Page 718 – Show-Me Institute

Gulag Demonstration at Washington University

Posted on November 10, 2009May 5, 2026 by Christine Harbin

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall! To celebrate the historic event, the Washington University branch of Young Americans for Liberty constructed a Gulag on their campus. Josh Smith, Caitlin Hartsell, and I trekked over to the event and talked with students about liberty.

The organization’s message was that Americans shouldn’t forget the lessons learned from a divided Germany, and that we should be wary as our government expands in size and scope.

Show-Me Institute intern Caitlin Hartsell was interviewed on KMOX (link via Combest):

“I mean it’s out there and it’s really out of the box,” said graduate student [Caitlin] Hartsell, “But I think it’s good that it really gets people thinking about what the actual implications of what socialism and communism mean.”

Ultimately, the university shut down the gulag because it was “too offensive.” Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit reports more on this subject.

Government Transparency Done Right

Posted on November 9, 2009May 5, 2026 by Audrey Spalding

On Friday, the state of Missouri surprised me. I’m used to long waits, unreturned phone calls, and copying fees whenever I ask a local or state official for public records. So, when I called the folks at the Missouri Accountability Portal (MAP), a state government website devoted to making state spending and revenues transparent, I expected the same. Even though, you know, the point of MAP is easy and quick access to information.

While MAP had readily searchable tables of employee salaries, state spending, tax revenues, and tax credits, the large databases behind those tables weren’t available for download as a whole; instead, they were exportable only in bite-sized tables. This made analyzing, say, state expenditures during the past decade impossible.

I left a voicemail; they left a voicemail. I left another voicemail. And then, on Friday, I was told that the web page was up.

That’s right, not only did the folks at MAP fulfill my request, but they thought they might as well fix this problem for everyone. Here’s the link: http://mapyourtaxes.mo.gov/MAP/Download/Default.aspx. On this page, you can download: state expenditures for the past decade, either by year or as a gigantic database; stimulus revenues and expenditures; a database of employee salaries for the past three years; and the amounts that the state has given away in tax credits during the past decade. Oh, and the spreadsheets for this year are updated each night — so you don’t get stale data.

I have never had such an experience of helpfulness and ease when requesting public information. I want to thank the folks at MAP for being so forthcoming and for working to make the website that much more useful for everyone.

Missouri’s Homeschooling Laws Are Fantastic

Posted on November 9, 2009May 5, 2026 by Sarah Brodsky

I knew homeschoolers in Tennessee faced some restrictions, but I wasn’t aware that parents need a bachelor’s degree or their superintendent’s permission to homeschool high school–aged students. (Parents of younger children need only a high school diploma or GED.)

There are many happy homeschooling families in Tennessee, and I haven’t heard of widespread protests over the degree requirements. My guess is that many homeschooling parents in Tennessee earned these credentials before they had children. Or, if they don’t have the degrees they need, they could enroll their children in an online school or a correspondence school and combine its structured program with their homeschooling. It’s also possible that superintendents readily grant exemptions, either because they personally know the homeschooling families in their districts, or because they want to avoid the hassle of a bunch of homeschoolers demanding appeals.

If Tennesseans want to improve their homeschooling laws, they need look no further than Missouri for an excellent model. Missouri doesn’t set any rules about credentials or impose other prerequisites. Homeschoolers have to keep a log of the hours they spend on certain subjects, but no one looks at the logs unless there’s a problem. Missouri parents don’t need to get permission or prove anything before they can homeschool.

Homeschooling laws like Missouri’s are of course desirable from the point of view of homeschooling parents. And their effects extend further. Free homeschooling laws contribute to a free education market in general; any district can potentially face competition from homeschooling. No one in a public district can say, “We don’t need to satisfy these parents. They couldn’t pull their kids out to homeschool, because they don’t meet the requirements.”

Parents as Teachers: A Middle-Class Entitlement

Posted on November 9, 2009May 5, 2026 by Sarah Brodsky

This article in the Kansas City Star celebrates the Parents as Teachers Program, and the fact that it makes no effort to focus on people who really need help:

Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of legislation in 1984 that forced all Missouri school districts to offer the experimental Parents as Teachers program to families living in their boundaries.

Not just to targeted families. Not just for low-income families. But any family in every district.

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what if it’s not targeted by law? Probably disadvantaged families are more likely than others to sign up.” Think again. Better yet, read the statistics from last year’s Parents as Teachers Program in the Columbia Public Schools. About 36 percent of participating parents were from low-income households. (I’m assuming they counted one parent per family. If they counted more than one parent per family, the percentage was smaller.) Only 12 percent mainly spoke a language other than English, and a tiny 5 percent were teen parents.

