Roy Blunt Luminary Park, the much-discussed plan to build a park over four blocks of I-670 in downtown Kansas City, just missed another federal grant application, according to the Kansas City Business Journal. The city’s request for $25 million was not included in the federal Department of Transportation’s recent round of $1.73 billion in handouts.
It’s the fourth rejection from the feds since 2022. Over the past four years, the city has failed to impress federal reviewers for the RAISE program in 2022 ($25 million), the Mega program in 2023 ($60 million), the Reconnecting Communities & Neighborhoods program in 2024 ($75 million), and now the BUILD program (previously called RAISE). Three different federal programs and four different reviews yielded the same answer.
Maybe, just maybe, the universe is trying to send city hall a message: Stop!
But the response from city leaders has been the same each time: Keep going. This time, they want to issue $51.6 million in new bonds, backed by convention and tourism taxes plus “any legally available” revenue, and repay it over 15 years.
The project’s own history is a warning. An HNTB study in 2017 estimated the cost at $139 million to $175 million. It ballooned to $217 million in 2023. Now the “target budget” is $315 million. Assistant City Manager Jeff Martin attributes the increases to “more refined” estimates.
Exactly how were they generating estimates before? With a Magic 8 Ball?
As the costs have climbed, the completion dates have been extended. Officials once hoped to finish before the World Cup; now they hope to open a single block by 2029, and a second phase is set to begin in 2032 with no committed completion date.
It’s setting up to be our version of Boston’s Big Dig, the project that rerouted Interstate 93 underground through downtown. Originally pitched at $2.8 billion in the mid-1980s, it climbed to $6 billion when formally approved. When it finally opened, years late, the true cost approached $15 billion.
Luminary Park is much less ambitious, but the story is the same: Cost estimates that grow every time they’re revisited, a completion date that disappears into the horizon, and a funding gap filled with more and more public borrowing.
“Missouri’s budget is broken.” That’s the conclusion of Missouri State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s June report on the state’s fiscal outlook. While much of the report focuses on Missouri’s oft-discussed unsustainable spending trajectory, it also highlights a more fundamental problem with the state’s budget.
As I’ve written repeatedly, Missouri’s annual budget totals have been misleading in recent years. Lawmakers aren’t including a full 12 months of funding in their approved spending plans, leaving out significant known costs that will have to be paid through supplemental funding bills later in the year. To be clear, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem if there is enough money set aside to cover those eventual costs. Unfortunately, the auditor’s report suggests Missouri isn’t setting aside enough.
Over the past six years, the state’s supplemental funding needs have averaged about $371 million. This year, however, the state has set aside just $100 million. The issue isn’t that every supplemental request will necessarily reach the historical average. It’s that lawmakers have repeatedly budgeted far less than the state ultimately needs, despite several years of evidence that this pattern is likely to continue. So far, the state has been able to cover the difference because sufficient surplus revenues have been available.
This issue has parallels with Missouri’s recent reliance on one-time funding. Both practices allow lawmakers to put off difficult choices about how to cover the spending commitments of the years ahead. When Gov. Kehoe signed the fiscal year 2027 budget into law shortly before July 1, he vetoed and restricted millions in spending approved by the general assembly. As I wrote last month, the governor also warned about relying on one-time funding for ongoing expenses. The auditor provides a concrete example of this problem, noting that the budget uses nearly $200 million from the Capital Preservation Fund and Blind Pension Fund for ongoing purposes, even though lawmakers know those fund balances will not recur.
Missouri’s budget has nearly doubled since 2019. The auditor projects Missouri will spend around $1.7 billion more in general revenue this year than it expects to collect, while facing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional mandatory spending increases in fiscal year 2028 and beyond.
That’s a dramatic change from just a few years ago, when Missouri’s fiscal outlook was much different. The state had more than $5 billion in surplus funds, an historic influx of federal money, and an opportunity to prepare before more normal fiscal times returned. Instead, I think it’s fair to say that the opportunity to proactively right Missouri’s fiscal ship has been squandered. The surplus will be exhausted by next year, and the need for tough decisions could arrive as soon as January, when the supplemental funding requests come in.
After three years of seeing this pattern play out, it’s clear that our elected officials should stop treating the gap between the budget and actual spending as a surprise. Fixing what’s broken with Missouri’s budget may not be easy, but providing an honest accounting of what government costs should be.
Susan Pendergrass speaks with Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, about whether Milton Friedman’s ideas still hold up seventy years after Capitalism and Freedom. They discuss why capitalism is losing favor with younger Americans, how regulatory capture rather than free markets is driving the backlash, what declining public school enrollment signals about the future of education, and more.
Susan Pendergrass (00:03): Thanks so much for joining us on the Show Me Institute podcast, Rob Enlow of EdChoice. You’ve been executive director, CEO there for how long?
Robert Enlow (00:13): Since two thousand nine.
Susan Pendergrass (00:15): That’s a long time.
Robert Enlow (00:16): Well, not as long as when I started in 1996, so thirty years this year.
Susan Pendergrass (00:21): 30 years. Yeah. Wow. Well, I don’t know how time is flying, but I wanted to have you on to talk about a couple things that are going on recently, and one thing in particular, which is, there’s poll after poll, there’s election after election, it seems to be the case that capitalism is losing favor with the American public, socialism is gaining steam with the American public. And recently I saw an editorial about the fact that JD Vance has said that Milton Friedman is essentially no longer relevant. That Milton Friedman’s ideas made sense in the 80s, but it’s no longer relevant for today. We need more of a Hamiltonian economic plan than what Milton Friedman put forth. And of course, Milton Friedman’s seminal work, Capitalism and Freedom, is now 70 years old. And well, I just realized 20 years ago you edited a volume on his work, Liberty and Learning, and certainly you worked side by side with him. You ran his foundation before he died, and you know him. I’m just curious your thoughts on whether or not Milton Friedman is still relevant.
Robert Enlow (01:40): I think we need more Milton, not less, right now. And I think we need far less Hamiltonian central banking, centralized scrutinizers, to quote the great Frank Zappa, I need no more central scrutinizers in our life, regardless of whether they come from the right or the left. There is a distrust in systems across the board, whether you’re right or left. And some people respond to that by saying we need to have a socialist system. And some people respond to that by saying we need to have a Hamiltonian sort of centralized control system. Milton Friedman’s correct solution is that we need a bottom-up system of individual liberty and enlightened self-interest. And we need far more of that than we need less.
Susan Pendergrass (02:25): So why is it out of favor now? What do you think is going on, that the idea of the government taking care of housing, healthcare, education, the basic foundations of each individual’s life, that the government should be managing that? Is it just too far in the rear-view mirror, the idea of individual liberty and individual responsibility, and folks haven’t seen it recently enough? Or maybe it’s neither of these, or is it that the particular form of capitalism folks are seeing right now, where some people are making a ton of money and a lot of people are not making much money at all, is that what’s causing this backlash against capitalism?
