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VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The difference between 'socialism,' 'sharing'
A government schoolteacher showed up at a talk I gave to an adult education class last month at the UNLV. By the time she raised her hand, she had a list. Her objections were so predictable I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a prepared script.

"When you say the government schools, do you mean the free public schools?" she asked.

I asked if the teacher worked for free. She did not. Nor do the school's librarians, administrators, bus drivers, or the carpenters and roofers who built the place. A county school system that now costs $3.3 billion per year (they always try to bury the $800 million annual interest on the construction bonds) is hardly "free."

"It's free for the children who go there," the teacher insisted.

Can anything mandatory really be called "free"? Were the prospective inmates of Sobibor glad to learn there'd be no admission charge? But even in the purely financial meaning, the parents of these children actually pay an amount in school taxes approximately equal to what they'd spend on private schooling or group home-schooling, were we to lose the mandatory government youth propaganda camps and revert to a free market in education. Total costs of any previously socialized endeavor tends to drop to about one-third when you get government out of the loop.

"I'd like to know what the difference is between what you call `socialism' and `sharing,' " the increasingly upset teacher snapped, her voice straining with emotion.

When a teacher gathers up all the children's privately purchased school supplies, pools them and announces they are now available for communal use -- as parents tell me is now routine -- coercion is in play. That teacher may not literally hold a gun to any individual child's head, but you can bet any child who "respectfully declined to participate" in this "sharing" would be disciplined, ridiculed or "written up" for failure to cooperate, follow instructions and play well with others. From day one, here we see the reproductive organ of the redistributionist state, opening like a poisoned flower to spread its heady pollen.

A person who cannot discern voluntary "sharing" and something redistributed by force or the threat of coercion -- including the taxes collected to pay her own government salary -- has no ethical compass. Such a person is at best astonishingly ignorant and unperceptive. She should not be allowed anywhere near impressionable children....