Morality of using public services?

[mweiss]

Obviously, the existence of things like public schools and public libraries and the like is immoral, and perhaps those services are of much worse quality than their private counterparts. The question is: Is it immoral to make use of the services? When I have children (admittedly a time far away, as I'm 16), is it immoral for me to send them to public school? On the one hand, I have paid for the service through my taxes, while on the other I don't know that I would ever feel comfortable using a service to pay for which others are forced. Similar objections come up with things like public libraries and public transportation(though this last to a lesser extent, since one pays each time one uses the service).

Ayn Rand answered this question at a lecture I attended in 1968: essentially, she said that the system is already there; use it.

[DavidOdden]

I suspect that taxes that go towards public universities are independent of how many students enrolled (until there is a change in state legislation.)

Just a comment. The subsidy is based on "usage", not numbers of bodies. 30,000 students enrolled for 5 hours generates less subsidy that 30,000 students enrolled for 15 hours, and 30,000 students enrolled for 5 hours would generate about the same subsidy as 10,000 students enrolled for 15 hours. Roughly: the actual formulae are virtually top secret. At any rate, it's all post hoc, based on enrolled hours, not numbers of bodies in the institution. No funding pre-allocation on the basis of young population is done.

It would be more accurate to say in either case (state residents attend the public university system or seek formal education elsewhere), you pay.

I doubt that this is true. It's false by simple application of the funding formula, but the formula could be changed. Imagine that all Ohio kids were to decide "Hey, I want to go to Michigan, not these crappy Ohio schools". Then the legislature would, if they worked automatically, reduce the tax subsidy to $0. That does not mean that you would pay less taxes, because taxes aren't automatically raised or lowered in proportion to state expenditures. But if the cost of the state government dropped by $10 million annually because of a zero educational subsidy, there could eventually be a budget surplus. Were that to actually happen, one of two things would result, depending on the existing state government. One, they could reallocate the money to welfare mothers or tree-hugging, or whatever. Two, they could cut taxes. Hard to tell which it would end up being, for any given state. My read of Ohio is that more people are more interested in getting something for nothing, as opposed to keeping what they have earned, that redistribution would be the order of the day. Thus in Ohio, you will pay, come hell or high water. In California, it's possible that everybody leaving the state for school would result in some reduction in taxation.

Okay, now the cynical option is this. The education committee crafts a bill that recomputes the subsidy so that each hour of class is subsidized at a higher rate. Same economic cost. But the health care committee says "Well, we have all of this money no longer being paid to universities, so we can afford to subsidize health insurance". Both bills pass, resultnig in a net increase in costs. Then the budget office says "BTW, you need to raise taxes by 3% to cover this years expenses". And then... hmmm, not so much savings, I guess.

[mweiss]

I see where you're going with it, but I don't operate on that track. The amount of my tax dollars that go towards the funding of public education is so minimal I can't believe that it's even an issue.

Where do you live, Arkansas? Over here in New England, it's costing me over half my income to school other people's kids, and I'm not even able to cover all my property taxes here because if I did, te utilities would be shut off for non-payment.

[DavidOdden]

Over here in New England, it's costing me over half my income to school other people's kids, and I'm not even able to cover all my property taxes here because if I did, te utilities would be shut off for non-payment.

Since I lived in CT for 3 years, I'm curious how you computed that and what changed. I lived there in 1981-5, so of course things could have changed immensely, but in my time, it was actually a pretty light tax load and negligible amounts were for education. Mostly, it was indirect payments to the mob.