* let's create some more crime

Topics: Regulation
30 Nov 1994

From: "DG Ervan Darnell"


There was a piece on the local news a few nights back about "Defensive
Driving" fraud where the instructors took the money, signed the form, and
let people get back to work. The news team was aghast at such shady
dealings and used their undercover videotape to get such operators busted.

Nobody ever stopped to ask what was going on. Who was being defrauded?
People were gladly paying their money for the form to be signed.
Instructors were glad to take the money and skip the dumb course. Who is
being hurt? Other drivers who are facing more reckless drivers who skipped
sleeping through the defensive driving tapes? Oh please. The government
has setup a system where neither side involved in the transaction actually
wants to make it, neither side cares that the other performs its part, and
lo and behold, the system is joke and people are cutting corners.

I ran into another instance of this last week when I was discussing
abolishing the federal education department with an anonymous liberal. As
an aside, the federal education department only takes money that could be
spent on education and uses it to pay bureaucrats to pass and enforce laws
that make it more difficult to educate children. Abolishing the education
department would be a strong positive step for education.

But my point here is that my debating opponent said the education department
was underfunded because it does not have enough inspectors to check out all
of the shady trade schools accepting government loans for an education that
is never really provided. I just laughed and said that I could fix that
problem in short order. It is rather like defensive driving. The
government gives people money in the form of 'loans' and tells them to spend
it on something they don't really want. And then much to everyone's
surprise, such students are not very careful about how they spend that
money. Seeing as they merely have to spend it, there are plenty of people
who spring up to take it off their hands for whatever excuse comes along.
Just try to imagine these overpriced and poorly run trade schools trying to
run the same operation with patrons who were paying their own way and
actually wanted to learn something instead of merely using a government
'loan' as welfare ticket.


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