Oh well, hey, if Wikipedia says [deflation] is bad, I guess that pretty much settles it.
Well, history and general economic theory don't really have a lot of good things to say about deflation either.
Alright guys, remember, when prices go down, that's BAD. The history of computers is pretty much a silent Holocaust. Remember to keep your money in an account that pays the inflation rate. I mean, you'll still have to pay taxes so... hell, why not just spend all your money?
I think you're conflating two different issues here. The history of computer prices is a good one. The buying power of the average consumer's income increased, making all of those consumers better off. Deflation is the general decrease of *all* (or nearly all) prices. That's a whole different ball of wax. Remember, your wages are a price. The amount of buying power that you get from your salary *does not* go up in that case. On top of that, simply sitting on money becomes a good "investment" which reduces the need to seek out riskier (but more productive) uses for the money.
Thought experiment: You have a boatload of cash in an inflationary economy. What do you do? You invest it in a business that will provide better than inflation returns, even if it does so at some risk. Net result? That money goes into producing goods and services. Now, what would you do in a deflationary economy? Stuff it in your mattress. You get X% at no risk at all. Net result? That chunk of money stops working for the economy. Even worse, you exacerbate the problem by artificially reducing the money supply and increasing the value of the remaining money even more.
Basically, if you throw an economy that was otherwise skipping along happily into deflation, you have the potential to grind it to a near halt. HTH.
Well, my point in bringing it up is simply that the Illiad is a work rich in history and real places and people. It also incorporates miraculous intervention by members of the Greek pantheon. It tells a story about a place that appears to be quite real (a fact discovered surprisingly recently) about a war that may have some grounding in fact (this point is not clear). The details, though, have plenty of divine intervention sprinkled throughout. I brought it up because the people who are often very happy to accept that because the Bible references real people, events, and places, that its miracles should be taken at face value would not necessarily say the same thing about the Illiad, mainly because the Illiad invokes gods that they aren't predisposed to believe in.
All breeds of dogs exist due to selective breeding of wolves. No genetic mutations necessary for that.
I'm very interested in how you arrived at the conclusion that no genetic mutations were necessary. I would be willing to bet that sequencing the DNA of wolves and a few different species of dogs would show a number of interesting mutations, but if you have some information that contradicts this, I'd love to hear it.
Since you can fly a plane high into the air, isn't it reasonable to assume you can fly to the moon?
Since the speed of car doubles every 10 years, isn't is reasonable to assume that we'll be driving faster than the speed of light in 1,000 years?
Your analogies are a bit broken. In both cases, there's a well understood and explainable phenomenon that puts an upper limit on how far we can extrapolate the trends (in this case, lack of atmosphere and the theory of relativity). What is the analogous phenomenon for mutation with selection?
It's worth pointing out that most ancient cultures lived (by necessity) near water and often in flood plains. It should not be surprising at all that many of them have exaggerated stories about the most cataclysmic type of disaster that could possibly befall them. A more interesting question is, what about those cultures that don't seem to have noticed a world wide flood at all? You'd think it would have been worth noting.
This does not follow. If the bible is seen to be an accurate historical document and it documents "supernatural" events, why are the "supernatural" events treated differently to the other events.
What adult animals aside from humans fly space shuttles? I appreciate the fact that drinking milk as an adult is a pretty rare thing in nature, but I'm not sure how that's an indicator of how one "should" behave as a lot of people think it is. To my knowledge, we're the only animals that cook their food as well.
However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.
Intrestingly, the author doesn't take the time to suggest a better number. Even more telling, the author seems to ignore the fact that when taking a statistical sample like this, there is little effective difference between sampling a middle school and an entire country. Nor does he mention that the confidence interval should reflect the small number of cluster points unless there's actually something wrong with the methodology. In fact, I haven't seen anybody do a good job of actually tackling the numbers and the methodology beyond the basic hand waving "Look at how small the sample is!" No calculations as to how big a proper sample is. No suggestion of why the confidence interval would reflect a tighter interval than it should. Just lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The Iraq Body Count project strongly rejects the 650,000 number as well.
I can't see how Iraq Body Count could be anything other than an absolute lower limit on the number of deaths. In fact, the two projects are measuring very different things.
As far as I can see, the methodology is sound. It's used all over the place and it's only generating complaints here. If somebody has a serious objection that can be backed up with real statistics instead of a gut feeling about sample size, please let me know. Lots of interesting study on the topic over at Good Math, Bad Math here and here.