Robert Enlow (03:12): So what people are seeing is absolutely causing a backlash. Let’s just say that. I have a 28-year-old son, and he and I argue about this constantly, right? And I love him for that. Everyone seems to see that both government is a major problem, but also there’s a massive inequity in how our systems of competition are working. What people forget is what Milton would say about that. He would say, we do not have a free market, we do not have individual liberty, and we don’t. What’s happening in America and what’s happening around the world is Milton’s greatest fear, and it’s also beginning to happen in education reform, even among some of our allies. The idea of regulatory capture. People forget that what ends up happening, and it was chapter six in Milton’s Free to Choose, is Milton’s book story on what’s wrong with our schools. People often forget chapter seven, which is who protects the consumer. In that chapter, he talks a lot about what used to happen with the old ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Railroad Commission, and how at one point everyone, all these people got together from right and left to create a change to a massive problem. That problem got changed, everyone was happy, and all the advocates went home, and the bureaucrats were left to put it in place. The bureaucrats did what? They put it in place in a self-interested way, and now all of a sudden you have to come and reform the reform. This is what’s happening, I think, both writ large in America and certainly with education. I think there’s this real challenge with regulatory capture. This is true among private schools, charter schools. The minute schools get into a choice program, sometimes they’re like, well, we don’t want any other schools in these programs. And so this regulatory capture is not a free market. Milton would be railing against that as much as he would be about anything else, in my opinion.
Susan Pendergrass (05:06): And I always go back to this very simple explanation of the four ways to spend money, right? And clearly the least careful way is when you spend other people’s money on other people. And the idea that folks want to expand that exponentially right now concerns me, because we’re just going to be burning more money for worse results.
Robert Enlow (05:29): This is why ideas like ESAs are so important, and directing direct funding to families where they have to pay something and have the actual act of paying, I think that puts skin in the game. For your listeners, maybe they don’t remember the four ways Milton said you spend money, but I think it’s important. Well, you know it, but I always use this with you. If I spend my money on you, I am super careful about how much I spend, I don’t care what I buy. If I spend your money on me, I’m super careful about what I get, but I don’t care how much I spend. And if you spend someone else’s money on someone else, you don’t care how much you spend or how much you buy. And I think that is our problem right now. And you mix that with companies, associations, unions that all make it harder for others to enter the marketplace. This is the real challenge of barriers to entry, right? We’re seeing this in K-12 education now, where a bad story creates a desire to have a regulatory impulse. This is not the right way to go. We should be going toward more freedom. And I think this is what young people are reacting to, Susan. In my opinion, people like my son and others are reacting to the basic, obvious problem that government is not capable of doing it, but the current structure of entering a marketplace is impossible and only advantages some.
Susan Pendergrass (06:54): Yeah. Right. Clearly the idea of parents choosing where their kids go to school is an extremely popular idea. You guys poll it every month. I think as long as those polls have existed, it’s been 70% plus, parents want to do this. And yet that’s one that’s being strongly resisted by the same folks who are leaning towards socialism. They want to really lock the doors on letting kids out of the worst schools.
Robert Enlow (07:26): So, you know me and my background. For those of you who don’t know, I actually did liberation theology work back in the day before I got to Milton Friedman’s organization. And then I got to meet Milton Friedman, which, by the way, in about 12 seconds I felt like a minuscule intellect, because he’s so incredibly smart. But I call my transition from liberation to liberty, and part of that is because I think Dr. Friedman, and I think the radical left, the socialist left, identify the problem. The problem is ineffective government and systems that do not work for people. So whether it’s an oppressive government or a fascist government or a dictatorial government, it is not working for people. Now the socialists and those who will argue, well, then the best solution is my view of government because I’m better, so, in a very sort of old George H. W. Bush way, it’s a kinder, gentler kind of socialism, my way, better than others. Milton’s argument was, no, the solution to this government problem is to give individuals more ability and autonomy. This is common sense that I don’t think a lot of our younger folks understand anymore. But the interesting thing is, it’s a difference, I think, between their public and private life. Publicly, they say this is a problem, we’ve got to solve this problem. Privately, they use choice and competition and individualization and customization more than any generation ever before. This is their entire life, and it’s called a cell phone. And every app leads them to individual customization.
Susan Pendergrass (09:04): Thank God that’s not my problem.
Robert Enlow (09:06): You mean scrolling, doom scrolling?
Susan Pendergrass (09:09): Yeah. Thank God I never scroll. But I just feel like there is a disconnect. You’re exactly right, of course they want more choice in everything. And I don’t want to say “they,” but I think this is also sort of crossing generational lines, this idea that capitalism is evil and bad and is creating, I think we see a lot of crony capitalism right now. We see our elected officials making billions of dollars and buying up parts of companies. We see this weird form of capitalism. And then we have the vice president himself saying it’s not relevant anymore. It’s for the 80s and it’s not relevant anymore. And maybe people are just buying that. Maybe there’s like, okay, I guess capitalism is on the way out, what’s the next thing? And socialism is being sold in a pretty neat package.
Robert Enlow (09:58): Right. Yeah, but you know who’s not buying it anymore? This is, I think, the hope for the future. Communities of color. Communities of color are seeing the importance of unleashing rampant individual capitalism and rampant opportunity. You see this with micro schools and homeschooling. The fastest growth of homeschooling is in the Black community. The same thing is often true in the micro school community. It is communities who are most challenged, often and sometimes most oppressed,
Susan Pendergrass (10:04): Yeah.
Robert Enlow (10:25): that understand the benefits of opportunity in free markets in a way that you might argue “bougie” suburbanites who go to Columbia don’t get. And that is, of course, I think a problem of privilege more than anything. And so I think that’s a challenge for our society. But I’m watching communities of color embrace competition and individual liberty in a way I’ve never seen before in education. And I think we’ll get there again, but I think right now there’s a real disillusionment. And I think part of it has to do with our current government and with our previous government. We’ve not had a really good go of it the last two times.
Susan Pendergrass (11:06): Yeah, and I’ve met many parents from communities of color, like Black parents, Black moms, who will do anything to make sure their kids get the same opportunities, particularly if they’re economically disadvantaged, to make sure their kids get the same educational opportunities. And they are the ones who are pressing. In Missouri, there are groups of parents pressing for open enrollment, pressing to expand our ESA program, going to Jefferson City, learning how to be politically active, and they’re putting pressure on these folks also to get their kids out of unsafe schools and to stop being told, yeah, I’m sorry, I know only three percent of the kids are proficient in math in your school, but we can’t let you out of it. They’ve had it with that argument, and they’re the ones who are really pressing it. I don’t know if it’s landing, because we’ve made some progress, but we haven’t really
Robert Enlow (12:01): Where it’s landing, Susan, here’s where you’ve got to remember it’s landing. What is the enrollment in our traditional schools looking like right now? Down dramatically, right? What is the enrollment and effort in what I would call, what Vela, my dear friends at Vela, call “indie education”? It’s dramatically increasing. And this is the proof of the positive. Milton used to say the readiness for a true free market can be seen
Susan Pendergrass (12:08): Down.
