If your target audience is people like me, I would suggest explaining your economics a little more. In both the school discussion nor the retirement/stocks discussion, I didn't see any clear explanation of why your proposals were better. For example, although I know that stocks can have a higher return than other options, they're very high-risk. They can have a higher return, but they can also wipe out savings. For people who can set aside enough money to balance out the odds and who have the combination of time/expertise to follow stocks, the risks are minimized. But can someone barely making ends meet do that? What's the breaking point on how much people need to save for stocks to be comparably safe? How will tax vouchers level the playing field? Is your idea to privatize education? Well, then it would seem to make sense to look at the existing data from charters and magnets to see how the existence of these school as options have had any effect (even if only to conclude that there's not enough data yet, but charters have a very mixed record). Also, this notion Because state-run enterprises have no incentive to perform well, the public schools all stink, needs support. I don't grant it as a fundamental precept. It presupposes that teachers, principals, and supervisors are all baseline incompetent and don't find the goal of "producing competent, thoughtful, well-educated" students to be incentive (or the politics of parental pressure, awards, and in this day and age, test results). It's also not true that all public schools stink. In property-rich districts, public schools can be wonderful. Good liberal that I am, I think the problem is resources and that privitization is not the answer (I don't think privitization has a good record in things like education which have no profit motive), but moving away from locale based funding to having a state funding source distributed among schools according to need (if we were starting from zero, I would say equitably distributed, but since there are districts that are in pressing needs of funds for up-to-date textbooks and building repairs that need more funds than schools with indoor tracks do). Now I may well be wrong, but there's nothing in what you've given me to show me that I am, so the arguments ends up reading to me as "If you thought like I did, you would see that I'm right," which I feel pretty confident is NOT what you want to say. :)

Ah, I thought you were trying to talk to a left audience and not talking to a libertarian audience about talking to a non-libertarian leftist audience. Got it now! That makes sense given who's likely to read Catallarchy. I definitely think it's a laudable goal for two reasons: the obvious one of that pooling information to try and come up with the most effective aims is always better than not talking to each other and my personal hope that libertarians and Democrats will ally together politically on the strength of shared social policy goals while the Republicans-in-charge are so far away from enacting libertarian-desired financial policies.

A few points here.

First, your chart does not look inflation adjusted. It should be.

Second, your chart suggests that if you want to avoid risk, you should NOT be in the market unless you have a 20+ year window to invest. Thus, if you are 45 and plan on retiring at age 65, you should pull your money out of the stock market if you don't want to risk your retirement. I'm assuming that once you do retire, your risk tollerance will drop to zero.

Third, the idea that stocks will automatically out perform other investment vehicles is based almost 100% on past performance analysis. It is quite easy to also use past performance analysis to show that todays stock market is waaay overpriced. It can be a double edged sword.

Can I ask about this? So the idea of having savings "wiped out" is a complete myth (if you invest in broad market indices, and you invest over a long period of time). I was actually trying to say the same thing as you, but what I wasn't (and still am not) clear on is the meaning of investing in "broad market indices." I've always taken it to mean basically having a diverse portfolio, which I think requires a certain amount of start-up capital. Am I misunderstanding the term? If not, how much money does someone have to have before they can invest it broadly enough for the stock market to be low risk? That's what I'm concerned about: that people at low incomes cannot set aside enough money to effectively invest in stocks.

Education: Vouchers are fine. The problem comes from the imbalance they create. If you give all students $x, apportioned equally, then all the private enterprise will take the students which cost less than $x to educate, and the state will be left with all the students who cost more than $x to educate. Thus the voucher system will end up costing much more than $x/student on average. To solve this, $x must be much less than the actual average cost of educating a student.

Part of the fundamental problem here is

free markets + regulation != free markets

And the idea that you can solve many problems with regulated governemnt by turning to the free market is just pie in the sky thinking.

Other Welfare: It would have been nice to see you address the other huge welfare machine of the state/nation governemnts. State funded transportation.

There is no such thing as a student who costs more than $x or less than $x to educate.

It's a bell curve, just like everything else. You recast it in a very theoretical manner. The truth is that every kid in the same is going to use a different amount of resources. Some will need more structure, some less. Some will need more discipline, others less. Some will be self directed, some will need one on one interaction. Some kids are mentally disabled. Some kids are physically diabled.

