Why are Republicans so interested in giving parents school choice?

I saw that Tennessee recently enacted a school choice problem, and on Facebook, there were a lot of negative comments. I was able to click on the profiles of some of the negative commenters – the majority of them were white, female public school teachers. Well, I thought it might be a good idea to explain to people why Republicans are so interested in letting parents choose.

First, here’s the story from Focus on the Family:

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Educational Freedom Act of 2025 earlier this week, creating 20,000 educational scholarships for students for the 2025-2026 school year. The bill also gives all public school teachers a one-time, $2,000 bonus for the current school year.

This legislation is part of a growing movement toward giving families the freedom to choose the best type of education for their children, allowing them to thrive and succeed.

[…]The scholarships, amounting to a little over $7,000, can be used for tuition and fees at a private school of a family’s choice, along with textbooks, instructional materials and uniforms at the private school. Money can also be used for transportation, tutoring and computer technology for educational needs.

In addition, “There will be an automatic growth trigger of 5,000 additional scholarships for each year after 75% of total scholarships are taken in the prior year.” The bill denies scholarships to students who cannot establish their “lawful presence in the United States.”

The Education Freedom Act was applauded by groups who want parents and families to have more freedom in choosing the education that best fits their children’s needs.

So, why would the opponents of school choice want to prevent parents from having a choice? Well, they view parents – the very people who pay their salaries – as enemies. They report them to the federal government as “domestic terrorists”. Why? Because those parents object to having their children indoctrinated with secular leftist ideologies.

Here’s an example of school choice opponents dealing with parents who object to their indoctrination:

First Daily Wire post:

On Tuesday evening, school board members representing Penfield Central School District in Rochester, New York, walked out on a packed house of parents who were upset about an inappropriate book on display at the elementary school library called “The Rainbow Parade,” authored by Emily Neilson.

The book in question is about a young girl attending a pride parade with her lesbian parents. The illustrations show men in sexual BDSM gear holding hands, drag queens, and naked people.

Instead of taking on comments from concerned parents, the board’s president called a motion to adjourn and ended the meeting abruptly. Kimberly DeRosa, who attended the meeting, told The Daily Wire that it ended after “more than an hour of presentations celebrating Black History Month and the superintendent detailing the process of submitting objections to books in the school.”

As noted by DeRosa, the board told parents that they should submit their complaints, which apparently negated their right to speak out at the meeting.

“We are here at our board meeting, conducting our business,” one board member told parents, who began booing. One parent responded, “It’s our board meeting,” and others yelled, “cowards!”

DeRosa, who is a Penfield taxpayer, concerned mother, and on the executive board of the Monroe County Federated Republican Women, told The Daily Wire that it was “a slap in the face to everyone there when the board members walked out before any public comments could be made.”

Second Daily Wire Post:

After school board members walked out on parents who were upset over LGBT book “The Rainbow Parade,” the board is doubling down and prohibiting public comments at meetings until at least the end of April, citing alleged racism.

[…]Now, the board representing Penfield Central School District has barred public comment at all meetings for the months ahead.

[…]The message also cited alleged racism, since one of the board meeting attendees showed up on Tuesday wearing a gorilla suit and a black “Make America Great Again” hat. Roberts suggested it was worn as an act of racism, since the district’s superintendent and some of the board members are black.

Can you imagine being treated like this by companies in the private sector, like Amazon.com or Apple? Recently, I ordered some Indian simmer sauces from Wal-Mart. They didn’t arrive for 2 weeks. So I asked for a refund. They gave me the refund immediately, no questions asked. But public school education isn’t like the private sector. You pay your money up front – in taxes – and then they give you whatever they feel like. It’s the complete opposite of the private sector, where they compete with rivals in order to earn your money.

And the Trump administration is aware of this, and they are already doing something about it.

Here’s a story from The Federalist:

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into five Virginia school districts that allow boys to use girls’ facilities like restrooms and locker rooms, moving one step closer to revoking their federal funding.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed to America First Legal (AFL) that it is investigating Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington, and Prince William Counties, as well as the City of Alexandria, for violating allegedly Title IX civil rights law meant to protect women and girls at school. AFL filed a formal complaint about the far-left Washington, D.C., suburb school districts in early February.

[…]The school districts in Northern Virginia, which serve some of the largest populations of students in the commonwealth, are notoriously defiant and completely consumed by gender theory, critical race theory, and a dedication to conducting far-left social and academic experimentation on children. If the Department of Education finds them violative of Title IX and they continue to be defiant, the districts are poised to lose federal funding.

You might remember that the Loudon County school board is the one responsible for working with the Biden administration to label concerned parents as “domestic terrorists”. This is why elections are important. The Democrat party thinks that parents should be forced to pay, and if they object to what they get, then they are “domestic terrorists”. The Republican party thinks that parents are more important than the school boards. I hope you voted Republican in the last elections, because they are looking out for your kids.

Jay Richards: what should Christians know about economics?

Here’s a good basic introduction to the free enterprise system by Dr. Jay Richards:

Here is the description:

In this edition of the Evangel Guest Lecture Series, Jay W. Richards discusses his book on the capitalist system within the context of the Christian faith and examine how enterprise based on hard work, honesty, and trust fosters creativity and growth.

Jay W. Richards, PhD, is author of many books including the New York Times bestseller Infiltrated (2013). Richards is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and executive editor of The Stream. In recent years he has been a distinguished fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, contributing editor of The American at the American Enterprise Institute, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and research fellow and director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute.

It turns out that the best system for lifting the poor out of poverty – by work or charity – is the economic system that creates wealth through human ingenuity and hard work. That system is the free enterprise system.

Something to read?