Robert Enlow (12:28): in the prior years by an underground marketplace. And in many ways we have an underground marketplace of education happening, which is fantastic. It’s leading to so many opportunities. You’ve done the research in Arizona and other places. The massive growth of new vendors, the massive growth of opportunity, is really amazing.
Susan Pendergrass (12:47): Yeah, it’s only limited by what parents can think up. And they just keep thinking up new stuff.
Robert Enlow (12:52): Yeah, it’s shocking. Milton’s quote is always true: there’s not been another way heretofore discovered to raise the masses out of poverty than what happens when you unleash the free market and capitalism. And I think the challenges we’re seeing with capitalism and with liberty and with the view of liberty now are problems related to government and cronyism and regulatory capture. I don’t think people realize, when a legislator says, how do I know if someone’s learning? Well, you know what doesn’t tell them if someone’s learning? A test they have to take once a year after a certain period of time. That does not really tell you. All that gives you is a mark in the day in the life of a kid. And by the way, those aren’t doing very well, right? Not anywhere. So I don’t want to rely on that system to tell me how kids are doing. And I think people see
Susan Pendergrass (13:38): Not in Missouri.
Robert Enlow (13:47): this huge disconnect between what they’re told and what they’re seeing in real life. And they want to do it themselves. Young kids want to do it themselves.
Susan Pendergrass (13:54): That’s right. And parents know when their kids can’t read. And they know when their kids are watching too many movies at school and don’t want to get on the bus. Parents know all of that. And if they don’t have any options,
Robert Enlow (14:07): And what’s exciting?
Susan Pendergrass (14:09): certainly work to expand options for parents. I know we’re up to a million and a half, maybe, in private school choice programs, maybe closer to two.
Robert Enlow (14:18): Yeah, I think it’s more important to look at what’s happening in some states. So it’s a million and a half across the country. That’s tripled in seven years, which is amazing in terms of publicly funded private school choice. You’ve got to look at what’s happened in places like Florida and Arizona and Arkansas. Florida has gone, since two thousand and one to today, from eighty-nine percent of kids in their assigned public schools to barely fifty percent. You’re seeing diversity of choice. And the future of education, and I think therefore the growth of liberty in educational marketplaces, is in the following three things: there are fewer kids, there are dramatically more options, and there’s no money. So that will lead to, in my opinion, a free market system of education far faster than any kind of top-down socialist idea.
Susan Pendergrass (15:08): And then they’re all going to come back and blame you, right? The idea that school choice is the reason, I mean Missouri enrollment is down, it’s projected to go down more. I looked at kindergarten cohorts, it’s absolutely going down. They continue to hire teachers. And when they have to start laying off teachers and closing school buildings, they’re going to say it’s because of school choice. And of course it isn’t because of school choice. But when parents can have school choice, they take it.
Robert Enlow (15:32): It’s the only system where I’ve seen you blame the customer for a failure of your product. I’ve just never seen anything like it in the country. We literally blame education failures on parents who don’t want to go to educational failures. It’s crazy.
Susan Pendergrass (15:53): And then in Missouri they lock the door on them. It’s like, well, too bad, you can’t leave. So maybe it’s just a matter of not needing to refer to any of this as capitalism, because when it comes down to it, parents don’t really care what it’s called, as long as they can pick their kids’ school. They don’t really care.
Robert Enlow (16:08): Look, the reality is parents don’t know if it’s a charter school, private school, or public school most of the time. And that’s okay with me. But the reality is, do they have power and control over how the money is spent and where their kids go? And the best thing we know about it, in my opinion, from the data we’ve seen, and we continue to see this, is families who make choices make better choices over time. This is one of the most amazing things. You start and say, hey, I want a good school for my kid, I think this is better. And then they get in there, and three years later they’re like, what’s the test scores, and how’s it working, and what’s your pedagogy? Because, shockingly, the more options you have, the better customer you become, because you care more. I use this story all the time. When I was a kid, I asked my mother for a ten-speed. I got it for Christmas and proceeded to leave it outside. By the fall it was all rusted and nasty. And I said, hey Mom, I need another ten-speed. And she said, no, but if you earn half of it, I’ll buy the other half. Well, I earned half of it and she bought it for me. Guess how well taken care of that ten-speed was.
Susan Pendergrass (17:14): Leave it outside.
Robert Enlow (17:16): Right, what happens? So when you put some skin in the game and allow free markets to work, this is what families benefit from.
Susan Pendergrass (17:24): So Milton Friedman’s still relevant?
Robert Enlow (17:27): I think Milton Friedman will become
Susan Pendergrass (17:29): Me too, even hearing it said, but yes, go.
Robert Enlow (17:31): Well, no, so actually I think what’s really interesting, I think Milton Friedman, if you read Michael Kanudi’s Wall Street Journal piece, which is amazing, the other day about Milton and this whole conversation, I think Milton is the countercultural revolution that’s coming. I think Milton is both, I mean, one of the things about knowing him and getting to know him over the last decade of his life was he was an equal opportunity challenger.
Susan Pendergrass (17:46): Okay.
Robert Enlow (18:00): If he was a right-leaning guy who didn’t like free markets, he would immediately call out a right-leaning guy who didn’t like free markets. If it was a left-leaning guy, he would do the same thing. Milton was about true individual liberty. I think we’re going to get back to that kind of countercultural revolution. Just like it was seen in Eastern Europe and Latin America. I think that’s the next thing, in America you’ll see communities who are poor reading Milton Friedman in the basement.
Susan Pendergrass (18:27): Love it. Well, you heard it here first. Maybe you can come back and talk to us more about it.
Robert Enlow (18:32): I’m happy. Thanks so much for having me.
Recently KBIA reported on a new coalition in the energy sector:
Electric companies in the Midwest say new large scale power lines are needed to get more energy onto the grid to serve big power consumers such as artificial intelligence data centers. Now, the utilities argue reducing competition is the fastest way to [build transmission infrastructure].
Specifically, utilities want to reduce competition by halting competitive bidding for multi-state transmission projects, as the bidding process can take 16 to 20 months. If approved, the utilities would be the default developers of those projects, with no competition involved. In Missouri, both Ameren and Evergy, our state’s largest utilities, operate in multiple states and would gain that right of first refusal.
For starters, it’s worth acknowledging that 16 to 20 months is a long time to select a developer, and these companies are right that we quickly need more energy to serve big new customers.
