Grocery School
by Don Boudreaux on April 24, 2011
Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are
supplied with K-12 education.
Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A
huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government
officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents,
depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to
a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly
allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket
officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for
determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different
types and sizes are entitled to receive.)
Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a
“public” supermarket outside of its district.
Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset
County, NJ -- would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive
supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties. Indeed, the
quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in determining
people’s choices of neighborhoods in which to live.
Of course,
thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be
free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the
groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would
get no discount on their property-tax bills.
When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be
dismal, the resulting calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by
a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically
benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers out of
good supermarket service -- indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families
the food that they need for their very survival. Such ‘choice,’ it
would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public
supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact
that these supermarkets are underfunded.
And the small handful of people who call for total separation between
supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at
best, delusional and -- it would be thought more realistically -- more
likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrition and
starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces
governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket. (Some
indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of
referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship
between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these
foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being
‘commercial.’)
….
Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work
well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive
system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing
services? To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re
nuts.
To those of you who understand that such a system for supplying
grocery-retailing services would be a catastrophe, why might you continue
to count yourself in the ranks of those who believe that government
schooling (especially the way it is currently funded and supplied) is the
system that we should continue to use?
http://cafehayek.com/2011/04/grocery-school.html
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