Babble about equality and discrimination notwithstanding,
the equal protection clause is about the protection against crime the law
affords, and that has nothing to do with segregation, legally permitted or
legally required, by private or public institutions or persons.
“De facto
segregation” is not segregation but mere non-integration.
As to Williamson’s apparent concern to equalize education by
equalizing funding, it is far more appearance than reality.
Vouchers and choice would almost certainly insure growing
educational inequality just as vouchers and choice in place of Medicare or
Medicaid would ensure growing inequality of access to medical care, in both cases
through shrinkage in the value of the vouchers compared to prices.
In any case, a good reason to think so is that
conservatives, who make no secret of loathing redistribution as well as
regulation and the taxation that enables both, support it.
The idea is that, here as elsewhere, people can obtain only
what goods or services they can personally pay for with whatever they can
legally get from the economic marketplace or the gift of others – such as, for
example, their filthy rich parents in the cases of such people as the Fords,
the Kennedy’s, the Forbes’s, and the entire tribe of silver-spoon babies.
Too, that is the point of privatization in all areas from fire
departments to highways.
(As to the latter, it is also the point of tolling.)
A regime of “user fees” is a regime affording maximum
advantage to wealth over poverty.
A regime of access open to all on the basis of need is the abolition
of that advantage.
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