I don't know about you, but I hate paying for shit. Gas, food, clothes (admittedly, i probably don't spend enough on clothes), you name it, I hate paying for it. That was the best part about being in elementary school; I thought everything was free, and to a degree it was. Sure, tax dollars paid for my books but that's like saying that the Education Fairy brought it. It was just a given that the stuff was gonna be there, water stains, torn pages, outdated facts, and all.
But those givens are well on their way out the door if things keep going the way they're going. School funding is getting cut every day, usually in favor of things like the troops who are defending our freedoms, more roads, keeping other countries swimming in their champagne pools. Eventually, school funding is going to reach a point where they can only afford to teach from books that still have Jimmy Carter listed as the last President, sitting outside of an abandoned warehouse, where they have to whisper so the wolves can't find them.
The only way out at that point is going to be for the free market to step in and bail out American schools. Yes, that free market. The free market that so many Americans swear by that should be completely unleashed to solve all of our problems. The free market that is going to abolish AIDS and cancer. The free market that is going to render the Federal Government obsolete. The free market where absolutely nothing is free, except for maybe ketchup packets at Burger King.
Could you imagine a school that was completely run by the free market? Yeah, all of the books and desks in the school would be new (The LeBron James Social Studies Book, 2008 Edition...collect them all!), but they'd have ads for the latest Hannah Montana concert in between the math problems. Channel One would become the continuous commercial that we always believed it was. Vending machines would be in individual classrooms, where they could be easily accessed before nap time. They'd probably bring recess back, so the kids could work up a hearty appetite before their McDonald's lunches, but all of the good stuff on the playground would have pay turnstiles on it, installed by MARTA to simulate the real-life experience of a morning commute.
This is what I fear the free market would bring us and this is why the free market isn't trusted to run anything necessary. It couldn't even control itself to run a deregulated cable industry, let alone a healthcare industry where people have to choose between paying their rent or getting their latest cancer treatment. A healthcare industry where Medicare supplements are needed because Medicare just isn't enough. A healthcare industry where people only ride in ambulances when they're too bloody or too unconscious because a 12 block ride costs $700. Way to instill faith in America, free market. You probably found a cure of AIDS the week after it came out, but you won't let it out because you can't keep it from entirely killing the virus. It works a little TOO well.
The entire focus of the free market is to separate you from your money. Goal number one: To make a profit. Goal number two: To come up with more ways to get their hand back in your pocket. Goal number three: To leverage those properties in synergistic ways to increase market share. Goal number four: To invent more corporate buzzwords, like "urban" or "sports entertainment." That's the whole list and "To look out for your best interests" is nowhere on it. If that was the case, they probably would have never invented daylights or the diamond-encrusted two-way pager.
And none of this is to say that i think socialism is the answer, but I do think there are some benefits to some of its ideas, and being a rich nation like we are, we can afford to do socialism the right way. After all, the free market doesn't have all of the answers, because in all those years, it never occurred to them to come up with child labor laws or vacation days. I'm not saying that everyone should throw their money into the pot and split it evenly, but I am saying that instead of letting our homeless sleep in a refrigerator box, we could at least let them sleep in a dorm shower or the back row at the movie theater. Or maybe we could let people live in their storage units. Come on, have a heart.
Instead of socialism OR capitalism, why can't we just agree on a happy medium? They both have their benefits, but a pure form of either one will not work. Pure socialism just leads to swollen-headed Republicans claiming that Reagan single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union and pure capitalism just leads to the Bush Administration and oil prices jumping from $15 a barrel to $130 in just seven years. Neither is perfect, but socialism can continue to give us, for better or worse, our public school education and capitalism can continue to give us, for better or worse, the five-dollar DVD bin at Wal-Mart and $160 dollar Nikes.
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