Friday, May 06, 2011

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system—politicized and monopolistic—will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services. Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket. No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district...more

And these public supermarkets would be named...Piggly Wiggly.
If supermarkets had always been public, I doubt if the word "super" would be used.

1 comment:

Floyd said...

There is an even better example of government management of any enterprise. Our federal government took over a business near Reno Nevada called Mustang Ranch. Federal officials reopened the brothel and went broke. Our best federal minds could not make a profit in a business based on prostitution and booze. That should provide some clue about the productivity of other government enterprises.