Why I ‘Heart’ Developers

To some who live in Sarasota County, Florida the word “developer” is a pejorative. For people like Dan Lobeck and groups like the Sarasota Council of Neighborhood Associations (CONA) having anything to do with a “developer” is like associating with someone infected with Ebola. Developers are pariahs and cause unspeakable damage to communities. These people complain from their company offices and homes in the very city and neighborhoods built by none other than — developers.

The worst crime any candidate or elected official can commit is to, heaven forbid, take a campaign contribution from a, dare I say it, developer.

A developer is defined as a person or thing that develops something. To read a short history of American real-estate development click here. Developers build homes, apartments, neighborhoods, hotels, theme parks, office buildings, grain combines, barns, hospitals, churches, schools, factories, roads, libraries, bridges, highways, railroads and entire cities. No one hates a software developer so why do some people hate those who develop their own land?

It is all about dirt control.

He who controls the dirt, a.k.a. individual property rights, controls the person, neighborhood, city, county, state and nation. Those who believe in central planning, designed to keep an individual or group of individuals (e.g. a company or church congregation) from real-estate development, want to, by proxy, control all of the dirt. These people work hard to put politicians in office who want to control dirt. They are against anyone who wants to control his own dirt and what he or she does with their dirt. I have even talked with some real-estate developers who want to control other real-estate developers dirt – a dirt oxymoron.

Florida is infamous for its draconian neighborhood associations, regional councils, regional planning councils and those politicians who want to control the people by controlling the dirt. From the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to the local city and county commissions, its always all about dirt. Control dirt and you control the person.

Some argue that developers should pay their own way. What these people do not understand is that like any business, all costs pass thorough to the consumer. It is the consumer who bears the burden. Some argue that with increased development comes more traffic, but these same people are for density restrictions, which packs and stacks people into limited areas, thereby causing other negative social anomalies. They have a “not in my back yard” mentality when it comes to new development. They have their dirt but you can’t have yours.

Mark Shousen, writes, “In his classic work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu expressed the novel view that the business of moneymaking serves as a countervailing bridle against the violent passions of war and abusive political power. ‘Commerce cures destructive prejudices,’ he declared. ‘It polishes and softens barbarous mores . . . . The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace.’ Commerce improves society: ‘The spirit of commerce brings with it the spirit of frugality, of economy, of moderation, of work, of wisdom, of tranquility, of order, and of regularity.’”

For those who have emailed me while drinking your morning cup of coffee or tea in your home, built by a developer, or from your office, built by a developer, or from a Starbucks, built by a developer, I thank you for reading this column. I hope you will leave a comment or two about my musings.

The Case for Voluntary Private Cooperation by Michael Munger

We don’t need nations, flags, and armies to make us prosperous!

When I tell Duke freshmen my version of the argument for liberty, they often scoff, “If this is right, how come I’ve never heard it before?” I try to be conciliatory. I offer the kids time to go text their parents. They need to sue those elite private high schools for failing to educate them in even the basics of how societies work, and why so many societies fail to work.

Okay, so that’s not all that conciliatory. And my answer plays to mixed reviews, at best.

But it’s the truth. How can it be that some of the world’s most educated young people have never heard the concise version of the argument for voluntary private cooperation? I want to present here the version I have found most useful. And by “useful” I mean profoundly unsettling to people who hear it for the first time.

“Markets” are not the point

To start with, the argument for liberty is not an argument for “markets.” The market vs. State dichotomy was dreamed up by German sociologists in the nineteenth century. Don’t buy into that dichotomy; it’s a rhetorical straitjacket, and in any case it’s not our best argument.

The question is how best to achieve the myriad benefits of voluntary private cooperation, or VPC. Markets are part of that, a useful way of achieving prosperity, but a variety of other emergent social arrangements—more properly viewed under the rubric “society”—are also crucial for prosperity.

The first argument I usually hear, especially from people hearing about VPC for the first time, is this: “If markets are so great, why is most of the world poor?” The problem is that poverty is not what needs to be explained. Poverty is what happens when groups of people fail to cooperate, or are prevented from finding ways to cooperate. Cooperation is in our genes; the ability to be social is a big part of what makes us human. It takes actions by powerful actors such as states, or cruel accidents such as deep historical or ethnic animosities, to prevent people from cooperating. Everywhere you look, if people are prosperous it’s because they are cooperating, working together. If people are desperately poor, it’s because they are denied some of the means of cooperating, the institutions for reducing the transaction costs of decentralized VPC.

So forget about explaining poverty. We need to work on understanding prosperity.

There are two reason that VPC is the core of human prosperity and flourishing.

1. Exchange and cooperation: If each of us has an apple and a banana, and I like apple pie and you like banana crème pie, each of us can improve our lot by cooperating. I give you a banana, you give me an apple, and the world is a better place. And the world is better even if there is no change in the total size of our pies. The total amount of apples and bananas is the same, but each of us is happier.

But there is no reason to fetishize exchange. (That’s the “markets vs. social/state” dichotomy; don’t give away the farm here.) Nobel Prize-winner James Buchanan’s central insight was that cooperative arrangements among groups of people are just “politics as exchange.” Nonmarket forms of exchange, in which we cooperate to achieve ends that we all agree are mutually beneficial, may be even more important than market exchanges. Banding together for collective protection and taking full advantage of emergent institutions such as a language, property rights, and a currency are all powerful tools of VPC.

If we cooperate, we can use existing resources much better by redirecting those resources toward uses people value more. So even if we are only thinking of cooperation in a static sense, with a fixed pie, we are all better off if we cooperate. Cooperation is just a kind of sharing, so long as every cooperative arrangement is voluntary. The only way you and I agree with a new arrangement is if each of us is better off.

2. Comparative advantage/division of labor: Still, we don’t need to be satisfied with making better use of a static pie. Working together and becoming more dependent on each other, we can also make the pie bigger. There is no reason to expect that each of us is well-suited to produce the things we happen to like. And even if we are, we can produce more of it by working together.

Remember, I like apples and you like bananas. But I live on tropical land in a warm climate that makes producing apples difficult. You live in a much cooler place, where growing your favored bananas would be prohibitively expensive. We can specialize in whatever we are relatively best at. I grow bananas, you grow apples, and we trade. Specialization allows us to increase the variety and complexity of mutually beneficial outcomes.

Interestingly, this would be true even one of the parties is actually better at producing both apples and bananas; David Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” concept shows that both parties are better off if they specialize, even if it appears that the less productive person can’t possibly compete. The reason is that the opportunity costs of action are different; that’s all that is necessary for there to be potential benefits from cooperation.

But there is no reason to fetishize comparative advantage. In fact, true instances of deterministic comparative advantage are rare. The real power from specialization comes from division of labor, or the enormous economies of scale that come from synergy. Synergy can result from improvements in dexterity, tool design, and capital investment in a production process composed of many small steps in a production line, or from innovations, using the entrepreneurial imagination to see around corners. Synergy is not created by the sort of deterministic accidents of weather, soil quality, or physical features of the earth that economists obsess about. Producing wool and port depend on location; human ingenuity can create synergy anywhere that division of labor can be promoted. All the important dynamic gains from exchange are created by human action, by VPC.

The street porter and the philosopher

Entrepreneurs are more likely to be visionaries than geographers or engineers. Argentina has a comparative advantage, probably an absolute advantage, in producing beef, because of its climate, soil conditions, and plentiful land in the pampas. But Argentina is poor. Singapore has next to nothing, and doesn’t produce much. But Singapore built both physical (port facilities, storage, housing) and economic (rule of law, property rights, a sophisticated financial system) institutions to promote cooperation. And Singapore is rich because those institutions help give rise to powerful synergies.

