According to a post on ProJo’s 7to7 blog, the Lt. Governor Charles “Mr. Insider” Fogarty is leading Governor Carcieri in a recent poll.
Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty is leading Governor Carcieri in the battle for the state’s top elected office, according to a poll released today by the independent pollster Rasmussen Reports.
Forty-six percent of likely voters supported Fogarty, a Democrat, while 41 percent supported the Republican Carcieri, in the telephone survey of 500 likely voters conducted Aug. 23. The margin of error is 4.5 points.
Today’s poll is the first to show the incumbent Carcieri behind. In a similar poll conducted last month, Fogarty and Carcieri were neck-in-neck, 42 percent to 43 percent respectively.
That means there are 13% undecided. Michael Barone has recently postulated that New England incumbents actually tend to get these voters in the end (contra the conventional wisdom). Be that as it may, why does Fogarty even have a lead? Are people really buying that Fogarty, an insider if ever there was one, will fight “corruption”? Or are there simply that many union-linked folks in this state who detest Carcieri? What if these numbers are merely reflective of the fact that Carcieri only started running political ads on TV this weekend?
[Open full post]Do you remember how the teachers’ unions whined when the latest Education Partnership report came out?
As they did with last year’s report, union officials called the study “an attack on teacher unions” and “an attempt to gut collective bargaining in Rhode Island.”
Union officials also questioned why The Education Partnership did not include them while compiling the reports.
“If we did not have teacher contracts in place, both teachers and students would be significantly worse off in Rhode Island,” said Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the state chapter of the National Education Association. “We would not have the quality of teachers we have and things like class size, the structure of the school day and professional development would not be protected.”
Putting more authority in the state or school administrators, Walsh said, would cause problems, not solve them. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution,” Walsh said. “The issues facing Providence are different than those facing Westerly, and to say there is one answer is crazy.”
If a statewide health plan cost a community more than the current plan, who would pay the difference? he asked. If principals chose their teachers, doesn’t that open the door to favoritism? Job fairs and job placement based on seniority are more fair and objective than other methods, Walsh said.
And what were the major themes of that report that caused such a vociferous reaction?
“Unions have got to get back in balance so they aren’t focused solely on membership and benefits, and instead are focusing on the kids,” said Valerie Forti, executive director of The Education Partnership. “It’s not like we have the answers to all these things, but we know what we have now is not working.”
Despite the fact that Rhode Island teachers are among the highest paid in the nation, student performance continues to lag, particularly in urban districts, which have high concentrations of low-income residents, recent immigrants and English language learners. Taxpayers and parents are fed up, and are asking where the money is going, Forti said.
“Rhode Island has shown it is willing to pay top dollar for our schools, because we know good education is expensive. We are not advocating to reduce teacher salaries or remove health care [benefits] and we understand teachers need retirement benefits,” Forti said. “But it is not beneficial to bankrupt communities to provide excessive adult benefits.”
In addition, the unions earlier resistance to pension reform is also well known, even though we have the 4th-least funded pension program among the 50 states.
So did you see this week’s news that Teachers’ endorsement list snubs House leaders?
The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals has gone public with its first round of endorsements in General Assembly races. So have lots of groups.
What’s striking about the union’s list: no one on or aligned with House Speaker William J. Murphy ‘s leadership team is on it.
Federation president Marcia Reback said the endorsements reflect votes on the so-called “pension reforms” of last year that raised the age and work requirements for unvested and newly hired state employees to qualify for a pension and this year’s votes for a state budget that provides $1 million in tax credits for corporations that donate to private and parochial schools.
Democrats who sided with the teachers union by opposing both moves — and by backing reduced pension contributions for affected employees — got the endorsements which, over time, will come with campaign contributions and plugs for their candidacy in mailings to people who live in their districts, Reback said last week. The union has more than 12,000 active and retired members.
