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Forcing other citizens to pay for the education of your child is stealing. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

I believe a reasonable argument of "promoting the general welfare" could be made under almost any state constitution given that we can all be said to benefit from an educated society. (I certainly don't want to live in a society with 80% illiteracy rates.) If a state chooses to tax to educate and it does so in a legal fashion through our lawfully elected reps then I don't have a problem with it. If you believe otherwise then the burden is on you to convince others. Blanket assertions that it is theft probably won't sway anyone but the choir which is already singing that chorus.

I believe a reasonable argument of "promoting the general welfare" could be made under almost any state constitution given that we can all be said to benefit from an educated society. (I certainly don't want to live in a society with 80% illiteracy rates.)

The state has an interest in seeing the children are housed and fed, but we don't have government farm collectives, government cafeterias, government food dispensaries, or wide spread Soviet-style cement block housing . We handle this privately. Parents pay for their children's food, housing, and clothing. We have government food vouchers ( food stamps) and Section 8 housing vouchers that are redeemed in the private market.

Yes, the government has an interest in seeing that children are educated, but we do not need Soviet-style government schooling to do it. It should be handled privately with charity and vouchers assisting the poor among us.

As for government charity:

In my city they actually had to have a advertising campaign to encourage people to use government food stamps and housing vouchers. It turns out that our local private food pantries are doing such and excellent job in feeding the poor, finding emergency and permanent housing, and job placement that the poor **prefer** to use the private system. The private charities can act immediately with little paper work or hassle.

So?....Even if government did provide government vouchers for the poor for education, I bet the poor in my city would also tend to use private educational charity rather than deal with the government.

I believe a reasonable argument of "promoting the general welfare" could be made under almost any state constitution given that we can all be said to benefit from an educated society.

What does it mean to be a conservative in America. This is my definition: one who wants the country governed by the principles as set forth in the Declaration of independence. Governments, therefore, are instituted to protect the natural rights of the citizens. Redistribution of wealth, although you could argue it promotes the general welfare violates my natural right to own property. Communism, after all, made the same claims about general welfare. They, at least were honest about abolishing private property, but they could hardly be described as being conservative.

I believe a reasonable argument of "promoting the general welfare" could be made under almost any state constitution given that we can all be said to benefit from an educated society.

That's not enough justification to support the education system we have by the coercion that's used to support it.

(I certainly don't want to live in a society with 80% illiteracy rates.)

We're getting there anyway, in spite of the *promoting general welfare* catch.

The department of education is NOT *promoting the general welfare* at this time.

Education happened before it was mandated by the federal government and literacy rates were higher then.