Governance, Morality, and Markets

The 2016 presidential race reminds us that there is a chicken-and-egg relationship between government-funded education and public support for socialism.1The chicken is government-funded K–12 and higher education; the egg is ideological indoctrination and moral relativism. In a recent email exchange, Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, proposed to me that the low quality of K–12 education is a root cause of the low quality of higher education. In turn, the removal of local, parental control from the governance of K–12 education has contributed to its decline. The decline of both K–12 and higher education has been accompanied by advocacy of centralizing solutions that in turn reduce the quality of broader economic, social, and educational outcomes. Political correctness, rule books, and speech codes in universities have also supplanted traditional, internally driven morality because state-driven education