Conspicuously absent from the list: Murphy, D-West Warwick, and his top lieutenant, House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox , D-Providence. Murphy’s earlier challenger for the top House leadership post, Rep. John DeSimone , D-Providence, topped the list.
Why? “Because they don’t have a good record,” Reback said of Murphy and Fox, while DeSimone — who, as a lawyer at one point represented the teachers in Providence — has “a 100 percent” voting record on RIFT issues.
Said Murphy: “The leadership team was proud to make some very difficult decisions. Most workers in Rhode Island’s private sector have seen their pension systems significantly revised over the past several years. In order to protect the integrity of the state’s pension system, we felt that reforms were necessary.”
Lo and behold, the Education Partnership was right: The union is acting petulantly because some of their unaffordable adult entitlements were reduced and a few kids in need will now be able to have some basic school choice via a corporate-sponsored scholarship.
The battle lines don’t get any more clear than that!
This is a potentially profound development in Rhode Island. The traditional political monolith has shown its first sign of cracking.
Kudos to the Speaker and his team for doing the right thing. Kudos as well to Treasurer Tavares and Governor Carcieri for their leadership on the important pension reform issue.
Speaker Murphy and his team know the pension and healthcare benefit financial liabilities are only going to get more visible as new reporting requirements kick in at the state and local levels. The upcoming transparency is ensuring they begin to face the impending disaster because the reporting will only put more pressure on all politicians.
Speaker Murphy and his team are intelligent people and they are also acting in their own self-interest. They know that it is their voters – especially working people and retirees – who are going to be asked to pay for a large part of the unfunded liability, something they cannot afford. And, they know we cannot continue to over-pay for under-performance in our public schools – and now a small number of kids will benefit by being free of the failed status quo.
In the future, remember this day well: When the chips were down, the teachers’ unions focused on their adult entitlements, not what was right for the working people and children of Rhode Island. But you aren’t surprised, are you?
The convenient cliche propagated by many people is that those who truly care about the needy will be supportive of new or expanded government programs. Those who oppose this approach of throwing endlessly increasing sums of money at social programs are commonly labeled as heartless and lacking in compassion. That is not only a false label but it shows a lack of knowledge about American history as well as a lack of understanding about how the incentives created by many large government programs are fundamentally flawed.
There are two sets of answers to the challenge about how best to care for the less fortunate in our society. The first is the empirical data that shows many/most large social programs, like those generated by the Great Society, just don’t work. The recent public debate about welfare reform, as it celebrated its 10-year anniversary, has driven this point home in spades. The second is to study our past and apply lessons from its successes to meeting social needs in today’s world.
Let’s review both answers, beginning with the second answer.
When we study the past, Alexis de Tocqueville’s words in Democracy in America are a good place to start:
Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.
Or at least we used to think more that way…
In his November 2004 letter in Acton Notes, Rev. Robert Sirico contrasted the two alternative world views:
When people say “call the authorities,” they generally mean governmental officials – usually, the police. It is just a colloquialism, but do we understand the implication? The suggestion is that government and its many agents trump all other authority in our lives – or, even, that they have supremacy in society. That is far from true.
Day to day, public officials do not have the greatest impact on our lives. At home, parents set ground rules. In school, teachers raise expectations. At work, we may be managed by virtue of a labor contract. In our neighborhood, we agree to observe the rules of the housing covenant.
Our civic associations and choices of faith also imply the desire to conform behavior to the wishes of the group at large…
Robert Nisbet warned decades ago that as civil authority gains power, private and voluntary authority will be less influential in our lives. This process results in tension between citizens and the state, and we know who will win that struggle. We need intermediating institutions of authority to enforce order and give coherence to our disparate wishes.
The free society is not properly characterized as one of individuals. It is, instead, made up of free men and women who choose to involve themselves in a wide range of structures of influence. If we care about freedom, the government should be the authority of last resort…
Senator Santorum and British MP Iain Duncan Smith have outlined an alternative vision to the large government program approach in Let’s Deploy the ‘Little Platoons’: A conservative vision of social justice:
For all the differences between the United States and Europe, we share a common challenge: how to improve the social well-being of our citizens without a massive growth in the size and intrusiveness of government. We’re convinced that conservatism–properly understood–offers the surest road to social justice.
