Most Americans enjoy the fruits of their advanced civilization without the slightest realization of its causes. Like fish unaware that they're wet. The free market delivers the wider choices and better choices than any other system on Earth, and it does this not just for cell phones, but for essentials like food, shelter, and other things. That your child's education should somehow be too "special" for this process is ridiculous.

The Yugo was one of the least-expensive cars in the world. Almost anyone could afford one. What you are telling me is that it is better that everyone have to drive a Yugo than suffer the horrors that someone might end up driving a better car than someone else. Nobody would buy one given any choice at all, but what does choice have to do with it?

Another hard fact you really don't want to face is that education is largely a matter of how one is raised, and parental involvement. Most of the brilliant people of the past century were educated in one-room schools. Put an unmotivated person in the finest school on Earth and what difference will it make? Maybe you didn't follow my college analogy very well. Did going to Yale make George Bush brilliant? Did being a college dropout make Bill Gates a failure?

I'm not surprised the educational establishment doesn't want choice. They know damn well what choices parents would make. It's odd that you would couch my advocacy of increased free choice in schooling as "taking schools away" from kids. In point of fact, it would take kids away from a failing educational bureaucracy.

Have it your way. Preserve socialized unionized education. Better everyone in a Yugo than abandoning egalitarianism. See how long it lasts.

The free market always works. This does not mean that the free market always delivers wonderful things to everybody all the time. It means it always works, like gravity, or the pressure of millions of tons of water behind a cracking dam. Try and pretend that market forces don't exist, like many liberals do, and the forces will end up running them over.

Meanwhile, homeschooling continues to increase, and new computer-based methods of delivering home schooling have increased as well. Technology marches on. It's now possible for a teacher to lecture students all over the world online. Minorities demand vouchers, and are squashed by the government education system and Democratic politicians (says something about real motivations, doesn't it?) People in almost-Third-World countries who can blow our students out of the water in math and science are sucking up jobs.

How many people are still sending correspondence through the postal service? Why or why not?

Yugos sold well in totalitarian nations because there wasn't much choice in the matter. How are they selling now?