So I was distressed to hear that the school board of Republic R-III in Republic, Missouri voted unanimously to remove Slaughterhouse Five from its curriculum. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the decision was “based on the complaints of Republic resident Wesley Scroggins, a professor of management at Missouri State University, and the father of several home-schooled children,” who “complained that the books advocate principles contrary to the Bible.”

This is paradoxical. Scroggins home-schools his children, presumably because his values conflict with those he believes the public school instills. He is exercising his right to choose how his children are educated. I’m sure he would object if the state board of education told him what books were suitable for his children to read. How then can he justify restricting what other students can study in school?

The real solution to this problem is more choice, not less. If we had a real market in education, parents who disapprove of Vonnegut and other authors like him could send their children to schools that don’t teach their works, while other schools could offer a more contemporary curriculum.

The district model for schooling is outdated. If it was ever a sensible model for educating students (I have my doubts), it was when the country was primarily rural and the technology to deliver the world’s information to every household did not exist. We have long since progressed past the need for these archaic bureaucracies that limit parental, student, and teacher choice. One district removing a single book from its curriculum may seem insignificant, but it illustrates how the current educational system limits rather than facilitates access to knowledge.

For any Republic High School students who want to understand the headline — or just spite their board of education — click here.

The post Republic, Missouri Has Come Unstuck in Time appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post The Eternal Struggle for Lower Transaction Costs: A Short History of the Modern Free Market Movement appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Less excusable are the actions of supposedly wise politicians who lay down billions in tax dollars in the vain hope of hitting it big with a stimulus or economic development bill. We are promised that a dollar in government spending will create more than a dollar in economic growth.

This idea, known as the fiscal multiplier, has never been borne out by evidence. When the actual results of government spending on the economy are examined, they show lackluster or even negative returns. However, that has not stopped proponents of greater government spending from using the multiplier to promote everything from the federal stimulus bill to state and local subsidies for warehouse construction around Lambert–St. Louis International Airport.

The multiplier is based largely on the work of economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued that higher government spending combats people’s propensity to hoard money in a recession and puts unemployed people and resources to work. As the spending ripples across the economy, a dollar in government spending should cause substantially more than a dollar in economic activity.

The Barack Obama administration invoked multiplier theory to promote the $787 billion federal stimulus package. The president’s economic advisers assumed every dollar spent by the stimulus would add $1.50 to gross domestic product (GDP). In a March 2 column for the New York Times Economix blog, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan showed that stimulus spending did not boost GDP, and may have caused it to shrink.

Nor has stimulus spending delivered the bounty of jobs that its supporters promised. Obama claimed that the stimulus would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8 percent., yet it hit 10 percent and now remains stubbornly stuck at 9 percent.

Others have taken this idea a step further, claiming a still bigger multiplier effect for specific projects — thinking, just as I did in my youth, that it must be easy to toss the ring around the bottle. When final plans for Ballpark Village were announced in 2006, the Saint Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association (RCGA) estimated that Phase I of the project would cost $387 million, but generate $273 million annually — paying for itself in a year and a half. Of course, this assumed that everything would go as planned. Almost five years later, construction has not started and the investment has been downgraded to $155 million, with at least $57 million of that coming from various levels of government. Furthermore, Ballpark Village is primarily shuffling existing businesses around instead of attracting or creating new ones. Stifel Financial Corp., the village’s largest future tenant, will move all of seven blocks.

Despite these failures, politicians of every stripe recently trotted out the multiplier to support subsidies for warehouses around Lambert, through “Aerotropolis” legislation. Although the precise equation behind it remains shrouded in oracular mystery, an RCGA study predicts that $300 million in public funding will lead to almost $34 billion in private economic activity over 20 years, suggesting a truly absurd return of more than 10,000 percent. Here, the Keynesian multiplier has itself been multiplied by the central planner’s conceit of being able to pick winners successfully — truly a sucker’s game.