In many conservative circles, “social justice” is synonymous with socialism or radical individualism. No wonder: For decades, the political left has used it as a Trojan horse for its big-state agenda. Yet the wreckage of their policies is obvious…
Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond are charting a new vision of social justice. It recognizes that the problems caused or aggravated by the growth in government cannot be corrected by a crude reduction in its size. Policy must also deliberately foster the growth of what Edmund Burke called “the little platoons” of civil society: families, neighborhood associations, private enterprises, charities and churches. These are the real source of economic growth and social vitality.
The social justice agenda we endorse is grounded in social conservatism. That means helping the poor discover the dignity of work, rather than making them wards of the state. It means locking up violent criminals, but offering nonviolent offenders lots of help to become responsible citizens. It endorses a policy of “zero tolerance” toward drug use and sexual trafficking, yet insists that those struggling with all manner of addictions can start their lives afresh.
In America, this vision emerged a decade ago with bold conservative initiatives aimed at empowering individuals and grassroots groups helping the nation’s neediest, such as the Community Renewal Act and other antipoverty initiatives. Today’s CARE Act is part of the same tradition…
…These efforts seek to empower individuals and families, not bureaucracies, and unleash the creativity and generosity of neighbor helping neighbor…
Addressing these social problems that have worsened over many decades will take years. “The most important of all revolutions,” Burke wrote, is “a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.” Yet we believe that social-justice conservatism can produce societies that are more humane than anything liberalism could accomplish. As we build a conservative alternative–a vision informed both by idealism and realism–we have evidence, experience and common sense on our side.
Further thoughts on this subject can be found in What is Social Justice? and Rediscovering Civil Society, Part I: Mediating Structures and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State. In the first posting link, Michael Novak writes on why volunatry associations are so important:
We must rule out any use of “social justice” that does not attach to the habits (that is, virtues) of individuals. Social justice is a virtue, an attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud. And if Tocqueville is right that “the principle of association is the first law of democracy,” then social justice is the first virtue of democracy, for it is the habit of putting the principle of association into daily practice. Neglect of it, Hayek wrote, has moral consequences:
It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common effort of many.
Returning to the first issue highlighted at the beginning of this posting, we must ask why the large government programs typically fail. It can be explained by comparing the differences between the incentives created by coerced charity versus voluntary charity:
[Open full post]Coerced “charity” via government taxation has several corrosive effects:
First, it incentivizes citizens to relinquish all personal responsibility to care for or get involved in supporting the needy in their community. After all, “the government” is responsible for doing that.
Second, it assumes that a distant bureaucrat can better judge how to structure the policy designed to meet the true needs of our neighbor whom he has never met. This is the knowledge/information problem raised over the years by both Hayek and Sowell.
Third, the problem in the second example also leads to higher economic costs due to more ineffective programs, continued propagation of such poor policies, and the ability for the programs to be affected by remote sources of power whose self-interest can often be anything but truly helping the needy neighbor.
Fourth, it also harms the recipient of the charity, because appreciation will soon be replaced with a feeling of entitlement.On the other hand, voluntary charity draws people in through the formation of associations who are willingly bound by the same altruistic purpose. Such voluntary associations end up developing a refined sense of moral responsibility at the individual and group levels. And by teaching people to care and receive the joy and satisfaction that only comes from giving personally, people are touched in emotionally and spiritually powerful ways – and will be more likely to continue to reach out to others.
Charles Bakst correctly identifies one of the reasons I’ve been feeling more favorably toward Steve Laffey of late:
… the more Chafee attacks him, the cooler and calmer Laffey tries to come across in debates and ads.