One could argue, of course, that Singapore has a comparative advantage in trade because of its location at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, connecting the Strait of Malacca with all of East Asia. But other nations not blessed with such location rents have used the same model. Portugal in the fifteenth century, Spain and Holland in the sixteenth, and England in the eighteenth century all built huge, prosperous societies by channeling the energies of citizens toward cooperation. None of these countries played well with others, perhaps, but internally they built synergies, so that for each their prosperity and importance in the world was multiplied far beyond what you would have expected just by looking at their populations, their climates, or their soil quality.

Humans build synergies by fostering VPC. Adam Smith’s example of the philosopher and the porter is sometimes quoted, but not well understood. The benefits to specialization need not be innate: The street porter might well have been a philosopher if he had had access to the tools that promote VPC. Education and social mobility mean that where one is born has little to do with where one ends up.

The plasticity of human abilities is at least matched by the malleability of social and economic institutions. Human societies need only be limited by what we can think of together. The development of specialization and the consequent increase in productive capacity is a socially constructed process, like Smith’s “philosopher”—the result of thousands of hours of study, practice, and learning. Smith’s porter didn’t fail to become a philosopher because of comparative advantage. The porter just failed (or was denied a chance, by social prejudice) to specialize.

To be useful, cooperation must be destructive

The flaw in division of labor is also its virtue. Division of labor and specialization create a setting where only a few people in society are remotely self-sufficient. Further, the size of the “market”—more accurately, the horizon of organized cooperative production—limits the gains from division of labor and specialization. If I hire dozens of people and automate my production of apple pie filling, I can produce more than you, your family, your village, or perhaps even your entire nation can consume. I have to look for new customers, expanding both the locus of dependency and the extent of improved welfare from increased opportunities to trade.

The same is true for the benefits of specialization. In a village of five people, the medical specialist might know first aid and have a kit composed of Band-Aids and compression bands for sprains. A city of five million will have surgeons who have invented new techniques for performing complex procedures on retinas, the brain, and exotic enhancements in appearance through plastic surgery. A village of 250 people may have a guy who can play the fiddle; a city of 250,000 has an orchestra. Division of labor, and specialization, is limited by the extent of the VPC.

The power of that statement, taken directly from Adam Smith, is the basis of the argument for VPC. People are assets, not liabilities. Larger populations, larger groups available to work together, and more extensive areas of peaceful cooperation allow greater specialization. Four people in a production line can make 10 times as much as two people; 10 people can make a thousand times more. Larger groups and increased cooperation create nearly limitless opportunities for specialization: not just making refrigerators, but making music, art, and other things that may be hard to define or predict.

VPC allows huge numbers of people who don’t know each other to begin to trust each other, to depend on each other. Emile Durkheim, the famed German social theorist, recognized this explicitly, and correctly noted that the market part of division of labor is the least important aspect of why we depend on it. He said, in his masterwork Division of Labour in Society, “the economic services that [division of labor] can render are insignificant compared with the moral effect that it produces, and its true function is to create between two or more people a feeling of solidarity.”

That “feeling of solidarity” is society—voluntary, uncoerced, natural human society. We don’t need nations, and we don’t need flags and armies to make us prosperous. All we need is voluntary private cooperation, and the feeling of solidarity and prosperous interdependence that comes from human creativity unleashed.

Find a Portuguese translation of this article here.

ABOUT MICHAEL MUNGER

Michael Munger is the director of the philosophy, politics, and economics program at Duke University. He is a past president of the Public Choice Society.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

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Why is natural marriage good?

Natural is better than unnatural, right? Frank Turek in his op-ed titled “Natural Marriage is Not Bigotry, It’s Biology” writes:

The real reason governments have an interest in promoting natural marriage because only natural marriage perpetuates and stabilizes society. Strong marriage laws encourage men and women to procreate and then stay together to mother and father their children. That benefits children and all of society because children raised in biological two-parent homes tend to do better and cause society much less trouble than children raised in other situations.

Why is this so? Because men and women are different. Mothering and fathering are different. A mother brings unique benefits to her child that a father cannot provide and vice versa.

Here is my simple and powerful case for marriage the way nature intended.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/ZR_Bb8IPZHI[/youtube]

Restore American Expectionalism: Nullify Obama

Upon seeing the size of the crowd, the trio of middle school students scheduled to perform the Star Spangled Banner became petrified. It was the monthly U.S. Immigration Naturalization Ceremony in Baltimore, Maryland. We were backstage. Every month the ceremony was ended with me performing my original song, “Celebrate America”. I felt honored that my song was the first heard by the new Americans.

Immigration

Immigration and Naturalization Ceremony.

The hall overflowed with a thousand or more people; applicants extremely excited about taking their oath of allegiance to the United States of America and their supportive families, there to witness the auspicious occasion.

The kids sounded great rehearsing backstage. However, halfway through their performance center stage in front of the audience, they panicked. They stopped singing and stood there shaking. I joined the kids on stage.

I told the audience that these brave kids were prime examples of what it means to be an American. Though terrified of venturing into the new frontier of singing for such a large audience, they pressed forward and gave it their best shot. The audience erupted in cheers and applause for the kids. We all sang the Star Spangled Banner. It was an awesome moment. An immigration official sent me a very nice letter of thanks.

That ceremony happened around 16 years ago. Back then, it truly meant something extraordinarily special to be an American. At every ceremony from my vantage point on stage, I saw many applicants reciting the oath with tears streaming down their cheeks. It choked me up every time.

At numerous ceremonies, I witnessed elderly applicants raised from their wheelchairs by family members; grandchildren holding up the frail applicant’s right hand as they tearfully took the oath.

With the glow of patriotism emanating from their faces, I knew these new Americans were not particularly interested in government handouts. Clearly, they captured our Founding Father’s vision of America and enthusiastically embraced the concept of American Exceptional-ism. Their body language radiated, give us the ball of freedom and we will run with it in pursuit of our American dreams. They were eager to assimilate; to be a part of something unique and wonderful.

Fast forward to the unprecedented insolence of president Obama. In essence, he is saying screw all the patriotic America the beautiful crap; expecting immigrants to assimilate and jump through loops to become citizens. America’s borders are hereby decreed open. Period. If you can get here, you can stay here. Thus, we are experiencing a literal invasion with no end in sight.

King Obama is also threatening to wave his royal scepter, unlawfully granting amnesty to 5-6 million illegals just because it pleases his fancy to create new welfare recipients and future Democrat voters.

Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth, nobody has had the courage to confront our vengeful king regarding his international advertising and embrace of illegals.

Finally, the great Republican senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions said, enough! Sessions called for the House and Senate to stop Obama’s amnesty.

My fellow Americans, all pretense is over. With two years left of his presidency, Obama has taken off his gloves and mask. Due to his mentors, Obama disagrees with America as founded. He believes our role as “the” world leader was unjustly acquired. Can you believe this folks? Our president is hellbent on knocking America off the throne.

For this cause along with numerous high crimes and misdemeanors, Barack Hussein Obama is unworthy to lead our great nation. He must be politically nullified. We the People must rally behind Sen Jeff Sessions’ initiative.

I still remember a very old gentleman at a Naturalization ceremony. He was held up by a family member on both sides with tears of joy and a big smile on his face. He had just completed reciting his oath of allegiance.

He was happy. He was proud. He was an American!

Spontaneous Overflow: Usury and the birth of money by Sarah Skwire

Ben Jonson: To Penshurst (1612)

Thomas Carew: To Saxham (1640)

Robert Herrick: A Panegyrick to Sir Lewis Pemberton (1613–1634)

Downton Abbey and its nonfictional counterpart Highclere Castle have inspired a new rush of interest in the elegance and beauty of the English manor house. These aristocratic country homes have been subjects of fascination from the first, and there is even an entire genre of poetry dedicated to describing them and the way of life that centers on them. It will come as no surprise to fans of Downton Abbey orManor House or any of Jane Austen’s novels that, alongside all the pastoral beauty, there are some interesting economic issues at play in these poems. When we read them we are taken right into a debate about charity, responsibility, and disparities in wealth.

