, in my view) adopted a relatively expansive view of the amendment’s text, holding that violations of privacy that are analogous to a search or a seizure are subject to the Fourth Amendment’s requirements.

By the same token, even if the literal meaning of the Second Amendment isn’t very relevant today, it’s far from obvious that that means we should simply interpret it in a way that renders it effectively meaningless. With almost every other provision of the Bill of Rights, the courts have adopted an expansive individual rights view of its text, even in cases where a literal reading might support a narrower interpretation. It’s a little hard, for example, to accept the notion that “penumbras and emanations” from the Fourth Amendment give us a right to birth control and abortion, but that the Second Amendment has no such penumbras and emanations related to an individual right to own firearms. The Second Amendment (along with the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, perhaps) is the only amendment that has been read so narrowly as to offer no protection at all for an individual right.

What’s going on here, I think, is largely that people tend to read their policy preferences into ambiguous constitutional texts. So people who support gun control on policy grounds will naturally find narrow readings of the amendment more compelling, while gun rights activists will naturally find broader readings more intuitive. In fact, Sunstein makes this all but explicit when he compares the constitutional claims of the gun rights movement to the constitutional arguments of the gay rights movement for gay marriage. Sunstein says he finds the moral claims of the latter more compelling, and therefore finds their positions more plausible. Obviously, there are a lot of conservatives who see things the other way around.

To his credit, Sunstein does end his talk by arguing that the courts should strive to come up with a narrow ruling that does its best to respect to the deeply held convictions of gun rights activists. It’s not clear exactly how he thinks the court can square this circle, but it’s good that he’s at least cognizant of the fact that there are a lot of sincere people on both sides of the issue, and that both perspectives deserve a degree of respect.

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11/12/07

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Paul the Fruitcake

More good stuff from Glenn Greenwald:

It has become fashionable among certain commentators to hurl insults at Ron Paul such as “huge weirdo,” “fruitcake,” and the like. Interestingly, the same thing was done to another anti-war medical doctor/politician, Howard Dean, back in 2003, as Charles Krauthammer infamously pronounced with regard to Dean that “it’s time to check on thorazine supplies.” Krauthammer subsequently said that “[i]t looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.”

For a long time now, I’ve heard a lot of people ask: “where are the principled conservatives?” — meaning those on the Right who are willing to oppose the constitutional transgressions and abuses of the Bush administration without regard to party loyalty. A “principled conservative” isn’t someone who agrees with liberals on most issues; that would make them a “principled liberal.” A “principled conservative” is someone who aggressively objects to the radicalism of the neocons and the Bush/Cheney assault on our constitution and embraces a conservative political ideology. That’s what Ron Paul is, and it’s hardly a surprise that he holds many views anathema to most liberals. That hardly makes him a “fruitcake.”

Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of a sovereign country that had not attacked us and could not attack us — as did some of the commentators now aggressively questioning Ron Paul’s mental health or, at least, his “seriousness.” She supported the occupation of that country for years — until it became politically unpalatable. That war has killed hundreds of thousands of people at least and wreaked untold havoc on our country. Are those who supported that war extremist, or big weirdos, or fruitcakes?

Or how about her recent support for Joe Lieberman’s Iran warmongering amendment, or her desire to criminalize flag burning, or her vow to strongly consider an attack on Iran if they obtain nuclear weapons? Is all of that sane, normal, and serious?
And I read every day that corporations and their lobbyists are the bane of our country, responsible for most of its ills. What does it say about her that her campaign is fueled in large part by support from exactly those factions? Are she and all of her supporters nonetheless squarely within the realm of the sane and normal? And none of this is to say anything of the Giulianis and Podhoretzs and Romneys and Krauthammers and Kristols with ideas so extreme and dangerous, yet still deemed “serious.”

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11/ 7/07

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Buckley 1957, Paul 2007?

Via Andrew Sullivan, a National Review reader asks if there’s “anything in Ron Paul’s platform that the young William F. Buckley would have disagreed with.” John Derbyshire concedes: not much.

Which casts into stark relief claims by modern-day “conservatives” like the hacks at Redstate.com that Ron Paul supporters are “a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans.” Seven years ago, no one would have disputed that Ron Paul was a conservative Republican in the Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan mold. But nowadays, the primary criteria for membership in the conservative coalition seem to be loyalty to the president’s agenda and a general suspicion of foreigners.

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11/ 6/07

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Taking the Constitution Seriously

I’ve never paid much attention to Glenn Greenwald, but this post was enough to earn him a place in my feed reader:

[Ron Paul’s] argument is that the Constitution does not allow the Federal Government to do so, regardless of whether it’s desirable. If one wants the Federal Government to exercise specific powers which the Constitution prohibits, then the solution is to amend the Constitution, not to violate it because of the good results it produces.