More significant, perhaps, has been the gradual emergence of the oh-so-sincere face of Sheldon Whitehouse into view. Culpability may be mere matters of degree regardless of what happens, but I’d hate to find myself directly contributing to Whitehouse’s victory for the reason that I will be unable to bring myself to vote against him. Win or lose, a vote for the Republican will say as much as my single vote is able to say, and I simply will not vote for Chafee in the general election.
Whether a vote for Laffey will be part of a victory may, in small part, depend upon whether the mayor heeds — albeit, with a twist — Mr. Bakst’s warning:
YOU HAVE to wonder where all the Chafee-Laffey back and forth in the primary will lead in the general election as the Republican survivor goes head to head with Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.
I had occasion last week to touch on this subject, at least as it might relate to women, with Washington-based pollster Anna Greenberg. She did an extensive survey of women’s political attitudes here for the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island. Greenberg, who also polls for Attorney General Patrick Lynch, found women are heavily into quality education, affordable health care, and secure retirement, issues that often have taken a back seat in the Chafee-Laffey primary to tirades against “special interests” and illegal immigration, debates over tax cuts, and squabbles about style.
Whoever wins the GOP race, Greenberg said, “there’s going to be some real work for the Republican nominee to pivot back to a conversation that’s more relevant to what sort-of-regular people care about, and I think that’s going to be a real challenge.”
I almost had to rub my eyes and reread the paragraph to believe that ostensibly informed people would see a need for pivoting in order to relate (on one hand) special interests, illegal immigration, and tax cuts to (on the other) education, healthcare, and retirement. I suppose that drawing the links for those who don’t see them (or alternately, providing them with spectacles) is partly our job as writers, but suffice to say that I find it not comforting in the least that such as Baskt won’t at least chip in toward the cause of honest comprehension… and that their audiences probably don’t want them to.
[Open full post]I had a chance today to re-read the latest developments in the Chafee-Laffey race as highlighted in the recent Anchor Rising postings on the Senate race, including the numerous comments posted by many readers.
After that effort, my overall reaction is a simple one: I will be glad when this race is over because I have found it to be a largely uninspiring campaign by both candidates and by many of their supporters. You can throw Sheldon Whitehouse into that same brew, too.
These two postings from nearly a year ago in 2005 still summarize my general thoughts on the race:
Reflections on Chafee, Laffey, Party Politics & the Future of Rhode Island
Is Laffey vs. Chafee Really a Battle Between Visionary Principles & a Reactionary Establishment? Unfortunately Not.
Some will likely say that the two postings contain more overt criticisms of Mayor Laffey than of Senator Chafee. I think they do. To a large degree, that is a reflection of my disappointment in several of the Mayor’s policy positions as well as some of my lingering concerns about whether he picked the right race to run in and whether he can keep his ego under control.
However, the relative balance of my comments is mostly a reflection of what I perceive to be a near-total lack of substance in Senator Chafee. That perception leads me to dismiss him as simply not a serious leader, with no further comments being warranted.
Overall, this third posting expresses some further thoughts on why I have found this whole campaign so unsatisfying:
Raising the Bar: Expecting Greatness From Our Political Leaders, which includes these words by Steven Hayward:
What is greatness, especially political greatness? In three thousand years we have not surpassed the understanding of Aristotle, who summed up political greatness as the ability to translate wisdom into action on behalf of the public good. To be able to do this, Aristotle argued, requires a combination of moral virtue, practical wisdom, and public-spiritedness…One must know not only what is good for oneself but also what is good for others. It is not enough merely to be wise or intelligent in the ordinary IQ-score sense; in fact, Aristotle goes to great lengths to show that practical wisdom “is at the opposite pole from intelligence.” One must have moral virtue, judgment, and public spirit in a fine balance, and these traits must be equally matched to the particular circumstances of time and place…
Greatness, especially political greatness, carries a whiff of political incorrectness…
In place of greatness, today we have mere celebrity, best exemplified by…People magazine…
Greatness is ultimately a question of character. Good character does not change with the times: it has eternal qualities. Aristotle connects the honor that accrues to the magnanimous person with the virtues of friendship. This suggests that it is always within our grasp to cultivate the virtue of greatness as individuals, even if circumstances – crises – do not call forth the need for political greatness on the highest level…
The tides of history and the scale of modern life have not made obsolete or incommensurate the kind of large-souled greatness we associate with Churchill or Lincoln or George Washington…yet the cases of Churchill and Reagan offer powerful refutation to the historicist premise that humans and human society are mostly corks bobbing on the waves of history…Why were Churchill and Reagan virtually alone among their contemporaries in their particular insights and resolves? The answer must be that they transcended their environments and transformed their circumstances as only great men can do, and thereby bent history to their will..
