Tenure

The institution of tenure for school teachers is merely the product of our dysfunctional public school system. It is curious that this practice exists almost exclusively in the education industry. Why is this? Why do we think that school teachers are in need of more protection than any other class of workers? If it is important to protect teachers from the whimsical and capricious actions of their supervisors, it must also be important to protect other professionals. In fact, why don’t we make it impossible to fire anyone after a few years on the job?

The very obvious reason that this practice does not exist in any other industry is that it is horribly inefficient. It encourages good behavior and effort only up until the time when tenure is granted. Afterwards, the rational individual will work just hard enough to not be fired (although certainly there are motivated individuals who will always do their best). In most cases (especially in education), that is very little effort indeed. That is why there are so many complaints about ineffective, tenured teachers that do barely enough to scrape by.

If there ever was a problem with teachers being fired for reasons unrelated to performance, it could only happen because consumers (parents and their children) have no other options. When parents can remove their children from a school if the quality suffers, the administrators have a powerful incentive to keep the best teachers, regardless of whether they like them. Once the public school system removed the consumer oversight that only a free market can provide, administrators could play favorites with teachers with no thought towards losing customers.

Why We Don’t Need the Post Office

The Post Office, along with the DMV, is a favorite target for proponents of small government. The reason I am going to rehash some of those arguments in favor of privatizing the Post Office is that it happens to be a very concrete example of a government program that can be made better and less costly by taking it out of Washington’s hands.

One of the primary arguments for a government-run Post Office is that if it is placed in private hands, there is no guarantee that everyone in America will get mail service. A for-profit company may decide that it is simply not rational to deliver to Nowheresville, Montana. This is undoubtedly true, but not the problem that some believe it to be.

When I send a letter through the Post Office (which holds a monopoly on First Class mail), I pay the same price no matter what its destination is. However, the cost to the Post Office is very different depending on where it is being mailed. Paying a mailman (and an entire Post Office branch) to deliver to a town of 300 people is very expensive. Yet the people living there pay no more to receive or send letters than I do, despite the fact that I live in the eighth largest city in America.

In effect, I am subsidizing the mail service of those individuals who live in these rural areas (and those who send mail to them). A private company would naturally charge higher rates to those who cost them more. This price discrimination would allow them to lower the price for people like me, making First Class mail cheaper than it is now. Mail service would still exist for those that live outside of big cities, but its price would accurately reflect one of the costs or living in the country instead of the city.

One of my favorite arguments for the abolition of the government-run Post Office is the absurd practice of not delivering mail one day out of the week. If private companies were allowed to compete with the Post Office, I have no doubt that competition would immediately push providers to deliver all week long. This would benefit everyone, and the only reason it does not currently exist is because there is a government mandated monopoly.

Making Education More Affordable

There was an article in the State Press (ASU’s newspaper) recently about student groups pressuring congressmen to help make college more affordable for everyone. Normally I ignore everything in the State Press except the crossword and the word jumbles, but this one caught my eye because this argument is made quite often. It goes: a college education is getting more and more expensive; therefore, Congress, or state legislatures, must give more money to young people (and of course, taxes must go up).

What puzzles me about these arguments is that there is a very simple alternative to taxing some people to let others go to college: pressure the universities to lower their costs. This changes the transaction from one involving coercion (government forcibly taking money from some and giving it to others) to one of voluntary agreement (the college/university can lower its prices or risk losing students or bad media attention).

The simple reason why student groups would not utilize this method is that a reduction in the price of something necessitates a reduction in the level of service. Rather than lower the quality of the university they are attending, it is more rationale for the student groups to pressure government institutions to spend other people’s money to help still others pay for college.