When G. R. Hibbard defined the country house poem genre in his 1956 article, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” he argued that the idea of sponte sua was central to these poems. Sponte sua, as he put it, means that “The things of nature … find their proper end and pleasure in being put to use.” In the country house poems, this trope is evidenced by the (often literal) voluntary self-sacrifice of fish, birds, and beasts in order to serve as food for the residents of the country house. While the sponte sua trope is sometimes subtly portrayed with images of endlessly fruitful trees, ever-full roasting spits, or horns of plenty, it is never absent. And it is, I think, at its most economically interesting when it is at its most explicit, as it is in Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and Thomas Carew’s “To Saxham.”

Jonson writes:

The painted partridge lies in ev’ry field,
And for thy mess is willing to be kill’d.
And if the high-swoln Medway fail thy dish,
Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,
Fat aged carps that run into thy net,
And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,
As loth the second draught or cast to stay,
Officiously at first themselves betray.
Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land,
Before the fisher, or into his hand.
And Carew, emulating him, gives us:
The pheasant, partridge, and the lark
Flew to thy house, as to the Ark.
The willing ox of himself came
Home to the slaughter with the lamb,
And every beast did thither bring
Himself, to be an offering.
The scaly herd more pleasure took,
Bathed in thy dish than in the brook.

Many critics have seen the sponte sua trope as a way of preserving order. Nature is here to serve man. But I want to suggest another function for these passages. They give the country house poet yet another way to engage in the apparently endless early modern debate over Aristotle’s comments about money in thePolitics.

The most hated sort [of money-making], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term usury [τ?κος], which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural.

Regardless of whether Aristotle is “right” about money, early modern poets seized on the vivid imagery of breeding and birth offered in the passage and replicated it throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristotle is speaking specifically of money and of the unnaturalness of increasing it, as it is not—like animals or plants—naturally given to increase itself. The natural things—birds, fish, plants, etc.—that are so productive and self-sacrificing in the country house poems should not be, speaking strictly logically, open to this Aristotelian charge of unnatural reproduction. But one of the most pressing concerns of the country house poem is finding ways to praise the wealthy in a time of great economic instability and inequality. In times such as those, possession of even the most “natural” forms of wealth can leave one open to severe critique, no matter how irrational.

Nervousness over this kind of critique of wealth certainly explains the country house poem’s focus on the comparative modesty of the country houses that are being praised. From Jonson’s “Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,” to Carew’s “the architect/Did not with curious skill a pile erect/Of carved marble, touch, or porphyry/But built a house for hospitality,” the country house poem is laden with assertions that these houses, though large, are not grand or showy. They are built in the proper fashion and of the proper size to fulfill the duties of hospitality that their owners are obligated to perform.

Piled on top of these assertions about the appropriately modest use of wealth in the country house are reassurances that the constructing of these houses causes harm to no one.  Penshurst is reared with “no man’s ruin, no man’s groan/There’s none that dwell about them wish them down.” And when Herrick writes his Panegyrick to Sir Lewis Pemberton, he carefully notes, “No widow’s tenement was rack’d to gild/ or fret thy ceiling, or to build.…” This is wealth and beauty that is consciously separated by the poet from concerns about inequity.

But the country houses do much more than simply fail to cause distress. In an attempt to alleviate (not eliminate) the inequalities of wealth for which they are so explicitly not responsible, they actively nourish those around them through continual acts of charity. Penshurst is laden with “free provisions, far above/The need of such whose liberal board doth flow/With all that hospitality doth know!” Saxham, in winter, would have been surrounded by starving neighbors “If not by these preserved/Whose prayers have made thy table blest/With plenty, far above the rest.” Pemberton’s home welcomes “the lank stranger and the sour swain/Where both may feed and come again.”

All of this sounds really great. But there are problems.

These poetic statements about modest display of wealth, about labor-free and cost-free construction, about effortless and continual charity are made amid the context—nicely outlined by critics like Hugh Jenkins and Kari Boyd McBride—of great social and economic disruption as well as an increasing willingness and need for the landed gentry to engage in that most shocking of occupations, trade. This means that possessing the kind of superfluity detailed in these poems, the kind of superfluity necessary to engage in a near-continual outpouring of charity, is suspect. To have so much one must have been hoarding, or grinding the faces of the poor, or participating in shameful commerce. There has been—and here comes Aristotle again—simply too much increase, too much muchness, for everything to be quite natural and honest.

And it is here that we return to sponte sua. Because in this troubling context what sponte sua does is to make superfluity entirely natural. The fish, birds, game, and plants not only reproduce entirely of their own free will, they give themselves up to be used charitably in the same way. This means that, while the owners of the country houses can still retain spiritual and moral credit for acting charitably—they did not, after all, keep all this excess to themselves—they are simultaneously excused from any taint of work or trade or Aristotelian unnaturalness that might otherwise lurk behind the level of wealth required for this level of hospitality. If the fish leap into the net, the birds fly into the house, and the ox and lamb offer themselves for slaughter, the owners of these houses serve merely as a conduit for this natural outpouring. They have not undertaken to produce it.

What is going on here, I think, is a poetic attempt to address concerns about the unnaturalness of wealth, excess, and profit—and possibly even trade and commerce in general—by creating an aggressively natural image of them as a response. The irony is that the hypernatural images of sponte sua aren’t natural at all. It is entirely against nature for an animal to sacrifice itself willingly in order to provide humans with food. These are the contorted positions produced by valuing charity in a time when it could be seen as morally suspect to try to create the superfluity of money and goods that are necessary in order to perform charity.

20121127_sarahskwireABOUT SARAH SKWIRE

Sarah Skwire is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbookWriting with a Thesis.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

CLICHES OF PROGRESSIVISM #16 – Ownership Must Be Tempered by Sharing by Lawrence W. Reed

Progressives have a problem with ownership, especially when it’s yours. The very notion seems to conjure up in their minds an anti-social acquisitiveness, selfishness, and greed. Far more quickly, they come to the defense of “sharing” because it suggests sacrificing ownership for the sake of others. Indeed, the most regressive Progressive is drawn to the idea of common ownership, in which no one owns anything because somehow we all will own and share it equally.

The Progressives’ hostility to ownership is neither well-founded nor consistent. While they have a visceral distaste for private ownership (and busy themselves taxing, regulating, seizing, and redistributing it), they have few problems with state ownership. It’s as if men are devilish with what’s theirs but angelic with what belongs to someone else. This is not a concept that explains life on any planet I am personally aware of.

The fact is, “ownership” as a general concept is never really at issue in any society. It is neither possible nor desirable to construct a society in which people or the material things they create are not “owned.” Either you will “own” yourself or someone else will own you. As far as material things are concerned, somebody must own them, too. Those “somebodies” will be those who either created them, received them as a gift, or traded freely for them, or they will be those who take them by force. There is no middle ground, no “third way” in which ownership is somehow avoided.

Indeed, ownership is both a virtue and a necessity. What is yours, you tend to husband. If it belongs to someone else, you have little incentive to care for it. If it belongs to “everyone”—the nebulous, collectivist approach—then you have every incentive to use and abuse it. That’s why over thousands of years of history, experience continually reinforces this essential axiom: the more the government owns and thereby controls, the less free and productive the people are.

Ownership is nothing less than the right to shape, use, and dispose. Even if you have legal title to something, you wouldn’t think you really owned it if the government told you what you could do with it, how, and when; in that instance, the government would be the de facto owner. In a real sense, ownership is control and the actual owner of anything is the controller.

For thoroughly trashing the resources of any society, no more surefire prescription exists than to take resources from those to whom they belong (the rightful owners) and give them to those who are convinced in the fantasyland of their own minds that they have a better idea of what to do with them. Think “Soviet.” Socialist regimes, which take from some and give to others at the point of a gun, have their cockamamie schemes for how to squander the loot, but they display an infantile ignorance of how to create wealth in the first place.

