The Newest Supreme and School Choice.
How does "Justice Samuel Alito" sound? Pretty good, if you're concerned about letting low-income people have the same thing that wealthier Americans have--school choice.

At least that's the word from the Alliance for School Choice:

"Although history makes abundantly clear that it is impossible to predict a Supreme Court justice’s positions, based on the evidence available, we believe that Justice Alito has a firm grasp on relevant legal issues and would provide a fair hearing to advocates of school choice," says president Clint Bolick. "In that regard, the nomination does not change the Court’s course at all, but would keep it solidly on track in support of educational opportunities for children who need them desperately."

Labels: Education, School choice

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The Value of a For-Profit University.
Can an institution that seeks to turn a profit really be a university? The former head of one Canadian university thinks so.

Here's an announcement from the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, in Halifax, Nova Scotia:

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"The first university that deliberately moves to private not-for-profit status would have a major marketing advantage in Canada and first-mover status for corporate and private philanthropy," says Kelvin Ogilive, former President and Chancellor of Acadia University in From Private U to Public U: An Atlantic Canadian Opportunity. He calls it an opportunity whose time has come, and now is the time to move.

In From Public U to Private U, Ogilvie points out that private universities tend to have a curriculum carefully organized to meet their clientsÂ?, that is the studentsÂ?, demands and needs, rather than leaving such matters to the "whims of faculty". He says CanadaÂ?s public universities are sheltered from accountability, because provincial governments feel obliged to ensure their continued operation rather than allow such institutions to fail, regardless of the satisfaction of their students or the quality of the education offered. "Many universities seem to be run more for the benefit of faculty than of students," Ogilvie says.

Ogilvie, who spent ten years as head of Acadia University, writes:

For profits have other advantages as well. The performance and discipline of academic staff in the classroom tend to be much better scrutinized than in public universities, where administrators are often reluctant to set foot in the classroom and where vigorous labour unions typically influence the terms of employment. Tenure is also far less common in for-profit institutions, which prefer to offer stock options or share-purchase agreements that permit professors to have a real ownership interest in their universities. Moreover, in for-profit institutions, governance devolves shared responsibility in line with market objectives and sound management practice, whereas public universities consider shared governance a sacred part of all aspects of operation Â? meaning that the faculty interest is the default position.

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The report, in a PDF format, is here. (permalink)

Cities to Cable / Phone Companies: Here's Our Wish List. Please Comply.
Utility companies must secure the permission of local governments to run wires. And the local treasury is interested in more than simply imposing a tax these days.

The Wall Street Journal (link for subscribers) notes that many cities are now creating wish lists. In Tampa, for example, Verizon wanted to get into the TV business by sending signals over its phone lines.

The response?

"City officials presented them with a $13 million wish list, including money for an emergency communications network, digital editing equipment and video cameras to film a math-tutoring program for kids."

Other requests are being made across the country:

"Holliston, Mass., is seeking free television for every house of worship and a 10% video discount for all senior citizens. Others want high-speed Internet for sewage facilities and junk yards, flower baskets for light poles, cameras mounted on stop lights and Internet connections for poor elementary students."

The rationale for these demands: the companies are using public property. Says one attorney hired by Tampa: "You've got a very special privilege using public property for your network. There ought to be a substantial benefit to the tax-paying public."

Benefit? One would think that increased choice and competition in telephony and information services would be a substantial benefit.

No wonder why SBC and Verizon are lobbying state lawmakers across the country in hopes of having to secure the approval of thousands of local officials. (permalink)

Getting Waterlogged at the Fountain of Knowledge.
Time is money--especially when university students stretch out their academic careers.

At the University of Kansas, less than 30 percent of its students graduate within 4 years. It has launched a "graduate in four" campaign to push students along.

If successful, the effort would save the university some money, though the "graduate in 4" task force doesn't say how much.

One student who took a while to find a major objected to a proposal that students declare a major after 60 credit hours (that would be 2 years of full-time study): "I guess it was a matter of finding out who I am."

Find out who you are, man?

Is this a university, or a religious retreat? (permalink)

About Those Rigorous High School Exit Exams.
The California Assembly voted to do away with the state's high school exit exam, which is really a test of tenth grade English and eighth grade math. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.

K. Lloyd Billingsley thinks that's a good first step.

Labels: Education

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Paycheck Protection on the Ballot.
What's paycheck protection, and why is it a good thing?

