[QUOTE=Menocchio]
In all realism, here’s what I see happening:
Education:
Public schools must now compete with private schools subsidized with publicly-funded vouchers. Virtually all children who can migrate to these public schools, which vary widely in quality, as some would be based on experimental pedagogical techniques that seem attractive to parents but don’t necessarily work, and others would be founded more on ideology and religion than education, and still others would operate by virtue of being cheap and marginally better than the public schools. All of these would have the luxury of being able to reject and underperforming, troublesome, or special needs student they don’t want. All of these could find education elsewhere, if there’s one local and their parents can afford it even after the voucher, but many of them would fall back on the shoulders of the public schools. The public schools, now with less money and less teachers (on the plus side, the average teacher would probably be paid more at the private schools), and still burdened with the worst the district can give them, would crumble even further, but I admit wouldn’t dissolve entirely. The bar for higher education would become higher, as government subsidized loans and grants for college tuition fade away.
Net result: Better education for some, worse education for others.
Roads:
Stay exactly as they are. Sorry folks, but only the most wide-eyed ideologues actually want privatized roads. Industry, retail, emergency services, private citizens, even the freaking military are all so dependent on the modern highway system that they wouldn’t dare try to clog it with tollbooths or costly GPS transponders (which, btw, would raise a whole host of privacy concerns troublesome to a Libertarian state). Everybody wants public roads, we just dicker about where they go or who gets the contracts to build and maintain them. Funding may shift more towards gas tax and tollbooths on the larger interstates (not city roads), rather than general funds.
Food:
Prices increase. A portion of federal subsidies makes it back to you at the grocery store, after all. Quality decreases. Never underestimate the American public’s tolerance for shoveling complete crap into their mouths. The market will provide options for those willing to look and able to pay for high quality foods, and we’ll never fall back to The Jungle levels, but the average person’s diet will become worse by a non-trivial degree.
Medicine:
Here’s the only place where the term “chaos” is at all applicable IMHO. With the FDA gone or severely cut down, market forces and tort law are now the ultimate arbiter of drug quality. Medical associations and insurers (including the charitable ones) would eventually work out some system, but it’d take a considerable amount of time before all the competing factions were merged. The meantime would be pretty shaky, and I’d predict doctors and insurers would be very hesitant to prescribe anything that’s not absolutely tried-and-true to anyone. I wonder how the ultimate result, the big certifying body, will differ from the FDA as currently configured. Drug companies will still have to jump through hoops to get them to sign off on anything.
Drugs:
Hate to say it, but I don’t see the situation changing much here anyway. Pot will be legal and common, but nobody wants heroin around. It may be technically legal, but legitimate business won’t touch it. That leaves the same gangs that are selling it today, at practically the same prices. This means the same level of attending violence, and related enforcement and incarceration. You can’t lock up someone for possession, but you do need to go after the gangs shooting at each other or the junky who robs people for his next fix.
Labor:
Unions loose whatever legal protection they had, but regain their importance and purpose. Workers will suffer quite a bit before organized labor is able to bounce back, but it eventually will.
Corporate:
Less regulation means more Enron-style hijinks. Oh sure, they’ll fall apart sooner or later, but not before they cause a lot of suffering to their employees and stock holders.
So really, not that different from today. If you’re doing alright financially and have no trouble watching labels, you may be better off (except for the medical thing, that’d bite everybody on the ass). But the majority would be doing a fair bit worse. Still not the total collapse some above are predicting.
[/QUOTE]
Assuming the zealots wouldn’t have free reign and that the situation wouldn’t get “worse”, I think you’re pretty much correct.
