Fact #1: Our economy and society are increasingly bifurcating along educational lines.

Fact #2: People with bachelors’ degrees are doing much better than people without them.

Fact #3: Not everyone can or should earn a bachelor’s degree. (Okay so this one is part fact, part opinion)

A recent paper by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that while racial gaps in life expectancy are narrowing, the gaps in life expectancy between those with bachelor’s degrees and those without them are widening. And, tracking the last two decades of unemployment data shows that every time there is an economic contraction, those at the lowest end of the educational spectrum are hurt substantially more than those with college degrees. This is reflected in the completely different pandemic experience of more-educated Americans who were more likely to have jobs that could be performed remotely and less-educated Americans who had jobs that had to be performed in person.

If our society continues to cleave along educational lines, there will be serious negative consequences for our politics, communities, and economy.

It is tempting to respond to this problem by saying “Okay, well then everyone should get a bachelor’s degree,” but we know that many good jobs don’t require bachelor’s degrees, many people are unable or unwilling to engage with college-level work, and college is increasingly expensive.

The real question is: Is there another way?

A recent working paper published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University may offer a better way forward. Researchers from Rice University and the RAND Corporation examined occupational credentials—post-high school certifications that denote skills or knowledge relevant to a particular field.

The authors found that certifications increased the probability of employment for workers without a bachelor’s degree by 37 percent. As they put it, “this suggests that occupational credentials act as an important signal to employers in the hiring process, especially for those with less than a bachelor’s degree.” This, as one might imagine, also translates to higher earnings.

It is increasingly clear that students need some kind of post-high school education to access more stable, more rewarding, and more remunerative jobs. Creating quality certification programs and helping link students to the training that they need could go a long way in bridging the educational divide.

The post Are Occupational Credentials the Answer to Educational Polarization? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’ve previously written about the Mercatus Center’s State RegData project, which calculates how many times each state tells its citizens what they can and cannot do. Using a similar program, researchers examined the impact that federal regulations have on individual states using the federal regulation and state enterprise (FRASE) index. Though federal regulations apply to all states, each state’s economy is made of different industries, so regulations targeted at specific industries will affect states differently.

The authors find that “[the] impact of federal regulations from 1997 to 2015 on the Missouri economy is associated with the following regressive effects:

• 93,411 people living in poverty
• 2.7 percent higher income inequality
• 180 fewer businesses annually
• 2,406 lost jobs annually
• 7.35 percent higher prices”

I’ll admit that it’s difficult to quantify these things and find direct links between regulations and these effects; there’s no specific regulation that led to one of these specific consequences. However, this novel program counts phrases that usually translate to regulatory requirements (like “shall” and “must”) to track changes over time. The authors then use this data along with data for other economic indicators to find the regressive effects. Given what we know about regulations generally, these numbers make sense and are pretty staggering.

From 1997 to 2015, the effective federal regulatory burden on Missouri increased by 54 percent. Researchers have found that an increase in the effective federal regulatory burden on a state is associated with an increase in the poverty rate in that state. This helps to explain why federal regulations have led to more people living in poverty and higher income inequality. Regulations reduce entrepreneurship because they increase the red tape one must cut through to be successful, which impacts the number of businesses in a state. Regulations also increase the compliance costs for businesses, which they then transfer to consumers by increasing prices.

These regulations are not just affecting the industries or groups to which they are targeted. They can affect Missouri workers, small businesses, and consumers. As we continue through this legislative session in Missouri, we should remember the unintended consequences of legislation and regulations.

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Some 38 million people, nearly one in eight, live in poverty in today’s America as liberals and conservatives spar predictably over solutions – government assistance versus pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Researcher and writer Michael Tanner wants to draw from both sides.

Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a National Review online columnist, explores the issue in a discussion of his book The Inclusive Economy. His remedy is not more government intervention in spending or redistribution but rather a series of actions that address the racism, gender discrimination, and economic dislocation feeding poverty. They range from criminal justice reform to greater educational flexibility and the elimination of savings barriers for the poor.

