U.S.: Liberty and education enlightening the world

Most investors -- and citizens at large, for that matter -- don't realize that one of the reasons the United States ascended to world power (and later superpower) status was that it was the first industrialized nation to adopt free, universal, public education, with every state offering a free elementary education by 1880.

Free, universal public education was a radical notion at the time, but the fruits of it in the United States were what you'd expect: you guessed it -- workforce skills and training increased, more citizens learned value-added skills, incomes rose, and so did corporate revenue and earnings.

LBJ: The Great Society

Further, the benefits were similar during other activist periods: the post-World War II federal G.I. Bill enabled millions of U.S. veterans to earn college degrees, a program that substantially increased talent pools in math and sciences, setting the stage for the aviation era/space age breakthroughs that followed. Later, the expansion of college funding, loans, and student aid during President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society led to another wave of math and science learning, laying the foundation for the information technology breakthroughs that would follow in the decades ahead.

It's hard to believe, but during each period, in the 1880s and again later in the 1940s and 1960s, there were bitter fights as to whether public funds should be spent on education.

And, as in today's universal health care debate, conservatives then trotted out the same, old, tired arguments: Why do we need to educate citizens? If they want an education, let them pay for it. If they can't afford to pay for an education, then that just means they don't deserve one, and or shouldn't have had one in the first place.

At the university level, California had some of the most bitter debates. The public interest eventually won, and of course the effort didn't achieve much ... just institutions like Berkeley, UCLA, and the California University System. Berkeley is so strong academically it's considered to be "Public Ivy"; i.e., a public university with programs so strong they are on par with the private programs offered in the Ivy League (Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, and Penn).

At the secondary level, the United States was ahead of Europe in seeing the link between public education and civilizational/economic advance. Conversely, Europe was ahead of the U.S. in seeing the link between universal health care and civilizational/economic advance. Like public education, the entire U.S. economy will benefit from an insured, healthy populace.

The United States is about 70 years late regarding universal health care. It's high time the nation caught up with Europe in this area.

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Financial Editor Joseph Lazzaro is writing a book on the U.S. presidency and the U.S. economy.