While there are certainly arguments to dispute Paul’s constitutional view (the Supreme Court, for instance, has had to reach to Congress’ Article I authority to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States” in order to “justify” many of these Federal Government activities), the argument that there are “good results” from having the Federal Government do these things — or that there would be “bad results” if it didn’t — isn’t a coherent or responsive reply to Paul’s position.

It’s either constitutional or it isn’t for the Federal Government to exercise these powers, and it’s irrelevant (for this argument) whether there is a “need” for the Federal Government to do so (for exactly the same reason that it’s irrelevant whether unconstitutional and illegal warrantless eavesdropping is beneficial for guarding against Terrorist attacks). Regardless of one’s view of Paul’s specific Tenth Amendment theories, it is critical to emphasize — as a general matter — that “good results” is not a justification for having the Government violate the Constitution or any other law. That’s true when the violations are committed by the Bush administration or anyone else.

The general point that violating the constitution is wrong even if it leads to results we like is a position that hardly anyone in mainstream politics takes seriously. Of course, there are people on both the left and the right invoke the constitution in stump speeches (usually it’s mostly the party out of power), but both sides are frustratingly selective about which provisions they pay attention to. The left is (rightly) outraged that the Bush administration is trashing the Fourth Amendment, but they’re perfectly willing to countenance tortured readings of the First Amendment in the name of “campaign finance reform,” of the Second Amendment in the name of “gun control,” and of the Fifth Amendment in the name of “urban planning.” While some leftie legal scholars make a half-hearted attempt to make a constitutional argument, you find that the real argument boils down to “if we took those amendments seriously, the government wouldn’t be able to pursue policies we approve of.” This is sometimes framed in terms of “compelling state interests,” which is another way of saying the court thinks there’s some policy goal it thinks is more important than taking the words of the constitution seriously.

Of course as we saw in Raich, no one in mainstream politics, left or right, has any interest in taking the Tenth Amendment seriously. And frankly, I think we’re now at a point where there’s no serious chance of that changing in the foreseeable future. But it’s still refreshing to have someone pointing out that the constitution actually does say something intelligible about what the government should and shouldn’t be doing, and that much of what the federal government is currently doing is in flagrant breach of its requirements.

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10/31/07

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Totally Baffling Voucher Arguments

Matt is baffled by Megan’s argument for vouchers:

One needs to go back to what we know about educating poor children. One thing we know is that it’s very difficult. The schools that do a good job of educating poor kids tend to expend more resources than do schools that do a good job of educating middle class kids. We also know that there are many schools that produce good overall results but that nonetheless produce bad results with their poor children. We know that some urban public school systems do better than others. We know that the charter school movement has produced some successful models, but also that market demand can keep a healthy number of non-successful charter schools operating because parents do a less-than-perfect job of making school placement decisions on the basis of evidence about educational outcomes.

If we’re concerned not about the “right” of exit (which already exists) but the practical ability to get a better education, then you need policies that increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children. Just handing a voucher to every family in DC that can manage to place a kid in a private school would be a nice subsidy to the parents at Sidwell and St. Albans and would presumably get some poor kids into better situations, but would still, in practice, leave most DC families right where they are today — with the “right” to send their kids elsewhere, but no practical ability to do so.

It seems blindingly obvious to me that “handing a voucher to every family in DC” is precisely the policy most likely to “increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children.” I mean look, in any other part of the economy, we have these people called “entrepreneurs” that see an unmet need, find a way to meet that need, attract paying customers, and thereby build a successful business. What makes entrepreneurship possible is a large pool of potential paying customers. The larger the potential market, the more entrepreneurs you’re likely to attract.

Now, educational entrepreneurs do exist. If Matt doesn’t believe me, he should visit and I’ll take him to a local Catholic school a toured a few months ago that’s successfully educating some of the poorest minority students in the St. Louis area. And he’s right—their per-pupil expenditures are fairly high, although if I recall correctly they’re not as astronomical as expenditures in city public schools. They’re able to survive because they’ve managed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in private donations. But running a private school for low-income kids is extremely difficult, because in addition to the ordinary problems of educating low-income kids, you have to also spend a lot of time wooing donors and organizing fundraisers. Which, I think, is one of the reasons such schools are few and far between.

Now, the number of such entrepreneurs is surely limited. Creating a new school, or serving as a teacher at a school serving low-income kids, is a stressful, harrowing job. So we shouldn’t expect vouchers to miraculously lead to the creation of good private school seats for all the poor children who want them. But a well-designed voucher program creates the opportunity for however many aspiring educational entrepreneurs do exist to create new schools for poor kids without having to worry about external fundraising.

The claim that vouchers would “leave most DC families right where they are today” rings hollow when absolutely no one is proposing anything that will work any better. Every reform proposal will result in most poor kids continuing to be trapped in bad public schools in the short term. Vouchers are likely to give more poor kids more opportunities more quickly than almost any other reform proposal under discussion.