Sure you can use free market ideas to help in solving problems. But that doesn't mean that they won't cost more. They may cost more in the short run, the long run, or both. The appeal to markets as a means of generating efficient results doesn't work in over-regulated environments.

I'm have almost no clue what you are talking about here:

It has nothing to do with bell curves, or how it is cast. You are discretizing a fundamentally continuous phenomenon...

This makes no sense. I wasn't aware that I was discritizng. Normal distributions are continuous models. If I'm guilty of anything, it's of modeling something discrete (the cost of educating an individual person) with something continuous.

But the idea that all students cost an equal amount $x to educate is only true if you define educate to mean that you give them $x and let them learn as much as they can with that amount. It seems that you really are using this as your operational definition of educate. This seems to be the crux of the matter. It goes to the heart of what education is, and what it means to a society. So I guess I have to ask: what do you mean by educate?

Regardless, your position still ignores practical issues like student competition for finite resource, management overhead and mandated performance. Here's a simple example. If two students attend the same school, but live different distances from the school, then it will cost different amounts to transport them to the same school. Another simple example. Consider two schools in different locations, one relatively safe and the other relatively dangerous. The cost of securing each school is going to be different. While that cost can be amortized over the entire school population, chances are that the cost per pupil in each school will be different.

Another problem is that education is not a liquid market. You can't just switch schools without incurring fairly high transaction costs. If the market is not liquid, this will lead various forms of market manipulation, both overt and covert.

I think the idea that vouchers might be more efficient is interesting, but I have yet to see any practical evidence of it. It is certainly the case that the current education system has many entrenched inefficiencies, and that vouchers may move the money/resources away from these inefficiencies. But I've seen no proposal which would keep these inefficiencies out of any voucher system. The solution to the entrenched efficiencies isn't to play the shell game with funds, hoping that this shell is less affected by the problem than that shell. The solution is to address the specific problem head on. There are also transaction costs associated "switching shells" and for vouchers to be a more efficient solution, those transaction costs must also be factored into the entire picture. (It's worth noting for the gambler in you that the transaction costs aren't just entry costs in to the voucher system, but also exit costs in the event that vouchers turn out to be a disaster).

And I'd still love to see you take on the transportation system (en toto). :)

Once private schools are accepting publicly funded vouchers for all their students, the transaction costs for opting out of public funding become prohibitive. So when government starts attaching significant conditions to the acceptance of public funds these schools will be faced with the choice of going out of business of knuckling under.

Private schools will naturally come under greater government control and that's not a good thing.

"Its true that private schools will tend to follow the govt. standards so they can be subsidized. But if these standards get too onerous, there will be market pressure to ignore the subsidy "
Well, that's like saying that even though banking is cartelized, if government-backed banks get too shoddy, private banking alternatives will grow.
Sure, but at (I suspect strongly) an insignificant (in terms of what you initially hoped to accomplish) level.
If I, dictator of Hypothestan, subsidize all Oil Companies that pump oil with 1970's rigs, instead of letting them go out of business, even though there is theoretically "more competition" initially, ceteris paribus, ceteris will not remain paribus for long.

On the meta level though, I do agree weakly that it is better for the government to redistribute more efficiently, rather than by the an-economic ad hoc methods they do now. By providing less drag on the market, private endeavors will have more "breathing room" to provide alternatives to the State.
I also think it is a good insight that countries like Sweden do so, and that's one reason why they don't fail utterly.

One possibility that you might want to consider is that the United States in particular, does not want to redistribute efficiently. Leftist ideologues might want to, but I am not sure that they are really guiding policy. It seems likely to me that they are (mostly unwitting) apologists. I think socialism in the USA is more of a neo-mercantilist/fascist flavor, historically the major movements toward government expansion have always come from big business.
They don't want necessarily to redistribute efficiently, because the whole point is to damage the market below a certain water-line. In other words, I suspect that the real "powers that be" understand economics and are intentionally setting policies that accomplish the opposite (or near-opposite) of what they are sold as. This may seem a bit paranoid but it also fits the data surprisingly well.