K. Lloyd Billingsley explains for the Pacific Research Institute.

The what:

This measure would require public-employee unions to secure written permission from members before using members' dues money for political purposes. Television ads charge that the measure takes away the unions' voice. It doesn't.

The why:

Those who are union members will find their voices enhanced, not diminished, by the requirement that union bosses ask permission to use their money for politics. The real lesson of Prop 75 is that nobody should get workers' money before they do, and that has a wider application.

The unexpected:

Indeed, the powerful Michigan Education Association raised more money after paycheck protection passed, all through the voluntary actions of its members.
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Solidarity For .. Forget It: Teachers Leave the NEA.
Some teachers are saying "Solidarity ... Forget it."

In North Carolina, teachers are free to withdraw from the state's chapter of the National Education Association (NEA).

In recent years, the number of teachers in the state has increased 2 percent--while the number of teachers in the NEA has decreased over 3 percent. (permalink)

TABOR Truth-Telling.
The Cato Institute has a new brief on the Taxpayers Bill of Rights. The full report is available only in PDF.

If you're at all interested in government spending levels, it's worth a look. (permalink)

All We Are Saying ... Is Teach Us to Write.
Mark Goldblatt tells the story of one professor who thinks that the purpose of his English composition class is to bring about world peace.

Worse yet, he does it through the use of ethnic / racial segregation at a state-sponsored university.

Has separate-but-equal been revived? (permalink)

Why Are Local Calls Free at Motel 6 -- and a Buck at the Ritz?
If you're already paying a king's ransom for a hotel room, will you get charged for towels?

On occasion my work takes me to conferences. The events, usually encompassing a few hundred people, can't be held at your garden-variety, nondescript suburban hotels with free, ample parking, an easy to navigate layout, and an unpretentious presentation.

Nope. They have to be located in urban centers, with parking going for $20 a day (when available), bellhops hanging out looking for tips, and dollar-a-local-call telephones.

Oh sure, I understand why places like the W hotels host conventions and such. They have the staff, they space for meetings and meals, and they're usually located in the cool parts of town. And most of the people who attend are on expense accounts, at least for the trip.

I typically pay my own way, so $150-$200 a night rooms sting. What makes the cost more irritating is the outrageous cost of local telephone service. If I'm laying out a Benjamin (or two) per night for a room, why does the hotel ding me 50 cents a ring? And why is the same call free at, say, a Hampton Inn? Going further down market, why doesn't a Motel 6 make some coin by charging coins for local calls?

Because the first can, and the second cannot. It all lies in expectations.

The Wall Street Journal brings home this point in a recent article on high-speed internet service in hotel rooms.

The good news for travelers is found in the headline: "Many hotels quit charging for web access." (Yeah, yeah, I hear you economists. The cost is rolled into the room rate.)

The Journal starts thus:

One of the most irksome fees associated with business travel -- the hotel Internet access charge -- is beginning to disappear.

For years, it has been standard practice for hotels to hit guests with a $9.95 per day charge for in-room Internet access. In recent months, however, a slew of hotels have begun offering the service free, while others have cut fees.

The article goes on to state that the $10 a day fee for one technological innovation (widespread use of high speed Internet) was devised to compensate for the revenue lost by another technological innovation (widespread use of personal, cellular phones, which cut telecom revenues of hotels by half in four years).

Thanks to competition, HSI is now just another "must have" feature for some hotels. That's why I have seen dives in small, depressed Midwestern towns advertise, one right after the other "Free high speed Internet."

But the market for high-end hotels is not quite the same:

Still, some high-end hotels are resisting the move to free Internet access and are continuing to charge per day rates. The upscale chains know that higher-end customers are already paying so much that the added charges likely won't spur them to take their business elsewhere. Some hotel companies with a wide range of brands are keeping their per day access charges at their high-end brands while eliminating them at their moderately priced properties.


Chalk it up to different elasticities of demand ("the added charges won't likely spur them to take their business elsewhere," versus the budget traveler), and (the Journal adds) the cost of retrofitting older, downtown hotels. (permalink)

Poverty: Easier to Induce Guilt Than Promote Change.
A reader of this blog reminded me of a faux consciousness-raising activity that sometimes occurs around discussions of poverty. Oddly enough, he read about it an alumni magazine, too.