This situation illustrates why Missouri is between a rock and a hard place in its efforts to modernize our electricity grid. Do we really need to choose between (1) remaining content with the slow, bureaucratic speed at which the energy sector operates, which is unsuited for this time of rapid and unpredictable growth or (2) giving up on a competitive bidding process and simply awarding the project to the biggest utility in the region?
There has to be a better way—and fortunately, there is. Missouri instead could allow private electricity grids (also known as consumer regulated electricity, or CRE) for large customers like data centers.
With CRE, a company like Amazon could partner with a supplier that would build and possibly operate a power plant and transmission/distribution exclusively for its customer(s). Since these grids would only be serving islanded, sophisticated clients, they would not need to be regulated like a utility serving the general public—meaning less red tape and fewer delays in getting power plants up and running.
Authorizing CRE would not mean replacing the existing regulated grid. Rather, it would create parallel pathway to serve the growing number of big power customers. Allowing private companies to work directly with electricity providers also would incentivize both parties to find innovative ways to bring power to data centers and other industries. Missouri doesn’t have to sacrifice competition for speed; rather, it can create more pathways for competition simply by letting the power suppliers and the power providers negotiate the price and schedule themselves.
Between April 2021 and February 2026, the small city of Sedalia paid a single law firm, Lauber Municipal Law, just shy of $2 million—nearly one invoice per business day, according to reporting by Genevieve Smith and Annie Goldman of the Columbia Missourian. Sedalia’s population is a little over 20,000. Out of its $35 million budget for fiscal year 2026, the city set aside $500,000 for legal fees.
Residents are asking why.
The answer, at least in part, is Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Smith and Goldman’s reporting found that Belle, another small Missouri town, has seen the once-free cost of producing public records rise sharply since it began contracting with Lauber. Alderwoman Rebecca Withouse has been pushing the town toward more openness on her own, trying to make records easier for residents to get without paying attorney fees. Nathan Nickolaus, an attorney at the firm, told the Missourian that an increasing volume of open records requests is part of what’s driving the cost, and that many small towns simply lack the staff to fulfill the requests without outsourcing the work. (The dramatic increase in the number of records requests in Sedalia has been driven in part by citizen opposition to real abuses of power over the last few years. More details are provided here and here.)
This is a real tension, and Missourians who care about open government should not wave it away. The Sunshine Law exists because taxpayers have a right to see what their government is doing, and that right shouldn’t depend on the size of the city. But when a town of 20,000 people is paying half a million dollars a year in legal fees, much of it tied to records requests, something in the system is broken. The law is functioning as intended—it’s the capacity to comply with it that’s failing.
Part of the problem is structural. Missouri’s smallest cities and towns often have no in-house attorney, no records clerk, and no dedicated compliance staff. When a Sunshine Law request arrives, towns often hire whatever legal help they can afford. Firms like Lauber have built a business model around exactly this gap. The arrangement isn’t necessarily predatory—someone has to do the work—but it does mean the cost of transparency in a small Missouri town scales with legal billing rates rather than with the actual complexity of the records involved.
The Show-Me Institute has documented this problem before, and the numbers get worse than Sedalia’s. In 2018, Institute researchers sent Sunshine Law requests to cities across the state asking for basic spending records. Battlefield billed $35,000 and Hollister billed $25,000 for records that Springfield, a far larger city, and Strafford, a far smaller one, handed over for free. The ability to produce a checkbook register has nothing to do with city size. It has to do with whether a city’s leadership wants residents to see how their money is spent. Missouri courts have recognized how far this can go—Rudi Keller wrote for the Columbia Daily Tribune in 2019 that a Boone County judge ruled that the University of Missouri’s demand for more than $82,000 to fulfill a records request amounted to a de facto denial, not a fee.
Small, struggling towns deserve some benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are simply receiving more requests as residents want more visibility into local government. A town that has historically operated with little scrutiny may find that its first real exposure to the Sunshine Law is uncomfortable. But there’s a difference between a town facing legitimate scrutiny and a town being structurally unable to respond without hiring outside counsel for routine requests.
If the goal is government transparency rather than legal billables, Missouri lawmakers and municipal associations have better tools available. The Missouri Municipal League could develop shared records-request templates and training so small towns aren’t paying attorney rates to answer routine questions. The legislature could examine whether some categories of Sunshine Law compliance could be standardized in ways that reduce the volume of one-off requests requiring individual legal review. And towns themselves should be asking whether a records clerk, even a part-time one, would cost less over a year than the current pattern of per-request legal bills.
Missourians should take seriously the problem that small towns are struggling to comply with the burdens of being open. The current model of outsourcing routine compliance to law firms billing by the hour is an expensive way to deliver necessary transparency. Sedalia’s residents are right to ask where the money is going, as are the taxpayers of a town paying outside counsel to handle a request that should take a few hours.
Missouri’s small towns didn’t create the Sunshine Law’s compliance burden, and taxpayers shouldn’t need to fund a cottage legal industry just to see what their government is doing.
If I told you that seven close-knit organizations were considering merging certain services for purposes that involve mutual support, regular sleepovers, and cost savings, would you guess I was talking about:
You could understandably guess A, but since I am writing about it you probably know it is B.
Olivette, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Maplewood, Webster Groves, Shrewsbury, and University City have launched a study to consider whether merging their individual fire departments would be a beneficial move. (As an aside, it is worth noting that University City has four streets named after a “Seven Sisters” school.)
The economic and political science literature on local government mergers is cautious. In one major literature review of studies of municipal mergers from dozens of counties, the author came to a few primary conclusions. First, cost savings from mergers do happen, but they are usually much smaller than predicted. Second, public services may be improved through having greater municipal resources, but this often results in a larger bureaucracy that limits potential cost savings. (The third main conclusion doesn’t apply in this instance.)
One of the main reasons cost savings are smaller than predicted is because governments rarely have the willingness to fire employees in mergers, so redundancies are maintained at first. Cost savings tend to come from attrition as redundant positions are not filled over time. That is indeed what happened when several fire districts merged in Oregon in the 1990s, where all reductions in employment came through attrition. But over time, there were some cost savings.
Another reason why local government mergers don’t save as much as promised is that everybody is moved up. If City A pays trash collectors more than City B, and City B pays their clerks more than City A, both sets of employees get moved up to the higher salary spot. That could certainly happen here. For these seven cities, the lowest median fireman salary is in Shrewsbury, at $83,668. The highest median salary is in Maplewood, at $117,873. Do you think the combined department will have a median salary closer to Shrewsbury or closer to Maplewood after negotiations with the union? According to the story in the Post-Dispatch, the union certainly likes its odds here:
There’s another reason the union supports a regional fire department — bargaining power.
Instead of negotiating seven separate contracts, which has sometimes led to conflicts between firefighters unions and city administrators, the union would negotiate just one contract with the fire authority. And it would have a chance to standardize pay and benefits.
