Let Your Freak Flag Fly

Under normal conditions, it's best, politically, to keep your extremist views to yourself. But this political season, with the primary triumphs of so many tea party candidates, I think some Conservatoids have thrown restraint to the win. Case in point, Terry Jeffrey's latest article.

County by county, state by state, Americans should begin functionally abolishing government-run schools and replacing them with a free market in schools. On the federal level, Congress should kill the Department of Education by choking off its funding. The department was not constitutional in the first place.

Say what you will about the merits of this plan, there is no qustion that it is an extreme plan. Eliminating public education would be a far greater change than the mediocre changes to health care that have caused Conservatives to declare that we are now practically a socialist state.

For the record, of course I think this is a horrible plan. Public education is the bedrock of a civilized society, and to eliminate it is to create, purposefully, a caste system far stricter than the one we have today.