The "anti-hunger" activity in this case is a dinner. Nobody knows what they will be eating ahead of time, for each person's plate will be assigned by the host. A few people will eat steak, a few more will get chicken, and the greatest number will be served lentils or even bread and water.

The purposes of the activity are several: to "raise awareness" of what hunger feels like, to transmit the idea that hunger is randomly distributed, and, perhaps to stir feelings of envy and injustice.

My correspondent notes that in the article he read, there was no discussion of why some people were in poverty. That's probably just as well, given that if any causation were to be given, it would likely have been the old saw that "the rich are rich because they made the poor poor."

The exercise does point out some facts, though incompletely. The vast proportion of U.S. residents live pretty well, compared with global and historical standards. They didn't do anything to be born here; from their perspective, their residence (or at least birth) in a wealthy country is a random act. And the exercise does point out that a few people live very well, while most do not.

Left unsaid, of course, are facts that are equally important, if not more so. WHY are some societies able to produce greats amount of wealth? HOW did they do it? The old "blame the rich" game is as intellectually lazy as it is false.

But it's easier for a dinner party to induce guilt (or in a better moment, gratitude to one's god) than to bring about a discussion of factors in other countries--the rule of law and the political system, to start with--that earnest "world citizens" here can't do anything about. (permalink)

Human Rights and Poverty.
When human rights are trivialized, the consequences of their violations are overlooked.

Today I received the alumni magazine of my undergraduate college. It mentioned the recent death of a young graduate. The tribute said that she was involved in efforts "to raise the issue of poverty as a human rights violation."

Think about that. If poverty is indeed a human rights violation, then almost everyone who has ever lived has been victimized. For in large measure, poverty is self-defined, and many Americans who might be considered to live in poverty today are near-royalty by standards of millions in the third world, not to mention the royalty of Europe a few centuries ago.

Call the "poverty as a human rights violation" as another example of the trivialization of language. For this attempt to cast poverty, the natural state of man, as a violation of human rights, overlooks many important facts. The most important of those facts may be that the causal chain often works in reverse: it is human rights violations that often cause poverty: not "I can't afford a second car" poverty, but living in dirt-floor houses poverty. Consider, for example, the story told by Hernando de Soto, in his remarkable book "The Other Path." Now that's a book that captures the link between rights and poverty. (permalink)

WWJ/W/R/D?
First it was WWJD--What Would Jesus Do?

Then it was WWWD--what would Wellstone do? (Wellstone, an old-school leftist, was the U.S. Senator from Minnesota until he died in a plane crash while campaigning for re-election in 2002. The subsequent WWWD stickers have evoked their own backlash.)

Now comes WWRD--What Would Reagan Do? That's a marketing gimmick of the Independence Institute, a Denver-area group that advocates limited government. The institute is perhaps the leading opponent of a ballot proposal that would modify--some say gut--Colorado's Taxyapers Bill of Rights (TABOR). The institute's already made a splash with the WWRD braclets, having hand-delivered one of them to the office of Gov. Bill Owens, a former TABOR supporter who now backs the change. (permalink)

Capitalists for Corporate Ice Cream and Farming
"Save the family farm," say Ben & Jerry, of ice cream fame. Stephen Moore asks "Why?"

While taking a tour of the manufacturing plant of America's largest "socially concious" enterprise, Moore finds that a company plans to run "a social awareness TV ad campaign." So he asks what the campaign will talk about.

"Here our earnest tour guide raises his chin a bit and proudly declares that the first ads are dedicated to saving the family farm. When I burst out laughing, 22 sets of angry eyes glared at me. For the past 100 years, as the productivity of the American farmer has surged to unprecedented heights, the number of Americans working in agriculture to feed the world has fallen from 35 workers per 100 to two.

This is called progress. What is Ben & Jerry's proposed solution, anyway? To turn back the clock and abolish the tractor? Many Americans seem to be under the illusion that the small family farmer has lived a carefree idyllic lifestyle. In truth, this livelihood has traditionally involved backbreaking toil, work-days that last from sun-up to sundown, and monotony--which is why sons and daughters have been fleeing the farm for five generations. The only people who actually want to save small farms are people who've never worked on a farm. (permalink)

Does Anybody Know What Time it Is? In Indiana, it's Confusion
Midwestern residents know Indiana for its time zone confusion. Today's Wall Street Journal provides an introduction to everyone else.

