There’s a story that someone from England was invited to talk about free markets in some other country, and after his speech was approached by several members of the audience who said, “I cannot agree with your ideas because I do not like to go barefoot.” The visitor was bewildered until his host whispered that most shoes in that country were made in state-owned factories. (Does anyone know where I read this story? I thought it was in An End to Allegiance, but the author, Geoffrey Sampson, said no.)
As Frédéric Bastiat put it in 1850:
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
In this context, let me plug the Separation of School and State. The analogy with “church and state” is intentional: the established schools have much the same role now as the established churches once had: their goal is to ensure mental monoculture.
Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to ‘educate the people’ so that they will have but one common mind to delude.
(Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, September 1980)