Sounds schizophrenic. Does the right hand not know what the left hand is doing?
But let’s go back in history: Is literacy because of public schooling?
The evidence shows … that the majority of people in the first half of the nineteenth century did become literate (in the technical sense) largely by their own efforts. Moreover, if the government played any role at all in this sphere it was one of saboteur!
As long as the first few years of the nineteenth century it was a subject for government complaint that the ordinary people had become literate. For the government feared that too many people were developing the “wrong” uses of literacy by belonging to secret “corresponding societies” and by reading seditious pamphlets. Far from subsidising literacy, the early nineteenth-century English governments placed severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the exercise of the public’s reading and writing abilities.
— E.G. West, Education and the State [1965]
For over 200 years, the U.S. government has imposed quotas on the import of sugar into the United States. This has allowed domestic sugar producers the ability to charge more for sugar. Americans consume less sugar.
Don’t think of this as cronyism. Don’t think of this as crony capitalism. Think of this as a government program to fight tooth decay.
Then the government provides subsidies to the sugar industry. Think of this as a way to keep the industry healthy, and dentists, too.
…
One estimate of what Americans pay extra to keep the sugar industry happy is $2.4 billion a year. Maybe $1.4 billion goes to the sugar barons.
Sugar farmers donate $3.6 million to campaigns.
When you can buy $1.4 billion in benefits for $3.6 million in payoffs — excuse me, democratic donations — you have a sweetheart deal.
Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty chapter 5:
It is characteristic of our statist trend that, when general indignation against unions led to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the government did not repeal any of these special privileges. Instead, it added special restrictions upon unions to limit the power which the government itself had created.
Given a choice, the natural tendency of the State is to add to its power, not to cut it down; and so we have the peculiar situation of the government first building up unions and then howling for restrictions against their power. This is reminiscent of the American farm programs, in which one branch of the Department of Agriculture pays farmers to restrict their production, while another branch of the same agency pays them to increase their productivity. Irrational, surely, from the point of view of the consumers and the taxpayers, but perfectly rational from the point of view of the subsidized farmers and of the growing power of the bureaucracy. Similarly, the government’s seemingly contradictory policy on unions serves, first, to aggrandize the power of government over labor relations, and second, to foster a suitably integrated and Establishment-minded unionism as junior partner in government’s role over the economy.
You get the point.