Some of Indiana is on the eastern time zone, aligning it with neighboring states Michigan (to the north), Ohio (to the east) and most of Kentucky (to the south), not to mention the eastern seaboard. The northwest corner of the state is on central time, aligning it with Chicago, where many of the region's residents work, via the various toll roads or the South Shore Line. The southwestern corner of the state, which is not close to any obvious metropolitan area such as Chicago, is also central time.

"The Hoosier state," the Journal story reminds us, "has never been a simple place to tell time. Of its 92 counties, 77 have been on Eastern Standard Time year-round, ignoring daylight-saving time. That means they're off an hour from adjacent states like Ohio, but only for about half the year."

The legislature voted recently to take the whole state to DST, but let counties decide which time zone to use.

In an article available to subscribers only, the Journal profiles stats freak Jeff Sagarin, who is known to fans of college sports as the man behind football and basketball rankings.

Sagarin's a proponent of moving the state to central time. His reasoning: being on eastern time "offends my sense of right and wrong mathematically."

Any wide range time zone is a compromise between business and political realities and astronomical ones. In the astronomical sense, "noon" occurs at different points, even in the same time zone. As reporter Amy Schatz points out, "under Eastern Daylight Time, the sun wouldn't reach its highest point in parts of Indiana until as late as 2:01 p.m. some days during the summer. That's because the state is so much farther west than seaboard states like Massachusetts or North Carolina."

The result is late sunsets in the summer, including 9:15 p.m.

And that's a bad thing?

It turns out that some business owners think so; the owner of a drive-in movie theater, as well as some restaurant owners, want the daylight to end sooner.

Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, reminds us that business was the reason behind standardized time zones.

In 1872, railroad officials from around the country met in Missouri to arrange summer passenger schedules. To address the time problem, they formed a permanent organization to work on a solution. In October 1883, this body (then known as the General Time Convention) approved a plan, conceived entirely through the ingenuity of private citizens, to establish standardized time zones. It chose the date of Nov. 18, 1883 for the adoption of the new system by virtually every railroad in the country.

Substitute "airline" for "railroads," and the logic holds today. Of course, commerce extends far beyond passenger traffic.

I was going to say that this is one case in which government action is called for, and does some good, but as Reed points out, "While standardized time zones were embraced voluntarily by most of the country, the federal government actually sought to prevent it. The U.S. Attorney General ordered that no department of the federal government could run according to the system developed in 1883 until authorized by Congress, which took 35 years."

Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation holds sway over time zone boundaries; Indiana counties have until September 16 to request a change. (permalink)

Will Medicaid Embrace Consumer Savings Accounts?
Market-oriented policy geeks call for Medicaid to use health savings accounts. The program would move in that direction under legislation introduced in Congress.

Writing in a newsletter of the Consumer Power Report of the group Consumers for Health Care Choices, David Hogberg explains the Medicaid Health Opportunity Account Act of 2005.

The bill lets states set up "health opportunity accounts," much like Health Savings Accounts. The federal government would match state contributions to the accounts, up to $2,500 per adult and $1,000 per child. States could use these accounts for targeted populations, so it's unlikely that they would be applied to everyone in Medicaid.

Money in the accounts would be used only for health care expenses. But as an incentive to move beyond poverty, if the person who holds the HOA earns too much money to qualify for Medicaid, the funds can be used to purchase a health insurance, college classes, or job training.

Unfortunately, the bill also contains several measures that, as Hogberg puts it, "insulate health insurance providers from competition."

Labels: Health care, Medicaid

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Does Teacher Certification Do Any Good?
One style of education reform is to improve the inputs through mandates, including teacher certification. But the practice may not do much good.

Here's how the John Locke Foundation summarizes one of its recent reports on the subject:

"A state-by-state comparison of teacher certification and student performance on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics exam shows that certification standards and teacher testing did not improve test scores. Schools should be able to recruit and retain talented teachers whether they are certified or not."

Available in PDF, the four-page report, The Teacher Certification Myth, looks at student proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the number of teachers who have achieved a status with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the number of teachers who have been given "emergency" certification. (permalink)

Understanding the Types of Charter Schools.
Does the term "charter school" mean anything? The Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests not, in a new publication that scopes out the range of charter schools.

In Playing to Type? (PDF file), Dick M. Carpenter II says that charter schools are not all alike; "charter" simply means that the school has some operation freedom, it does not designate its pedagogy. On the other hand, the 3,500 charter schools are not so different individually that there are no other similarities among the schools.