We’re hosting this event in both St. Louis and Kansas City.

To RSVP for St. Louis, click here

To RSVP for Kansas City, click here

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The US Department of Agriculture just released an article based on research that concluded that while earlier studies suggested that grocery store location mattered,

More recent studies—using new data with rich detail about food shopping behavior or better methods for understanding the underlying relationships between store access and diet—show that the effect of food store access on dietary quality may be limited.

The study found that regardless of income, people don’t necessarily shop for groceries at the stores closest to them. The study also indicated that food prices affect choices, which shouldn’t be surprising. The part that matters most for Kansas City is the section titled “Building New Supermarkets Is Not Enough.” In one study, researchers compared eating habits before and after a new supermarket opened; concluding,

residents who regularly used the new store had similar diets as residents who did not. The study also found that fruit and vegetable consumption decreased slightly in both neighborhoods.

A similar study of two neighborhoods in Philadelphia—one where a new supermarket opened in 2009 and a similar neighborhood without a new store—was published in 2014 by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Penn State University. Residents’ perceptions of food accessibility in the neighborhood with the new store improved relative to the control neighborhood, but consumption of fruits and vegetables did not improve.

The article concludes that “improving access to healthy foods” won’t have much impact. It suggests that more important factors might be product cost and available income for food. In those regards Kansas City is not doing well—we are a high tax city overall; often charging a higher tax rate in poorer neighborhoods. Kansas City’s profligate spending—despite the best intentions—is hurting its most vulnerable residents.

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Greater Kansas City is on a roll—almost a week doesn’t go by when we’re not on a top ten list of one kind or another. Where we always lag is in creation of jobs and economic growth; we always lag our peer group cities.

Not only is Kansas City lagging our peers overall, but city policy is seriously failing to help those who need it the most. According to the left-leaning Brookings Institution, while Kansas City is having middling success at growing the economy and building wealth relative to other metropolitan areas, it is performing poorly at spreading it around. Over the past ten years, Brookings ranked Kansas City 46th out of 100 at growth and prosperity. Yet we’re down by the bottom for inclusion—a combination of employment, median wage, and relative poverty.

In the chart below, Brookings calculates that over the past ten years the Kansas City region has seen a decrease in the median wage of 7.7%, an increase of 12.5% in relative poverty, and a regional decrease in employment by 3.5%. Despite claims about caring for every neighborhood and every socioeconomic level, civic leaders have failed to deliver to those in the most need.

Supporters of the status quo may like to gather like latter-day Gatsbys and tell us how swimmingly everything is going in Kansas City while they lay out their ambitious plans for the future. They direct us to all the shiny new things they’re building downtown with taxpayer dollars. But it’s worth remembering that far too many people are being left out of the party.

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I spend a lot of time talking to developers and I spend a lot of time talking to developers trying to get them to build east of Troost [Avenue]. If they don't want to do it, you can incentivize them all day long. What they look at is, "How do I get a return on investment?"

Developers can't be faulted for wanting to earn a buck, and investment on the east side of town can carry additional risks. That is exactly why governments adopted tax increment financing, or TIF, to alleviate some fo the risk that investors face. But that policy is made meaningless if everyone gets TIF, and if they get it in the nice parts of town. Of course a developer would not take on a large risk developing east of Troost when the city will subsidize a low-risk development west of Troost. The solution is to stop incentivizing the wealthy western part of the city, and save incentives for where they were actually intended.

Later in the film, Mayor James gets defensive when asked if it isn't time to take action. He says, [53:17]

Everybody says action. Nobody has an answer. If anybody had an answer to that question you don't think it would already be being used? You know, people seem to think that this is somehow a political issue. This is a citywide societal problem and the city and society has to address it; not just people in public office. That's crazy. If that were the case it would have been done by now. Certainly I would have done it by now if I had that power and authority but I don't even have the authority to keep guns out of the hands of 19 year olds.

