So just how much does it cost to hold an election?
Well, obviously, that depends on the election. If you’re like me, you’ve heard the figures for high-profile, national elections, but the general focus there is campaign costs. What about the cost of renting polling places, printing ballots, and even paying postage on absentee ballots? For a Missouri municipal election, at least, Andrew and Hickory counties were able to shed some light on that question.
According to the Post-Dispatch, experience is not the sole factor to consider when hiring teachers:
That’s the conclusion of a new study released Wednesday that looks at the quality of public school teachers in Illinois.
The 44-page report from the Illinois Education Research Council found the highest percentage of academically talented teachers were at schools in the Champaign area, with those in suburban Chicago and west-central Illinois close behind.
I know this isn’t really shocking news for anyone who has given the subject serious thought. It seems fairly obvious that experience is only one of many factors that need to be taken into account when hiring mechanics, doctors, financial analysts, stock brokers, farmhands, dishwashers, sales clerks, and, yes, even teachers. So, surprise! This study confirms the obvious.
The reason this study is necessary at all is that unions have strong incentives to favor policies that benefit current workers at the expense of future workers. The result is an overemphasis on experience relative to other merits in the workplace. So it really shouldn’t be surprising when teacher unions favor experience-based pay and oppose merit-based pay — even when both common sense and science contradict them.
Slowly, yet surely, Missourians have given away a significant aspect of their freedom during the last one hundred years. In this state’s early days, it was understood that constitutional protections for liberty and property meant you were free to use your land as you saw fit in pursuit of the American dream. People used this freedom to build homes, farms, and businesses, while still maintaining the flexibility to change the ways they used the property as their circumstances demanded. While they could be held liable for any damage they did to their neighbors, property owners were generally at liberty to work toward prosperity on their own initiative, without asking anyone else’s permission.
Sadly, Missourians today rarely enjoy the same freedom. Long ago, a significant part of the population decided that a person’s freedoms end where they create a critical mass of irritation among their neighbors. Now, even when people hold documents saying they own their property, local governments have crafted an imposing array of laws to tell them how they may and may not use it. Ordinances restrict how land may be used, how tall or how large buildings may be, what they must look like, and how many people or families may live in them. Where owners once had flexibility to change the use of their properties to realize their greatest advantage, they now must gain the approval of others whose interests might be directly contrary to those of the individual property owner.
A case in point is the story of Brad Ferguson, who would like to develop his land on the outskirts of Washington. He believes that people would be interested in owning homes that he would like to build on his land by Holtgrewe Road, so he has been trying to jump through the necessary hoops to profitably develop his property. For the first century of Missouri’s statehood, Mr. Ferguson would not have been required to ask anyone before building homes and offering them for sale to willing buyers. Even in this past year, he had a glimmer of an opportunity, thanks to the controversial “village” law that should have allowed him to pursue his dream. But the fear of inconvenience has led Mr. Ferguson’s neighbors and elected officials to severely limit his individual liberty and to prevent his constitutionally guaranteed right to “enjoy the gains of [his] own industry” by realizing the potential value of his property.
The founders of our nation spoke about circumstances in which the desire of a majority conflicted with the freedoms of the individual. James Madison, well aware that the tendency of governmental power would be to legislate majority preferences to the detriment of those outside the mainstream, cautioned that government must be obliged to control itself. He noted that where a majority was willing to restrict the liberties of some, they necessarily compromised freedom for all within that society.
These same principles once guided the Missouri Supreme Court as well. More than a century ago, the Court held that when a government subjects the property of its citizens to the unlimited control of “even the most democratic depository of power,” it would still be a despotism. The justices further stated that communities were and ought to be powerless to deny individuals the right to use their property as they saw fit, so long as that use did not threaten the health, safety, or welfare of the community. Because the state constitution protected citizens’ liberty and property, cities were not permitted to limit the height, location, or use of buildings on their property unless the government demonstrated that a particular use of property would threaten the neighborhood’s health or safety.
While courts in Missouri and across the nation have in recent years neglected such a simple freedom as the harmless development of one’s own property, this sort of liberty is no less essential today than it was when courts were more zealous in its protection. We, as citizens, should all cultivate respect for the importance of this sort of freedom, and we should remember that our own liberties necessarily depend on our willingness to secure the freedoms of others, like Mr. Ferguson.
Dave Roland is a policy analyst with the Show-Me Institute, a Missouri-based think tank.
The St. Louis Public School District is looking for a new superintendent. If you think you’re up for the job, keep in mind that this is the only school district in the state where the superintendent is required — by law — to post a $50,000 bond to be hired. (It should be noted, however, that posting a bond generally costs only a fraction of its full value.)
Why would a school district, let alone Missouri legislators, require such a thing?
In general, having a person post a bond is done to encourage something. It all depends on the wording. For example, the St. Louis district could use the bond to encourage the superintendent to stay (she could get it back after five years with the district), to work toward an academic goal (she could get it when the district’s drop-out rate decreases by a set amount), or simply to lower the school district’s costs.
The bond required of Dr. Diana Bourisaw, and every other St. Louis superintendent hired by the district during the past 40 years, encourages none of those things. In its entirety, the bond requires the superintendent to "Faithfully perform the duties of his (her) office as provided by law."