Carpenter sorts schools into 55 types of schools, based on each school's targeted population and curriculum. Some schools, for example, are vocational. Others are traditional, while others are progressive. (In the words of progressive advocates, their approach is that the teacher is the "guide on the side," and not the "sage on the stage.")

Meanwhile, schools are also classified by their targeted market, which includes open enrollment (anyone can come) or targeted enrollment (often but not always, at-risk students.)

So what did Carpenter find?

Traditional schools make up 23 percent of the charter school universe; progressive schools come in at 29 percent, while general schools are 29.5 percent. What are general schools? Institutions that are "essentially indistinguishable from conventional neighborhood public schools." They may operate free of some of the normal regulations that conventional public schools face, but they do not have a distinct pedagogy or targeted market.

Institute president Chester E. Finn, Jr. says that this study does not compare the types of charter schools by effectiveness. But, he promises, a follow-on report will do that by taking advantage of the types developed out in this report, called "Playing to Type."

If you're in the market for a charter school, here is how Carpenter categorized some well-known programs:

TRADITIONAL, OPEN ENROLLMENT
Core Knowledge
Edison
International Baccalaureate

PROGRESSIVE, OPEN ENROLLMENT
Montessori
Waldorf

The section of the report labeled "Descriptions of Instructional Sub-Themes" gives a brief yet helpful explanation of the different (and sometimes opposing) approaches to understanding the goals and methods of education.

Labels: Charter schools, Education

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Pension Mess Shows Need for Public Accountability, Reform.
The Wall Street Journal gives another reason why chasing after major sporting events can be a fool's errand: it was one factor in the San Diego pension debacle. (link for subscribers).

The scandal, which has claimed the job of the mayor, as well as some other city officials. The city has spent over $15 million in legal fees trying to sort out the mess, which includes a pension fund deficit that was $1.1 billion in January of 2004. Worse yet, the city's auditors have refused to sign off on its financial statements, given their unreliability. The implications: the city can't issue new bonds for necessary public works projects.

So how did the city get into this mess? Doubtless there are many reasons, but sports lust was a contributing factor: "San Diego's problems began with a cash crunch in 1996 caused by the cost of hosting the Republican National Convention and bidding to host the Super Bowl, among other expenses."

Two questionable policy decisions became the occasion of financial folly in the pension arena: "To soften the pain, the city made a deal with its pension fund, which was sitting on a $100 million surplus. The fund allowed San Diego to reduce annual contributions for 10 years. In return, the city pledged to make a one-time payment if the pension fund's assets fell below 82.3% of its projected liabilities."

Do you remember what was happening during the late 1990s? That's right; the stock market got soft, and then tanked, making the fund's situation even worse, and exposing the city to increased liability.

The city made things worse with another deal: "Eager to avoid the one-time payment -- which would have totaled $500 million -- San Diego negotiated another deal in 2002: In lieu of handing over a lump sum, it agreed to increase employment benefits to city employees and raise annual contributions to the pension fund."

To make matters worse, the city engaged in what behavior that would easily be called fraud if practiced in the private sector: "Between 1996 and 2003, San Diego sold $1.2 billion of bonds in 16 offerings, but it didn't disclose either the pension fund's deterioration or the city's liability. Any entity selling stocks or bonds on the open market is obliged to divulge all significant financial data."

The city is now engaged in a dispute with an auditing firm as well as a law firm over matters relating to clearing up the problems.

The big boys in Washington are hounding the city, too: "The SEC, which is conducting its own probe along with the Justice Department, has told the city it wants the same level of cooperation it expects from corporations under investigation."

Slowly, expectations for the public sector are being revised to reflect what is demanded in the private sector.

Labels: Public employee pensions

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Are You Ready for Some Football ... Ticket Scalping?
It's football season, which means that it is time for more handwringing about so-called ticket scalping, which is just another term for free enterprise at work.

The Manhattan Mercury is the town paper of the Kansas State Wildcats. While the team is ranked a lowly 46th place by Sportsline.com, it has lived in the top 25 in years past, so it's not surprising that some people are willing to pay more than face value to get a ticket.

The problem for such fans is that politicians, not fans, know what the true value of a ticket is. At least that's the effect of the law. As the Mercury (registration required) says:

Ticket scalping Â? the practice of selling a ticket for higher value than what was paid Â? is illegal. In Manhattan, so is buying or selling tickets without a permit. So is solicitation on campus without a permit...and the university does not issue permits on game days.