Can there be another Churchill, or another Reagan? The answer is plainly yes, though we must note that the greatness of statesmen is seldom recognized in their own time. Typically we only recognize greatness in hindsight…
Leo Strauss took the death of Churchill in 1965 as the occasion to remind his students that “we have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, of human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.”
Contemplating on the example of Churchill and his influence on Reagan gives us confidence that even though the mountaintops may be often shrouded in fog, we can still tell the difference between peaks and valleys.
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:
In response to Mr. Mahn’s comment below: The validity or lack of validity of my thoughts in this posting will be unaffected by whether turnout is high or low in the September 12 primary.
Rather, let me now offer a more granular explanation of why I am so disappointed in how this Senate campaign has played out.
To paraphrase the late Richard Weaver, I believe ideas have consequences and that means my views on this race are influenced primarily by the major ideas expressed by each candidate. More specifically, I have looked to see which candidate has articulated policies most closely aligned with my personal preference for ideas of a conservative persuasion.
My issues with Chafee are:
I cannot respect a politician who vacillates and equivocates. His thoroughly bizarre vote in the 2004 Presidential election and delay in taking a position on Judge Alito until after the vote outcome was determined are two examples of such behavior.
I find the alliance between the NRSC and Chafee to be symptomatic of the problem with Washington politics today – retaining power is more important than standing for anything. It says something about Chafee that he is willing to take money and support from the very party he so often disses.
I also cannot respect a politician who says seriously dangerous things such as “a bad peace is better than a good war” when we are engaged in a prolonged war with Islamofascists committed to the destruction of our country and Western Civilization.
I also cannot support a politician whose policy preferences are so liberal.
I am particularly repulsed by Chafee’s positioning of his PAYGO budget philosophy as fiscally responsible when it is nothing more than a back-door way to increase government spending and taxes. PAYGO willfully ignores 25 years of supply-side economic policy empirical data which have shown the policy problem in Washington is over-spending, not a lack of revenue. To say otherwise is intellectually dishonest. No less important, PAYGO’s formula for ongoing tax increases will result in slower economic growth that reduces the opportunities for people to live the American Dream. That is unjust to our fellow citizens.
Additionally, Chafee’s energy policy proposals are nothing short of unimaginative and completely avoid addressing how to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. He has rejected school choice when Laffey proposed it and Chafee’s approach to the failing educational status quo is to throw more money at it without demanding any changes or accountability. His policy view on a recent drug reimportation bill shows no courage either.
It is for all of these reasons that I consider Chafee to be devoid of gravitas and therefore incapable of political greatness. By way of contrast, Chafee’s father had gravitas and was someone you could respect even when disagreeing with some of his more liberal policy preferences. Bluntly speaking, I doubt Lincoln Chafee would be a viable Senate candidate if he was not living off the legacy of his father, John Chafee.
Alternatively, I have endorsed Laffey’s challenges to the political status quo going as far back as December 2004. It was those challenges which made me consider him capable of political greatness, with the caveat about his ego expressed in this earlier posting.
My previous writings on Anchor Rising generally agree with a number of Laffey’s policy positions on matters such as health savings accounts, school choice, pork/corporate welfare/government spending, taxation, and judicial nominees.
