During a trip to Washington, last weekend, I was struck by a front-page Washington Post article on the dismal state of the city's public schools. Despite spending more per student than virtually any other school district in the nation, the capital's pupils are tragically deprived of a decent education, with nearly three-quarters of them lacking basic math skills.

"The district spends $12,979 per pupil each year," the Post reported. "But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration."

And the schools aren't even safe. The Post reports that it takes more than a year to fix even the most dangerous conditions. The series tells a troubling story of bureaucracy, mismanagement, incompetence and corruption. The district, for instance, created a "showcase" school where money was no object, featuring a state-of-the-art TV system wired into every classroom. Three years later, the production room remains in a storage closet, unused and lacking the parts needed to get it up and running.

This is no anomaly. Read about the conditions in any major urban school system in the nation, and the story is essentially the same. Every year, southern Californians learn about the latest plan to fix Los Angeles Unified, but no matter which officials are in charge or what political upheavals take place, the schools remain dismal, and the kids endure the brunt of the failure. L.A. officials put the dropout rate at somewhere between a third and a half of all students. That's criminal.

Despite what the noxious teachers unions say, the answer is not "more money."

Reading these stories reminds me of those reports about the economic situation in the old Soviet Union, where central planners were incapable of allocating resources to the right places. People waited in long lines to get foodstuffs. We're always told that education is so important that it must be left to the experts, yet experts cannot be all-knowing.

I highly recommend a little book, available for free online (http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Essays/rdPncl1.html) called "I, Pencil," by Leonard Read. It traces the production of a simple, little consumer item: "I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-how's configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-mind- ing!"

No one person can do everything necessary to bring into being a simple, little pencil. No one and no cadre of experts could know enough on their own to make these things happen. That's why socialist economies eventually must fail. That's why socialist education systems cannot provide decent education for kids no matter how much money is thrown at the bureaucracies.

Although charter schools and tuition vouchers offer some hope for individual parents who want to get their kids out of urban public school nightmares or out of the mediocre, politically correct school systems in affluent suburbia, they are not the ultimate solution to the education problem. The solution: the complete elimination of the public school system and its replacement with a true free market. Parents would pay for their own kids' education and would select from a host of private schools (ranging from big institutions to tiny home schools) that best serve their needs. They would shop for benefits, quality, features, location and price — just like we do for everything else in the market economy, such as cars, groceries and cell-phone service.

For years, it's been considered too radical to say so. But maybe that is changing. A mainstream conservative, Jonah Goldberg of National Review, saw the same Post series as I did and penned an excellent newspaper column that asks this question: "Why have public schools at all?" All the predictable answers, he wrote, "leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid 'behind' is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90 percent of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets."

Most supporters of public schools acknowledge that the middle class and wealthy people would do well if the system became entirely private. But what about the poor kids, they ask. That brings us back to the current state of affairs in the nation's poor, urban school districts. Can it get any worse? I believe things can get much better, that the market (and private charities) will provide an astounding array of excellent choices in the poorest, bleakest neighborhoods. And an enormous amount of resources (almost half of California's general-fund budget) would be unleashed, generating unheard-of prosperity. Call it the freedom dividend.

Well, I'm on board with the idea to shut down the public schools, and so is Jonah Goldberg. How can anyone object who believes in freedom rather than central planning?