Murray N. Rothbard, “Education: Rethinking ‘Choice’” (1991)

This file is a short single-author political essay, written as polemical libertarian commentary rather than as an academic treatise. Its scope is narrow but strategic: Rothbard reassesses school “choice” proposals in the early Bush administration and argues that vouchers and even tuition tax credits risk strengthening, not weakening, state control over education.

The essay opens by placing education reform inside Rothbard’s broader critique of neoconservative statecraft. Bush’s “Education President” agenda, in Rothbard’s account, is not decentralizing reform but an extension of bureaucratic rule over family life. Lamar Alexander, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch function here less as individual targets than as signs of a governing class that presents managerial centralization as reform.

Essentially, the neocon program for education is to bring us more of the problem rather than the solution: that is, to escalate the already calamitous statization of the family, and to bring all kids under the domination of the swollen and monstrous educationist bureaucracy.

Against this, Rothbard states the libertarian end point without qualification: not better public administration, but abolition of public schooling and compulsory attendance. His central conceptual move is to separate real parental authority from state-mediated “choice.” Choice is not meaningful, for him, if the state defines the acceptable institutions among which parents may choose.

There is no doubt about the ultimate libertarian position on the public school question: it is to abolish that monstrous system root and branch, and return education to the total control, management, and choice of the parents.

The middle of the essay turns from principle to “transition” politics. Rothbard concedes that intermediate demands may be useful, but only if they move toward the final aim rather than corrupting it. This is the essay’s key test: a reform is not libertarian merely because it inserts some private actors into a public funding scheme.

In other words, the transition goal must not be such as to undercut our work against the ultimate goal itself.

On that basis he rejects vouchers. Though defended by Friedmanite free-market economists as a way to expand parental choice, vouchers remain tax-financed education spending. Rothbard sees them as welfare-state instruments disguised as market reform: they make private schooling dependent on public money and redirect libertarian activism toward administering state benefits.

I have always opposed the voucher scheme bitterly, because it enshrines in “libertarian” favor a policy forcing taxpayers to pay for the education of other people’s children.

The most important turn in the essay is Rothbard’s reversal on tuition tax credits. He had previously defended credits on the ground that allowing parents to keep their own money was not a subsidy. He still distinguishes credits from direct subsidies in principle.

A subsidy to X only exists when the State takes money out of Y’s pocket to give to X.

But he now argues that the decisive issue is not the subsidy question. Influenced by Gary North and paleoconservative critics, Rothbard concludes that any tax-credit or voucher system will require the state to certify which private schools qualify. That certification power would reshape private education according to official political and cultural standards. “Choice,” in practice, becomes a regulatory trap.

The result, then, of vouchers or tax credits will be, in the name of expanding parental choice, to destroy the current private school system and to bring it under total governmental control.

The essay’s relevance lies in this warning: state aid to private institutions can become a mechanism for state supervision. Rothbard’s argument is not simply anti-spending; it is anti-accreditation, anti-certification, and anti-permission. He fears that schools outside approved norms would be excluded, forcing dissenting parents to pay for public schools, officially approved private schools, and then genuinely independent schools on top of both.

So the problem with tax credits is not the Subsidy Question, but granting the State any right to rule over our choices.

Rothbard closes by preserving a set of transitional demands compatible with his abolitionist goal: end compulsory schooling, oppose school bonds, resist budget expansion, cut higher-level education spending, and decentralize control. The essay’s structure thus moves from denunciation of Bush-era reform, to restatement of libertarian first principles, to rejection of vouchers, to a self-correction on tax credits, and finally to a narrower anti-statist reform agenda. Its core claim is that education policy must be judged not by the rhetoric of choice but by whether it reduces the state’s authority to define, fund, certify, and discipline schooling.