Much has been made in the past about alleged differences between fascism and communism. Sure, the Nazis invaded Stalinist Russia (after the two had made a deal to squash and divide Poland), but that was a dispute between thieves that proved the old adage that there’s no honor among them. On the question of ownership, the difference was a cosmetic one that ultimately mattered little to the ordinary citizen.

Communists didn’t let you own a factory, and if you did own one, when they came to power you were shot. Fascists often refrained from nationalizing a factory, but if you as the alleged owner didn’t do as you were told, you were shot. Under either system, real ownership was in the hands of the omnipotent State, regardless of what any scrap of legal title paper said.

The myth of “common ownership” only muddies the issue. Public parks are thought of as held in common (“the people’s property”), but that really means that the government owns them, the taxpayers pay the bill, and the public gets to use them according to the rules established and enforced by the government. Some have argued that the post office is another example of common ownership. That would mean that theoretically, each American owns about one-three-hundred-millionth of it, but show up at the counter and try to redeem your share and you might be surprised how fast the response can be.

From the remote but fascinating country of Mongolia comes an ownership story told to me by the country’s current president (as of 2014), Elbegdorj Tsakhia (known by his friends as “E. B.”). He earlier served as Prime Minister twice, and visited me in Michigan between those terms. I asked him during that visit what he was most proud of having accomplished as PM. He said, “I privatized Mongolia’s 25 million yaks.”

Yaks are large, furry cattle that wear their hair in bangs. For decades under communist rule, the poor creatures were owned by the government, which claimed they were “the people’s property.” Their total population hardly budged from the 1920s to the 1990s. E. B. decided that yaks were not a core function of government, so he worked up a formula whereby all of them would be sold to the individual herdsmen. Three years later he was Prime Minister the second time. I visited him in his office in the capital of Ulan Bator and asked him, “What’s the latest on the yaks?” Excitedly, he replied, “Remember when I told you we had 25 million for seven decades? Well, now we have 32 million!”

When it’s your yak, not “everybody’s” yak, wonderful things happen. You have a personal interest in the investment, in the capital value of the asset. You take care of the yak and make more yaks, which you then “share” with more and more people in an endless stream of peaceful, mutually beneficial trades of yak products.

Progressives yak a lot about sharing, but you can’t share it if you don’t produce it and take care of it in the first place. Private, personal ownership of material things we create and trade for is unsurpassed as a source of the wealth that Progressives want to share.

Moreover, we should ask ourselves, “Is it really ‘sharing’ if I have to do it at gunpoint?” I was always taught that sharing was an act of free will. When you give half your sandwich to a friend who forgot to pack his lunch, you’ve shared it. If he threatens to beat you up if you don’t give it to him, “sharing” is no longer the operative term.

So when it comes to this thing we call “ownership,” it’s either you or somebody else. Who should own your retirement savings—you or the government? Who should own your health-care dollars—you, the government, or some third-party payer you’d prefer to avoid? Who should decide where your child goes to school—you the parent or a handful of other parents different from you only by virtue of the fact that they work for the government? Who should decide what charitable activities you support—you or some congressman or bureaucrat who prefers the social welfare department over the Red Cross or your local church?

Those questions should not be answered solely on utilitarian grounds. In a free society, Person A might choose a better school or make a better investment than Person B—a fact that can’t be known for certain in advance. But in any event, that does not mystically grant Person B the right to make Person A’s choices for him. If freedom means anything, it means the right to make your own choices even if you make what others regard as mistakes. When someone argues that we cannot allow people more choices over their retirement, health care, or schools, we should demand they tell us, by what right do they make these decisions for us?

Make no mistake about it: The more someone else controls you or the important decisions that govern your life or the material things that sustain it, the more they own you. We used to call that slavery, and no gauzy, self-righteous calls to “share it” made it any less inhumane.

If you’re a principled and articulate defender of private ownership of property, be ready for some Progressive social engineer to lay a guilt trip on you if he thinks you’re not “sharing” enough. I suspect that the preponderance of Progressives will not be satisfied until their coercion-based policies effectively own the rest of us lock, stock, and barrel.

Own or be owned. Take your pick.

Lawrence W. Reed
President
Foundation for Economic Education

Summary

  • Progressives are two-faced when it comes to ownership. They are suspicious of it when it’s private and personal but supportive when it’s politicized and centrally directed.
  • Whether it’s people or property, it will be owned. It’s just a matter of whether it’s owned by those to whom it belongs or those who simply want to claim it for some alleged higher cause.
  • Private ownership of property is both a virtue and a necessity. Get rid of it and you flush civilization down with it.
  • “Common ownership” is largely impractical and meaningless, even destructive.

For further information, see:

“The Economics of Caring and Sharing” by Dwight R. Lee
“Experiments in Collectivism” by Melvin D. Barger
“Little Lessons in Larceny” by Russell Madden
“The Puritan Experiment in Common Ownership” by Gary North
Plus previous Clichés #6 and #9: http://fee.org/publications/page/cliches-of-progressivism

20130918_larryreedauthorABOUT LAWRENCE W. REED

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Prior to becoming FEE’s president, he served for 20 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the July/August 2005 issue of The Freeman under the title, “To Own or Be Owned: That Is the Question.” The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is proud to partner with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to produce “Clichés of Progressivism,” a series of insightful commentaries covering topics of free enterprise, income inequality, and limited government.

Our society is inundated with half-truths and misconceptions about the economy in general and free enterprise in particular. The “Clichés of Progressivism” series is meant to equip students with the arguments necessary to inform debate and correct the record where bias and errors abound.

The antecedents to this collection are two classic FEE publications that YAF helped distribute in the past: Clichés of Politics, published in 1994, and the more influential Clichés of Socialism, which made its first appearance in 1962. Indeed, this new collection will contain a number of essays from those two earlier works, updated for the present day where necessary. Other entries first appeared in some version in FEE’s journal, The Freeman. Still others are brand new, never having appeared in print anywhere. They will be published weekly on the websites of both YAF and FEE: www.yaf.org and www.FEE.org until the series runs its course. A book will then be released in 2015 featuring the best of the essays, and will be widely distributed in schools and on college campuses.

See the index of the published chapters here.

Tragedy of the Healthcare Commons: The Affordable Care Act contributes to an already unsustainable situation by D.W. MacKenzie

Recent difficulties with implementing the Affordable Care Act have increased opposition to the program. A majority of Americans now oppose it. Problems with the healthcare.gov website are in all likelihood temporary. However, there are serious long-term problems, particularly considering long-term finance and labor-supply issues. Give the mounting difficulties with and growing concerns about the ACA, it is worthwhile to reconsider the main issues regarding this program.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently published a report examining some of these problems. It contains nothing new. Many commentators have discussed the projection of lower labor-force participation. Obamacare subsidies will allow lower-income Americans to work less. People do in fact work less if their costs are shared. The tendency of people to withhold work from collective undertakings is known among economists as a tragedy of the commons.

Reduced labor-force participation means both lower total tax revenue and higher spending on government benefits. The CBO’s long-term forecasts report serious imbalances between tax revenues and federal spending. Federal deficits are projected to remain high, but “manageable,” for about a decade.

The costs of entitlements, along with regular budget items (defense and non-defense), are relevant to any discussion of the ACA’s affordability. The retirement of the baby boomers, though, will result in steadily rising costs for older entitlement programs. Taxpayers are already legally responsible for a national debt of $17 trillion (which  will hit $20 trillion by the time Obama leaves office). Interest payments on the national debt are low for the time being, but they won’t stay that way forever. The Medicare trustees have admitted to a long-term deficit of $34 trillion, but independent estimates run much higher. Social Security has an unfunded liability of more than $12 trillion. These costs pile on top of the current regular budget of $3.5 trillion, not to mention projected growth in this budget. Taxpayers are also responsible for the ACA’s cost overruns. Section 1342 of the ACA makes taxpayers responsible for bailing out insurance companies if the need arises.