Parents as Teachers sends out teachers to read and play with kids, most of whom don’t need any intervention at all. We see a similar pattern across a variety of social programs: Middle-class parents are good at finding educational opportunities for their kids, and they crowd out families that need the help. Legislators write eligibility rules and income limits into laws to prevent this, but no such language found its way into the formulation of Parents as Teachers. So the program continues to grow, using tax dollars to entertain middle-class kids and do things their pediatricians could do just as well (like screening for vision and hearing problems).

However, some experts disagree with my analysis and argue that everyone needs Parents as Teachers:

“I’m supposed to be a world authority (on child development), but when we brought my son home from the hospital, I didn’t know what to do. We all need this service.”

Perhaps all parents could benefit, but not all parents need to receive the service for free. World authorities who are paid commensurately with their vast knowledge need to hire their own pediatricians and early childhood educators.

And then there’s the argument that open eligibility removes any stigma from the program, allowing the neediest parents to participate without feeling uncomfortable. There may be some truth to that — but keeping the program open to all imposes a tremendous cost on taxpayers, who have to spend more than $1,000 for each family visited by Parents as Teachers. Removing a stigma isn’t worth that expense.

Congratulations to MoDOT’s Director, Pete Rahn

Posted on November 6, 2009May 5, 2026 by David Stokes

MoDOT Director Pete Rahn has received a well-deserved award from Governing Magazine for his work at MoDOT. I eagerly second the award. (A quick note on Governing: I used to read it regularly. You might assume that most of the writers and readers here, coming from a free-market perspective, would hate a magazine dedicated to government. But, honestly, it’s not as terrible as you might imagine.)

Here’s the key quote from the award, via the MoDOT presser:

Governing magazine specifically praised Rahn’s ability to “partner with the private sector in unique ways to build large-scale transportation projects quickly and affordably.”

That is definitely something worth praising.

Missouri Starts Taxing Yoga Classes

Posted on November 6, 2009May 5, 2026 by Chaya Kristen Chopra

The Kansas City Star reports that on Sunday, the state’s Department of Revenue began enforcing a 4-percent tax on yoga and Pilates classes. Why the change? Missouri officials have decided that yoga and Pilates are places of “amusement, entertainment or recreation” and therefore taxable, rather than spiritual practices that are untaxable. Unsurprisingly, there is already an uproar:

“The practice of yoga in a studio setting is a spiritual practice, and is not done for entertainment,” said Michael Shabsin, a St. Louis area lawyer and yoga instructor.

Shabsin said he is leading an effort to clarify the legal definition for places of amusement, entertainment or recreation and exclude yoga-specific studios. That effort could include legislative proposals and lobbying, he said.

Whether one believes yoga to be spiritual or recreational, should the government really be making that distinction for us? And, for that matter, with obesity wreaking havoc on the nation’s health care system, should the state be discouraging those who use yoga for health or weight loss? A Department of Revenue spokesman says they’re just trying to make applications of the tax fair for everyone. But it seems here that taxing yoga classes isn’t fair to anyone but the Department of Revenue.

Bail Bondsmen Back in the News

Posted on November 5, 2009May 5, 2026 by David Stokes

Nothing involves the combination of occupational licensing, the Second Amendment, civil rights, police and courts, free markets, and entrepreneurship quite like the bail bond industry. That’s probably why I write about it every chance I get. So, when I got back in the office this morning for the first time since Friday (there was a fire in our Clayton office building on Friday, shutting it down, and many of us spent Monday through Wednesday at a think tank convention — my brain is very tired), I was delighted to see Combest linking to a story about an investigation of some bail agents.

Apparently, Missouri is holding hearings on the industry. I might go and testify on Nov. 10 — but, then again, I might not. I really don’t know very much about the industry (my enthusiastic blog postings aside), and since this is one industry where I think the benefits of having some licensing outweighs the costs, I really don’t have that much to add. “Don’t go too far with tightening up the licensing requirements,” would basically be all I might say.

This is also topical because some agents possibly went too far in their efforts to catch someone the other day in Springfield. As the police officer quoted in the story says, agents do have the right to kick down your door in certain circumstances:

“They have less […] restrictions [than] what a law enforcement agency has and can make some entries under some circumstances,” Springfield Police Department Maj. Kevin Routh said. “And that’s the key that’s under investigation here…is, did they have enough information to make entry into the residence?”

I basically think that if the agents did indeed violate the rights of the other citizens, criminal and civil penalties should be enforced. If they made an honest mistake in a difficult situation, then perhaps there should be civil repercussions to benefit the people they harassed, but I wouldn’t see the need for criminal charges. No matter what, there are current laws to deal with this, and this should not serve as some excuse to tighten up the licensing requirements further.