How did this happen?
Continue reading “What Does $50,000 Get You? (A St. Louis Story)”
"Rains clog sewer system, residents asked to limit toilet use," the Kansas City Star reports. The hilarity of this headline should be apparent to anyone with a bit of schooling in economics. According to the article:
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment issued a statement Wednesday urging Sublette residents to curtail water usage and use toilets as little as possible. The statement said sewers will remain shut down until further notice.
I sincerely doubt that this statement will have much of an effect on water usage. A much more effective way to curtail water usage would be to simply raise prices, much like a private provider would do when the costs of supplying water temporarily but dramatically increase. In response to the higher price, water consumers would cut back on consumption. Only when the benefit to the consumer outweighed the cost to the water producer would water be consumed.
Admittedly, this is an imperfect solution because, as the article alludes to, the primary problem is not in water usage per se, but in the sewers. Ideally, sewage companies would be able to charge for each flush independent of how much water it uses, but this may be impractical. If these services were privatized, they might be provided by different companies, but the sewage company would have a strong incentive to pay the water company to raise prices.
Under the current system, both Kansas and Missouri get bureaucratic proselytization about when they can and can’t flush, rather than actual results, and that just stinks.
Dr. Philip Anderson, Dean of the St. Louis University School of Medicine, calls for tuition assistance for students studying to be primary care physicians over at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His rationale is that there aren’t enough primary care physicians, and tuition assistance would provide an incentive for young bright minds to move into the field.
I suspect that the supply of doctors is relatively inelastic, and thus tuition assistance woouldn’t have much of an effect on the number of primary care physicians available. The problem is that the supply of doctors is fundamentally limited by occupational licensing laws. It’s no secret that it costs an enormous amount of both time and money in order to become a doctor in the United States. As a result, there are fewer doctors than there would be otherwise, and those who do become doctors enjoy much higher wages. In the end, this hurts the average family who has to pay more for medical services — particularly low-income families who are already strapped for cash.
The standard argument for requiring doctors to be licensed is that this protects the public from fly-by-night operations that only endanger the public’s health. There may be some merit to this argument when it comes to invasive surgery. When it comes to things like treating a cold or giving birth, however, the argument loses much of its force. You simply don’t need an M.D. to effectively do many of the things doctors do. What this argument ignores, though, is that fully functioning adults are capable of making their own decisions. It may be a useful service to warn the public about the dangers of not using a doctor for any given medical need, but requiring the public to use a doctor only limits the options available.
Speaking of midwifery, as Justin Hauke notes, the Missouri Supreme Court has just upheld a law to legalize the practice. Midwifery provides a textbook example of how occupational licensing hurts both the consumer and the competition. The Post-Dispatch reports:
Doctors’ groups have fought efforts to loosen the regulations, arguing that midwives lack training and that pregnancies can quickly become dangerous.
Even if this is correct — and it probably isn’t — this issue is fundamentally a matter of personal choice. We don’t allow the government to treat us like children when we decide what to wear in the morning; why shouldn’t we insist on autonomy when it comes to health care?
My fellow bloggers have written quite a bit more about midwifery in Missouri — for example: here, here, here, and here.
Clearly, Eric Dixon played an influential role in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision.
Missouri now becomes the 38th state to legalize the use of a midwife, certified by a private entity.
In the Post-Dispatch’s coverage, the state’s medical lobby provided a statement:
Tom Holloway, who lobbies for the Missouri State Medical Association, said the new law jeopardizes public safety because it allows midwives to "provide unlimited services related to pregnancy: C-sections, drugs, epidural anesthetic, even abortions, without any state regulation or oversight."
This clearly misses the point. The state’s oversight and regulations haven’t changed. Any expectant mother can still choose to use an “approved” nurse/doctor and receive the same care as always. But they don’t have too. And that is the point.
We were all over the airwaves of Missouri yesterday, talking about ethanol and our recent case study. Justin, sitting at a very impressive desk, appeared on Columbia’s KMIZ-TV as part of a well-done sort of point-counterpoint piece. The ethanol supporters admitted that ethanol has a lower energy content than ordinary gasoline, but said this difference is too small to measure — as though math can’t measure small numbers, which add up to millions of dollars a year statewide, or $29 a year in added costs for the average Missouri driver. That ain’t so small anymore.
I, myself, was a guest on the Mark Reardon show (to listen, click on the podcast at the right side of that page) on KMOX radio in St. Louis. We both appreciated the opportunity to discuss the issue, and thank both KMIZ and KMOX for the invites.
Often, when a county clerk changes the computer system used to report election results, information gets lost. Sometimes it’s temporary — the clerk can find the information on hard copy — other times, it’s never found.
Collecting voter turnout data from Missouri’s 114 counties and the city of St. Louis has proven difficult. If you read my first post, this might surprise you. After all, I reported a success rate of more than 50 percent in obtaining records from county clerks. But getting the records is just the first step.
The Sunshine Law is meant to promote transparency in Missouri government, but the voting records I have received are anything but clear. Although I only requested the last nine years’ worth of data for school district elections, numerous county clerks struggled to fulfill my request. In fact, some didn’t even come close. Many times, information was missing because of a new computer system.