Taxpayers are legally obligated to finance all of the above-mentioned expenditures, debts, and unfunded liabilities. People who believe in individual liberty reject the idea that people are morally obliged to fund ever-rising Federal expenditures. But the dispute over whether American taxpayers should fund projected federal spending is rendered academic by the fact that younger Americans will not be able to afford to pay for all of it. The commons created out of the New Deal and the Great Society is collapsing.

Economist Larry Kotlikoff estimates that average rates of taxation would have to rise 56 percent to cover projected increases in federal expenditures. Kotlikoff’s estimate may be high, but even a lower figure would leave Americans in dire financial straits. Taxpayers simply will not be able to fund all projected increases in all current federal programs. Bond investors will not finance our rising national debt in unlimited amounts. The ACA’s increased spending and lower labor-force participation, on top of these increases, makes national bankruptcy that much more likely.

National bankruptcy is not inevitable. The U.S. government is heading toward bankruptcy superficially because politicians have failed to set rational budget priorities, and fundamentally because citizens expect far too much of the public sector. The ACA was created out of concern that financial considerations bar access to healthcare to many people. And Americans do spend a large percentage of national income on healthcare.

The good news is that “we” have a substantial amount of leeway to save money on healthcare. Data on the overall effectiveness of public healthcare spending is clear, but not nearly as well known among voters. For example, The RAND Corporation conducted a health insurance experiment from 1974 to 1982, which showed that making healthcare “free,” or available at no personal marginal cost, does lead people to buy more. Much of this extra healthcare is inappropriate or largely unneeded, however. When people pay for more of their healthcare out of pocket, they tend to waste less money. The RAND study concluded, “In general, the reduction in services induced by cost sharing had no adverse effect on participants’ health.” Many other studies cast doubt on the effectiveness of providing healthcare at no private cost. According to another study, “Medicare enrollees in higher-spending regions receive more care than those in lower-spending regions but do not have better health outcomes or satisfaction with care.” Studies of people with health savings accounts (HSAs), as compared with people with plans like PPOs, show HSA holders control premium inflation better than their PPO counterparts.

Having people pay deductibles or bear other out-of-pocket costs causes us to economize on healthcare. Health insurance pools risks and creates a type of commons, whether done privately or publicly. The private commons of insurance companies does, however, have limits. Private insurance companies deny some types of coverage, depending on how much insurance people contract for in the first place. In other words, private insurance is not an open commons—it specifies the extent to which each policy holder can draw out of the insurance pool.

Public insurance programs lure people in by promising more benefits than private insurance plans offer. Yet public programs ultimately run into the basic problem of scarcity. The ACA pushes people out of very basic insurance plans into plans with higher levels of coverage, but excessive coverage is a major source of high healthcare costs. Americans spend a sizable portion of GDP on health expenses (17.9 percent in 2011). The overconsumption of healthcare by overinsured Americans is both a major source of excessive costs and a cost that can be cut with little adverse effect.

The tendency of people to waste money in open-access healthcare financing is simply going to produce another tragedy of the commons. Too few young people have been signing up at Healthcare.gov because younger Americans are mostly smart enough to avoid paying into a commons. Americans are signing up mainly because they expect to draw subsidies out of this commons.

Problems with managing a commons in healthcare financing are serious. Once someone enters into a life-threatening medical condition, they and their family will want every possible available step taken to save this person—provided that “someone else” pays. Passing costs onto someone else is, aside from being morally dubious, unworkable in the aggregate because we are each “someone else” to everyone else.

There are many costs associated with government intervention into the healthcare industry: administrative and regulatory compliance costs, elevated costs of litigation and court rulings, lobbying costs, costs of perverse incentives. The perversities associated with treating health as an open-access and politicized commons have, along with other, government spending programs, created an unsustainable fiscal situation. The unaffordability of the Affordable Care Act leaves us with two main options: Congress can repeal the ACA immediately through the legislative process, or we can all wait for the repeal process of national bankruptcy.

ABOUT D.W. MACKENZIE

D. W. MacKenzie is an assistant professor of economics at Carroll College in Helena, Montana.

EPA Still Wants to Garnish Your Wages Without a Court Order

A few weeks ago, EPA quietly tried to reinterpret its authority and wanted to garnish wages from those who owe it a debt. After a storm of criticism from Members of Congress and the public, EPA pulled back.

However, the agency is still trying to grant itself this power, only this time it’s going through the standard notice-and-comment process that most federal regulations go through.

What’s is the problem EPA wants to solve by having the ability to dig to go after your wallet? Will this stop polluters? Is EPA inundated with deadbeats?

Apparently not, according to Catrina Rorke and Sam Batkins at the American Action Forum who looked at EPA’s data.

They point out that, over the past six years, EPA has imposed more than $2.3 billion in “non-major” fines against companies and individuals that committed “infractions that do not involve large facilities emitting tons of toxic pollutants annually.”

However, Rorke and Batkins found, “the majority of fines for individuals involve paperwork infractions – not environmental contamination.” Individuals or businesses were fined for failing to file notification or reports with EPA.

And as for a delinquency problem, here’s their key finding:

[T]he average length of time that individuals were delinquent paying EPA was zero quarters. In other words, people generally pay their fines on time.

So why does EPA want to be able to garnish an individual’s wages? Based on its data, it’s not to ensure a cleaner environment nor solve delinquency problems. Roark and Batkins conclude (correctly in my view):

EPA’s proposal to grant itself wage garnishment authority more closely resembles a power grab than an appropriate administrative step to rectify an observed issue in their fine repayment process.

Stay tuned.

Keep Them Down, Keep Them Dependent: How to prevent the young and poor from succeeding by Issac M. Morehouse

Let’s face it. I’m not that young anymore. I’m also not poor anymore, and I live a comfortable middle-class American life. Most older, better off middle-classers like me got where we are through the dynamic market process. The trouble is, now that we’re doing pretty well, that same dynamic process is a threat. I don’t want some young whippersnapper or poor immigrant to outwork me. What if they succeed faster than I do? What if they create more value than I can, and so outcompete me for a job?

Take heart, well-heeled middle-agers. I have a plan. My scheme for keeping younger and poorer people from succeeding—and possibly making us have to work harder to stay on top—is two pronged: We’ve got to affect both supply and demand.

We need to restrict the supply of economic opportunities. We need to make those opportunities more costly and thus out of the reach of many young and poor. We also need to suppress the demand for jobs and entrepreneurial ventures. We need to make it more beneficial to stay out of the market than to participate in it.

Let’s get to some specifics.

Restricting the supply of opportunities

The biggest advantages young and poor people have over us are very low opportunity costs and a low-cost lifestyle. This means they don’t have to give up much to work a job, and they don’t need to earn much to cover their expenses. Because of these major advantages, they can work for very low wages, and thus become attractive for employers to hire and train. At low wages, they’ll always find work, and worse yet, they’ll be constantly learning and improving—adding to their stock of human capital.

The obvious solution is to make it illegal to work for low wages. Working for free is absolutely out of the question. If young and poor people could simply offer to work for little or no pay, they’d soon be gaining valuable skills and competing with us for jobs! Let’s cut that first rung off the ladder, lest they climb over us some day.

Young and inexperienced workers don’t have a lot of expertise. They make mistakes. Of course, if they’re allowed to participate in the trial-and-error process of the market, the incentives will soon drive them to develop expertise and be reliable suppliers of goods and services. That would be a travesty for us. We need to keep them unskilled and unreliable. The solution is to create a labyrinthine web of licenses and regulations that make it illegal for anyone but experts to sell goods or offer services. Since we’ve already banned working for low wages or apprenticing for free, it will be almost impossible for these novices to learn from a seasoned expert until they gain the necessary skill. We can make it even harder by adding lots of fees and costly training sessions to obtain licenses.