I definitely wouldn't call the political, industrial, and population center of the country where over 1 in 4 citizens resides a "small part of a large country" for any practical purpose. I agree with a lot of your points, but you're definitely minimizing the problem.
he bad area is really only Baghdad which is a small part of a large country, and they are killing each other a hell of lot more than Coalition soldiers.
Last I checked, Baghdad was over 1/4 of the country's population.
With a percentage-based tax, the person making more money pays more in taxes -- reflecting the greater benefit they get from government and a stable society. But I think this logic falls flat when it tries to justify taking 15% of one person's income and 30-40% of somebody else's. If they were paying the same percentage, the person making more money would already be contributing more. I see no justification for a higher rate of taxation on them.
Progressive tax supporters seem to be saying that the 'disproportionate benefit' increases non-linearly with income; that a person making $100k benefits more than twice as much from the presence of government as does a person making $50k, and I've never seen any convincing argument why that's the case. If anything, the person with more wealth can cope with more risk, and would probably be satisfied with less government, than the person with less.
I agree that you can look at the benefits derived from taxation both ways (rich people earn a lot of money through the national infrastructure but they could also afford to build a lot of infrastructure--like private militias--themselves). That's why I tend to look at progressive taxation differently:
A progressive taxation system reflects the diminishing marginal utility of money. The marginal utility function of money is decidedly nonlinear, so the "pain" caused by removing X% of a person's wealth depends on what point they're on in that function. Those higher up on the function consume any increase in wealth at a far lower marginal utility than those at the bottom. A progressive taxation system provides the maximum revenue possible without causing disproportional suffering to a particular class of people (assuming the marginal tax rates accurately reflect the marginal utility of the money, which they probably don't).
You can take somebody's money because... it is advantageous for you to do so? (Isn't there a word for people who do that?)
Yep, that's pretty much how it works. We break up companies that have monopoly power and prevent mergers that promote monopoly power because the result is less efficient markets and everybody (on average) being poorer in the long run. If the same holds true of personal wealth (and I'm not necessarily arguing that it does), doing something about it doesn't seem like a bad idea. It's interesting that the people who worship markets as being the best things for the overall wealth of society in the long run are often vehemently against corrections to those markets when they become uncompetitive or otherwise inefficient. It seems to me like less of a pragmatic "we want the most efficient allocation of resources" position and more of a "I don't care if the market distorts to the point where it's a zero sum game and the economy slows down as long as I get my piece of it" position.
Still the money in whatever form, is being put in resources that are used for the purpose of getting back more money. There is little difference between wise investment and hoarding except expense.
That's simply not true. If I hoard $50, I can keep it in my mattress (bad) or, I can:
1) Throw it in a savings account for it to be loaned out and spent.
2) Buy a stock with it. If I buy newly issued stock, I'm funding the development of the business that sold the stock (money which will be spent on salaries and other expenses). If I buy the stock "used" some other rich guy gets $50 and he'll be in the same place I was at before step 1 (minus some taxes). This loop may continue for a while (not doing the economy any , but we'll eventually break out of it.
3) I can buy a bond, loaning money to a government or company that will spend it.
4) I can put a down payment on a gold plated statue of my ass, stimulating the economy by giving a gold vendor and some unlucky sculptor some cash.
Basically, unless I'm literally taking the cash out and putting it in a hole somewhere, it's going somewhere else and being used in the economy.
The more important question is, is there a scheme that would cause that money to be spent in such a way as to stimulate the economy *more* than whatever I was going to do with it. That's an arguable point, but the idea that the money simply "goes away" while I sit on it is false.
Even if that were true (which I dispute) it would obviously have nothing to do with how "rich" poor people are, but how cheap mobile phones are.
Wealth is all about buying power, not about how much money you have. Money by itself is worthless unless it buys something. The point is, a person in the same income percentile from a generation ago would not have the buying power to live as well as he would now, regardless of how much more money other people have or how many dollars are actually in his bank account. In the end, wealth is all about standard of living.
I agree with you in principle, but I think that comparing the average price of a home (including single family homes and condominiums) with the average rent on an apartment isn't entirely accurate. The goods aren't really comparable, except in that they give you shelter and a place to live within the SF Bay Area.
