LeBron James has become the new angelic archetype of what a wealthy person should do with their money, at least according to the left. The I Promise School located in Akron, Ohio hopes to be “that groundbreaking school.” The children attending the school will receive free tuition, uniforms, meals, transportation, bicycles, and guaranteed tuition to the University of Akron.

This is now seen as a great moment; a wealthy member of our society is giving to his childhood community and is showing to be a pretty great dude. Unfortunately, all of those “free” things I listed are not exactly free; somebody has to pay for everything, nothing just appears. So who is paying for all of these benefits of the IPS? Intuitively it seems as if it would be LeBron, but that is not the case.

Although LeBron plans to spend $2 million annually on the school, the other necessary $8 million is being paid by the local taxpayers. Not only that, the rest of the cost is going to be covered by shifting resources away from the existing public schools towards this low capacity school. LeBron’s school can only have about 120 students, which means that children in the rest of the district will be getting a worse education because the local government wants to subsidize LeBron’s altruistic moment of fame.

Eric July had a thing or two to say about the school:

The modern public education system is, in fact, an indoctrination camp that turns children into collectivist followers of the state. In addition, the fact that it is a state-run institution means that the costs will go up as the quality declines. LeBron James could have solved this problem if he had produced a low cost or free school from his students independent of the state, but instead, he decided to help the few at the expense of the many.