You realize that this is a uniquely un-democratic proposition, right? While on the surface it seems you’re doing the opposite, you’d actually be denying the taxpayers their right to have a say in how their tax dollars are spent. (In the vast majority of cases, the parents of a public school student pay only a very small fraction of the actual cost of their child’s education. The property tax payers in their district — all of them — pay the bulk of it.)

It’s all part of an Evil Plotâ„¢ to get you breeders to pay for your own damn kid’s education, and not shift a major portion of that debt onto the childless among us.

What we’ll do is use the automatic improvements that are a direct result of the free market to privatize the school system, totally eliminating public schools altogether.

Once that is destroyed, we’ll peg the yearly voucher payments to a cost of living adjustment (COLA). Because the government “cooks the books” on the official rate of inflation, the real buying power will slowly erode over the decades. Gradually, parents will come to understand that we no longer live in a subsistence farming economy and they need to make wise reproductive decisions.

Shhh, please don’t spill the beans.

Now despite the fact that he’s willing to travel the world to sample the very best ideas in health care, in the very next sentence he’s already got what he thinks is the perfect solution

You may have read that I think this would be a “perfect solution,” but I sure as hell didn’t write it. I do think, however, that there does have to be some level of government involvement/funding, or it can’t work. Health care is inherently expensive and is needed by everyone. I just don’t see any purely free market system that could provide adequate health care to, say, a single mom making $20k per year.

That’s not to say that more government control / regulation is necessarily what’s needed. Just that more intelligent government involvement is needed. Here’s a hint: If you’re going to have the government provide prescription medication, don’t include industry protections that prevent that same government (and, by extension, the taxpayers) from negotiating for lower prices.

leaving the Social Security Administration with a pocket full of IOUs not worth the paper that they are printed on

I wouldn’t tell that to the Bonds market, if I were you…

So now that I’ve trashed tgirsch’s proposed system

I wouldn’t say that you’ve trashed anything, because I didn’t even really propose a system. You focused in on one narrow suggestion and assumed that I intended this to be a comprehensive plan. I think it’s pretty clear that I didn’t. I’m totally open to suggestions, actually; I just want those suggestions to actually allow for universal health care (whether privately-funded, publicly-funded, or some combination thereof).

I will interject here that I’m a strong advocate of vouchers, and abolishing public schools altogether, letting the private schools compete with each other and cater to the educational wishes of their customers.

You realize that this is a uniquely un-democratic proposition, right? While on the surface it seems you’re doing the opposite, you’d actually be denying the taxpayers their right to have a say in how their tax dollars are spent. (In the vast majority of cases, the parents of a public school student pay only a very small fraction of the actual cost of their child’s education. The property tax payers in their district — all of them — pay the bulk of it.)