That being said, I live in the SF Bay area, both my wife and I are young engineers with good incomes, and I crunch the numbers very much as you did. We're renting an apartment and putting every penny we save by not paying a hefty mortgage payment into savings and earning interest on them. If, at some point, the calculation works out in our favor, we'll use the extra cash for a big down payment. Until then, I see no reason to throw away a huge chunk of money paying interest on a loan that I used to pay for an asset that may well lose value. Much better to get the equivalent of a car payment back in dividends every month to be reinvested.
I respect his moral choice, and I would say that in my opinion even shoplifting is not immoral. in spite of what you have been taught in school. I is not wrong to take something from somebody, when that person has no need for it.
If everybody thought that way, the shop would soon be empty and the shopkeeper wouldn't be able to pay his rent or feed his family. He may not "need" the first marginal thing stolen from him, but you go from not needing things to needing things awfully quickly when people take things from you whenever they please.
Libertarians are rarely elected for several reasons:
- Very little money to campaign with
- Libertarians tend to NOT promise handouts and entitlements (most people in the US vote selfishly)
- The Republicrats and Demarubs are entrenched to the point of having a political and psychological duopoly.
Agreed on all three points.
But libertarianism does NOT equal anarchy. Anarchy means NO government, whereas libertarianism means very small and limited government. The essential idea is that one's rights end where another's begins.
No, libertarianism is not *quite* equal to anarchy, but I would put it to you that Libertarians also have a harder time getting elected because their policies would leave a lot of people out in the cold and have a net negative effect on society. Your original response is a classic example, which is why I brought the subject up at all. It's all a great idea to have a "swim or sink" philosophy of personal responsibility, but once the next generation of kids of dysfunctional families grow up uneducated and unable to support themselves, society as a whole is faced with a major problem: Massive increases in crime and social discontent. Suddenly, securing your property rights suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult. I bet a lot of Libertarians would not miss a beat in saying, "Well of course, the solution to that is to call in your private security force that you paid for with all the money you saved in school taxes!" It works so well in Somalia. For some reason, a lot of Americans aren't quite ready for that yet.
Sometimes we have to compromise a little bit on our ideals to make society function better. The question is, can we handle spending some extra money and mandating education if the end result is a society that is, on average, safer and more productive? The problem with libertarianism is not the basic philosophy. I strongly agree with it. The problem is that its proponents frequently take it to its illogical conclusion. There is a difference between seeing property rights as a good thing and seeing property rights as the only good thing to the detriment of all other things.
Because we don't penalize people for traffic offenses that didn't occur. Rear-ending someone (as I am assuming happened through process of elimination, since you didn't state it outright) is a very common accident type, regardless of age. Asserting that someone shouldn't be driving because they _could_ have caused a serious accident in some other hypothetical situation that did not occur is stupid, since every one of us is potentially an accident waiting to happen (see a poster above who, correctly, asserts that everyone believes they're a good driver, and everyone else is an accident waiting to happen). He rear-ended you, no one was injured, and he got a ticket. That's how it should be, instead of your bizarre thought-experiment traffic law scenario.
Whenever you're ticketed for doing something reckless (running a red light, speeding, changing lanes without signaling, etc.), you're being ticketed because you *could have* seriously hurt somebody. That's the whole point. The severity of the transgression is based on how dangerous it was and how avoidable it was. If it was both seriously dangerous and avoidable, you're a bad driver and shouldn't be driving. I can't just drive home at 100 mph and run every red light and then say "No harm, no foul" to the cops who arrest me just because I didn't happen to kill anybody that time. Traffic law is about preventing accidents, not assigning blame to people after somebody gets killed.
Those "assholes" have no legal observation whatsoever to move over. You're supposed to find a hole in traffic, match speeds, and move in. That's why it's called "merging" - you merge with the traffic already there.
The flip side of that is that the people who are already on the highway should drive far enough apart that there *are* holes between them when possible.
My point is this, and then I leave it alone, integrity is important, sexual morality is important, especially for a pres. We have to trust him, if he can look and a grand jury and a nation in the eye and say twice that he didn't do something as serious as adultury when he did it is a big deal. We have solid evidence that these thing happened, but that's ok because he was a liberal democrat.