Here’s the rub: The Laffey Plan consists of four major policy proposals and I have serious problems with two of them – energy independence and the cost of drugs.
His energy policy proposal is as shallow as Chafee’s as it only proposes higher CAFE standards as well as tax credits for electrical hybrids and renewable power producers and consumers. The difference is that Chafee never suggested he was proposing a broader solution leading to energy independence.
Unfortunately, Laffey set higher voter expectations by saying he was touting a means to energy independence but then put forth a proposal devoid of courageous leadership because he dodged taking any stands on the tough and often unpopular policy questions that must be addressed for the United States to become energy independent. I held Laffey to the higher standard he encouraged and he failed to measure up on this important policy proposal.
More significantly, I found his policy preferences about the cost of drugs to be dangerously ill-informed and far more in agreement with Senator Kennedy’s left-wing politics than with generally conservative beliefs based on free markets.
Laffey didn’t just express platitudes about the high price of drugs like nearly every politician tends to do. Rather, among other things, he endorsed the dangerous idea of importing drugs from Canada – which is a back-door way the Left is using to socialize medicine in this country via de facto price controls. Government-driven price controls would destroy new drug innovation, just like it has in Europe. Plus, given that the Canadian market size is 5% of the United States market, importing from there is not a practical solution – which means anyone proposing the idea has to be ignorant or cynically pandering for votes.
Simultaneously, Laffey effectively lowered the quality of the public debate on healthcare by choosing to remain silent on several important and related issues: First, most people do not know that drugs are “only” 11% of total healthcare spending. If the concern is about increasing healthcare costs, why does the other 89% get no attention? Furthermore, while not perfectly separated, most people do not know that the 11% is comprised of 7% for branded drugs sold by traditional pharmaceutical companies and 4% for generic drugs sold by generic drug companies. Stripping out every last dollar of profit by traditional pharmaceutical companies would reduce healthcare costs by 1% – and ensure much higher costs in the future when there were no forthcoming new drugs. Second, while sometimes costly in their own right, drugs often have a positive cost impact by reducing overall healthcare system expenses. In other words, more drug use can eliminate costly surgeries or reduce hospital stays. Third, drugs can extend lives or improve the quality-of-life of the patient.
Comments in his policy proposal about direct-to-consumer advertising and me-too drugs also showed a thorough lack of understanding of the industry, too.
I have spent 23 years working in the healthcare industry; more on my thoughts about these drug industry issues can be found here.
I was alarmed that his healthcare policy proposal listed such information sources as Marcia Angell and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen. It is a matter of public record that Angell has endorsed a single-payer national health insurance system, like Canada, while working with fellow advocates like David Himmelstein (whom I met when I chaired a 1993 national conference and hosted a healthcare public policy panel with him and Stuart Butler from the Heritage Foundation).
You can read the drug industry’s response to Angell’s book here.
If Laffey is truly conservative, what is he doing endorsing policy ideas backed by overt advocates of socialized medicine? That goes beyond taking a populist stance. In addition to the philosophical issues here, there is also a practical implication to advocating this policy: Socialized medicine delivers lower quality healthcare to citizens.
I cannot reconcile the underlying philosophical incongruence between these various policy preferences without concluding that Laffey either is not truly conservative in his beliefs or he is playing dishonest/opportunistic political games. Neither is an attractive conclusion to reach.
I expected more from him than Chafee and I think Laffey missed an opportunity to show real leadership on some tough issues – leadership that could lead to political greatness over time. And that begs the question whether he wants to win more than he wants to show the gravitas necessary to lead an informed public debate.
I would encourage you to return to Hayward’s words earlier in this posting about political greatness and ask yourself if the candidates have held themselves to a high enough standard of excellence. Have we held them to that high standard as well? Have our own comments to others fostered achieving that same standard of excellence, too?