Certainly the Mayor is correct that the problems faced in Kansas City are not unique to us. These problems plague urban areas all over the country, and they indeed stem from significant systemic issues of poverty, education, and racism. But that is not to say that the Mayor has no "power or authority," or that expecting political solutions from our political leaders is "crazy." It is not. 

The Mayor does have the "power and authority," for example, to tear down the 875 vacant and "dangerous" homes that litter the east side as featured in the documentary. He has the "power and authority" to beef up spending on code enforcement. Instead, he and the City Council have chosen policies that spend money on downtown streetcars and luxury apartments and hotels.

Frankly, if anyone lacks "power and authority," it is the people on the east side of town who can't afford to hire the high-priced development attorneys needed to get the ear of policymakers.

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The important point that these discussions often miss is that it isn’t the folks with six-figure loan debt who are defaulting. By and large, it is low-amount borrowers.  In fact, the average amount of debt from federal loans in default is only $14,014.

How can that be?

Well, think about who takes out large loans to pay for college. We’re talking lawyers, doctors, and folks getting MBAs.  Sure, they rack up a lot of debt, but they also make a lot of money, so they’re able to pay it off.  The people who can’t pay off their debts are the usually the ones who took out loans to pay for a year or two of college but then didn’t complete it.  They incurred the debt and years of lost wages, but will not see the wage premium from that college degree.

The Washington Center for Equitable Growth just released a helpful interactive map that illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. It allows you to search, by zip code, the average loan balance and the delinquency rate of student borrowers anywhere in the country.  As a reference, it gives the median household income of the zip code as well.

Look, for example, at Kansas City’s 64113 zip code. Median income? $113,536. Average loan balance? Extremely high. Delinquency rate? Extremely Low.  St. Louis’s 63105 is the same story, with a median income of $86,031 and extremely high levels of student debt but extremely low rates of delinquency.

At the other end of the spectrum is St. Louis County’s 63140.  There we see a median income of only $21,750 and a low average loan balance, but a high rate of delinquency. The same is true in Kansas City’s 64126, which has a median income of $25,009, extremely high delinquency rate, but moderately low levels of student debt.

When we realize that it is low-amount borrowers who are struggling, our focus should shift from trying to make college free to trying to make college better. Those policy prescriptions don’t fit easily on a bumper sticker, but they’d do a lot more good than the slogans that do.

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The researchers partnered with The New York Times to create a searchable data visualization of every county in America and its neighborhood effect on lifetime earnings. Missouri is shown below  (on the map, blue is good and red is bad.) 

The three best counties to grow up in, paired with the extra money a child from a poor family will expect to make by age 26 for having grown up there, are:

• Osage County +$5,260
• Chariton County +$4,660
• Perry County $4,460

The three worst counties, paired with the negative financial repercussion of growing up there, are:

• St. Louis City –$3,780
• Boone County –$1,470
• Mississippi County –$1,320

The authors point to five factors driving better rates of upward mobility: less segregation by income and race, lower levels of economic inequality, better schools, lower rates of violent crime, and a larger share of two-parent households. 

Each of those factors is important, but here I’d like to focus on the role that educational attainment plays in increasing economic mobility.  Take a look at this graph from the Pew Research Center:

The gap between the wages of high school graduates and college graduates is widening. Helping more students successfully complete high school and then get a meaningful postsecondary credential (it doesn’t have to be a four-year degree, but it’s critical to choose one’s field of study wisely) can be a huge boost to upward mobility. Consider the following graph from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project:

Visually, what jumps out are the dark bars, which show how difficult it is to progress to a better economic situation without a college degree. But the light bars tell a much more hopeful (and frankly amazing) story. At the far right edge of the graph we see that with a college degree, even someone born into a poor family has a 19% chance of making it into the top quintile of income distribution. By definition, only 20% of the entire population is in that top quintile at any given time, so this finding suggests that those who earn a college degree in spite of the formidable challenges of poverty really do achieve economic mobility.