There needn’t be just one law making low wages illegal or just one licensing and regulatory regime. We need a wide variety of complex and ever-changing barriers. High taxes on productivity and profit, union dues and demands, work restrictions, rigid job categories, seniority bias, massive credential requirements, health and safety rules to cripple upstarts, consumer protection laws to hamper smaller producers, no access to capital or ability to stay in line with the law without costly lawyers and accountants, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

My recommendations are myriad, but they all boil down to a simple principle: Do anything we can to make economic opportunities more costly and rare. This reserves most of said opportunities for us.

Now for the second prong.

Reward non-participation

We don’t want to seem callous and cold toward those less comfortably situated. Indeed, we harbor no ill will toward the young and poor. We just don’t want them to compete with or catch us.

Since we care—and especially because want people to believe that we care—we can’t be all “stick.” We need some “carrot,” too. It’s not enough to restrict the supply of opportunities, because some people will break the rules or work around them. We also need to suppress demand by offering some sweet incentives for young workers to stay unproductive and uncompetitive. We need to make non-participation in the market more attractive than participation.

First, I recommend a strict policy of forced education for the first few decades of life. We’ve already discussed making it illegal for the young to work or the poor to work for low wages. But we also need to make it mandatory that they do something else, and something that won’t make them more likely to compete with us now or later. We should create giant institutions where we send them all day to follow rules and do what they’re told without question. We don’t want them becoming innovative, or pursuing passions and interests that they might become experts in and thus supplant us in the market. They must only learn what the bureaucrats who run the system tell them to. (Oh, and the people who run the system should only be those who don’t really know much about competing in the market, because we wouldn’t want them passing on such knowledge.)

We can’t just make school mandatory. Many would still play hooky if it cost too much. We also need to hide the cost by paying for the whole thing through taxes and borrowing. We need to subsidize it so much that alternatives can’t compete. We need to weave a narrative about its glory so that no one wants to opt out.

But 18 years isn’t enough. We need to keep these young, hungry individuals out of our way as long as possible. I say we artificially lower the cost of otherwise very expensive degree programs and advanced studies. We can guarantee low-interest loans, throw a lot of grants and subsidies around, and always, always parrot powerful propaganda about the inestimable value of classroom learning. Let’s make the most attractive option—socially and economically—the one that keeps them from the commercial world as long as possible.

The longer we can make the education process, the better for us. Defer, defer, defer the time at which young people start entering the productive sector. The more loans they take on in the process, the better. Maybe they’ll even get married, get a nice house (we can incentivize the buying of expensive consumer goods via debt as well!), and have kids. All of these things are good because they take away one of the major advantages the young have in the workforce—their low cost of living and hence ability to bid for lower starting wages. We want them saddled with so much debt that they have to earn high wages to get by, and thus have to compete with workers that are a lot more experienced for those higher wage jobs. We need them coming out of college looking for salaries that don’t comport with their skill levels. This increases the odds that older workers like us will win.

We’ll need to address those too old or too poor for school as well. We need basic income guarantees, food stamps, and all manner of welfare to cover the costs of low-income life such that no part-time entry-level job could pay quite as much. Again, we need to make not working worth more than working.

The best part

Here’s the best part: By the time these young and poor find themselves unable to compete, with costly lifestyles and loans to maintain and little skill or experience, they’ll be older. They’ll join our ranks. They’ll lobby for even harsher restrictions on those even less experienced and less well-off than they are. They’ll demand to get the low-skill jobs they’re qualified for, but demand the pay be raised to high-skill wages. They’ll make the list of degrees and credentials they’ve accumulated the new barrier to entry to artificially raise their market value. They’ll help us perpetuate the very policies that caused their plight!

As with the first prong, these are but a few examples. Ideally a massive and shifting bundle of incentives to not enter the market as a producer can be put together: education mandates and subsidies, tax incentives to spend rather than save and to purchase education rather than other goods or business tools, housing and healthcare as long as you don’t work, and rewards for any activity that makes one less likely to try to compete with us in the market.

These policies will subtly turn the attention of nearly everyone away from value creation, innovation, and serving customers—all of which might threaten our dormancy. It will turn everyone’s attention and energy to fighting over the details of these policies and programs, to who gets which slice of the artificially limited pie and at whose expense. Some of us can really take advantage by running for political office and dividing up the warring interests we’ve created by promising them more restrictions and subsidies.

Above all, with both prongs of this strategy, we need a narrative that calls these policies noble, compassionate, and wise. We need them to be perceived as humanitarian aid to the young and poor, not as ways to keep them from succeeding. We need to make these programs universal values in themselves—regardless of the outcomes they produce. Who could oppose better wages? Who could oppose more education? Who could oppose more loans for homes or college? Who could oppose work rules and consumer safety regulations? Middle-aged, middle-class people certainly won’t, if we know what’s good for us.

We cannot abide an America in which plucky newcomers outperform us at every turn. Join me in securing our future.

ABOUT ISAAC M. MOREHOUSE

Isaac Morehouse is an entrepreneur, thinker, and communicator dedicated to the relentless pursuit of freedom. He is the founder and CEO of Praxis.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

Priceless: The Evolution of Teaching Mathematics in Public Schools

A reader sent me a commentary on teaching in public schools using mathematics as the example. I was taken by the simplicity and power of this commentary and decided to share it. This look at teaching mathematics from the 1950s to the present today was written by Kirk F. MacKenzie, founder of Silent No More Publications.

On his website MacKenzie says he, “[I]s a proud citizen of the United States and the son of a career Air Force Colonel. He has degrees in electrical engineering and business administration, and spent most of his career in high-tech. He decided to stand up, make a difference, and remain silent no more. His growing body of work is the result of his commitment to do what he can to restore the ideals our government was founded upon.”

Here is MacKenzie’s commentary on teaching mathematics in public schools:

I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried.. Why do I tell you this? Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1960s:

  1. Teaching Math In 1950s (when I was in school) A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit ?
  2. Teaching Math In 1970s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
  3. Teaching Math In 1980s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit? Yes or No
  4. Teaching Math In 1990s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20 Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
  5. Teaching Math In 2000s A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it’s Okay).
  6. Teaching Math In 2014 Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho? ANSWER: His profit was $375,000 because his logging business is just a front for running drugs across the border.Mathematics

The issue of a traditional education versus Common Core has become the hot button issue for parents, teachers, academics and concerned citizens in Florida and across the United States. In the battle for the control of the heart and soul of education this commentary by Mackenzie is priceless.

To learn more about Kirk F. MacKenzie and Silent No More Publications click here.

RELATED ARTICLE: How to Encourage STEM in Early Education | Kids STEM

Miami, FL: Court upholds firing of teacher who cheated, while accomplice is returned to the classroom

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014, Department of Administrative Hearings (DOAH) Judge Cathy Sellers issued a Recommended Order upholding the decision of Miami-Dade County Public Schools to fire Mr. Emmanuel Fleurantin for his part in the massive test cheating scandal, Adobegate, at Miami Norland Senior High School during the 2011-2012 school year.

The School Board of Miami-Dade County will either formally accept or reject the Recommended Order at the August 6 or September 3, 2014 School Board meetings.

What is disturbing is that there were two teachers involved doing the exact same thing in the exact same room at the exact same time (for the most part) and one is fired (Mr. Emmanuel Fleurantin) while the other (Mrs. Brenda Muchnick) is still on the job at Miami Norland Senior High School while the whistle blower, Trevor Colestock, is still displaced from Norland and is not allowed to return there.

With the assistance of cheating, undertaken by Mr. Emmanuel Fleurantin and Mrs. Brenda Muchnick, Miami Norland’s school grade went from a “C” for the 2010-11 school year to an “A” for the 2011-12 school year.

The Miami-Dade OIG Final Report concluded that, “Miami Norland has benefited in the form of attaining a higher school grade and may have received financial compensation or other benefit resulting from its high pass rate on the industry certification exams” (page 13).