In the July 2006 issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Larry Arnn interviews Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman on a number of topics. Here are his thoughts on economic issues:
[Open full post]LARRY ARNN: In Free to Choose, in the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you argue that protectionism and government intervention in general breed conflict and that free markets breed cooperation. How do you reconcile this statement with the fact that we think of free markets as being competitive?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: They are competitive, but they are competitive over a broad range. The question is, how do you make money in a free market? You only make money if you can provide someone with something he or she is willing to pay for. You can’t make money any other way. Therefore, in order to make money, you have to promote cooperation. You have to do something that your customer wants you to do. You don’t do it because he orders you to. You don’t do it because he threatens to hit you over the head if you don’t. You do it because you offer him a better deal than he can get anywhere else. Now that’s promoting cooperation. But there are other people who are trying to sell to him, too. They’re your competitors. So there is competition among sellers, but cooperation between sellers and buyers…
The final outcome in China will not be decided until there is a showdown between the political tyranny on the one hand and economic freedom on the other – they cannot coexist…
Almost every country in the Middle East that is rich in oil is a despotism.
LA: Why do you think that is so?
MF: One reason, and one reason only, the oil is owned by the governments in question. If that oil were privately owned and thus someone’s private property, the political outcome would be freedom rather than tyranny. This is why I believe the first step following the 2003 invasion of Iraq should have been the privatization of the oil fields. If the government had given every individual over 21 years of age equal shares in a corporation that had the right and responsibility to make appropriate arrangements with foreign oil companies for the purpose of discovering and developing Iraq’s oil reserves, the oil income would have flowed in the form of dividends to the people – the shareholders – rather than into government coffers. This would have provided an income to the whole people of Iraq and thereby prevented the current disputes over oil between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, because oil income would have been distributed on an individual rather than a group basis.
LA: Many Middle Eastern societies have a kind of tribal or theocratic basis and long-held habits of despotic rule that make it difficult to establish a system of contract between strangers. Is it your view that the introduction of free markets in such places could overcome those obstacles?
MF: Eventually, yes. I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of…
…Following the election of Ronald Reagan, there was an abrupt and immediate halt to this expansion of government. But even under Reagan, government spending as a percentage of national income didn’t come down: It has held constant from that time to now. Although the early years of the current Bush presidency did see spending increases, national income has risen, too. We have achieved some success at our first task: stopping the growth of government. The second task is to shrink government spending and make government smaller. We haven’t done that yet…I should also mention as a cautionary tale that, prior to Reagan, the number of pages in the Federal Register was on the rise, but Reagan succeeded in reducing this number substantially. However, once Reagan was out of office, the number of pages in the Register began to rise even more quickly. We have not really succeeded in that area.
…since Free to Choose was published [in 1981]…in general, there has been a complete change in public opinion. This change is probably due as much to the collapse of the Soviet Union as it is to what Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or somebody else wrote. Socialism used to mean the ownership and operation of the means of production, but nobody gives it that meaning today. There is no country in the world attempting to be socialist in that sense except North Korea. And perhaps Russia is moving in that direction. Conversely, opinion has not shifted far enough in terms of the dangers of big government and the deleterious effects it can have, and that’s where we’re facing future problems…We must make clear that the only reason we have our freedom is because government is so inefficient. If the government were efficient in spending the approximately 40 percent of our income that it currently manages, we would enjoy less freedom than we do today…
LA: …Like Lincoln, you argue that a house divided against itself cannot stand: America is going to be a government intervention country or it’s going to be a free market country, but it cannot continue indefinitely as a mixture of both. Do you still believe that?
MF: Yes, I very much believe that, and I believe that we’ve been making some headway since Free to Choose appeared. However, even though it is real headway compared to what was happening before, we are mostly holding ground.
LA: What do you think are the major factors behind the economic growth we have experienced since the publication of Free to Choose?