No, no, no. It wasn't "OK" at all. It was, in fact, a severe transgression. However, it is possible to dig up lies and moral transgressions that cost the American people far more in just about every Presidency. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" is bad, but "We're winning the war in Vietnam. We just need a few more of your sons to finish the job" is worse. "We are not selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to fund guerrillas in Nicaragua" is worse. In my opinion, "Going into Iraq is more important than finishing the job in Afghanistan" is worse. The sad fact is, politicians lie. Politicians often put personal agendas above the good of the nation. When you're the President, it's possible to measure the severity of those lies and professional failings in billions of dollars wasted, or in innocent lives lost. A broken family is a tragedy, but not nearly so much so as what happens when a President's personal agenda gets between him and what's best for the country.
if we stayed out of Iraq, there would still be disease, famine, and war, this is a completly different subject than the war in Iraq.
Correction: We would have *one less* war and we'd probably be doing better in the other war that we failed to finish (a war, IMO, that was thoroughly justified and executed very well initially). Pulling troops from Afghanistan and leaving some regions to the tender mercies of Taliban fighters for what amounts to a political priority is a moral failing. As I see it, removing resources from the fight against an enemy that is a real and immediate danger to the American people to fight a war that you and your buddies have always wanted to finish is a greater failing with a more real impact on America than anything Clinton could have done to wreck his marriage.
Anyway, I think we would be farther along that trail if Clinton, and the previous three or four presidents would have done more about the problem we are facing now, but the three of four before him weren't caught in a big scandal about sexual "immorality" to bog their leadership down either.
We've been mishandling the problem for several administrations now. I agree that Clinton's ability to effectively fight against Al Qaeda was hamstrung by his domestic scandal. In the final estimation, that was his fault. However, it would have been better *for America* if the opposition hadn't used the "wag the dog" argument against Clinton when he was using force to respond to what turned out to be a real threat. At the end of it all, attacking one moral failing over another is not a matter of which party that president belongs to, but rather what are the costs of those moral failings and the benefits to harping on them.
Actually believe it or not, it isn't the government's duty or responsibility to protect us. We are responsible for protecting ourselves. Imagine if the government was charged with protecting each and every person?!?! It would be logistically impossible first of all, and secondly the only way to even attempt it would be to turn the country into a police state. Government's duty is to secure natural rights, and establish justice.
So, are you for abolishing the police forces as well? The government *is* charged with protecting its people. Not from every little thing, but certainly from violent criminals and foreign raiders. This is why Libertarian candidates are hardly ever elected: The philosophy makes a lot of sense and can solve a lot of problems, but the people espousing the official platform can't convince themselves to push for anything short of total anarchy.
My point is, we pay the government to protect us from some basic threats from the criminal element. We can do that by paying a bunch of extra money to ramp up the police forces to put down criminal activity by people who were raised with no education or social conscience. Alternately, we could probably save a little money by making sure that even people who were born into dysfunctional families have a chance at getting a job that doesn't involve shooting me and taking my wallet off my corpse.
Why do you think that 'the right to bear arms may not be infringed' was written into the Constitution?
I don't disagree that the right to self defense is important. I'm a pretty good shot and I would not hesitate to protect myself or my wife if it came down to that. As it stands, though, the environment is such that I can drive to my desk job in the morning, drive home, and go to bed without bothering to wear a sidearm to protect myself from marauders along the way. It's a side effect of living in a place where the rule of law is enforced and the government has programs to keep most people out of dangerously desperate circumstances. This isn't the case in a lot of places. You could always try moving to a country where the rule of law only exists where you can enforce it with your guns and your own private army, I suppose. I hear that a lot of them have very low taxes and no public education to boot.
Logged vs Ac - neither lends nor removes any actual legitimacy from an argument.
A verifiable identity certainly can lend legitimacy to the "You're naive and I'm experienced, and in my experience, you're wrong" argument. The "Help! I'm being suppressed!" line comes most commonly from anonymous folks with secret research who refuse to give concrete examples of good ideas that they've had squelched.
"Right wing blowhards" do not need to prove that private schools work better, the facts already show this.
I'm interested. Do you have a study that corrects for socioeconomic status and takes into account that private schools can simply drop any student who is underperforming or misbehaving? I went to public high school while my sister went to private high school. We both went to private universities. I have every faith in private schools being able to produce fine results. However, from what I saw, the main differences between my school and my sister's school were: 1) Parents at her school were all rich and involved with their kids' studies. 2) The school had an assload of money to spend on new computers every year, fresh buildings, security, and fantastic library facilities. 3) My sister's school would dump any student who wasn't performing up to snuff or who was a discipline problem.