The problem is that so few among the economically disadvantaged are able to earn that college degree. Several factors—broken families, lackluster schools, and unsafe streets, to name a few—contribute to opportunity inequality that is too often overlooked by those who consider income inequality to be the primary (or even the only) concern. But rather than hold out for a single solution to all of these interconnected problems, why not see if serious educational reform (as Show-Me Institute writers have suggested here and here and here, for example) can help give students the opportunities they need to improve their lives?

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These contradictory accounts of the city’s performance point to a more complex reality, a tale of different populations and neighborhoods. The bad news is that wages are stagnant and the poor and middle class continue to leave the city. From 2005 to 2013, Saint Louis City households whose income was less than $75,000 per year (more than twice the city’s median income) fell by 7.8 percent. But the good news is that wealthy households (earning more than $100,000 per year) increased by 78 percent. Households earning $200,000-plus per year more than doubled over the same period.

But as the map below demonstrates, lower income residents are most predominant in North and South Saint Louis City, while the very wealthy are most populous in the central corridor. That means increasing growth where growth is most visible, and stagnation and decline where it is out of sight, out of mind.

Saint Louis City’s planning strategies may have contributed to this bifurcated outcome. We have written before about the city’s attempt to generate density, walkable neighborhoods, and a vital downtown through lopsided investments to the central corridor. The city also uses tax incentives to subsidize high-end living and entertainment districts. Instead of fostering economic opportunity, which draws residents who will generate local culture from the bottom up, the city instead will become an entertainment machine, which will draw the creative class, who in turn will create jobs.

Even where this upended model succeeds (and there is no guarantee of that), there are questions as to whether this actually helps middle-class or poor residents, or simply makes them former middle-class or poor residents. Urban “renewal” in boutique cities like New York City and San Francisco has resulted in a displacement of the poor and middle class and rapidly rising income inequality. Although Saint Louis City is not NYC, income inequality is rising quickly. From 2005 to 2013, the city’s median income fell from 75.3 percent to 69.6 percent of the city’s mean income, indicating an increasingly top-heavy income distribution. This trend, compared to that of Saint Louis County, is shown below:

If leaders focus on making the city a safe, affordable, and easy place to live and do business, it is possible Saint Louis City could enjoy an expansive resurgence. But as things stand, the city is pushing more publicly supported bar districts, luxury apartments, and expensive amenities to draw the rich into the city center and hope the wealth trickles down to the rest. For areas like North Saint Louis, that could be a long wait.

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Ludwig von Mises, a mentor to Friedrich Hayek and a major figure in economics in his own right, set out his views on capitalism and inequality in a slender book (just 113 pages) called The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. First published in 1954, and readily available online for less than $10, it is well worth reading today.

Mises’ treatise on why capitalism sits in the dock, falsely accused of various crimes against humanity, is a classic: bravely saying what still needs to be said. It offers a robust rebuttal to the jaundiced view of capitalism found (most recently and conspicuously) in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

In The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Mises asks: Why do so many people “loathe” capitalism? He gives a threefold answer.

The first factor is simple ignorance. Few people credit capitalism for the fact that they “enjoy amenities that were denied to even the most prosperous people of earlier generations.” Telephones, cars, steel-making, and thousands of other advancements are all “an achievement of classical liberalism, free trade, laissez faire, and capital” — with the driving force being the profit motive and the deployment of capital used in the development of better tools and machines and the creation of new products. Take away capitalism and you wipe out most or all of the extraordinary progress that has been made in raising living standards and reducing poverty since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

The second factor is envy, the green-eyed monster, which causes many people to think they have gotten the short end of the stick. As Mises observes: “Capitalism grants to each the opportunity to attain the most desirable positions which, of course, can only be attained by the few … Whatever a man may have gained for himself, there are always before his eyes people who have outstripped him … Such is the attitude of the tramp against the man with the regular job, the factory hand against the foreman, the executive against the vice-president, the vice-president against the president, the man who is worth three hundred thousand dollars against the millionaire, and so on.”