The government cannot create resources from thin air. It must take them from taxpayers through taxation or borrowing. Resources used by the government therefore cannot be used by the private sector. Increasing government spending does not in itself increase the country’s capacity to produce — it just shifts existing production away from goods and services that consumers demand, and toward those demanded by politicians.

The multiplier is a lie, but an attractive one, luring the listener like the familiar siren song of my youth: “Ring the bell, win a prize!”

John Payne is a research assistant with the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Development Spending by Government Only Multiplies Madness appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Yum. Despite many people’s instant aversion to the insects, people have eaten cicadas for decades — but typically grilled, and never before in ice cream, to my knowledge. Nonetheless, the concoction proved a hit — so much so that Sparky’s sold out of it before it even officially debuted. Unfortunately, the health department warned Sparky’s against making more, likely ensuring that this will be the only batch of cicada ice cream ever sold there:

Sparky’s approached the Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services and asked about the use of cicadas in the ice cream, Gerry Worley, environmental health manager for the department, said.

“The food code doesn’t directly address cicadas,” Worley said. “We advised against it.”

Despite the fact that people are free to eat cicadas on their own and frequently do so, the city has recommended that food service professionals avoid using this highly demanded ingredient. Everyone loses in this situation. Sparky’s loses business and publicity. Consumers lose an exotic experience. The only winner is a climate of senseless regulation.

The post Local Government Inhibits Ice Cream Innovation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Since 2007, the proportion of students in the district scoring “basic” — essentially at grade level — or better has now more than doubled from 23 percent to 48 percent, rising faster than any other district in the state.

Test scores from students that still fall under the Orleans Parish School Board, which held onto a small group of high-performing schools, improved as well, with 82 percent of students scoring basic or better, up 2 percentage points from the year before.
[…]
Still, the proportion of RSD students scoring at basic proficiency in state testing climbed 5 percentage points to 48 percent this spring from the year before. That figure combines results from state LEAP, iLEAP and graduation exit exams.

The latest results compare with growth of just 1 percentage point to 66 percent across the state as a whole.

The 16 schools that remain under the Orleans Parish School Board, some of them magnet schools with admissions requirements, continued to perform well above the state average.

This last bit undermines the oft-repeated notion that charter schools only prosper by “stealing” the best students from public schools. New Orleans’ experience shows that all schools can improve when parents are allowed to choose the schools that best fit their students’ educational needs. There’s a great deal of evidence that charter schools in Missouri improve educational outcomes, but in order to realize gains anywhere close to what New Orleans has witnessed, Missouri will have to allow for expansions of both the number and the geographic scope of charter schools.

Link via Marginal Revolution.

The post School Choice Continues to Succeed in New Orleans appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Across the country, there is widespread disagreement among educators, politicians, and the general public about what constitutes a good curriculum. Even within districts, conflicting interest groups fight heated battles over curricular changes.

On April 26, a group of students took over a board meeting of the Tuscon Unified School District, protesting a proposal that would change the district’s Mexican American Studies program from a social studies credit to an elective. Student supporters of the program chained themselves to the board’s dais and could not be removed by security. Under a national curriculum, disputes such as this would have to be resolved at the federal level. Congress would determine what students should learn. Allowing Congress to serve as the custodian of truth in the teaching of history, social studies, and other subjects is asking for trouble.

In fact, our current system is already too centralized, with state legislators and boards of education committing new crimes against veracity every time curriculum design comes up for debate. Last spring, conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education pushed through a new social studies curriculum. Among other changes, the new curriculum required a greater emphasis on the “conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s,” and excised the insufficiently religious Thomas Jefferson from a list of thinkers who inspired revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, replacing him with overtly Christian figures such as John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas. The left plays this game just as much as the right. California’s guidelines forbid textbooks to “cast adverse reflection on any gender, race, ethnicity, religion or cultural group.” That sounds well-meaning, but it has led to a whitewashed version of history for fear of offending any interest group.

