Honest opinion about government from David Boaz:
In the private sector, firms must attract voluntary customers or they fail; and if they fail, investors lose their money, and managers and employees lose their jobs. The possibility of failure, therefore, is a powerful incentive to find out what customers want and to deliver it efficiently. But in the government sector, failures are not punished, they are rewarded. If a government agency is set up to deal with a problem and the problem gets worse, the agency is rewarded with more money and more staff–because, after all, its task is now bigger. An agency that fails year after year, that does not simply fail to solve the problem but actually makes it worse, will be rewarded with an ever-increasing budget.
A key point to keep in mind is that nongovernment schools, which have to offer a better product to stay in business, do a better job of educating children. Defenders of the education establishment have tried to dismiss that success by claiming that the private schools start with a better grade of students–once again, blaming the customers for the enterprise's failure. But that excuse has been exposed time and again. Urban Catholic schools serve a clientele not terribly different from that of the government schools. Marva Collins's school in Chicago received national publicity for its success with poor black children, many of them declared "learning disabled" by the neighborhood government schools. Joan Davis Rateray of the Institute for Independent Education describes…the success of many minority-run independent schools. Any remaining doubts should have been eliminated in 1982 when James S. Coleman and his colleagues, after a comprehensive investigation of the results of public versus private schools, concluded that "when family backgrounds that predict achievement are controlled, students in…private schools are shown to achieve at a higher level than students in public schools.
Liberating Schools, 1991
Executive vice-president of the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C. libertarian think-tank devoted to a belief in minimal government, David Boaz has written many articles and edited a number of works, including Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City (1991) and Market Liberalism: A Paradigm of the 21st Century (with Edward H. Crane, 1993).
Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.