---

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'They'll break into your house ... '
Last week, I was discussing a government-school teacher I encountered at a UNLV adult education class. She was asserting that without government schooling, the children would be illiterate.

Of course, this flies in the face of the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville found this the most literate nation on earth when he visited in the 1820s -- 30 years before Horace Mann & Co. erected their first tax-funded mandatory government schools on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in the 1850s.

It also fails to explain the fact that black literacy peaked in the 1940s in America, and has been dropping ever since -- even as we have poured vastly more billions into the ever larger and more thoroughly unionized government youth internment camps (statistic courtesy of the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as cited by New York state [government] teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto in his fine book "The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling").

This argument also closely mimics the piteous mewlings of the Soviets -- 70-year captives of a classically dysfunctional system of socialist impoverishment -- who used to whine, "But if we allowed greedy capitalists to take over the food distribution system, they'd be able to charge any prices they liked, and the poor people would starve! Groceries are far too crucial a commodity to be handled by anyone but the wise, redistributionist state."

Guess what? Private supermarkets now prevail in the former Soviet Union, with the result that there is more and better food more readily available for all -- just as there is no starvation to speak of in the United States, despite the fact that food distribution here is almost entirely handled by the free market. (Pardon me, by the "greedy capitalists.") ...