Kevin Carey of Ed Sector blogged yesterday that he has intercepted a communication revealing “what extremist libertarians say when they think they’re talking to one another.”  He is referring to this month’s issue of the highly classified Cato newsletter. I knew we should have used the Cone of Silence instead of 3rd class mail!

The title of Carey’s post proclaims: ”Cato Renounces School Vouchers.” This would be difficult, since Cato has never advocated vouchers, or, for that matter, anything else. The Cato Institute does not take policy positions, its scholars do.

Carey also suggests that I am personally “abandoning vouchers,” citing an interview in our newsletter in which I explain one of the advantages education tax credits enjoy over vouchers. As it happens, I have been pointing to that and other advantages of tax credits for the last decade: in my 1999 book Market Education: The Unknown History, in the 2001 Cato paper  “Toward Market Education: Are Vouchers or Tax Credits the Better Path,” in the 2002 Independent Review essay “Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Why Tax Credits are Better than Vouchers,” and more recently.

Vouchers have many redeeming qualities when compared to both conventional government-run schools and charter schools, but since I concluded, while researching Market Education, that tax credits have important advantages over vouchers, I have recommended credits. 

The most puzzling part of Carey’s post is its conspicuous self-contradiction. On the one hand, Carey claims that tax credits ”only help people who make enough money to pay taxes.” On the other, he quotes my advocacy of tax credits for donations to non-profit scholarship funds serving low-income families. Since such programs already exist and are growing in several states, and are serving people who pay little or nothing in taxes, Carey’s post disproves itself.

Hmm. Is this some devious strategy to undermine “extremist libertarians” by doing our jobs for us, thereby putting us out of work?