I’ve written before on the importance of recognizing education, specifically the existence of a well educated populace, as a necessary public good. Like clean air, drinkable water, roads, fire departments, and all other public goods, an educated populace is something that creates a better society for all, and needs to be paid for by all.

At the same time, each individual’s education, or the education of your own child, is certainly an individual responsibility. Parents have the right to seek the best possible education for their child. This can take the form of moving from one school district to another, choosing to homeschool, or paying for private education. When parents have the resources, either the time or money necessary for homeschooling and private school, it is completely reasonable, indeed expected, that they would take that option. Parents have a responsibility to their child to give them the best possible education, and we should expect them to take whatever measures they can to do so.

At first glance this seems logical, and likely better for everyone. After all, wouldn’t it be better to have a few people in society that are even better educated than the rest of us? Don’t a few highly educated people only raise the average level of schooling among us? Yes, but only if the people who opt for private education also continue to support high quality education for the rest of society. Unfortunately this is not the case. Families that can afford private school do still pay for public schools through their taxes. But an increasing number of families are both requesting to have a tax exemption based on their private tuition (or tax loopholes allowing them to draw on college funds tax free), or even asking for vouchers from the public school system to help cover the costs of private schools.

The logic of this argument is that if the public good of an education is not being provided, then each family is owed back their share of taxes to let them seek their own education elsewhere. This seems logical from the point to view of individual education, but is destructive to the health of society overall when we remember that education is a public good.

A similar analogy can be drawn with fire departments. We have agreed, as a society, that having a fire department is better than not having it. Having the knowledge that if a fire begins there will be a fast, effective group of trained individuals to put it out, creates a great deal of stability and safety in society, allowing people to focus on their own methods of being productive.

Fire departments are effective, but there is still a response time of a few minutes, and a risk, however minimized it is, that your home could burn. As with education, some people will simply have the resources needed to decide that they want to further reduce the risk, and could hire a private fire department. It’s no stretch to imagine that a billion dollar estate could easily afford to have two or three full time firefighters on the property with state of the art equipment. This would nearly guarantee that the wealthy individual was free from even the few minutes of delay. Because these few families could afford to pay more than society, the best few firefighters would be stripped away from the public version of the profession, but the change would be fairly imperceptible. These are the private tutors that the super wealth can hire, perhaps 2-3 per subject, for their own children.

Just as with education, others who couldn’t quite afford a fully private fire department would still be tempted by the quality of what the richest could afford, and would do their best to imitate it. But the most cost effective method for them would perhaps be a small team with the cost shared by the few other almost-filthy-rich friends in their social circle. Again, these higher paying jobs would strip away the best of the remaining firefighters, this time a full station worth, but the effect wouldn’t be that noticeable. These are the elite private schools of the country, serving the 1%, or maybe event the top 3-5%. These families, while easily able to afford such costs, use their friends and connections to maybe make a loophole or two to reduce their share of firefighting taxes. After all, aren’t they contributing to the overall of public good of fire protection by making sure their own houses are completely safe?

With the precedent of private fire departments increasingly becoming the standard, and the remaining public fire departments starting to, at least slightly, decrease in quality, those families that were at least close to being able to afford such a service would begin to ask why they should pay into the public system. After all, the public fire department wasn’t that great anymore, and if they could just get their share of the fire department tax back as a credit, a fire voucher if you will, they could make up the rest of the cost and get themselves better quality fire protection. Those families, even if not in the top 5%, would still tend to have the social, institutional, and financial pull necessary to get such exemptions and vouchers. The next best layer of firefighters would be removed from the public pool. By now the effect would certainly be felt.

A few public fire departments in the middle class neighborhoods might still be in luck. The middle class families, especially those with education and some sense of social awareness and civic duty, would still appreciate the need for a fire department. They might not be able to afford to privatize, but they could pass a few additional tax levies that would make sure their own public fire departments were on par with the lower end professional stations.

The remaining public fire departments would now be without a large part of the firefighter talent pool, and would be operating on very minimal funding. The members of society that may have been the most engaged, and the most able to change the tax structure in ways needed to fund the public department would now have no vested interest in doing so. Indeed, they would be more motivated towards defunding the department, and freeing up the remaining firefighters to serve their private departments. The residents served by those departments would have no ability to pass special levies, and their departments would be left with only minimal public funds.

At this point in time there would no doubt spring into being vocal advocates for doing away with the public fire departments altogether and switching entirely to a voucher based system. The fire departments that were really doing their job well would have enough vouchers come in that they would stay open. Fire departments where there were not enough vouchers would simply have to close or learn to operate on almost nothing. It might not be great, but the underperforming departments would likely get by using questionable methods like underpaying the few firefighter altruistic enough to do a difficult job for pennies. Maybe they could replace a few firefighters (there would be high retirement and turnover afterall) with para-firefighters who didn’t quite have the right certifications.

