Murray N. Rothbard, “Vouchers: What Went Wrong?” (1994)

This file is a short polemical policy essay. Rothbard uses the defeat of California’s Proposition 174 to attack school vouchers from within a libertarian, anti-statist framework. His central thesis is that vouchers failed not merely because opponents spent more money, but because the scheme itself violated property rights, expanded welfare, and threatened to bring private education under state control.

California’s Prop. 174 was the most ambitious school voucher plan to date.

Rothbard opens by stressing the scale of the political failure: a nationally promoted reform, tested in a state with visibly troubled public schools, was defeated overwhelmingly. He rejects the explanation that teachers’ unions simply bought the result. For him, the electoral defeat reveals a deeper political truth: voters sensed that vouchers were not a genuine escape from state schooling but another mechanism of state redistribution and control.

For the big problem was the voucher scheme itself.

The essay’s structure moves from diagnosis to inversion. Rothbard first grants the standard conservative-libertarian critique of public schools: they are inefficient because they are coercively funded, and they are ideologically dangerous because they educate children under state authority.

Governmental schooling is bound to be biased in favor of statism and of inculcating obedience to the state apparatus and trendy political causes.

But he then argues that voucher advocates stopped their analysis too early. Public schooling is not only inefficient and statist; it is also, in his terms, a welfare scheme and an egalitarian project. Vouchers therefore do not abolish the underlying problem. They universalize it by forcing taxpayers to subsidize private schooling too, including for families whose education choices others do not wish to finance.

Vouchers would greatly extend the welfare system so that middle-class taxpayers would pay for private as well as public schooling for the poor.

Rothbard’s core conceptual move is to shift the debate from “choice” to property. Voucher advocates define freedom as consumer selection among schools; Rothbard defines freedom as control over one’s own earned resources. Thus a state-funded “choice” for one family necessarily becomes a tax burden and loss of control for another. His most important principle is that subsidy and regulation are inseparable.

On the crucial principle that control always follows subsidy, the voucher scheme would extend government domination from the public schools to the as-yet more or less independent private schools.

This is why the essay is not a defense of public schools. Rothbard dislikes public education, but he fears that vouchers would damage the remaining independence of private and suburban schools. He also argues that many suburban parents are not seeking revolution: their schools are sufficiently local, homogeneous, and responsive to satisfy them. A voucher plan, in his view, threatens those communities with a new form of coerced egalitarianism.

The rhetorical center of the essay is Rothbard’s attack on abstract “choice.” He insists that market choice is not created by government certificates but by income, ownership, and voluntary exchange.

The focus should not be on abstract "choice," but on money earned.

From that premise, he dismisses the need for education vouchers alongside food, housing, or other targeted subsidies. The proper “voucher” is ordinary money acquired without coercion.

By far the best "voucher," and the only voucher needed, is the dollar bill that you earn honestly, and don't grab from others, even if they are merely taxpayers.

The conclusion offers a brief alternative program: deregulate private schools, cut public-school budgets, restore strictly local control, and reduce taxes so families can leave government schools with their own money. The essay remains relevant as an internal critique of school-choice politics: Rothbard argues that reforms advertised as market mechanisms can become extensions of the welfare state if they preserve taxation, subsidy, and bureaucratic authority.

Let each locality make its own decisions on its schools and let the state and federal government get out completely.