The post You Can Say That: A Lecture from David French appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The question should be left to the council member’s constituents. If they’re satisfied with his telecommuting, that’s what counts. If they’re not, they should vote him out of office.

The post Representing From Afar appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I agree that respectful treatment of women is important. But I disagree that some minimum percentage of all representatives needs to be female, as is implied by statements like these:

In Missouri, women hold four of the eight statewide elected offices — secretary of state, state auditor, state treasurer and one of the two U.S. Senate seats. But of the 197 state legislative positions, only 39 of the seats are held by women. Ironically, that near 20 percent representation of women is lower than the 25 percent mandated in the Iraqi constitution for the minimum number of women in its representative body.

First of all, what is the point of the comparison with Iraq? Since when do we take our ideas of model government from war zones in the Middle East? If we’re supposed to conclude that as a result women are worse off in Missouri than in Iraq, that’s crazy, because women here enjoy safety, stability, and many other benefits attendant on U.S. residence — benefits that far outweigh whatever gains follow from the additional women in the Iraqi legislature.

Still, you could argue that sex quotas in legislatures are intrinsically good, and it just happens to be one thing that Iraq has gotten right and Missouri has gotten wrong. But does anyone really want to enforce strict sex ratios in other occupations? Most ballet dancers are women, even though you can’t perform the great ballets without men. And this article about employment notes that men are much less likely than women to go into nursing — only about 10 percent of nursing students are male — despite the fact that the demand for nurses is growing. In fact, because women outnumber men in thriving sectors like education and health care, they suffer less from recessions that hit other industries harder:

From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs.

Missouri women should have the opportunity to go into state government if they want to put up with annoying constituents, boring committee meetings, hectic schedules, and looming term limits. But we shouldn’t consign some arbitrary number of women to that fate.

The post Women in the Missouri Legislature appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In 2005, Congress passed the “Real ID Act” as an addendum to an appropriations bill, for the Iraq war and tsunami relief. The “Real ID” Act set national standards for the data that is included on state driver’s licenses, and required states to build and share databases containing licensees’ personal information.

Libertarians find such identifying requirements to be a blatant violation of privacy rights, and a very dangerous precedent (not to mention a fiscal burden to the states).

Rep. Jim Guest (R-Kingwood) has succeeded in suspending the Missouri provision — at least temporarily. It prohibits the state Department of Revenue from amending its procedures to comply with the Real ID Act. It further prohibits the department from collecting, storing, or sharing additional personal data mandated by the act.

I, for one, would like to be free to move around the country without a constant border check and ID scan. If I wanted those, I would have moved to Russia back in the mid-80s … when I was like two years old.

The post Big Brother Is Watching You appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to CNN, both Florida and Michigan have considered mail-in ballots as a method for tabulating votes if their respective primaries are to be redone. This method of vote tabulation — already used in Oregon for all elections and as the primary mechanism for absentee voting in most other states — has a number of benefits that are specifically tailored to the current democratic situation. An all-mail primary would cost considerably less than a traditional one, and as recognized by Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, such an exercise would ease the balloting process for all:

"Every voter gets a ballot in the mail. It’s comprehensive. You get to
vote if you’re in Iraq or in a nursing home," he said on CBS’ "Face the
Nation."

Additionally, a mail-in primary could lead to more attention for the process within Missouri. In February, state Representative Jake Zimmerman introduced House Bill 2088, which would establish an all-mail election system for all elections that take place within the state. Currently, the bill has not been referred to a committee, and as reported by Suburban Journals, there is little confidence of it being given serious consideration. However, as the resident intern in favor of election reform, I’m hoping that any attention given to mail-in balloting by Florida and Michigan leads Missouri lawmakers to reconsider it as an electoral method.