Given that public schools cannot guarantee any of those circumstances and privates schools can do so only by virtue of the fact that they're expensive and can eliminate students who would negatively skew statistics, I'm not sure that vouchers would solve the problem. I'm all for free market solutions when they work, but I don't think there's sufficient data to make a huge infrastructure change in hopes that it fixes something.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're conflating two different issues here. The history of computer prices is a good one. The buying power of the average consumer's income increased, making all of those consumers better off. Deflation is the general decrease of *all* (or nearly all) prices. That's a whole different ball of wax. Remember, your wages are a price. The amount of buying power that you get from your salary *does not* go up in that case. On top of that, simply sitting on money becomes a good "investment" which reduces the need to seek out riskier (but more productive) uses for the money.
Thought experiment: You have a boatload of cash in an inflationary economy. What do you do? You invest it in a business that will provide better than inflation returns, even if it does so at some risk. Net result? That money goes into producing goods and services. Now, what would you do in a deflationary economy? Stuff it in your mattress. You get X% at no risk at all. Net result? That chunk of money stops working for the economy. Even worse, you exacerbate the problem by artificially reducing the money supply and increasing the value of the remaining money even more.
Basically, if you throw an economy that was otherwise skipping along happily into deflation, you have the potential to grind it to a near halt. HTH.
Well, my point in bringing it up is simply that the Illiad is a work rich in history and real places and people. It also incorporates miraculous intervention by members of the Greek pantheon. It tells a story about a place that appears to be quite real (a fact discovered surprisingly recently) about a war that may have some grounding in fact (this point is not clear). The details, though, have plenty of divine intervention sprinkled throughout. I brought it up because the people who are often very happy to accept that because the Bible references real people, events, and places, that its miracles should be taken at face value would not necessarily say the same thing about the Illiad, mainly because the Illiad invokes gods that they aren't predisposed to believe in.
Your analogies are a bit broken. In both cases, there's a well understood and explainable phenomenon that puts an upper limit on how far we can extrapolate the trends (in this case, lack of atmosphere and the theory of relativity). What is the analogous phenomenon for mutation with selection?
It's worth pointing out that most ancient cultures lived (by necessity) near water and often in flood plains. It should not be surprising at all that many of them have exaggerated stories about the most cataclysmic type of disaster that could possibly befall them. A more interesting question is, what about those cultures that don't seem to have noticed a world wide flood at all? You'd think it would have been worth noting.
What adult animals aside from humans fly space shuttles? I appreciate the fact that drinking milk as an adult is a pretty rare thing in nature, but I'm not sure how that's an indicator of how one "should" behave as a lot of people think it is. To my knowledge, we're the only animals that cook their food as well.
I can't see how Iraq Body Count could be anything other than an absolute lower limit on the number of deaths. In fact, the two projects are measuring very different things.
As far as I can see, the methodology is sound. It's used all over the place and it's only generating complaints here. If somebody has a serious objection that can be backed up with real statistics instead of a gut feeling about sample size, please let me know. Lots of interesting study on the topic over at Good Math, Bad Math here and here.
I definitely wouldn't call the political, industrial, and population center of the country where over 1 in 4 citizens resides a "small part of a large country" for any practical purpose. I agree with a lot of your points, but you're definitely minimizing the problem.
A progressive taxation system reflects the diminishing marginal utility of money. The marginal utility function of money is decidedly nonlinear, so the "pain" caused by removing X% of a person's wealth depends on what point they're on in that function. Those higher up on the function consume any increase in wealth at a far lower marginal utility than those at the bottom. A progressive taxation system provides the maximum revenue possible without causing disproportional suffering to a particular class of people (assuming the marginal tax rates accurately reflect the marginal utility of the money, which they probably don't).
1) Throw it in a savings account for it to be loaned out and spent.
2) Buy a stock with it. If I buy newly issued stock, I'm funding the development of the business that sold the stock (money which will be spent on salaries and other expenses). If I buy the stock "used" some other rich guy gets $50 and he'll be in the same place I was at before step 1 (minus some taxes). This loop may continue for a while (not doing the economy any , but we'll eventually break out of it.
3) I can buy a bond, loaning money to a government or company that will spend it.
4) I can put a down payment on a gold plated statue of my ass, stimulating the economy by giving a gold vendor and some unlucky sculptor some cash.
Basically, unless I'm literally taking the cash out and putting it in a hole somewhere, it's going somewhere else and being used in the economy.
