Carter posts an interesting video in which Huckabee lays out his position on school choice. His concerns are that vouchers would come with strings attached and thus be bad for private schools, and that they would skim the cream from the public schools. The first concern is a reason either to support vouchers without strings, or to support tuition tax credits. The second is a standard liberal argument that has not been empirically borne out. His solution is to improve the public schools so that nobody feels a need to leave them. That’s not an answer for those who have religious reasons to want out, of course, which you’d think he would understand. And it leaves out altogether the possibility that private school choice would itself improve the public schools.

Also, Carter posits that the Cato Institute’s criticism of Huckabee can be discounted because they’re libertarian whackjobs rather than fiscal conservatives. I don’t find the proposal that the highways be privatized as nutty as Carter does. But Cato wasn’t comparing Huckabee to a libertarian ideal; it was comparing him to other governors, including Romney, and finding his record worse. And while I’m not a libertarian myself, I do think that it is possible to learn from libertarians.