The main reason I am supportive of this effort to study the merging of fire departments is because of what it is not. It is not an attempt to merge the fire services into a new, independent fire district. That has also been proposed, and it would be a terrible idea. The various firefighters’ unions prefer fire districts because they are easier for the fire union to control, although unions are certainly influential in cities with fire departments, too. Fire districts elect their board members in April elections that get very little attention, and their board members are only concerned with managing the fire district. Union support for these obscure votes is vital. With municipal fire departments, the local races, particularly the races for mayor, get more public attention. More importantly, the revenues and costs of operating the fire department must be shared as part of the revenues and costs of operating the entire city. Elected officials in a municipality have to operate the fire department within the overall revenues and budgets of the larger city. If these cities merged into a shared fire department, the cities would still be funding the departments. That’s a good thing.
Overall, I think there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed changes. If I have to pick between a regional fire department or a new fire district, I’m going with the department.
Susan Pendergrass speaks with Emily Ekins, vice president for policy and society and director of polling at the Cato Institute, about new survey data on Americans’ declining civic knowledge and growing openness to socialism. They discuss why younger Americans are less averse to socialism and communism than older generations, what Cato’s polling reveals about basic civic knowledge gaps, why the founders prioritized protecting rights and freedoms above solving economic problems, the psychological concept of locus of control and its link to support for socialism, and more.
Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Emily Ekins, you are at the Cato Institute, vice president of politics and society and also director of polling, right, Cato? Thanks for
Emily Ekins (00:10):
That’s correct, yes.
Susan Pendergrass (00:11):
joining us. You guys do lots of great polling and survey that you did recently this summer that kind of coincided with the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States particularly caught our eye, and I appreciate you coming on to talk about it.
Emily Ekins (00:25):
Thank you for having me. Glad to talk about it.
Susan Pendergrass (00:28):
Yeah, I mean, honestly, there’s a lot in the news these days, multiple surveys coming up with results that I guess some people are shocked by, but clearly within this week we’ve had new election results, and something about the idea of socialism is really resonating with folks in the United States right now. Why do you suppose that is?
Emily Ekins (00:52):
Well, that’s a really tough question. I think
Susan Pendergrass (00:53):
That’s a big question. But first of all, you could tell us what your poll found on it, but your poll supports what many of them support, which is that views on socialism are more positive than they’ve been in the past, and views on capitalism are more negative. And I just wonder, since you’re out talking to people, why do you suppose?
Emily Ekins (01:12):
Yeah, so first let’s separate out young people from older people.
Susan Pendergrass (01:17):
Okay.
Emily Ekins (01:17):
especially Americans who grew up and came of political age during the Cold War, they know what socialism is and they know how many tens of millions of people it murdered over the past hundred years or so. And so there’s really a strong aversion to the word socialism, to the word communism, among people of that older generation. But there really is a drop-off. And it’s hard not to think that the Cold War ending had something to do with it, where these younger generations had less reason, perhaps, or teachers didn’t talk about why not socialism, why not communism, it just doesn’t work. And so right now, a lot of young people are worried about affordability, and particularly housing. I have to say, looking through the data, it seems like housing may be kind of a linchpin here, that people who are really struggling to afford their rent or their mortgage, or paying a large percentage of their income on housing, they’re very susceptible to these arguments, because people come around and say, well, we’re going to lower your price, the cost of living. The problem is that these policies, centralized economic planning, just does not work. It has the same set of consequences. But I think economic anxiety is part of it. But there’s actually more to it, and I’d love to talk to you about that, because our survey was connected to America’s 250th and the Fourth of July. We launched it right before the Fourth of July, but we had a lot of questions on our nation’s founding. What led to the founding and the creation of our country? And I think what we found is that young people know next to nothing about things that matter. We asked, we had a series of civic questions, seven questions. They only answered one of seven correctly. The one they answered correctly was, who was the first president? And 70% knew it was George Washington. And I thought, well, good, at least they know that. But the problem is they don’t know the more important questions. Why did we declare independence from Great Britain? Why did we adopt the Constitution of the United States? What is the purpose of the Constitution of the United States? And without knowing the why, it’s really easy for other people, trying to curry favor and win votes, to come in, rewrite history, and basically tell young people that they offer an alternative program that will solve their problems. And without knowing the history of why we set up a system of limited government, when they hear these alternative proposals, they don’t understand where it could go wrong.
Susan Pendergrass (04:10):
Yeah, and just to clarify, some of the questions you asked were like, how many branches of the federal government are there? And half, almost half, of the respondents got it wrong, right? They did not know it was three. What country we fought in the Revolutionary War, a lot of folks didn’t get that right. I mean, some of these very basic questions, and that jumped out at me immediately, like when you ask somebody their opinion on socialism and they don’t know how many branches we have of our federal government, how could they possibly answer that question in an informed way? Right.
Emily Ekins (04:40):
Yes, no, I’d love to share something with you. We kind of got into the weeds on this one question. We asked a question where we said, what is the purpose of government? Is the purpose of government primarily, not to say there’s no other purpose, but what’s the primary purpose of government, is it to protect rights and freedoms, or is it to solve economic and social problems, or both equally? And about a third of all Americans, so this isn’t just looking at young people, this is all Americans, only a third of Americans said to protect rights and freedoms. Most everyone else said it was either both equally or to solve economic and social problems. And so here’s the fun part. We took this question and we loaded it into four of the leading AI models, so Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini. We said, feed in all of the writings, speeches, drafts, letters, published and unpublished works of the American founders. How would they have answered this question? And all four models came back with the same answer. They said, this isn’t even contestable, this isn’t even hard, it was very clearly number one, which was to protect rights and freedoms. So why? Well, so that’s why I’m saying the why really matters. Teaching young people, teaching Americans the why. Why did the founders think it was protecting rights and freedoms? Aren’t there complex economic and social problems we want to tackle? Well, here’s why. The argument they made was, they weren’t anarchists, they wanted the government to do some things, but they recognized that when government was not constrained in its power, and was not governed by consent of the governed, right, that problems happened, that government exploited people, government oppressed people. And so there was a hierarchy of goals here, and the main goal was government needs to protect rights and freedoms first. And then everything else has to be subordinate to that. And as long as your program or your idea does not require the government to fail in its duty to that first goal, which is to protect rights and freedoms, then you can have a discussion. And apparently, this was just the thing the founders agreed on. Now, you had Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, different sides, different opinions about the role of government, but I thought that is the argument, that’s the discussion I think is missing from our current framework, which is why. Why is unlimited government dangerous? Why do we want to limit it? Isn’t it obstructive? Isn’t it preventing us from solving problems that we need to solve? Well, here’s why. And then if you want to have government do X, Y, or Z, make sure we don’t undermine liberty in the process of doing it.