We should return decisions about educational content to the local level. That would not make these arguments disappear, but it would give parents the greatest opportunity to find a curriculum that suits their educational preferences.

Furthermore, localized curricula would give teachers more flexibility in meeting students’ individual educational needs. When I pursued teacher certification, I encountered repeatedly in my coursework the idea that every student learns in different ways. Good teachers must vary the information they present and how they present it in order to appeal to the different aptitudes and interests of their students. A national curriculum may not completely strip teachers of the ability to tailor lessons for the particularities of their students, but every new mandate from on high removes a little more autonomy from the educators who know their students best.

Many American schools are in desperate need of reform, but more federal micromanagement is not the solution. We need more autonomy for schools to innovate and serve the individual needs and interests of their students, and greater choice for parents to hold those schools accountable. A national curriculum would take us in the opposite direction — toward heavily politicized subject matter and no alternatives for students whose needs are left out. Reforming education in this country is not one large problem — it’s millions of small ones, and a national curriculum would only make them harder to address.

John Payne is a research assistant with the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy. He is a former high school social studies teacher, and an original signatory to “Closing the Door on Innovation,” a manifesto opposing a national education curriculum.

The post Don’t Nationalize Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Full Podcast (MP3)

The post Podcast: Rolling Back Big Government With Tom Woods appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties. Indeed, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in determining people’s choices of neighborhoods in which to live.
[…]
Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services?

You should read the whole thing, but I’d like to expand on Boudreaux’s analogy to show that such a system of public supermarkets would not only be inefficient, but also inherently inequitable.

Because people would try to buy houses in districts with good stores, much of the price of groceries would be built into the price of housing. The price of housing would rise, but not uniformly. Areas with relatively good supermarkets would become more expensive while areas with very poor supermarkets would become cheaper. Less expensive housing would attract people with lower incomes, and they would quickly become locked into a system of bad supermarkets.

Even if one of the supermarkets in a low-income area managed to improve drastically and become one of the better supermarkets, this likely would not benefit those low-income residents in the long run. The improved supermarket would attract people with relatively high incomes and slowly drive out those with low incomes through increased housing prices. Considering that housing is already the single largest expense for most Americans, tying rents to supermarket service would only further restrict the already limited options for buying food that those with low incomes currently face.

The analogy to education isn’t perfect, obviously. The biggest difference is that people without school-age children don’t usually consider a district’s school system when deciding where to live. That might help to explain why more young professionals are choosing to live in Saint Louis, but the city is losing population among almost every other group. As long as lower- and middle-class residents of cities like Saint Louis and Kansas City cannot choose from a number of quality schools, they will continue to stagnate or decline, trapping the worst in their failing institutions.

The post Designed to Fail appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Nevertheless, economist Robert Murphy catches several writers — who should know better — repeating this hoary old myth. For instance, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman recently compared the current Republican position on federal spending to Hoover’s during the Depression:

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” That, according to Herbert Hoover, was the advice he received from Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, as America plunged into depression. To be fair, there’s some question about whether Mellon actually said that; all we have is Hoover’s version, written many years later.

But one thing is clear: Mellon-style liquidationism is now the official doctrine of the G.O.P.

To which Murphy responds:

To his credit, Krugman acknowledges that this quote comes from Hoover’s own memoirs, written well after the fact. But to his discredit, Krugman fails to notify us that on the very next page of Hoover’s memoirs, after he explains the liquidationist advice he got from his treasury secretary, Hoover wrote,

“But other members of the Administration, also having economic responsibilities — Under Secretary of the Treasury Mills, Governor Young of the Reserve Board, Secretary of Commerce Lamont and Secretary of Agriculture Hyde — believed with me that we should use the powers of government to cushion the situation.“[2]

If you read Hoover’s memoirs in context, you see that his whole point in bringing up the Mellon doctrine was to tell his readers that he rejected the advice. Hoover was trying to show people (and of course I’m paraphrasing here), “Hey, I did everything I could to get us out of that awful downturn! You should have seen the crazy laissez-faire stuff my treasury secretary was recommending.”