On the other hand, enforcement is weak:

Most people who are trying to buy or sell their tickets on K-State property are warned of the problem and told to stop the practice, said K-State Police Department patrol commander Richard Herrman. If someone is caught continuing to sell tickets, then the person is asked to leave K-State property. After a person is caught a third time, they are issued a citation for trespassing.

I could write a long essay on the morality of selling tickets, but the absurdity of such laws ought to be obvious. The "victims" are obviously self-selected, and the social costs are unlikely to be as high as even, say, casino gambling. (permalink)

Four Days a Week.
Go to school 4 days a week? That's what some children in Kentucky are doing.

Four districts have a four-day week (with longer hours per day). Critics say that the move was motivated by a desire to save money on the costs of running the school bus system. Defenders say it's a plan to help teachers get more prepared for classroom time.

Labels: Education

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Read My Lips: No Special Session.
It looks like Governor Tim Pawlenty is inching closer to calling a special session. Allegedly, the only topic for the session will be to transfer money from taxpayers to the University of Minnesota, to pay for a new football stadium.

It's not as interesting as some documents on the web site "The Smoking Gun," but Checks and Balances has the letter in a PDF file, here.

The Golden Gopher team did themselves a favor over the weekend, when the program enjoyed its first victory over the University of Michigan since 1986.

While the parties involved may promise to limit the session to this one topic, one is reminded of the quip that "no man's life or liberty is safe when the legislature is in session."

In this case, "life" may be a bit extreme, but given the spending spree of the state's legislature this year, one may wonder about a man's liberty to use his money as he sees fit, rather than turn it over to government for political projects. (permalink)

Teachers Union, School Board Association Unite in Opposition to TABOR.
Do management and labor disagree? Not in Kansas, where the state school board association and teachers union unite in opposition to a Taxpayers Bill of Rights.

Labels: Education

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SPN: Intellectual Property Rights and Real Property Rights
The Supreme Court's Kelo v. New London case may have ignited a coalition of two kinds of property rights advocates.

The State Policy Network's annual meeting included a panel called "The Bridge between Physical and Intellectual Property Rights." The panel was an interesting cast of characters. Depending on your perspective, it had all the right villains, including a representative from the pharmaceutical industry as the motion picture industry, the recording industry, as well as land owners.

The large number of panelists meant that each person gave a talk of only 5 minutes or so, not nearly enough to discuss interesting issues. Still, a few themes stood out.

Technology makes it easy to violate intellectual property rights cheaply and quickly.

The case for real estate property rights is more easily understood at the popular level than that for intellectual property. That's probably because most people own real estate, or aspire to it, while intellectual property is often the product of faceless corporations.

The Supreme Court recently issued two decisions that are in a juxtaposition. On the one hand, Kelo said that real estate property rights must give way to the whims of government planners. In the Grokster case, however, the Court upheld the value of intellectual property rights by declaring that companies that distribute technologies used to violate intellectual property rights may be liable to prosecution.

The difference between the two decisions, besides the kind of property at stake, is that the tradition of government-as-economic planner in real estate does not exist in intellectual property. Government has been more respectful of intellectual property than real property, though the recent Big Squeeze of Big Pharma by Big Medicaid may signal a new phase of government action on property rights.

The Institute for Justice has launched a vigorous campaign to persuade state and local governments to enact their own measures to limit the use of eminent domain for economic development purposes. (In fact, the Supreme Court invited states to do just that.)

By issuing its decision in Kelo, the Supremes may have done a favor for advocates of property rights. The ruling has prompted a coalition of two groupings that have had little to do with each other in the past to come together. If the new coalition is able to exert enough influence and pressure to strengthen all property rights, then creativity, health and medicine, and individual landowners will be better off.

Labels: Medicaid

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SPN: Lost Opportunities for Sound Policy.
A decade ago, Republican candidates for Congress offered an alternative vision for running government. Today, it's often hard to tell what has changed in Congress other than the names on the program.

That sentiment comes to mind as I reflect on the talk that Pat Toomey gave at the SPN conference I recently attended. Toomey is the head of the Club for Growth, which describes itself as "a national network of over 30,000 men and women, from all walks of life, who believe that prosperity and opportunity come through economic freedom."