Susan Pendergrass (07:41):
Yeah, I think that’s right, but then you also see, okay, so absolutely, when you talk to folks who are gravitating towards this new idea of socialism and democratic socialism, it’s like, well, I think
healthcare should be free for everybody, I think housing needs to be affordable, I think childcare needs to be affordable, without kind of taking that next step, which is to say the government’s going to pay for everything. And then the government’s going to decide. I’ve talked to people who like this idea, and they’re like, I’m
Emily Ekins (08:07):
Mm-hmm.
Susan Pendergrass (08:08):
willing to give some of my paycheck to help do this. And I’m like, but there’s central planning involved. They will decide how much of your paycheck and they will decide where it goes to. And that is, they, whoever’s in office. Like if you don’t like the people in office today, they, we are the central planners. That’s how it works, and generally they haven’t done a good job at it. But on the other hand, they’re like, I just want people to have healthcare and I just want people to have housing, what’s wrong with that? Without realizing, I think, to your point, this idea of the social contract, where the government only governs by the consent of the people, I just think that violates that in a way that says, we’ll give all the power to the government and we’ll let them decide how that gets redistributed. Not to mention the fact it’s never worked. It’s been tried multiple times and has never worked, but it sounds so attractive right now. And
Emily Ekins (08:57):
Right.
Susan Pendergrass (08:58):
I also think part of that attractiveness that comes out in your survey is people recognize that currently there is a feeling that capitalism is turning into crony capitalism, and there’s a lot of fears around fraud and things at the federal level, that I think is not only making socialism more attractive but is kind of giving capitalism a bad name. What do you think?
Emily Ekins (09:28):
Yes. Okay, there’s so much I agree with what you were saying there, and there’s a lot to unpack. I think that there’s two things going on when we’re talking about, like you said, people just want affordable healthcare, they want people to be able to afford their housing, childcare if they need that, and so forth. So there’s two issues. One is abuse of power, and then what actually works. So one is, make sure that you don’t give government too much power, because it always leads in the same direction. Can someone show me an example where unchecked government power ever didn’t result in the oppression of the people? I would
Susan Pendergrass (10:07):
Yeah.
Emily Ekins (10:08):
love for a democratic socialist to point that out, because there isn’t one. That’s something we’ve learned through the test of time. The second thing is just more pragmatic, centralized economic planning, where the government says, we’ll take more of your taxes and then we’re going to plan out your healthcare, your childcare, we’re going to, when it comes to housing and things like that. Whenever you centralize economic decision making, we have some data on that, and it has never worked, because of something called the knowledge problem. Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote extensively about this. Those government experts, you could take the whole faculty from Harvard and MIT and Yale, and have them sit on a board and try to figure this out, they would not do as good of a job as millions of Americans making individual decisions when they’re free and able to do so. Now, people would say, well, then why isn’t the free market working in healthcare, why isn’t the free market working in housing? And the argument is this: that’s not the free market. That’s actually
Susan Pendergrass (11:16):
Right.
Emily Ekins (11:17):
government, excessive government management of those areas. Like with housing, there’s a lot that goes into it, and I’m not going to go, we don’t need to go into all of it, but there’s just some simple things, right? When you think about supply and demand, if you have more people in demand of housing than you have supply of it, the first thing you should look at is, are we limiting the supply of housing in some way? And if the answer is yes, start there before we have the government seizing property from landlords, for heaven’s sakes. So there’s some first steps that people should look to. But again, without civic knowledge, without economic knowledge, how could we expect people to do that?
Susan Pendergrass (11:57):
I mean, that’s the basic point, right? We talked a little bit before we started, like Missouri, our kids aren’t even learning to read. So I understand that we need to do a better job of teaching civics and history and geography, and certainly at the federal level, there’s NAEP tests on those things and the results are terrible. And the results of your survey are dismal when it comes to why younger people, what their civic knowledge even is about how the government works and why it was founded. But I don’t see how we can begin to tackle that, or what is capitalism, what is socialism, and who are Lenin and Stalin and Friedrich Hayek, how do we tackle that if they can’t even learn to read? I feel like we’re
Emily Ekins (12:36):
Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (12:37):
we’re slouching towards Gomorrah, it’s like, I feel like we need to start at these basic levels and then try to take on civics and history, but I could see you thinking we need to do them simultaneously. What do you think?
Emily Ekins (12:52):
Well, yes, to your point about wanting to raise the reading level of kids in Missouri, my very first thought was let’s think about Mississippi versus California, and the dramatic differences in reading competency between the kids in both states. One state implemented better processes, phonics, right? Phonograms, phonics.
Susan Pendergrass (13:17):
Yes. Yes.
Emily Ekins (13:19):
I was raised in California, they were like, we’re not going to do something new, we’re going to teach it this new way, like sight words, and learn by absorption. Anyway, some things work better than others. And when economic decisions like education are made in a centralized fashion, and the centralized planners get it wrong, then all the students suffer. So what can we do about that? Well, more school choice, that’s one approach that we could look at, and then also doing a better job at figuring out what works, what doesn’t work, and actually implementing it. Public education is not a jobs program for adults, right? It’s for children.
Susan Pendergrass (14:03):
Yeah, I’ve heard it argued both ways, honestly, in Missouri, but that’s it.
Emily Ekins (14:06):
Well, we care about both. We want teachers and students to be taken care of well.
Susan Pendergrass (14:11):
Yes.
Emily Ekins (14:11):
But again, if we have experimentation, competition, where people are actually innovating, apply what works. But if we just have it centrally determined by one small group of people and they get the answer wrong, lots of kids suffer.
Susan Pendergrass (14:30):
So where do you see this heading? You know, Zohran Mamdani is opening up government grocery stores in New York, and as somebody who grew up in the sixties and seventies, I can only think of what happened in the Soviet Union when they had government grocery stores, and there were lines and they were terrible. The fact that that isn’t an attractive idea to anyone kind of blows my mind. So where do you see this going? Are they going to have to, is it going to have to play out? Rent controls and government grocery stores and free childcare, are they going to have to play that out and see that it doesn’t work? Or what do you think is going to happen ten, twenty years from now?
Emily Ekins (15:09):
Yeah, it’s hard to say. Maybe they’re going to just do a live demonstration for us so we can repeat and learn exactly what we learned every other time government
Susan Pendergrass (15:17):
Yeah.
Emily Ekins (15:18):
tried to do these things. I mean, it’s just like a huge eye roll. Like, what are they doing? We
Susan Pendergrass (15:23):
Right.
Emily Ekins (15:23):
have some data. I mean, I think that a lot of these leaders would purport to support the idea of scientific research, academic research. Well, consult that. What does that say will happen with government-run grocery stores? It’s not going to go well. But
Susan Pendergrass (15:41):
Right.
Emily Ekins (15:42):
I understand, again, his goal, people could say, is noble. But
Susan Pendergrass (15:46):
Right.