And Hoover was not exaggerating when it came to his expansion of the government. It’s relatively well-known that Hoover endorsed and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff into law, causing American exports and imports to decrease by more than 60 percent by the end of his term. However, Hoover’s meddling was hardly limited to the sphere of international trade. He increased federal spending by almost 50 percent and dramatically increased taxes, including raising the top income tax rate from 25 to 63 percent. Perhaps most disastrously, Hoover urged businessmen to keep wages up, which they did even amid serious deflation. These artificially inflated wages forced businesses to lay off workers. Soon, the country experienced the greatest mass unemployment in history, with a quarter of the labor force out of work.

It was Hoover’s dramatic interventions into the economy that turned what would have been a severe recession into the Great Depression. In a 2009 article, UCLA economist Lee Ohanian estimated that Hoover’s high-wage policies accounted for two thirds of the 27-percent drop in GDP from 1929 to 1931. Unfortunately, Franklin Roosevelt built on Hoover’s mistakes instead of learning from them. Rexford Tugwell, a leading member of FDR’s brain trust, later remarked that “[t]he ideas embodied in the New Deal legislation were a compilation of those which had come to maturity under Hoover’s aegis.” Not surprisingly, the continuation of bad policy did nothing to remedy the economic situation, and the country stayed mired in depression until after World War II.

The post Herbert Hoover the Interventionist appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Full Podcast (MP3)

The post Podcast: Educational Options for At-Risk Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Now watch Salman Khan discuss his online Khan Academy at this year’s Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference:

Khan Academy gives students engaging instruction in an expanding number of subjects, right now primarily those in mathematics and economics, befitting Khan’s background as a hedge fund manager. Of course, this makes it easier for self-motivated students to teach themselves linear algebra, but I think the real innovation of Khan Academy is the way in which it can supplement more traditional courses.

Instead of receiving a lecture at school and working on problems by themselves at home, students using the Khan Academy can watch the lecture at home online and then work through the problems at school, where the teacher can work one on one with any students who are struggling with the material. Khan Academy’s mastery assessment software also makes it easier to identify who those students are and what particular topic they are struggling with, so the teacher can use his time most efficiently.

And it’s all free! Khan started developing these courses for his cousin and discovered that he had a knack for it. Now the Khan Academy is a nonprofit, where he works full time. Even with virtual schooling programs that are developed by for-profit companies, the fact that they can be used by millions of students simultaneously means that the per-pupil costs are extremely low. We need greater experimentation in our school systems to allow more innovations like Khan Academy to spring up and spread across the world.

The post The Education of Tommorow … Today! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A quick look at the available evidence suggests that the same holds true here in Missouri. Although it does not contain the same rigorous controls as the study of Florida and Chicago charters, a 2010 study by the Missouri General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Education reported that seven of eight charter schools in Kansas City and Saint Louis city achieved higher graduation rates in 2009 than the surrounding school districts, and six of eight beat the state average. Critics often accuse charters of skimming off the best public school students, but in Missouri that is emphatically not the case. The charter law requires one third of charter schools to actively recruit and serve dropouts and high-risk students.

With regard to college attendance, a quick look through the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s data indicates that, with the exception of two schools in Kansas City, all charter high schools send graduates on to college at a comparable or higher rate than their public school counterparts. It should also be noted that if a charter is sending graduates to college at the same rate as the public schools they supplement, but have higher overall graduation rates, students who attend those schools are still more likely to attend college than are their public school counterparts.

The evidence in Missouri appears clear: Charter schools improve educational attainment for students in Kansas City and Saint Louis. Perhaps it is time to expand charters beyond those narrow confines.

The post Charter Schools Boost Graduation Rates and College Attendance appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Emperor Diocletian tried to arrest this inflationary spiral in A.D. 301 with an unenforceable decree fixing wages and basic commodity prices. Faced with significant shortfalls in the western half of the empire, tax collectors concentrated on the cities and towns, where magistrates faced fines and confiscations if they failed to produce sufficient revenues. Not surprisingly, the wealthy and privileged fled to the countryside, where the reach of imperial authority was inherently shorter.