Charters Shouldn’t Have to Copy Traditional Public Schools

Posted on November 5, 2009May 5, 2026 by Sarah Brodsky

Worrisome news from Los Angeles suggests that some public school districts are not the “melting pots” that education lore makes them out to be. Students who don’t speak English are relegated to separate classes, where they have little contact with native speakers. Many who entered the schools in kindergarten still don’t know English by high school. And, once they’ve mastered the language, they have to catch up on the academics they missed:

Mary Campbell, who is in charge of English language learning programs at L.A. Unified, said students must learn English as well as the grade-level material to move into mainstream classes. That often takes longer than learning the language, she said.

It must be a big challenge for a district with lots of non-native language speakers to integrate them all within a few years, so I don’t want to rush to blame L.A. Unified. But it does make you wonder why traditional districts’ English language learning programs are held up as a model for charter schools. The districts’ approach doesn’t work with all students, and charters should be free to try new ways of teaching English that could help students who fall behind in regular English classes.

Several charter proposals in Oregon have been turned down on grounds that they lacked plans to educate children who don’t speak English (and that they didn’t have enough community support, and a bunch of other things). Given the results of English programs in districts like L.A. Unified, no plan could be the best plan. If charters don’t expect large numbers of English language learners, they might mainstream them and let them learn English through immersion. Students would hear English all day long, instead of sitting in a class with others who don’t know any more English than they do. Parents who prefer a structured English program would always have the option of staying in the traditional district instead of choosing a charter.

Language immersion charters are another alternative to traditional English classes. In these schools, part of class time is spent in English and the rest in a foreign language. Every student has the experience of learning in a language they don’t yet speak fluently, so English language learners aren’t the odd ones out. An advantage of immersion charters is that grade-level materials are taught in at least two languages. For example, a Spanish-speaking student attending an English-Spanish charter would learn English for part of the day, while continuing to study some subjects in Spanish. This prevents students from taking one step forward in English, two steps backward in math or history.

If they’re to improve education, charters have to be free to depart from the districts’ established routines — including English classes.

Farm to School and Nutrition Education

Posted on November 5, 2009May 5, 2026 by Sarah Brodsky

Today was the second USDA live Facebook chat. (Here are my comments on the first chat; the video is here.) Today’s session focused on the Farm to School component of the USDA’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” Initiative, and its goal of supplying public schools with local produce. Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan also discussed teaching students about nutrition.

The talk was marked by a conspicuous non sequitur: In response to a question about the high cost of local produce — asked by someone other than me, no kidding — Merrigan insisted that we don’t know that local produce is more expensive for districts than food from other sources. But she went on to list what she called “barriers” to buying local: the difficulties of contracting with lots of individual farmers, fluctuations in local farm outputs caused by weather, seasons when crops don’t grow. I think of those “barriers” as “costs” or “expenses.” If a district has to go to extra trouble or deal with additional uncertainty when it purchases local food, it would be better off buying healthy food from somewhere else.

I agree with Merrigan that some districts are in a better position than others. I imagine that buying local is not all that hard for many districts in California. Those districts would choose local food if there were no federal program, because it would be the most advantageous choice for them. The USDA is encouraging them to do what they would have done anyway. At best, Farm to School is superfluous; at worst, it pushes districts to spend more than necessary on food, taking resources away from other uses, such as paying teachers or repairing buildings.

On the subject of teaching nutrition, the suggestions had more to do with promoting a locavore ideology than with conveying information about food. Merrigan proudly displayed trading cards featuring local farmers, and another viewer commented that a school had produced a fruit-and-vegetable memory game with USDA funds. The thing is, there’s no connection between knowing your farmer and choosing healthy foods. If students get the impression that healthy choices are all about personalities and who you know, they’ll be at a loss when they walk into a grocery store and find that the names of farmers aren’t displayed.

Nutrition is not a popularity contest, and students ought to learn about what kinds of foods are healthy without bringing farmers into the picture. And I don’t like the implication that farmers are more worthy of our acquaintance than the people who serve fast food at a chain restaurant. The fact that one food product is healthier than another doesn’t have anything to do with the producers’ intrinsic value as human beings.

Although nutrition facts are more relevant than farmers when it comes to making good choices, I still question the propriety of the federal’s government’s involvement in people’s diets. “Helping people eat healthier food” is not one of the enumerated powers granted in the Constitution. Furthermore, this is not something that the government does effectively. The Deputy Secretary noted that the food pyramid website has had 9 billion hits — yet obesity continues to rise! She concluded that the government hasn’t done enough. I’d say it’s done too much.

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