Emily Ekins (15:47):
markets actually deliver that better than government, and empirically there is evidence to support that.
Susan Pendergrass (15:55):
I mean, New York’s had rent control for a long time. I just am kind of surprised, if it’s not maybe the person and the personality, I just don’t understand. And again, I go back to thinking to myself, right now we have a group of folks with a lot of money. We have our own president making a lot of money in office, and he’s hanging out with people with a lot of money, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and maybe if people are associating that with capitalism, maybe what they’re saying is they want to reject that.
Emily Ekins (16:27):
Yes, I think that that’s exactly right. There’s something called policy moods, where when you have a Democrat in office, the voters tend to say they want smaller government. When you have a Republican in office, the voters start to say they want bigger government. This is a well documented phenomenon, that kind of whoever’s in office, voters will tend to go the other direction. And I too have wondered that very thing, if having a billionaire for president and having him be friends with lots of billionaires, anyone that’s like, well, I’m against them, then whatever they stand for. So if they were religious, then they’d probably be like not as religious, depending on how they’ve really been framed. And I think Trump has been framed as this billionaire capitalist. And so I think that that is definitely playing a role here. I also think that there are some
deeper trends happening in the American electorate, and we probably don’t have time to go into that in too much depth. But
Susan Pendergrass (17:24):
Let’s try. Yeah.
Emily Ekins (17:25):
what I would say is I think some of the problems are psychological, in kind of almost a spiritual psychological sense, not religious, I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about this concept of the locus of control. In psychology, there’s this idea that people can differ to what extent they explain events in their lives as being within their control, or outside their control. And people who think of things inside their control, they’re more likely to be happier and earn more money, have better relationships, better friendships, be healthier, less likely to get in fights, because they think that they have some say in what’s happening in their lives. They think their choices matter. Now, for the external locus of control group, psychologists have really worried about this, because all the good things I just mentioned just reversed, flipped, worse grades, worse health outcomes, poorer relationships, more likely to get in fights when they’re in high school, because, you know, if people think, well, it’s not my fault, they’re just a victim of circumstance, then it’s harder for them to feel like their choices matter. Well, anyway, at a more societal level, what we are observing is that each generation of young people, when asked survey questions to measure their locus of control, they’re becoming more and more external in their locus of control. What that means is, young people, each generation of young people, we’ve been studying this since the 1970s, this is Jean Twenge’s work, each generation of young people is more likely than those before them to say external forces are shaping their lives. They’re less likely to believe that their own agency is what matters in their lives. Now, the reasons for that are complicated, multivariate, and
Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
Sure.
Emily Ekins (19:23):
complicated. But what the consequence of that is, is that we do know this, people that have an external locus of control, they externalize the events in their lives, they are far more drawn to socialism. That’s just the way it is. They’re drawn to socialism, a zero-sum view of the world, it’s like us versus them. And some really bad things can happen when people go down that route. There’s a lot more tolerance of political violence, and we’re seeing that play out. And so the question is, well, why is that happening? I don’t have all the answers to why, but I do think we should recognize that it is happening, and it’s not just economic, it’s not just political, it’s at the level of psychology.
Susan Pendergrass (20:05):
Yeah, and were we to enact the agenda of some of these democratic socialists, then we would simply be, I think I heard somebody say, fitting people for cement shoes. We would simply be putting them more into the externalist camp, right? Where it’d be like, I depend on the government for food, housing, healthcare, and childcare, I have no control over my life. And if they decide to raise how much or lower how much, or put in a work requirement, I have no control over how well my family’s doing or my own well-being, because it all depends on these decisions by the government, doesn’t that exacerbate this idea of externalism?
Emily Ekins (20:48):
Well, that’s actually the irony here. So evolutionary biologists have actually gone through and documented what happens here, is that kind of this external locus of control will lead people to support policies that actually make the world more external, meaning
Susan Pendergrass (21:04):
Oof.
Emily Ekins (21:04):
that they have less control over the situation. So, in the case of the 2008 financial crisis, in which they were really examining this, the crisis will make people feel like they lack agency, because understandably a recession is not the fault of any one person. So then those voters go out and vote for politicians who promise to do X, Y, and Z policies that actually will, ironically, make another recession more likely, will actually slow the economy, make things worse. And so it’s interesting from an evolutionary biology perspective, how that can happen, those negative feedback
Susan Pendergrass (21:40):
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, what’s the policy implication of that? Or what do we do to try to stem that tide? I mean, I’ve heard folks say, number one, we improve high school education in regard to civics, history, and economics. Maybe, I don’t know. That feels like a very
long term goal that’s unlikely to have any real impact, but what do you do from a policy point of view?
Emily Ekins (22:05):
Right, no, that gets tricky. I feel like a book could be written on this topic.
Susan Pendergrass (22:09):
Yes. Mm-hmm.
Emily Ekins (22:11):
But I do think, like, the way I’ve thought about it mostly is from a perspective of kids, and how do you raise each rising generation to have a more internal locus of control rather than external. Right now we’re doing the opposite. And, you know, just anyone that’s a parent of young kids, I think you can probably, or if you’re a parent of children at all, you’ve probably seen this in action, where kind of the zeitgeist in our public schools, the zeitgeist, and especially social media, is not helping, where like you can see at micro levels how we all the time are telling young people it’s not their fault, it’s forces beyond their control. I do think that in colleges and universities, as well as K through 12, critical race theory and ideologies that are similar to that really emphasize the external. That’s not to say that external forces like racism or sexism don’t exist or don’t matter, that’s not what we’re talking about. But if you tell kids the reason for the challenges you face are due to insurmountable challenges that you cannot overcome without electing this politician, that’s teaching young people an external locus of control. So at the college level, it’s rampant, and I don’t observe any efforts on the part of administrators or faculty to recognize the psychological harm that they are doing to their students by propagating ideas that really turn the attention of their students to focus and emphasize on external forces.
Susan Pendergrass (23:43):
Yeah, there’s certainly folks like Ian Rowe out there who are fighting hard against it, to say don’t
Emily Ekins (23:48):
Yes.
Susan Pendergrass (23:48):
you dare talk to our kids that way, but I think you’re exactly right, we don’t even talk about AI. But I can see us heading for a big correction, and if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. But it’s hard for me to foresee a future where the idea of the government taking care of things for everybody loses popularity. I just don’t see
Emily Ekins (24:18):
Right.
Susan Pendergrass (24:19):
where we’re going with it. Like, I just don’t know.
Emily Ekins (24:23):
And here’s why it works. This is what I would also remind people is that when the government runs businesses or runs industries, we observe the same sorts of consequences. It’s all a matter of degree, longer wait times, lower
Susan Pendergrass (24:35):
Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Ekins (24:37):
quality services, limited access to kind of the best of the quality. So, like in healthcare, for instance, the more government gets involved, and this is, there’s academic papers that demonstrate this, it’s quite clear, you have less access to the star doctors, to the star hospitals, to the highest ranked, in terms of quality. And think about it, if you have a cold or the flu and you need something minor, for instance, a government-run healthcare system, I think, probably seems great in that situation.
