School Censorship; J. Semmens

It is because the schools are publicly owned and operated that an otherwise reasonable act takes on sinister potential. It is the existence of tax-financed education that creates the inevi table clash of individual rights. That is, both sides of this case have legitimate rights. The resolution of the case in either side's favor tramples the rights of the other side. The Court's logic was sound in asserting that the school, since it sponsors and funds the stu dent paper, has a right to exercise editorial con trol. To deny this right would amount to re quiring someone to fund the publication of ideas he finds offensive or harmful. Some 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson correctly con demned forcing a person to finance ideas he opposes. On the other hand, critics of the Court's de cision are justified in their fears of growing suppression of expression. The recent trend in Court decisions has upheld warrantless searches and censorship of speech within John Semmens is an economist for the Laissez Faire Insti tute, a free-market research organization in Tempe, Ari zona.

schools. The extension to student papers is in line with these earlier findings. If schools were private institutions, privately financed and voluntarily attended, there would be no case to bring to court. Private institutions would have discretion over whether there were a student paper and what its content might be. Those who didn't like the way this discretion was exercised would be free to take their busi ness elsewhere. Competition among private schools would lead to a diversity of approaches to this issue. When schools are public, though, there can be no equitable resolution of the problem. Those who find their local schools unsatisfac tory, for whatever reason, are not really free to take their business elsewhere. Students are per mitted to attend state-approved alternative schools, but not to select unapproved alterna tives. Even if the student leaves the public school, his parents aren't free to withdraw their tax support. Parents may send their child to a state-approved private school, but they still will be required to pay for a public school education not received.

The heavy tax burden for public education effectively limits the schooling choices for many people. Though they might like their child to attend a private school, many parents cannot afford to pay twice for one education. In short, many children are forced to attend public schools. Because of the compulsory and collectivist method of financing the public schools, the violation of rights is guaranteed. The student writing a controversial article for the school paper has paid (in the form of his parents' taxes) for part of the cost of the support of the publication. Other taxpayers, who also have paid part of the cost, do not want their tax dollars to fund this controversial article. Whether the article be printed or suppressed, someone's rights will be violated. That compulsion and collectivism should threaten free expression is amply demonstrated by conditions in the Soviet Union. The Soviet constitution guarantees a free press. At the same time, though, the government owns all the presses. Obviously, the government cannot allow valuable and scarce resources to be wasted on the expression of "frivolous" or "harmful" ideas. Consequently, the constituThe Locus of Sovereignty 299 tional guarantee is meaningless. Similarly, the attendees of public schools are finding their constitutional guarantees of a free press to be meaningless in a collectivized institution where the authorities own the presses.

The only way to protect the rights of those who express ideas, as well as the rights of those who must pay for the publication of the ideas, is to discontinue the use of compulsion in edu cation. Taxpayers should not be compelled to pay for schooling they neither want nor use. Students should be free to attend any school they or their parents are willing and able to pay for. Ending coercion in schooling would go a long way toward demonstrating our under standing of and commitmentto freedom. A truly free education would eliminate a major source of conflict and injustice in our society. D IDEAS ON LIBERTY T he ultimate source of the educational crisis stems from an error in first principles. Once committed to this error, the public education system has floundered repeatedly. To locate the source of the error, men need only ask themselves a single question: Who is responsible for the education of a child? The answers, of course, are varied: the parents, the church, the civil government, or a combination of the three.

The conflicts in education are in fact conflicts over a much more funda mental issue: the locus of sovereignty, and hence, the locus of personal re sponsibility. The person or institution which possesses sovereignty must be the one which takes on the responsibility. By affirming the legitimacy of tax-supported education, voters have attempted to transfer their responsibili ties for the education of their children to another agency, the state.' Yet, at the same time, they affirm their own sovereignty over the content and structure of the educational system. That they have lost almost every battle in their war with tenured, state-supported educational bureaucrats, is the direct result of the public's abdication of personal responsibility, family by family, for the education of their children. The war was lost on the day that parents, as voters, decided to transfer the financial responsibilitiesof educating their own children to other members of the body politic.

-GARY NORTH 300 Privatizing the Judiciary by Daniel J. Popeo A s tight budgets have inclined some state governments and Federal executive agencies to search for alternatives to expensi ve government services, ,'pri vatiza tion' ,- the shifting of government functions to the private sector-has finally become an ac ceptable option to pursue. Curiously, however, the idea of erecting a private judiciary as an al ternative to the nation's judicial systema system in danger of becoming immobilized by an onslaught of litigation-has received little attention. Yet there is no reason why the idea couldn't work in the judicial setting as well. In fact, the litigation explosion that occurred in the 1970s (coupled with a simultaneous in crease in judicial activism) has already caused a small number of entrepreneurs to set up alter native dispute resolution systems. The purpose of these systems is to ease the current judicial bottleneck, to allow for expeditious dispute res olution, and to open up the judicial process to a class of litigants who are finding it increasingly costly to use the public court system.