The club has a decent blog on public issues, and of course it raises money for its favored candidates.

Among other topics at the luncheon, Toomey discussed four policy mistakes of the Congress and president:

a. A bloated farm bill. [My take: This has all but undone previous reforms that pushed agriculture into the free market. While American agriculture can compete against anyone in the world, taxpayers are paying the bill for corporate welfare, given to huge companies.]

b. Restrictions on free speech, in the form of campaign finance reform. [My take: If you have a huge government, and you respect the freedom of speech, there's going to be a lot of money spent on lobbying and political advertising. Count on it. If you restrict speech, you violate a foundation of the political system, and still end up with lots of lobbying and special interest money.]

c. The prescription drug benefit in Medicare, which is the greatest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ. [My take: If we are to have taxpayer subsidized health care for any population, including the elderly, it makes no sense, medically or financially, to exclude prescription drugs. On the other hand, adding a benefit to an unreformed system is a foolish move that will impose tremendous financial burdens down the road.]

d. A federal transportation bill with a record number of "earmarks." [My take: Pork-barrel spending in infrastructure projects has a long if not glorious place in American history. What is troubling is the sheer size of the recent indulgence, as well as the blatant shamelessness of it all.]

And now we have federal spending on hurricane relief. That's already included plenty of dough for areas not in the path of the storms, and the amount is only going to increase.

The conclusion? The Club for Growth has a lot of work ahead, not only in electing candidates favorable to its ideas, but in educating the public on the importance of its ideas. (permalink)

Anti-Education, or Anti-Satisfaction with the Status Quo?
Do you need to be a teacher to be an administrator of a state education bureaucracy?

As night follows day, the selection of Bob Corkins as the next Commissioner of Education, for the Kansas State Department of Education has drawn fire from the status quo lobby. The commissioner's job is described on one state web site as being the chief administrative officer of the Kansas Department of Education. The fireworks have started, however, not over questions of mere administration, but over what constitutes support for education.

The Wichita Eagle's story on the appointment quotes several legislative critics who label Corkins as "anti-education." Why? Presumably because he has called for funding education (or at least some students' education) through vouchers rather than the "you live here, you go to school there" approach.

The Eagle's editorial board is even more critical than the people it quotes in its news story.

As Craig Westover has pointed out, however, "public education" and "public schools" are not necessarily the same.

In short, "public education" is education in the public interest. It is a "public good" in the sense of "benefit to all." It is worthy of tax dollars. But "public education" is NOT the private fiefdom of the tenurial few. "Public education" is NOT equivalent to a government monopoly. It is NOT a specific institution.

Indeed. This separation between purpose and institution works well in higher education, where "public education" is furthered through channeling some funds directly to students--financial aid--which may then be used to purchase schooling at privately owned and operated universities. The purpose of public education is achieved at government-run colleges, and at privately-run colleges.

Critics of Corkins, it would appear, are focused on specific institutional arrangements, and above, all, giving extreme deference to those institutions. Whether that approach is the best way to ensure an educated public is another question.

Labels: Education

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SPN: Favorable Towards Policy, Distrustful of Politicians.
Greg Blankenship attended the same SPN conference that I did (in fact, we shared a meal or two), and he offers some thoughts on the events, and particular, attitudes towards Congress among the participants.

"If the GOP Congress was mentioned -- and believe me it was -- the GOP was soundly ripped into. The mood of the group was one of defiance, distaste and distrust. Frankly, very few, if any, attendees seemed inclined to rush to the barricades to defend Delay."

Years ago, the Bible counseled us to "Put not your trust in princes." Not only do today's princes get indicted, but they disappoint as well. Shortly before his indictment (the alleged scandal of conservatives), DeLay angered many by his remarks that there was nothing left to cut in the federal budget. (permalink)

This Could Get Interesting ...
The Kansas Board of Education has selected a conservative activist and policy expert to be the next commissioner of education for the state.

Bob Corkins is not a teacher, and does not have experience as an administrator in a school or in the school bureaucracy. That's going to raise some hackles. Even more enraging (to some) is the fact that he filed an amicus brief defending the state against demands for even more funding, in the controversial and ongoing Montoy case.

To outsiders, it's easy to think "evolution" when the words "Kansas" and "education" appear in the same sentence. But the bigger problems in the Jayhawk state are similar to those other states face: less than satisfactory school performance, increasing costs, and demands for even more money. Corkins certainly brings some new ideas to the post, ideas that might hold the solution to these problems.

