Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Conclusion 215
them in their various activities that engage the legal system, thus distinguishing legal
services from many other essential services that citizens require. However, the demands
of the rule of law do not require that government pay for legal services for all. Rather,
when coupled with the demands of distributive justice, it simply requires that when
individuals need them and lack the means to purchase these services themselves, the
government should provide them with the means to do so, thus implying a means-tested
entitlement. In the case of food stamps and low-income housing programs, ensuring
access by all citizens to basic necessities of life implies means-tested entitlements that
satisfy distributive justice concerns.
Qualified suppliers
Obviously, one of the principal virtues of voucher systems is the competition that they
are intended to elicit on the supply-side of voucher-assisted markets, thus requiring a
significant number of competing providers and relatively free entry Most of the rationales
for any form of government intervention at all in the programmatic sectors under review
are implicated in determining what restrictions, if any, should be placed on qualifying
suppliers and new entrants (i.e. distributive justice, social externalities, and paternalism).
With respect to primary/secondary education and child care (at least if viewed as early
childhood education), social externalities/citizenship social solidarity values in particular,
and to a much lesser extent paternalistic values may argue for some restrictions on
qualifying suppliers in order to screen out grossly incompetent and more importantly
socially insidious or politically subversive providers. Paternalism concerns might be
largely addressed by various ex post mandatory disclosure requirements as to relative
school performance rather than relying excessively on ex ante screening (depending on
one’s assessment of the ability of most parents to utilize this information effectively), but
these will not address social externalities concerns that are reasonably raised by racist,
segregationist, or subversive educational ideologies. Public financing of religious schools
is also likely to raise analogous concerns, especially in jurisdictions having constitutional
prohibitions on public support for religious institutions. Thus, we do not see how the state
can avoid performing some ex ante screening function, while recognizing how sensitive
and contentious this exercise is likely to prove. Distributive justice concerns are also
implicated to the extent that voucher entitlements can be used as a credit towards private
school tuition fees, thus further enabling wealthier families to purchase superior quality
education, and spreading more thinly, and diluting the impact of, existing public
education budgets. While allowing parents to opt out entirely of the entitlement system
by sending their children to private schools at their own expense (an option that cannot
realistically be foreclosed) may also pose political risks to the quality of educational
services provided in the entitlement system, we should not go out of our way to foster a
two-tier or multi-tier child care and primary/secondary educational system closely
correlated with wealth if we are committed to genuine equality of opportunity. With
respect to post-secondary education, social externality and paternalism concerns seem to
provide a much less compelling case for extensive restrictions on qualifying suppliers;
similarly in the case of job-training programs for unemployed adults. With respect to
health care services, individual health care professionals would remain subject to existing
licensing and certification regimes and hospitals and other health-related institutions to