As a result, total federal funds (SIG, RTTT) given out due to a grade influenced by cheating was $100,560; the total state funds per FSRP was between $130,000- $140,000; the total overall combined federal and state incentive funds were $230,560- $240,560.

Each teacher at Miami Norland Senior High School received $1730.41 from all three payouts.

On October 16, 2013, the Miami-Dade School Board voted to terminate Mr. Emmanuel Fleurantin for his role in Adobegate, and rightfully so, and his case was forwarded to DOAH court.

On November 19, 2013, the Miami-Dade School Board voted to suspend Mrs. Brenda Muchnick for 30 working days without pay for her role in Adobegate, which boggles the mind.  She accepted this punishment and therefore it was not referred to DOAH.

When Mr. Fleurantin appeared alone on the D55 item of the School Board Agenda on October 16, 2013, something seemed amiss and it was common sense that something was in the works given the disparity in actions taken against them.

Most crimes, such as theft and homicide, have varying degrees; test cheating does not and state law is straightforward and clear.  In any given instance of test cheating, a role is a role; there is no distinguishing a major role from a minor role. Either one was involved or they were not.

Both Mr. Fleurantin and Mrs. Muchnick, according to the Miami-Dade OIG Final Report, allegedly “knowingly and willfully” violated test security rules irrespective of quantity of students in their respective roles.

When one reads that document and the Department of Administrative Hearings brief, issued by the School Board Attorney on January 8, 2014, justifying Mr. Fleurantin’s termination, one can reasonably conclude that Mrs. Muchnick is equally culpable and a reasonable person would think her employment was up for termination as well.

A reasonable person would conclude that the logic and conclusion of Judge Sellers’ Recommended Order pertaining to Mr. Fleurantin would be applicable to Mrs. Muchnick as well.

Enid Weisman, the Chief Capital Human Officer for M-DCPS, is responsible for disciplinary practices in Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

She led the effort to remove Mr. Colestock from Norland; fired Mr. Fleurantin while reinstating Mrs. Muchnick at Norland though they both were charged by M-DCPS with the same offenses word for word

A confidential source said Mrs. Weisman told the School Board that the disparities in punishment came about as a “technicality” pertaining to Mrs. Muchnick.

According to another confidential source, the “technicality” was that Mrs. Muchnick told District personnel prior to the October 16, 2013, School Board meeting that she was going to claim that school administrators directed her and Mr. Fleurantin to provide students the answers to the Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver industry certification exams in order to enhance the “back 800 points” of the school grade and improve the school grade overall.

As a result, she was removed from the October 16, 2013, D55 Item of the School Board Agenda (thus leaving only Mr. Fleurantin), deemed to be under further investigation, and was placed on the D55 Item of the School Board Agenda of the November 19, 2013, meeting with a more lenient and favorable punishment- 30 days without pay.

The crime is bad enough; like Watergate and other similar scandals, the cover-up is far more worse.

A reasonable person may well conclude that the disparity in punishment between Mr. Fleurantin and Mrs. Muchnick suggests a cover-up and the illegal and retaliatory actions taken against Mr. Colestock are meant to keep the Norland faculty and staff quiet and to keep the truth from coming out and exposing other improprieties relating to Adobegate.

Furthermore, the inaction of federal and state officials to investigate encourages such misdeeds and criminal behavior and shortchanges teachers, students, and the general public alike.

Will Florida’s 67 School Districts empower parents to decide what their children learn, or not?

During the 2014 session the Florida legislature passed, and Governor Rick Scott signed into law, Senate Bill 864. SB 864 took effect on July 1, 1014. All 67 of Florida’s school districts are now in the process of implementing the provisions of this bill. However, some question whether the bill’s intent, to empower parents and stakeholders, will be fully realized.

Sherri Krass, founder of Eye on U.S. Education (EUSE), has done an analysis of SB 864. Krass writes:

Senate Bill 864, sponsored by Senator Alan Hays, initially stated that all counties SHALL create an “instructional materials committee” consisting of parents and teachers. The word SHALL dictates that this must be done. Parents would be able to provide input into the approval of the textbooks used by their children.

Unfortunately, by the time the bill left the House and a “compromise” was agreed upon, the body of the legislation was “hollowed out” – where only a “skeleton” remains of the original legislation.  The legislation now states:

(2)(a) If a district school board chooses to implement its own instructional materials program, the school board shall adopt rules implementing the district’s instructional materials program which must include its processes, criteria, and requirements for the following, but need not be limited to:  1. Selection of reviewers, one or more of whom must be parents with children in public schools.

Therefore, the creation of such a committee falls within the domain of each County School Board.  They can choose to not have one.

The legislation does provide an “opening”. Parents can still insist on a committee being formed.

A date is provided when School Boards have to “certify” the instructional materials.  Textbooks must align with the “Florida Standards” – a pseudonym for “Common Core”.

The district school superintendent shall certify to the department by March 31 of each year that all instructional materials for core courses used by the district are aligned with applicable state standards.   

But, parents can still reject a textbook and insist on another one. Textbooks can be found that align with the “Standards” and are not specifically written for “Common Core”. A major problem with “Common Core” are the textbooks that have been published for it. Rejecting these textbooks is a step forward in removing its influence.

Question: Will every school district empower parents and let them decide what textbooks and instructional materials are best suited for their children?

There are several indicators of a school district’s intent to empower parents and stakeholders in the adoption of textbooks and instructional materials.

  1. The establishment of a district Instructional Materials Committee, codified in district policy;
  2. Who selects the committee members, the Superintendent or School Board;
  3. The makeup of the committee (e.g. do parents or district staff have the majority of votes on the committee);
  4. Has the district established a fair and equitable process whereby parents can file a complaint directly to the local District School Board requesting rejection of a committee educational materials selection.

I asked Lori White, Superintendent of the Sarasota County Schools, if an Instructional Materials Committee would be formed and if so, when? Here is Superintendent White’s reply:

It is our intent to continue to participate in the state adoption process as outlined in the School Board policy 4.21. Our current policy requires that one or more laypersons participate in the district council. In most cases, these community members are parents with children in the system. Our School Board policy will be revised to incorporate the new requirements outlined in SB 864 regarding the process for a parent to protest the School Board’s decision to adopt a specific instructional material.

Krass wants to make sure parents are empowered and has asked Floridians to sign a petition stating so to Governor Scott and Florida’s legislators. Krass states, “EUSE suggests that a petition be submitted to each County School Board stating that parents want an ‘instructional Materials Committee’ to be formed.”

Krass has an online petition asking the Florida legislature to amend SB 864 to “require” that school districts establish a district Instructional Materials Committee. Interested citizens may sign the petition by clicking here.

IRS and Obama State Department conferred about ways to deny tax-exempt status to pro-Israel groups

Obama ought to be impeached for this alone. He has turned the United States government into an instrument to punish his political enemies, and shows in this particular incident how deeply he hates Israel and how ardently he supports the “Palestinian” jihad. Obama and the Left seem bent on destroying what was one of the great achievements of the United States: the continued existence of a loyal political opposition that was not subject to violence or oppression, but allowed to operate freely and accorded respect, as it accorded the same respect to the majority. Those days are over. There is a single perspective that is allowed in the mainstream media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry, and now Obama has gone one step beyond that and endeavored to make a group’s legal privileges subject to its submission to his political line. Dark days, indeed.

“The IRS’s Foreign Policy,” Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2014:

The IRS has stuck by its story that tax-exempt applications by conservatives got slow-rolled because of bureaucratic bungling not because the groups opposed President Obama’s policies. Now the slow drip of email evidence to congressional investigators is casting further doubt on that tale.

In 2009 the Pennsylvania group Z Street applied for tax-exempt status for its mission of educating people about Israel-related issues. In 2010 an IRS agent told Z Street that its application was delayed because the tax agency’s Washington, D.C. office was giving special scrutiny to groups whose missions might conflict with Administration policies. The IRS’s “Be On the Lookout” list that November also included red flags for groups referring to “disputed territories.”