The more important question is, is there a scheme that would cause that money to be spent in such a way as to stimulate the economy *more* than whatever I was going to do with it. That's an arguable point, but the idea that the money simply "goes away" while I sit on it is false.
I agree with you in principle, but I think that comparing the average price of a home (including single family homes and condominiums) with the average rent on an apartment isn't entirely accurate. The goods aren't really comparable, except in that they give you shelter and a place to live within the SF Bay Area.
That being said, I live in the SF Bay area, both my wife and I are young engineers with good incomes, and I crunch the numbers very much as you did. We're renting an apartment and putting every penny we save by not paying a hefty mortgage payment into savings and earning interest on them. If, at some point, the calculation works out in our favor, we'll use the extra cash for a big down payment. Until then, I see no reason to throw away a huge chunk of money paying interest on a loan that I used to pay for an asset that may well lose value. Much better to get the equivalent of a car payment back in dividends every month to be reinvested.
No, libertarianism is not *quite* equal to anarchy, but I would put it to you that Libertarians also have a harder time getting elected because their policies would leave a lot of people out in the cold and have a net negative effect on society. Your original response is a classic example, which is why I brought the subject up at all. It's all a great idea to have a "swim or sink" philosophy of personal responsibility, but once the next generation of kids of dysfunctional families grow up uneducated and unable to support themselves, society as a whole is faced with a major problem: Massive increases in crime and social discontent. Suddenly, securing your property rights suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult. I bet a lot of Libertarians would not miss a beat in saying, "Well of course, the solution to that is to call in your private security force that you paid for with all the money you saved in school taxes!" It works so well in Somalia. For some reason, a lot of Americans aren't quite ready for that yet.
Sometimes we have to compromise a little bit on our ideals to make society function better. The question is, can we handle spending some extra money and mandating education if the end result is a society that is, on average, safer and more productive? The problem with libertarianism is not the basic philosophy. I strongly agree with it. The problem is that its proponents frequently take it to its illogical conclusion. There is a difference between seeing property rights as a good thing and seeing property rights as the only good thing to the detriment of all other things.
Correction: We would have *one less* war and we'd probably be doing better in the other war that we failed to finish (a war, IMO, that was thoroughly justified and executed very well initially). Pulling troops from Afghanistan and leaving some regions to the tender mercies of Taliban fighters for what amounts to a political priority is a moral failing. As I see it, removing resources from the fight against an enemy that is a real and immediate danger to the American people to fight a war that you and your buddies have always wanted to finish is a greater failing with a more real impact on America than anything Clinton could have done to wreck his marriage.
We've been mishandling the problem for several administrations now. I agree that Clinton's ability to effectively fight against Al Qaeda was hamstrung by his domestic scandal. In the final estimation, that was his fault. However, it would have been better *for America* if the opposition hadn't used the "wag the dog" argument against Clinton when he was using force to respond to what turned out to be a real threat. At the end of it all, attacking one moral failing over another is not a matter of which party that president belongs to, but rather what are the costs of those moral failings and the benefits to harping on them.
Good catch. I think I may need to turn in my nerd card. :::hangs head in shame:::
My point is, we pay the government to protect us from some basic threats from the criminal element. We can do that by paying a bunch of extra money to ramp up the police forces to put down criminal activity by people who were raised with no education or social conscience. Alternately, we could probably save a little money by making sure that even people who were born into dysfunctional families have a chance at getting a job that doesn't involve shooting me and taking my wallet off my corpse.
I don't disagree that the right to self defense is important. I'm a pretty good shot and I would not hesitate to protect myself or my wife if it came down to that. As it stands, though, the environment is such that I can drive to my desk job in the morning, drive home, and go to bed without bothering to wear a sidearm to protect myself from marauders along the way. It's a side effect of living in a place where the rule of law is enforced and the government has programs to keep most people out of dangerously desperate circumstances. This isn't the case in a lot of places. You could always try moving to a country where the rule of law only exists where you can enforce it with your guns and your own private army, I suppose. I hear that a lot of them have very low taxes and no public education to boot.
Given that public schools cannot guarantee any of those circumstances and privates schools can do so only by virtue of the fact that they're expensive and can eliminate students who would negatively skew statistics, I'm not sure that vouchers would solve the problem. I'm all for free market solutions when they work, but I don't think there's sufficient data to make a huge infrastructure change in hopes that it fixes something.