What Am I Missing Here?

Independent schools will have to educate more pupils from impoverished families or face losing some of the £100 million a year they receive in tax breaks under plans to eliminate education "class barriers".

I'm clearly missing something here because I haven't a clue what the aim is. Way back when, in 1997, we actually had a scheme, calld the Assisted Places scheme, whereby the Government paid for disadvantaged children to go to these schools. This was scrapped in the name of something or other, although clearly it isn't an insistence that poor children should not attend such schools.

But to me there's something more insidious here as well. The Government is forcing a private business to give away some of its production. It's as if being unemployed meant that the supermarkets have to give you free food.

We've already seen one grievous breach of the sanctity of private property in the imposition of the minimum wage. A worker is no longer, at penalty of law, to sell his labour (the fruits of which are the one thing in a free society which we absolutely own), allowed to sell his property for a price he considers acceptable. Here, with the schools, we are being told that a business must give away some part of its production.

The correct, both morally and in practice, method of dealiing with these problems is the way in which we deal with unemployment. We tax those in work to provide a safety net to those out: they get money to go to the supermarket. If we think that wages are too low we should top them up, as we do with tax credits, rather than insist upon a minimum wage. And if we insist, as a society, that poor children should gain a better education than the one the State behemoth provides, then we should pay for it, through the taxation system.

And if people, when confronted with the true cost of these schemes, decide that they're not worth it, then so be it, the people have spoken.

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