I just got my new jetpack, and my new micro-helicopter, so I won’t be using the roads anymore. Who do I see about getting my ‘road dollars’ back?
What, you say? There’s no such thing? We just pay for the roads, and whoever wants to use them can? And because anyone can use them, we all pay for them?
Okay, I guess that makes sense.
But in that case, what’s all this nonsense about ‘education dollars’? As in, ‘parents should be able to spend their education dollars the way they want’?
It’s exactly the same: We pay for the schools, and whoever wants to use them can. And because anyone can use them, we all pay for them.
For the longest time, I found myself irked whenever I heard someone use the phrase ‘their education dollars’ when talking about school choice. But I was focused on the word ‘their’.
I would point out that any parents can use their dollars for anything they want: food, shelter, medical care, education, entertainment, investment, and so on. Issues only arise when they want to spend dollars that are taken from other people, by force.
After a while, I started hearing people try to finesse this point by talking about ‘the dollars that would have been spent on their children if they were using the schools’.
But if a child moves to a town and starts attending a school, the budget of the school does not change at all. The amount spent on that child is exactly zero. Similarly, if a child leaves a school, the budget of the school does not change. The amount that would have been spent on that child is also zero.
Again, it’s the same for the roads. If you start using the roads, or stop using the roads, it doesn’t change what gets spent on the roads. The amount spent on you is zero.
And that’s when the light came on. I realized that I had been focused on the less important part of the phrase — the word their — instead of on the more important part — the words education dollars.
(It’s a little like what happens when people focus too much on the word cherish in Article 83 of the state constitution, when they should really be focusing on the word and, as in ‘seminaries and public schools’.)
Note that a more precise analogy is to compare roads to schools, and transportation to education. We use tax money to fund roads and schools, and anyone can use them, or not use them, for transportation and education.
While we have long had the concepts of road dollars and school dollars, we have never had the concept of transportation dollars, because that doesn’t even make sense. And until very recently we have never had the concept of ‘education dollars’, which also doesn’t make sense.
So how did we get to the point where so many people fall into a trance when the magic words ‘their education dollars’ is uttered?
There is something in formal logic called a Skolem function. Informally, we use the idea in language when we refer to something whose identity we don’t know, but whose attributes we can specify.
For example, I probably don’t know who your great-great-great-great-grandfather is. And you might not know either. But we know he existed, so we can make sensible statements about him.
Similarly, we can talk about the eighth President of the United States, or about the caliber most often used by special forces snipers, or about the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.
We can even talk about things that don’t yet exist, like the next President of the United States, or the person who will buy my house, or the next winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course, we can put ourselves on thin ice when doing this, since we’re essentially predicting the future. (As Yogi Berra reminded us, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”)
Maybe the United States will be taken over by China, and there won’t be any more presidents. Maybe my house will burn down before I have a chance to sell it. Maybe the Nobel committee will decide that the Peace Prize has become such a farce that no more will be handed out.
But this can also be one of the greatest powers that we have as humans: The ability to give a name to something that doesn’t exist, and then work to make it exist. That’s essentially what happened with the Declaration of Independence.
But as with any power, it can be used for good, or for evil.
In particular, the same technique that lets us talk about things that must exist, even if we don’t know their identities, can just as easily be used to talk about things that can’t exist because they simply make no sense — which becomes a big problem if we start basing public policy on them.
That’s what’s going on with education dollars. There have never been education dollars, in exactly the same way that there have never been transportation dollars. They don’t make sense. But the more some people repeat the phrase, the more other people become conditioned to think that they must be a thing — otherwise, why would so many people be talking about them?
And so, in the truest, literal sense of the word, we are sleepwalking into adventures in legislation and public policy that are based on nonsense.
What should we do about that? I don’t know, except to start calling bullshit on anyone who uses the phrase ‘education dollars’. When you hear education dollars, think transportation dollars, and just start laughing. Out loud.