Labels: Education

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Homesteading in the 21st Century.
Last week, Joel Kotkin suggested that displaced residents of New Orleans head into the Great Plains.

While his idea may not have caught on among Katrina victims, some people in Los Angeles, Miami, and other locations are pulling up stakes and moving to ... Marquette, Kansas, population 574, give or take a few families.

Among the attractions: peaceful streets and free land. One woman who moved from California, where she was looking at spending $500,000 for a house. She said "Do we want to spend that much, live by so many people, gangs, drive-by shootings?" (permalink)

SPN: The Trouble with Labor Unions.
During the recent conference of the State Policy Network, Grover Norquist (of Americans for Tax Reform) lead a panel on public sector unions and government reform. Norquist is no fan of government employee unions, having called them cornered rats.

Due in large measure to the secular decline of manufacturing, the percentage of the workforce in unions is on the decline. That is especially true in the private sector.

There's one area where union membership keeps growing, however: government workers. Anyone who has ever been a government worker can appreciate the fact that government managers can be as difficult to work for as private sector managers, so some sympathy for case of unions as a countervailing force is natural. But there's a world of difference between the value and importance of unions in the private versus the public sectors.

In the private sector, owners (and to a lesser extent, their managers) must keep the competitive environment in mind. They must offer value for service, innovation, and reasonable prices lest other companies attract their customers. Further, there's often a financial clash between owners / management and workers, giving management another incentive to operate efficiently.

But in the public sector, there is no conflict between staff and management. Both live out of the public purse. Their employer, government, cannot, by definition, go out of business. So both staff and management have an incentive to increase market share, which in this case means lobbying legislators for ever-larger budgets, an ever-large amount of personal income of state residents. Government worker unions, then, are forces for ever-larger government budgets. This is something that warms the heart of those who advocate limited government.

That's only one challenge that is posed by public sector unions. Another is that they can be obstacles to reforms that are necessary to serve taxpayers at large, as well as the recipients of government programs. Few people enjoy change, and government unions often stand in the way of necessary change. Whether the question is welfare reform, Social Security reform, school choice, contracting out for greater efficiency, or focusing government on core functions, government unions stand in the way. Big time.

Those considerations aside, the internal politics and structure of unions (private as well as government) are troubling for those who believe in individual freedom, good government, and fiscal responsibility. In an age of calls for increased government and corporate accountability, unions (which often enjoy the monopoly of a "closed shop" environment) are too often closed-book outfits.

There is a place for unions. Today's Wall Street Journal, for example, has a story about how unions in Texas have a financial incentive to provide job training that building contractors don't. So some contractors are actively seeking out unions for their skilled workers--and yes, Texas is a right-to-work state. Workers join unions voluntarily, and contractors seek out union workers, voluntarily. Win-win and all that.

But government unions? There's something wrong when unions of government employees can take money from their members, and spend it on lobbying and donations to political campaigns to push for ... more government employees.

Labels: School choice

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School Audit Doesn't Tell Us Much.
Standard and Poors has come out with a review of school district efficiency in Kansas. But as I argue in Sunday's Wichita Eagle, the audits don't tell us much.

Why? They're conducted within the confines of a non-competitive system. We have yet to see what the true "costs" of education will be in a competitive market of education providers.

Labels: Education

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Rural, Urban, Suburban, or Something Else?
Policy geeks such as those in the Census Bureau classify human settlements into metropolitan, non-metropolitan, and most recently, micropolitan.

Writing in The Tennessean, Leon Alligood takes a more "man on the street" look at the question of how to define an area. "Rural is a Rorschach test. For some, it's all cows and clover. For others, it's a sense of where you came from and how that experience shaped you."

Given the various public programs that distribute funds based on the classification of settlements, the question of what to call a given area is important not only as an occasion for homespun stories, but, as a driver of budgets. (permalink)

Education: More Money, Sir.
In another sign that public policy is being made less in legislatures and more in courts, nine school districts in North Dakota are suing the state in an attempt to get more money from the state.

Doug Bahr, of the attorney general's office, argues that "The constitution does not mandate what the plaintiffs are requesting," adding that "They are actually asking for the court to usurp legislative authority, not to make judicial decisions, but to act as a super-Legislature."

Labels: Education

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