If you can’t listen to the lecture and don’t want to buy the whole book “Money, Greed and God?” Then I have a series of posts on each chapter for you.

The index post is here.

Here are the posts in the series:

  • Part 1: The Eight Most Common Myths about Wealth, Poverty, and Free Enterprise
  • Part 2: Can’t We Build A Just Society?
  • Part 3: The Piety Myth
  • Part 4: The Myth of the Zero Sum Game
  • Part 5: Is Wealth Created or Transferred?
  • Part 6: Is Free Enterprise Based on Greed?
  • Part 7: Hasn’t Christianity Always Opposed Free Enterprise?
  • Part 8: Does Free Enterprise Lead to An Ugly Consumerist Culture?
  • Part 9: Will We Use Up All Our Resources?
  • Part 10: Are Markets An Example of Providence?

Parts 4 and 5 are my favorites. It’s so hard to choose one to excerpt, but I must. I will choose… Part 4.

Here’s the problem:

Myth #3: The Zero Sum Game Myth – believing that trade requires a winner and a loser. 

One reason people believe this myth is because they misunderstand how economic value is determined. Economic thinkers with views as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed economic value was determined by the labor theory of value. This theory stipulates that the cost to produce an object determines its economic value.

According to this theory, if you build a house that costs you $500,000 to build, that house is worth $500,000. But what if no one can or wants to buy the house? Then what is it worth?

Medieval church scholars put forth a very different theory, one derived from human nature: economic value is in the eye of the beholder. The economic value of an object is determined by how much someone is willing to give up to get that object. This is the subjective theory of value.

And here’s an example of how to avoid the problem:

How you determine economic value affects whether you view free enterprise as a zero-sum game, or a win-win game in which both participants benefit.

Let’s return to the example of the $500,000 house. As the developer of the house, you hire workers to build the house. You then sell it for more than $500,000. According to the labor theory of value, you have taken more than the good is actually worth. You’ve exploited the buyer and your workers by taking this surplus value. You win, they lose.

Yet this situation looks different according to the subjective theory of value. Here, everybody wins. You market and sell the house for more than it cost to produce, but not more than customers will freely pay. The buyer is not forced to pay a cost he doesn’t agree to. You are rewarded for your entrepreneurial effort. Your workers benefit, because you paid them the wages they agreed to when you hired them.

This illustration brings up a couple important points about free enterprise that are often overlooked:

1. Free exchange is a win-win game.

In win-win games, some players may end up better off than others, but everyone ends up better off than they were at the beginning. As the developer, you might make more than your workers. Yet the workers determined they would be better off by freely exchanging their labor for wages, than if they didn’t have the job at all.

A free market doesn’t guarantee that everyone wins in every competition. Rather, it allows many more win-win encounters than any other alternative.

2. The game is win-win because of rules set-up beforehand. 

A free market is not a free-for-all in which everybody can do what they want. Any exchange must be free on both sides. Rule of law, contracts, and property rights are needed to ensure exchanges are conducted rightly. As the developer of the house, you’d be held accountable if you broke your contract and failed to pay workers what you promised.

An exchange that is free on both sides, in which no one is forced or tricked into participating, is a win-win game.

If you do get the book, be sure and skip the chapter on usury. It’s just not as engaging as the others, in my opinion.

New study: break-ups are harder for men than for women

For Valentine’s Day, I found a new 2024 study that is related to male-female romantic relationships! A lot of people think that men are less committed than women, but if you look at the data, men initiate fewer divorces than women, and they take break-ups a lot harder than women. And lesbian couples have the highest rates of divorce! Let’s take a look at the data.

Here’s the report on the new study, from the New York Post:

Breaking up is hard to do — for men, anyway.

That’s because males care more about being in a relationship than females, a new study set to be published in Behavioural and Brain Sciences found, according to PsyPost.

Researchers at the Humboldt University of Berlin are pouring cold water on the popular belief that gals are more desperate for a partner — saying that guys are more likely to experience loneliness after calling it quits, and are less likely to see the silver lining to the situation.

The team analyzed more than 50 scientific studies on gender differences in heterosexual relationships to come up with their findings.

Women are more likely to initiate divorces than men:

The results could explain why men are less likely than women to initiate a break-up when in a steady relationship — 70% of divorces are initiated by women, the experts stated.

Men are also more likely to search for a partner and to be focused on entering into a serious relationship — perhaps because they have more to gain.

“We know from numerous studies that women typically receive more emotional support from their social environment than men. Therefore, heterosexual men are more dependent on their partners to fulfill their emotional needs than heterosexual women,” Iris Wahring, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

“In short, steady relationships are psychologically more important for men than for women.”

If you look at the instability rates of lesbians, they have the highest rates of relationship instability of any relationship arrangement.

During the five years of marriage, lesbian spouses have twice the risk of divorce compared to heterosexual marriages. Only after 25 years of marriage this difference seems to be gone, the study shows. Same-sex male couples only have an 8 percent higher chance of getting divorced than heterosexual couples in that same period. Senior researcher Ruhne Zahl Olsen is not surprised by the results. They have been the same in other countries, he says to Aftenposten.

[…]For the survey, 5,187 same-sex couples and marriages entered between 1993 and 2018 were examined.

This is important, because in lesbian relationships, it’s two women. So, you can’t blame the high rate of instability / divorce on any man. There isn’t any man there to blame!

Anyway, I thought this new study would be good for men. Men are always getting beaten up and blamed for everything. But not everything about men is bad. I don’t mean the top 20% most attractive men, who have so many options that they don’t have to be nice to any particular woman. I mean the vast majority of ordinary men who just work and live quiet lives. They are the ones who are good at commitment.

Something to think about for those who are wondering “where are all the good men?”. Men are good, you just have to choose the good character ones.