The worst part would be that despite the absolute best efforts of the public fire departments, they would primarily be responsible for firefighting in the poorest areas of society. They would have the areas of high population density, low building standards, and the most at-risk citizens. They would also have the oldest equipment, the least training, and the least appreciation from the population they served, only making their job that much harder. But their responsibility would still be to keep everyone just as safe as the highly trained firefighters working for private departments. On every standardized analysis of effectiveness it would appear that the public system was absolutely failing.

From the perspective of the rich, the public fire departments were so inferior to their own that it was hard to justify having them at all. When looked at from the lens of private markets and conservative business values the only explanation would be that the failure to succeed was entirely the fault of the public fire departments. Afterall, in business when you aren’t profitable, it’s because you’re not offering a good enough service. Under that logic, the public fire departments simply aren’t doing their job, which is their own fault, and thus they should be closed down like a failing business.

The fire department to educational system analogy is pretty straightforward so far. It’s the last step of the comparison, this next one, that seems to be entirely forgotten about in current education debates about vouchers and privatization: Sometime down the road towards full privatization and voucherization of any public good, shit will hit the fan.

With fire departments the result would be that maybe after a large fire or two in the poorly protected public areas (if they wanted better fire protection they should have worked harder, made better decisions, and funded their firefighters with their tax-exempt 529 plan college fund as allowed under the new tax law like the rest of us did) the vast majority of firefighters will have left the profession or gone private. The rich would read about these tragedies, maybe feel sorry for the poor, and wonder why there was nothing they could have done.

The real problem comes when those unprotected areas become so prone to fires, with so little protection, that a blaze of destruction starts that can’t be put out. As the few richest, most removed estates are protected by the very best, everyone else will learn that when an entire city, an entire society burns, protecting your house does nothing for you. As the conflagration spreads from city to suburb no amount of private fire protection can balance out the fact that the vast portions of the population were left unprotected. An individual home can be protected from a small fire, but not from the city burning. Even for the families that remain untouched, they now live in a wasteland. What’s the point of having a perfectly preserved estate in the middle of miles of smouldering ruins? From what we’ve seen so far, it’s likely those families would use their resources to simply leave the area or country, and likely spend their life blaming the poor for not doing more to protect themselves from fire. You know those irresponsible poor people, after all.

So, if that’s the result of privatizing a public good – and numerous examples around India exist that show that is very much what happens in reality as well as theory – what can we do to prevent such a disaster?

Many people have suggested simply outlawing private school. But, as expected, almost all of them mention that such an outlawing also simply won’t happen. This is America after all, and any attempt of the government to take away freedom of choice is opposed, as it likely should be. Besides, back to the first argument for privatization, if a few families can afford to be incredibly well educated, it might actually benefit the rest of us.

The desire to spend money for a private version of a public good is itself an admission that the quality of public good needs to be increased. If no one wants a private version of education, everyone accepts the quality of what is provided. The goal of any solution then should be to increase the quality of the public good, and reduce the number of people who desire to buy a private version. The solution that fits both of these is a 100% tax on private school tuition.

Such a tax won’t ban private schools or even remove them. The super wealthy who can easily afford $20,000 – $50,000 per year per child can also afford an equal amount of cost for tax. The families that can only afford private school with a voucher, and those who can barely afford it without a voucher, and even all families who can’t easily afford doubling the tuition of their private school, would suddenly again be part of the public system, and be invested in improving the overall system, instead of in dismantling and defunding it.

The loophole (there always is, it seems) would be that people who couldn’t afford to double their tuition, could afford to put a great deal of additional funding only into the public schools their children attend. The result of unequal “fire protection” would certainly be smaller, but would still exist. That leads to the second part of the plan, a significant tax on any locally originating educational finds. This means when a wealthy county passes a special levy or tax, 20%-40% of it would automatically go into a general fund for the overall system. This again does not prevent wealthy areas from creating better schools for their own children, but it does help combat the formation of massive disparities between the quality of education in each are.

The same privatization of a public good story with these two features in place has very different results. In this version, the super rich decide that they want a private fire department on their property. They go and buy it because they can. The 100% tax means the local fire department gets a large infusion of funding. The families in the almost-super-wealthy bracket now have a choice between the now-even-better public fire department or a double-the-cost private department. Only a few families take the private option. The next bracket of wealth has the option between an incredibly well funded public department or the high cost of creating a private department that would have few advantages over the public. They might even opt to pass a local levy to make sure that their department is just as good as the private ones. That local levy adds yet another boost in funding to fire departments state wide. The result here is that the city never burns.

So next time you hear an argument for the privatization of a public good, specifically the public good that we teachers provide, tell them the allegory of the private fire departments. Let them know that the desire to have the best protected home in the world is natural, but that doing so at the cost of the public good will have a heavy cost. Ignorance is fire that will be hard to extinguish once we allow it to start.