And finally, the third factor is the unceasing vilification of capitalism by those who seek to constrain or destroy it. As Mises notes, the critics and anti-capitalists go on telling and re-telling the same story: saying that “capitalism is a system to make the masses suffer terribly and that the more capitalism progresses and approaches its full maturity, the more the immense majority becomes impoverished.”

Indeed, that is the story Piketty tells in his book, which has soared to the top of the New York Times and Amazon best-seller lists. Does inequality rank as the great defining issue of the twenty-first century? If you agree with Piketty, it does. He contends that disparities in income and wealth are spiraling out of control, setting the haves- against the have-nots. Without “confiscatory” taxes to create a new social and economic equilibrium, he warns, today’s democracies may ultimately collapse, taking capitalism and the capitalists down with them.

Piketty makes much of the seeming fact (some dispute his statistics) that those at the highest levels of income in the United States have claimed a sharply rising share of total U.S. national income over the past three or four decades. From there he leaps to the conclusion that the vast disparity in income between the top 1 percent and the bottom 90 percent will lead over time to the emergence of a new “patrimonial capitalism.” With nothing (save perhaps violent revolution) to worry about, the heirs to big fortunes will turn into a new class of rentiers, living off the rent they receive from owning land and other forms of capital.

In his analysis, it is set in stone that return on capital (r) outstrips economic growth (g), which means that the heirs to great fortunes stay on the fast track to even greater wealth – without even having to work – while the lower and middle class are condemned to economic stagnation or utter hopelessness. His little formula, r>g, is supposed to be one of the great takeaways from the book, but it points up one of the problems of presenting a far-too-static picture of how people behave in a competitive marketplace.

That would not have escaped Mises’ attention. Mises would have challenged Piketty’s assumption that the heirs to great fortunes would manage their money wisely, or that they would have the same success as others (more driven than they) in searching out the best investments. Mises maintained that “the dull and stolid progeny” of people who built business empires were likely to “fritter away” their heritage and “sink back into insignificance.”

Under a capitalist system worthy of the name (meaning, to Mises, a competitive market economy free of the crippling effects of state planning and controls); it is neither the powerful industrialist nor the rich investor who calls the shots; it is ordinary people in their capacity as consumers. Through their “buying or not buying,” consumers provide “a daily referendum on what is to be produced and who is to produce it.” They have the whip hand – the power to “make poor suppliers rich and rich suppliers poor.”

One may almost pity the poor capitalist portrayed by Mises. However hard he might work or fast he might run, someone is probably gaining on him. At all times, other suppliers are striving to unseat the incumbents by discovering new and better ways of serving their customers. In comes a Wal-Mart or Target and out goes a Sears or K-Mart. It is a battle fought with an unending supply of fresh recruits, and it is never the case (as Piketty claims) that “The past (i.e. wealth accumulated from previous success) devours the future.” Rather, it is the future (whatever the next big thing may be) that replaces the present with something better.

In The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Mises states unequivocally: “Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody.”

Look at the fastest-growing countries in today’s world. Is there not a natural compatibility – as opposed to an inherent contradiction – between major advances in the standard of living in some countries and the ability of their most enterprising citizens to make spectacular gains? That is what has happened in China as a result of economic liberalization: the number of Chinese billionaires has skyrocketed (and is now close to the number of U.S. billionaires), while hundreds of millions of people inside China have worked their way out of poverty.

Is it true – as Piketty contends – that we are witnessing a hyperconcentration of wealth inside the United States?

It might be true if the people with the highest incomes remained the same from one year to the next – over an extended period of time. But they are not the same people. Just as Mises would have expected, it is an ever-changing cast of characters. A recent report from the Tax Foundation data shows IRS data on people reporting a million dollars or more in income over a nine-year period. Fully half of these people made a one-time-only appearance. Only 15 percent of them reported at least a million in income two of the nine years and only 5.6 percent made it all nine years.