Z Street sued in August 2010 for viewpoint discrimination and its case is headed for discovery in federal court. Emails uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee show that the IRS and State Department were conferring in 2009 about pro-Israel groups like Z Street and considering arguments to deny their tax-exempt applications.

In an April 16, 2009 email, Treasury attache to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Katherine Bauer sent IRS and Treasury colleagues a 1997 JTA News article sent to her by State Department foreign service officer Breeann McCusker. The subject was whether 501(c) groups buying land in Israel’s disputed territories were engaged in “possible violations of U.S. tax laws.” The article chronicles the controversy and whether “ideological activity” can “legally be financed with the help of U.S. [tax] dollars.”

“Thought you might find the below article of interest—looks like we’ve been down this road before,” Ms. Bauer wrote. “Although I believe you’ve said you can’t speak to on-going investigations, I thought it was worth flagging the 1997 investigation mentioned below for you if it can be of any use internally when looking for precedence [sic] for the current cases.” A Treasury spokesman declined comment on Ms. Bauer’s behalf.

The “current cases” would have been applications like Z Street’s in which Israel-related activity was apparently being scrutinized for its ideological and policy content. The government says Z Street got special scrutiny because it was focused in a region with a higher risk of terrorism, which is hard to believe and in any case doesn’t explain all of the IRS’s behavior.

It doesn’t cover, for instance, why one questionnaire we’ve seen from the IRS to another Jewish group applying for tax-exempt status asked, “Does your organization support the existence of the land of Israel?” and “Describe your organization’s religious belief system toward the land of Israel.” No matter the answers, they should not affect the processing of an application for 501(c) status. The State-IRS emails reveal a political motivation for IRS scrutiny that gives Z Street powerful evidence for its suit charging IRS bias….

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The Common Core Fight: Small Victories and the Way Forward

“You’re lined up against business interests, the entire public school bureaucracy, Bill Gates and his billions, public broadcasting, the rest of the media, the Chamber of Commerce, and every elected official who is indebted to the Chamber of Commerce, which means virtually every elected official,” Says Tina Trent, who has been leading Common Core workshops on political organizing in Georgia and Florida.

In spite of hundreds of millions of dollars from Bill Gates and affiliated business and non-profit groups, and promotion by the Department of Education, support for Common Core among parents of school-age children is plummeting.

A united front stands against Common Core, as even Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss acknowledged.  She wrote recently, “even more sober-minded people felt the Obama administration had coerced states into adopting the standards with federal money and No Child Left Behind waivers.”  Opposed to the “more sober-minded people” in Strauss’s estimation, were “far-right-wingers who saw the Core as a federal conspiracy to turn students gay, or communist.”  Those Strauss smears as “far-right-wingers,” however, were the first to recognize Common Core for the federally coercive radical effort that it is.

Potential Republican presidential candidates are also suddenly recognizing the wisdom of the grassroots and making some about-faces.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former Common Core champion, recently signed an executive order to replace Common Core tests with new tests, for which he has been threatened with a lawsuit. Then, seventeen lawmakers filed a lawsuit seeking an end to the Common Core standards in the state.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced at the recent National Governors Association meeting that he is considering an executive order against Common Core.  Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said he had proposed a state measure to replace Common Core.  The National Governors Association, a major player in ushering in the standards in 2009, did not even put Common Core on their agenda this year.

In state legislatures there were some victories, and some partial victories.  Indiana officially dropped Common Core, but activists are calling out Governor Pence for keeping the standards under a new name.

In Missouri, the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core publicly thanked Governor Jay Nixon for signing HB 1490 into law.  According to the website, the bill’s main purpose is “to define a system wherein state education experts will evaluate and recommend state K-12 education standards.”   The bill means relying on the professional integrity of those in the work groups.

Still it is a “step forward,” for the coalition, described by co-founder Dr. Mary Byrne, Ed.D., as “a group of people throughout the state who respect each other’s strengths and honor independent thought and action.”  Various volunteers keep track of multiple bills, when necessary.  The core members are registered lobbyists, although they deliberately speak without charge and pay for the materials they distribute in order to be free from “top-down control.”

Two states did pass Common Core withdrawal bills, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

Pushback came, though.  The Oklahoma Board of Education sued the lawmakers, alleging that they did not have the Constitutional authority to repeal Common Core standards.  The Oklahoma Supreme Court, however, ruled against them.

According to Jane Robbins, senior fellow at the American Principles Project, Oklahoma succeeded because of a solidly conservative legislature, a longer legislative session that allowed more time for planning and lobbying, and a governor attuned to the grassroots.

But for South Carolina, Robbins is not yet ready to declare victory.  The State Superintendent seems determined to develop genuinely new standards and not just re-brand Common Core, Robbins says.  However, he faces challenges: the standards will have to be approved by the State Board and the Education Oversight Committee.  She advises the grassroots to keep up the pressure on these groups and the incoming State Superintendent (after November elections) to make sure the ball isn’t dropped.

One of the strategies of Common Core promoters is to implement new tests before standards, and then to argue that it would be a waste of money to change the standards after so much had been spent on tests. The South Carolina bill requires the new test be implemented the year before the new standards are.  (The “funds already spent” was a frequent argument in Georgia.)  Activists need to be aware of such pitfalls in testing contracts.

Georgia, as I reported in Part I, experienced a major defeat on Common Core withdrawal legislation this last session.  Although corporate interests “won this round,” Robbins states, “Georgia parents won’t go away. Their children are too important.”

That is why they stay in the David-and-Goliath fight.  Tina Trent, who has been leading workshops on political organizing in Georgia and Florida, tells activists to be realistic: Many just learned the ropes of state lobbying this year.

It will be a multi-year fight, Trent warns.  She advises patience, long-term planning, and coalition-building.  Activists are up against an array of well-organized political and corporate interests, “an army of paid, professional lobbyists,” and teachers and school administrators whose paychecks depend on implementing Common Core.

“You’re lined up against business interests, the entire public school bureaucracy, Bill Gates and his billions, public broadcasting, the rest of the media, the Chamber of Commerce, and every elected official who is indebted to the Chamber of Commerce, which means virtually every elected official,” Trent says.

The July 22 Georgia primary run-off suggests that the public is turning against candidates they associate with such interests.  Pundits on both sides attribute Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jack Kingston’s loss to his association with the Chamber of Commerce.  At the state school superintendent level, Common Core opponent Richard Woods won with a 700-vote lead over Common Core proponent Mike Buck. At Buck’s request, a recount is expected to take place this week.

The grassroots anti-Common Core activists are learning from experience, and seeing the big picture.  This means keeping education decisions at the local level.  Christina Leventis, an activist in Nevada, warns about bills like her state’s SB197, which was passed in 2011.  The law replaced the 10-member elected board of education with a seven-member panel: four elected from each of the state’s congressional districts and three appointed by the governor.  Parents and citizens lose influence when power is ceded to the executive in this way.

“Top-down” control is just not good—as the founding fathers determined.  Common Core, of course, is top-down all the way, and that is the bottom-line reason why it needs to be defeated.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research. The featured image is courtesy of the Selous Foundation.

Responding to a Gay Man Who Wants to Redefine Marriage

Ryan T. Anderson responded to this question from a gay man, “Why should I, as a gay man, be denied the same right to file a joint tax return with my potential husband that a straight couple has?” This video of Anderson’s reply adds clarity to why marriage is defined as between one man and one woman in Florida:

Anderson also talked about the differences between the law’s interest in contracts and in marriage:

Curious in hearing more? Here are the highlights from Anderson’s remarks, his full speech, and the full Q&A courtesy of The Daily Signal.

ABOUT RYAN T. ANDERSON

Portrait of Ryan T. Anderson

Ryan T. Anderson researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He also focuses on justice and moral principles in economic thought, health care and education, and has expertise in bioethics and natural law theory. Contact Ryan at: Ryan T. Anderson@RyanT_Anderson

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