This exodus helped ingrain feudalism in the countryside as the rich bought up large estates. For the record, I don’t think city earnings taxes, no matter how high, will lead to a resurgence of feudalism, but incentives still change the way people behave now just as much as they did 1,700 years ago. If people can avoid a tax — and the rich can avoid them most easily because of how mobile they are — many of them will do so. Although we don’t know precisely the level of taxation in Roman cities, it was almost surely higher than 1 percent. Nonetheless, all else being equal, higher taxes tend to drive people away, whether we are talking about early 4th-century Rome and Londinium (London) or contemporary Kansas City and Saint Louis.

The post The Effects of Municipal Taxation: Roman Empire Edition appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

During the debate surrounding the 2006 minimum wage law, the Show-Me Institute released a study by University of California, Irvine, economist David Neumark showing that minimum wage laws decrease employment among unskilled workers and prevent them from acquiring the skills they need to climb the socioeconomic ladder. When the minimum wage increases, businesses respond by hiring fewer low-wage employees. The employees who keep those jobs are more likely to be teenagers from relatively affluent families than minority workers from poorer households.

In essence, a higher minimum wage destroys jobs for the most vulnerable workers in the labor market and redistributes a portion (but not all) of the lost wages to workers who frequently live in families that make more than four times the poverty level. Neumark’s thorough review of the literature demonstrated that a 10-percent increase in the minimum wage (about 70 cents, at present) caused teenage employment to drop by 1 to 2 percent and increased poverty by three quarters of a percent. It is a peculiar type of anti-poverty program that throws poor people out of work.

A 1994 study by economists David Card and Alan Kreuger purported to show an increase in employment in New Jersey’s fast food industry after the passage of a higher minimum wage. However, Card and Kreuger relied on telephone surveys for their employment information. Subsequent studies using payroll documents from the restaurants themselves showed that employment fell after the minimum wage was increased, just as standard economic theory predicts.

Business owners generally do not employ people or give employees raises out of the goodness of their hearts — nor could they, without bankrupting their enterprises. If the government forces a business to pay workers more than the owner believes their labor is worth, those workers will soon be out of a job. Wages do not rise because of government mandates, they rise as workers acquire more skills and create more goods and services at lower costs. We can boost wages across the board with improvements like better education or greater investment in technology, but simply waving the wand of government and expecting low wages to rise magically is no solution at all.

John Payne is a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post The Minimum Wage Hurts Those It Is Designed to Help appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several of the speakers have since noted the growth in both the quantity and quality of young liberty activists over the last few decades. In his Washington Examiner column, Cato Institute Vice President Gene Healy recollects that when he founded a college libertarian group in the early 1990s, “we considered ourselves lucky when we could get a couple of dozen socially awkward malcontents together to grumble about the government.”

But economist Bryan Caplan probably summed it up best: “Twenty years ago, a pack of libertarian students would have been roughly as awkward and freakish as attendees at Comic-Con … or, say, me. Now I see hundreds of students who aren’t just smart, but smooth.”

My college experience was not nearly as benighted as Healy’s or Caplan’s. I helped lead a libertarian group at Washington University in Saint Louis from 2001 to 2005, and we were extremely active: holding weekly meetings, bringing speakers to campus (sometimes multiple times per semester), debating other student groups, helping to publish a biweekly conservative-libertarian student newspaper, etc. The group was a major force in campus political life, but we were still outnumbered and isolated. There were only a few other large and active libertarian college groups across the country (Loyola New Orleans, Hillsdale College, and George Mason University spring to mind), so we felt like the last of a dying breed, a remnant of brighter days.

