Plenty of double standards go to around

Steve, at Deinonychus antirrhopus, comments on objections to private schools.

If privately run schools had any history of achieving the goals of our public school system, advocating privatizing schools would make sense. But there is no privatley run school system on Earth, nor has there ever been, which approaches the success of the U.S. patchwork system of public education. There are a few systems in the world that perform better than our system in elementary and secondary levels, in certain subjects — each of them is government run, and each of them has a centralized, federal curriculum selection device.

Funny, that sounds very much like an ID argument. We have never seen a privately run system work, therefore they can never work. We have never seen a bacterial flagellum evolve therefore it can't evolve.

Indeed.

One thing I've noticed about large numbers of people on the right and the left is that both sides accept that order and structure can and do arise spontaneously, without the intervention of a designer required. And both sides will argue that complicated, intricate systems can't possibly arise on their own without the intervention of an intelligent designer.

The side that believes intelligent oversight is required in the economic realm is perfectly willing to accept that complexity in nature can arise without it, and the side that demands an intelligent designer in nature has no trouble with the notion of spontaneous order in a free market.

I'll leave the application of labels to the alert student.