There is no danger of an oligarchy of the rich taking shape here to rival the power and permanence of the landed aristocracies in the pre-capitalistic France and Britain. (Note: This assumes that governments do not intervene, as they have been doing, to favor certain groups and enterprises. For more on how government increases income inequality, see Frank Hollenbeck’s article on income inequality, and Andreas Marquart’s work on this topic.)

But there is something else to worry about – something that caused Mises to lose sleep. That is the thought that the natural tendency under capitalism “towards a continuous improvement in the average standard of living” will be stymied by a growing “absence of capitalism” due to “the effects of policies sabotaging the operation of capitalism.” Among those perverse policies, Mises pointed to credit expansion, gunning the money supply, and raising minimum wage rates. Still more, he railed against progressive policies that diminish individual choice and leave more and more economic decision-making in the hands the state. Mises’ greatest fear was that people would “renounce freedom and voluntarily surrender to the suzerainty of omnipotent government.”

Ironically, the most ardent proponents of big government are those who carry on the most about inequality. Do they want nothing more (to paraphrase Churchill) than an equal sharing of misery?

Andrew B. Wilson is a resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, a free market think tank based in St. Louis, MO.

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Here are five market-oriented resolutions for a more prosperous 2014:

1. Privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS). The United States should follow the lead of other Western nations, including Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain, in deregulating and privatizing mail service. It is a form of economic insanity, which can only be explained by the power of the postal union and its political friends, to require daily delivery of mountains of mostly junk mail to U.S. households. The USPS should have to compete with FedEx, UPS and other private concerns in the delivery of first-class mail.

2. Follow suit with other public services. Look for other ways to benefit consumers and taxpayers by deregulating or privatizing other public services, with airports, roads and public utilities at the top of the list. There is a reason vacation travel is much cheaper and more convenient within European and Mediterranean countries than it is in North America and the Caribbean. Europe has widespread airport privatization and greater reliance on market forces to allocate scarce resources. As travel writer Rick Steves says on his website, “Ryanair routinely flies from London to any one of dozens of European cities for less than $20” (through its most heavily discounted fares paid weeks or months in advance).

3. Do not buy the “living wage” rhetoric. Recognize the folly of calls to increase the minimum wage — now $7.25 nationally — to $10 or more at a time of sky-high youth and minority unemployment. Why would a fast-food restaurant — or any other business — want to hire someone for $10 an hour who adds, say, only $6 an hour in additional profit, before counting the cost of his or her wages? To do so would be to accept a $4-an-hour loss. Raising the minimum wage thus has the perverse effect of causing unemployment. It artificially reduces the demand for labor and makes the first rung on the job ladder higher than it ought to be for young and unskilled workers.

4. Break the health insurance oligopoly. The next stage in the seemingly never-ending debate about health care, now entering its sixth year, might be between full-scale nationalization — as one way of rescuing the Affordable Care Act from going into a full-scale “death spiral” in 2014 — and the creation of a much more market-oriented system than the status quo ante. The starting point for a market-oriented approach should be in freeing — and, indeed, forcing — insurers to compete across state lines on both price and range of product offerings, without a great assortment of government dictates or mandates at either the state or federal level.

That would give individual consumers the right to buy low-cost, low-price health insurance — from a far larger universe of sellers. And it would cause big insurers to lose the monopolistic or oligopolistic positions they have built up over the years through assiduous lobbying at statehouses around the country. Their cozy arrangements with state regulatory offices have resulted in mandates to cover everything from hair pieces and contraceptives to acupuncture and marriage counseling. Opening the insurance market to open-ended interstate commerce will cause all producers — both insurers and health care providers — to reduce costs and look for more and better ways to satisfy the health care customer.