At one point, we tried to launch a national libertarian student group, much like what SFL has become. When we started planning for a conference, we thought 100–200 student attendees would be phenomenal, but we never achieved that because there wasn’t a great deal of interest in the idea outside of those few groups. If someone told us that, less than 10 years later, there would be a pro-liberty student group hosting a convention with more than 500 attendees (and many others turned away because of a lack of space), we would have laughed in his face.

I don’t think it has ever felt this good to be wrong. (Maybe in 2006, when the Cardinals surprised even me by beating the Tigers and winning the World Series, but I’m pretty sure this is better.) Students and young people in general are listening to the message of freedom being articulated by talented writers, filmmakers, artists, etc. — and by groups like the Show-Me Institute. I get dispirited on an almost daily basis when I see the government grow and grow, seemingly without end, but I have seen real changes in people’s beliefs since I first started tilting at these government windmills. That’s no guarantee that things will change for the better, but it is something. It’s hope.

The post A New Hope appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Pujols falls into the top federal tax bracket with a 35 percent marginal rate, so his federal tax bill will come in a little below $10.5 million. (It’s lower than that because of the lower rates he pays for the first few hundred thousand dollars and his ability to write off his Missouri income tax on his federal tax return.) The state of Missouri’s take is easy to determine because it is a flat 6 percent, clocking in at $1.8 million. The Saint Louis earnings tax is for 1 percent of income, but it only applies to games he plays in Saint Louis, so it will be half of 1 percent in his case, or $150,000. (He will have to pay earnings taxes in other cities that have them, like New York City and Kansas City, for the games he plays there, but if I were to try to tabulate his tax bill exactly, it would be absurdly complex, and I’d demand to be paid like his accountant.)

In short, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that Pujols might make $30 million a year, because after paying the various taxmen, he will end up with closer to $17 million — or less than 60 percent of his gross income.

The post How Much Will Pujols Pay in Taxes? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For most of baseball’s history, even the best professional players did not make salaries hundreds of times greater than the average American. In large part, this was attributable to the reserve clause attached to player contracts that forced them to bargain solely with the team that signed them — even after the contract expired. In 1975, an arbitrator allowed two players to become free agents, effectively striking down the reserve clause. From that point forward, general managers have been forced to compete against each other for free agents, driving player salaries skyward.

In most cases, these multimillion-dollar salaries benefit everyone involved. Most obviously, the players benefit because they earn more money. And, although ownership would undoubtedly like to return to the days of the reserve clause and cheap labor, they still generally prefer paying stratospheric salaries instead of fielding a third-rate team. Most importantly, baseball fans enjoy watching their highly paid stars play up to their potential, as shown by our willingness to spend money on the sport. Until the recession hit in 2008, Major League Baseball (MLB) set attendance records on an almost annual basis, peaking in 2007 with more than 79.5 million tickets sold — an average of 32,785 fans per game. Attendance has declined about 7 percent since then, down to (still healthy) 2003 levels. The reason that superb athletes like Pujols can command millions or even tens of millions of dollars per year is because people willingly give their hard-earned money to watch them perform.

Seen from the perspective of the value he brings to fans, Pujols is a bargain at $25 or even $30 million a year. The Cardinals had the fourth-highest MLB attendance in 2010, with 3,301,218 fans attending 81 home games, according to ESPN. If each of those fans contributed only nine dollars — just once — it would net Pujols $30 million for the year. Of course, this dramatically understates how dearly Cardinals fans value his skills, because it ignores attendance at away games and the much larger audiences listening on the radio and watching on television. J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University and author of The Baseball Economist, estimates that an eight-year contact with Pujols is worth $350 million, based upon similar deals to other superstars and current revenue growth. That’s $43.75 million per year. Another examination, using the statistic Wins Above Replacement (WAR), pegs the dollar value of an average season for Pujols at $32.3 million.

This analysis is complicated by subsidies that the Cardinals have received from the government — mostly in the form of deferential tax treatment and government-secured loans for the construction of the new Busch Stadium. Some area taxpayers do not care for baseball or the Cardinals, so they lose out on that deal. Such subsidies, however, are not an argument against high salaries per se, but rather against government favoritism toward certain businesses.

