The Price of Liberty

Kerry McDonald recently published this commentary in her email newsletter. It is worth pondering:

In an article earlier this week in the large education news site, The 74, 7th grade teacher Ronak Shah laments that today’s school-choice programs enable families to switch schools too often. On the basis that this can be problematic for students, he argues for greater regulation and government oversight, including establishing set enrollment windows, outside of which switching schools would be rare. “In every other sector,” he writes, “we regulate choices to minimize collateral consequences. Why not in K-12 education?”

While I’m sure this teacher is well-meaning, his recommendations reflect the folly of central planners the world over, or “The Pretence of Knowledge,” as Friedrich Hayek called it. As he accepted his Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, Hayek spoke about the troubling tendency to believe that an individual or institution has sufficient knowledge of the countless, diverse preferences and needs of others to make decisions for them in a top-down manner.

“To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm,” said Hayek.

Indeed, while the teacher I mentioned above has concerns about the harm that frequent school-switching might have on students, the harms of centrally planned solutions are likely to be far worse.

Hayek explained that “the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. Even if such power is not in itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims.”

Let individuals and families be free to make the choices that are right for them—as often as they choose—without seeking permission from central planners.