5. Choose growth over class warfare. Be prepared for the proponents of big government to try to turn every debate — whether it is about health care, privatization, the minimum wage, entitlement reform, curbing the power and privileges of public sector unions or any other issue — into another rant on what President Obama has called “the defining issue of our time”: namely, income inequality. However, the president and others greatly exaggerate income disparities between different quintiles in the distribution of income by ignoring the effects of high taxes on high earners and, for lower earners, the effects of income tax rebates, food stamps and other welfare. One study finds that income inequality actually declined between 1993 and 2007, after adjusting for taxes and transfer payments.

But the real takeaway here is what the poor and the middle class really need to achieve a better life for themselves and their children. That is faster growth, not more income redistribution. It is the opportunity for self-improvement, not the fallback of welfare dependency.

Andrew B. Wilson is resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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Plainly, it is more than the exercise of peaceful assembly and free speech. The protesters have had almost two months to express their complaints about corporate greed, income inequalities, and the whole notion that life isn’t nearly as fair as it ought to be. What more can they possibly say that they haven’t already said (however obtusely) a hundred times?

In the root sense of the word, to ‘occupy’ a place is to seize it from someone else. In just that sense, the Soviet Union ‘occupied’ Poland in September of 1939.

In the public theater going on in our cities today, the occupiers lay claim to the ground that they occupy — chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets” and refusing to leave, regardless of city ordinances forbidding the pitching of tents in public places and regardless of the entreaties of elected officials asking them to leave.

According to their argument, the occupiers have reclaimed public space for the “99%” — meaning everyone outside the tiny group of people (the richest “1 percent”) who supposedly control almost all wealth and power. Of course, it is preposterous for the protesters to claim that they speak for 99% of the country — or, indeed, for anyone other than themselves.

Nevertheless, in cities across the country, mayors and other public officials have gone along with this fiction and bent over backwards in trying to accommodate the occupiers.

That was the case in my home city of Saint Louis, where 60 or so protesters were camped at Kiener Plaza, two blocks away from the city’s baseball stadium. At first, Saint Louis Mayor Francis Slay, a Democrat, went out of his way to welcome the “Occupy residents,” as he called them. He offered the occupiers a free permit to gather at the plaza and openly expressed his willingness to overlook the violation of various city ordinances.

Said the mayor in a blog post on Nov. 4:

During the weeks it has been camped here, Occupy St. Louis has had the opportunity to make its points heard during some very high profile events, including a presidential visit (on Oct. 5) and the World Series.

I emphatically disagree with those who say that allowing the encampment to remain during those events showed St. Louis in a bad light . . . Moving the Occupy residents simply to deny them a chance to tell their story to a large audience would have been wrong-headed and wrong-hearted.

But with the Christmas season drawing near (a big event at Kiener Plaza), the mayor wearied of the street theater. He announced that he would put an end to the occupation — promising only to give the group 24 hours’ notice before police would be called. In response, the Occupy St. Louis group accused the mayor of bending to the will of corporate leaders — the dreaded 1 percent. At a meeting with the mayor’s staff, occupiers expressed their outrage by showing up with money taped to their mouths.

The drama ended in the early morning hours of Nov. 12. That is when Saint Louis police arrested 27 remaining protesters and cleared the plaza of tents and signage.

If any moral may be drawn from the “big-hearted” mayor’s falling out with those he so recently lauded as having “important things to say about the direction of the country,” it is this: You can please professional agitators and self-proclaimed victims some of the time, but you will never be able to please them all of the time.

In truth, the protesters in Saint Louis and other cities have no claim to special treatment in the use of parks and other public places — apart from their willingness to flout the law.

The violation of city ordinances may sound like no big thing — against the immensity of the First Amendment guarantees of free assembly and free speech.

But no one ever denied free speech to the protesters. It is they who put the liberty of others in jeopardy. City ordinances that prohibit the pitching of tents in public places ensure that no one group can seize these places and deny or inhibit others in the use and enjoyment of the same space.

In other places around the country, city officials should follow the Saint Louis mayor’s example: They should strike the tents and stop coddling the occupiers.

Andrew Wilson is a resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri Public Policy.

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