In 1960, Stan Musial came off a substandard season and requested a pay cut from $100,000 to $75,000. It was an honorable move from a man who demanded nothing short of perfection from himself. But nothing suggests that Pujols’ success as a player will decline any time soon. The value that Pujols has added to his fans’ lives far outstrips even the eight-digit figure on his current contract — so go ahead and pay the man what he deserves.

John Payne is a research assistant for the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Pujols Is Worth Every Penny (All 3 Billion of Them) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Roos painted the mural to protest the city’s decision to use eminent domain to seize numerous properties from his low-income housing nonprofit organization, Sanctuary in the Ordinary. After Roos completed the mural in 2007, the city cited him for violating its sign code and ordered Roos to remove the mural. Roos refused, and fought the case in federal court on First Amendment grounds. Last March, a U.S. District Court ruled against Roos, remarkably claiming that the mural would be legal if it were devoid of political content, like a fleur-de-lis or a Cardinals logo. This turns the First Amendment on its head, because it was explicitly added to the Constitution with the intent of protecting political speech.

The case also illustrates the unity of property rights and civil rights. If the government can legally regulate away Roos’ most effective platform, it will have the same chilling effect on free speech as direct censorship. Similarly, freedom of religion is useless if zoning laws prevent groups from building places of worship; freedom from search and seizure only applies if your home is your castle; and freedom of the press will not get you very far if the government can block access to all the presses. Many people think of property rights and civil rights as fundamentally different things, but if the government places enough restrictions on how you can use your property, it must necessarily interfere with our fundamental political rights. Let us hope that the appeals court will understand this connection and allow Roos to speak his mind.

Headline allusion here.

The post Using Your Property to Criticize Us for Taking Your Property? You’d Better Believe That’s Illegal appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Learning From Home Means Never Having to Miss a Day appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A 2008 study of the economic impact of political conventions found “no statistically significant evidence that these huge conventions contribute positively to a host city’s economy.” The authors point out that political conventions crowd out a great deal of day-to-day economic activity, so although hotels typically benefit from the influx of convention attendees, local shoppers avoid the area because of the crowds and stringent security. This is precisely what happened in New York City during the Republican National Convention in 2004, as reported by the New York Times:

But some businesses, particularly those around Madison Square Garden, where tight security scared off customers, said they paid a heavy price.

“We had high hopes, but there was nobody on the streets,” said Marlon St. Clair last week as he presided over uneaten platters of barbecue chicken, corn bread and ribs at Soul Fixins, a restaurant on 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “Usually we are packed at lunchtime. But there’s nobody here to eat.”
[…]
It was clear that parts of the city were emptier than usual, particularly Midtown. Even though the state suspended sales tax on many items of clothing for the week of the convention, popular stores like the Gap and H & M at Herald Square were deserted.

Ridership on the commuter railroads showed declines, ranging from 10 to 60 percent, and bridge and tunnel crossings plummeted as well, indicating that a goodly portion of workers simply stayed away.

If Saint Louis held the convention, it would be a tremendous inconvenience for anyone who works or shops downtown and would likely lead to a great deal of lost productivity and business from local sources.

Conventions also cost tens of millions of dollars. The parties themselves foot a great deal of the bill, and the federal government shells out huge amounts for security (the impropriety of which could be the subject for another entire blog post), but a massive amount still has to be raised locally. Organizers in Charlotte expect their costs to total more than $40 million. Organizers for the last two conventions managed to raise the funds without turning to local and state taxes, but as Mike Dino, CEO of the 2008 Denver Convention Host Committee, put it, “We worked hard, but we got lucky too.” If Charlotte does not prove as lucky, its taxpayers will most likely be left holding the bag. Saint Louisans should not envy them. As with government, so too with political conventions — less is usually more.

The post Saint Louis Dodged a $40 Million Bullet appeared first on Show-Me Institute.