Susan Pendergrass (25:11):
Yeah.
Emily Ekins (25:12):
But what if you have a life-threatening illness? You don’t want long wait times. You want the best quality. You want to have access to the best doctors and providers, clinicians. Unfortunately, the more government gets involved in running things, longer wait times, lower quality, less access to the best. And it is like that everywhere it’s been tried. And I think we should do more to push back, to say no, they will fail to deliver what they’ve promised, and here’s why.
Susan Pendergrass (25:45):
Yeah, I know somebody who moved to Canada for the healthcare system and currently has a torn ACL. Surgery is
Emily Ekins (25:52):
Oh no.
Susan Pendergrass (25:53):
scheduled for like twelve months from now. And that’s like a year wait to fix a torn
Emily Ekins (25:56):
Oh my god. Yes. Wait time. Wait time.
Susan Pendergrass (26:00):
I assume it will heal itself, but I mean, I don’t think that reality sinks in. Certainly there’s a lot of work to be done, and there’s a lot of people with a lot of great ideas. You mentioned one I work on all the time, school choice, to improve outcomes in education for everybody, and give all kids, regardless of income, more opportunities. That’s what you do. You make the schools perform for the families. But even that faces incredible headwinds. And there’s great ideas out there around healthcare and around housing. We had Bryan Caplan on talking about, just build more housing. San Francisco, it’s impossible to buy a house, build more, stop regulating and over-regulating where they can be built. We know that there are some things that could work, but instead I think it just must seem easier to just have the government print the money and pay for it. I just don’t know. That’s why I think we might have to see a correction of some sort, because when I see in your poll that of the eighteen to twenty-nine year olds, thirty-eight percent had a positive view of communism, that means that we have an incredible work ahead of us. I mean, communism,
Emily Ekins (27:15):
That’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (27:16):
like Stalin, and like, yes, what led to genocides, and they must, I don’t think that side of communism is out there. So
Emily Ekins (27:28):
No. And I think there’s an organization that has polled on this, and we should do some polling as well. But most young people just don’t, I think they
Susan Pendergrass (27:34):
Yeah. I don’t know.
Emily Ekins (27:36):
run out of time after World War II, and like everything after that, they just
Susan Pendergrass (27:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Ekins (27:41):
too. I was a studious student, I paid attention, and we didn’t get to any of that. Like
Susan Pendergrass (27:47):
No, yeah.
Emily Ekins (27:47):
the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, like all of these communist revolutions that killed probably upwards of a hundred million people. How did we run out of time to talk about that? Might there be some value in us
Susan Pendergrass (28:02):
Right.
Emily Ekins (28:02):
learning some lessons of the very recent past?
Susan Pendergrass (28:06):
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, what’s next for you guys in terms of what we can look for, for more interesting polls? I know you’re always doing
Emily Ekins (28:14):
Yes, actually, we are in the process right now of writing an exciting survey where we’re looking at economic populism and democratic socialism. And this is where I get really excited. We’re looking at the psychological correlates of those types of policies. What types of psychological traits and underlying beliefs and assumptions correlate with support for these types of economic policies? So we’ll have to wait to see what the data says, but I’d love to share it with you.
Susan Pendergrass (28:45):
That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Emily. I really appreciate it. I could talk to you forever, but let’s wait and come back and talk about that one. I do really appreciate it.
As we look ahead to Missouri’s 2027 legislative session, literacy reform is likely to be one of the top education issues. States like Mississippi and Louisiana have surged past Missouri on national reading assessments, particularly in the early grades. While these states have adopted several important reforms, two have been central to their success: improving literacy instruction and requiring students to demonstrate reading proficiency before advancing beyond the third grade.
Many states are considering whether to follow their path, including Missouri.
The retention component of these literacy policies is often controversial. Critics worry that it amounts to “punishing children.” But it is no kindness to promote a child through school who cannot read. Indeed, research shows that, at least in the early grades, retained students benefit tremendously in terms of on-grade academic performance when they are held back.
The debate also tends to focus narrowly on the students who are retained. However, new research in several states (including Michigan and Ohio) suggests that these policies produce broader benefits by affecting the much larger group of students who are ultimately promoted. This is because it turns out that students benefit from just the threat of retention, even if retention doesn’t actually occur.
Why? The answer is a bit uncomfortable: Weak reading skills alone do not seem to motivate schools and parents to make literacy a top priority. The possibility of retention, however, creates a clear incentive for everyone to intervene earlier and more intensively.
Writing on recent changes that weakened Ohio’s grade retention policy at the Fordham Institute’s Gadfly Daily, Vladimir Kogan provides a nice discussion of the value of the grade-retention threat. He writes: “Although much of the debate about retention laws has focused on impacts on students, the new evidence suggests that benefits come primarily from changing the behavior of two sets of adults—parents and educators.”
The evidence that early-grade retention can benefit retained students is already strong. This newly emerging evidence that these policies also improve outcomes for many students who are never retained only strengthens the case for reform.
Missouri lawmakers should consider such evidence as they consider literacy reform during the 2027 legislative session. During the 2026 session, they failed to pass literacy reform. Another year of inaction would mean that another cohort of children will pay the price for Missouri’s weak literacy policies.
I first wrote about the use of Flock license-plate readers in Missouri in early 2025. Then and now, the use of the license-plate readers to track cars on public roads and elsewhere was expanding across the nation.
As I stressed in my first piece on Flock, there may be no clear “right to privacy” on public roads, but that doesn’t mean average American citizens should be tracked as we simply move around doing our daily business. Police have abused and will likely continue to abuse these systems. One police officer was recently fired in Joplin for doing so.
The risk, however, goes beyond bad law enforcement actors misusing the system. Concerns about constant government surveillance are legitimate. Surveillance equipment such as this was used by police around the world to enforce authoritarian restrictions during COVID. We shouldn’t have to give up our personal liberty—and that liberty includes the right not to be tracked by the government without a warrant—under the guise of safety.
Thankfully, people are starting to push back against Flock and similar police surveillance equipment. I don’t believe our state or our country should become a vast surveillance society (assuming we are not already there), even if it makes us “safer” in some ways.
Several Missouri communities have recently ended their Flock camera contracts. The towns of Weston, Seneca, Louisiana, and Bolivar have cancelled, or are in the process of cancelling, their Flock contracts. The Dutchtown CID in St. Louis did the same. I hope that this is the start of a major policy shift against the cameras.
Much more to come from me on this topic. The solution to crime in Missouri does not have to be a vast surveillance system watching every person in the state.
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