The post Mailing It In appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I don’t think it’s juvenile or ad hominem to label a right-wing think tank as such. I think it’s important to remember the folks who told us the smoking gun might become a mushroom cloud, that there were WMDs in Iraq, that Sadaam was in league with Al Queda, that they’d welcome us with flowers, that it might be six days, six weeks, they doubt six months, that the mission was accomplished, that catching Sadaam’s kids would end the war, that catching Sadaam would end the war, that things were getting better, that if we didn’t fight them there we’d fight them here, and whatever other notions they’d created.

People, you’re thinking of some other think tank. We don’t write about Iraq or take any positions on foreign policy. Trust me, this is a Show-Me Institute rule, and it’s enforced. I risk getting my Show-Me Daily posts pulled altogether if I even mention words like "Iraq" and "war."

The post Show-Me Institute Mislabeled, Misidentified, Misconstrued … Again appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

"Most Americans say they’re paying their fair share in taxes."

Good, we are at war and this is not the time to say you are paying too much in taxes unless you are now or have recently been spending some time in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

"But, according to a recent MSN-Zogby poll, that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it."

Our troops probably don’t care if you are happy about it. 

"People with $75,000 to $100,000 in annual income were most likely (45%) to say they pay too much in taxes, followed by those making more than $100,000 (43%)."

This makes sense to me.  The general income area of 75 to 100 K is where higher rates start to kick in ($77,100 for an individual) and deductions, such as IRA contributions and student loan payments, start to fade out.  A person in this area could easily be caught in the middle between higher rates and fewer deductions.  This area is also sort of a partisan battleground, with Democrats seeing $75 – 100 as high income and Republicans seeing it as middle-class level.  As people in it will almost always see themselves as middle class, there could certainly be some resentment toward being included with higher incomes in verious brackets.

"Just 3% said they pay too little."

About 3% of Americans probably consider themselves socialists of varying degrees.  I assume these are the same 3%. 

(more…)

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I don’t blame Blunt for pandering to a powerful constituency. Lots of politicians?Democrat and Republican?have used the alleged problem of foreign oil as part of their justification for providing more welfare to corn farmers. But just because everyone says we need to end our “dependence” on foreign oil doesn’t mean it’s true.

The most fundamental thing to understand about oil economics is that oil is that it’s an interchangible global commodity. (It is, in economics jargon, fungible) if we stopped buying oil from Iran or Saudi Arabia, they would just turn around and sell their oil to China, France, or Japan instead. Oil-exporting countries, by and large, don’t care who they sell their oil to, and the laws of supply and demand ensure that they’ll be able to sell their oil to somebody, albeit perhaps at a somewhat lower price.

It’s sometimes argued that all the oil in the Middle East requires us to get involved in foreign conflicts like the war in Iraq. But this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Obviously, there are lots of good reasons to prefer a peaceful, democratic Middle East to one ruled by erratic despots. But despots seem just as willing as anyone else to sell us oil. Foreign countries don’t sell us their oil as a personal favor. They sell us oil because we have the money to pay for it. No matter who’s in charge in Iran or Saudi Arabia, they’ll most likely be interested in the revenues that come with oil exports. And as the richest country on Earth, we’ll have little trouble outbidding other nations for the oil we need.

But doesn’t our dependence on foreign oil make us subject to blackmail from those countries? Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, two economists at the Cato Institute, explain why this is silly:

Even if you think that OPEC has the means and motive to use this alleged oil weapon, there’s not a thing we can do about it. First, even if every drop of oil we consumed came from Oklahoma, Texas, and Alaska, a cutback in OPEC production would raise domestic oil prices as high as if all our oil came from Saudi Arabia. That’s because there are no regional markets for oil — only global markets — and because prices always reflect opportunity costs in free markets, regional prices invariably rise to the world price. In 1979, for instance, Great Britain was “energy independent” — virtually all the crude oil it consumed came from the North Sea. But the oil price spike of 1979 hit Great Britain as hard as it hit Japan, a country dependent upon imports for its oil. No country can wall itself off from the world market.

The post The Oil Weapon Myth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.