I know I’m a bit of a malcontent sometimes, and that’s why I would like to come out and admit it. I love school vouchers. If I could choose between school vouchers or an eternity of world peace, I’d choose vouchers.

Of course, I should point out that my love for school vouchers is not so much in the belief that they will help education, but only that I will no longer have to purchase toilet paper for any children that I may spawn, because the government will basically be sending it to me in the mail in voucher form.

In the field of education, Republicans have placed themselves in a bizarre conundrum. They’ve gone from the actually gutsy behavior of Ronald Reagan, who wanted to abolish the Department of Education, to the attempts of modern conservatives like Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and President George W. Bush, who want to introduce more bureaucracy to education in the form of vouchers.

Superficially, voucher programs look like the salvation of the poor. Low-income families could be given need-based vouchers to help pay for an education superior to that offered in the inner cities. The fact that many conservatives support vouchers merely so they can push people into conservative religious schools could be considered a negative, since it eliminates exposing students to other curricula. However, even if that were ignored, the plans for vouchers are insane, to put it gently.

For one, most conservatives rely on market-based analogies to justify voucher programs and education overhauls. There’s only one problem. Education is not a true market, so long as we make it available to everyone. Markets are based on supply and demand, not a supply that will be increased by default every time a school gets overcrowded and a demand that increases in perpetuity.

Public schools, therefore, are simply not designed to compete. Why should they be? Schools ought to be designed to educate, not to drive their competitors into the ground. Furthermore, since they are run by the government at some level, they simply aren’t designed for competition, because if the government gets itself beaten down at something, it can always just stop. If people moan about the quality of governmental health care through Medicaid, the legislature could always just pull the plug entirely. The government has no need or reason to compete. If it tried to, Republicans would be hopping mad because they’d have to raise taxes to pay for such competition.

When private schools are considered, the market-based analogy attaches more cleanly, since private schools are not obligated to admit anyone and can limit their supply effectively. If vouchers enter the picture, this no longer works. Private schools lose some of their authority if they become governmentally-funded, just like universities do.

Private schools could no longer reject students because of special needs, thus burdening them with what was considered a social concern. The limited supply of private schools would mean that those who wanted to go wouldn’t necessarily have a chance, since the government couldn’t force them to exceed their capacity without turning them into (gasp) public schools.

It really doesn’t matter, though, because the idea of vouchers to help the poor is ridiculous. After all, a large percentage of our poorest children grow up in rural areas, where the idea of school choice is a laughable one. The choice is essentially the county high school or staying home. For the urban poor, the situation’s not better, since even with full-scholarship vouchers that go far beyond the current proposals, they’d have to find a way to get to the private schools. Somehow I doubt the kid in Watts is going to set up a car pool with anyone in Bel Air, leaving him in the same place he started.

School vouchers endanger the idea of public schooling, because schools have overheads of the non-projector variety, regardless of how many students they serve. It’s not like subtracting one student and the tax money that would go with him suddenly allows his old public school to pay less for its plumbing or heat.

Vouchers merely act as a way out for those kids whose parents aren’t quite wealthy enough to pay for parochial schools. For the truly desperate, they’re a slap in the face, like a $1 coupon off the purchase of caviar.

If only some conservative would grow a pair and admit that they want public schools to go the way of the liberal Democrat, perhaps they’d have a point. Until then, their arguments rest on a base shakier than cafeteria Jell-O.

Tim Kearns is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.