MF: Economic growth since that time has been phenomenal, which has very little to do with most of what we’ve been talking about in terms of the conflict between government and private enterprise. It has much more to do with the technical problem of establishing sound monetary policy. The economic situation during the past 20 years has been unprecedented in the history of the world. You will find no other 20-year period in which prices have been as stable – relatively speaking – in which there has been as little variability in price levels, in which inflation has been so well-controlled, and in which output has gone up as regularly. You hear all this talk about economic difficulties, when the fact is we are at the absolute peak of prosperity in the history of the world. Never before have so many people had as much as they do today. I believe a large part of that is to be attributed to better monetary policy. The improved policy is a result of the acceptance of the view that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, not a real phenomenon. We have accepted the view that central banks are primarily responsible for maintaining stable prices and nothing else.
LA: Do you think the Great Depression was triggered by bad monetary policy at a crucial moment?
MF: Absolutely. Unfortunately, it is still the case that if you ask people what caused the Great Depression, nine out of ten will probably tell you it was a failure of business. But it’s absolutely clear that the Depression was a failure of government and not a failure of business.
The New Republic’s Open University is a new blog with the goal of providing a place for “the magazine’s contributors and friends in the professoriate comment on current events, bring their expertise to bear on Topic A, and discuss the academic issues of the day.” As one with a bit of “policy wonkishness”, my interest was piqued and already rewarded by posts by Cass Sunstein and David Greenberg on the idea of “Ideological Amplification.”
According to Sunstein:
A few years ago, I was involved in some studies that uncovered a funny fact: When Republican-appointed judges sit on three-judge panels with other Republican appointees, they show unusually conservative voting patterns. So too, Democratic-appointed judges on three-judge panels show especially liberal voting patterns when sitting with fellow Democratic appointees. In short, like-minded judges show a pattern if “ideological amplification.”
….It turns out that ideological amplification occurs in many domains. It helps to explain “political correctness” on college campuses–and within the Bush administration. In a recent study, we find that liberals in Colorado, after talking to one another, move significantly to the left on affirmative action, global warming, and civil unions for same-sex couples. On those same three issues, conservatives, after talking to each other, move significantly to the right.
Greenberg points to a study by Valdis Krebs “on the polarized political reading habits of Americans.” In short, according to Greenberg, Krebs used Amazon’s “‘Customers who bought this item also bought…’ feature” and “found that people who read Ann Coulter weren’t reading much of Michael Moore, and vice versa. The few books that found audiences of diverse ideological persuasions were those by straight news reporters like Stephen Kinzer, Tom Friedman, and Bob Woodward.” (Krebs explanation and updated data can be found here). The obvious question is a familiar one: do we tend to reinforce our ideology by living in an “echo chamber” and, if so, is it a good idea to do so? My answer is “Yes” and “No.”
It is intellectually necessary to venture outside of one’s own ideological box to encounter–and confront–ideas that are different. Such intellectual curiosity can expose you to ideas that will change your mind about how you view issue “X”, but that’s not a bad thing. However, it is more likely that such intellectual adventuring can help to reinforce your ideological predispositions. Confronting the way that different ideologies approach issue “Y” forces you to reason beyond your gut instincts. You are forced to organize your thoughts and thus are better prepared to refute the arguments of your ideological opponents.
Some people are satisfied to trust their gut instincts because they are confident that they are right. Trusting your gut is both perfectly fine and a very American thing to do. However, for those of us interested in political ideas and rhetoric, it is necessary to be familiar with the ideas–and the tactical arguments used to espouse those ideas–that we seek to refute while battling in the arena of ideas. To paraphrase Sun-Tzu, “Know thine enemy.”
And that brings me back to Open University. Most would agree that The New Republic is a liberal-to-moderate publication. Thus, with it’s stated goal of serving as a go-between for academics and the public, it is in the best interest of conservatives to be in the vanguard of those who will be exposed to the ideas emanating from academia. In short, conservatives need to be on the front line of the informal peer review system that has emerged on-line.
Within the past week, my wife had to drop my niece off at Tiverton High School (of which town both we and my brother-in-law are relatively new residents), and she returned with this commentary: “That school is a dump. I hope they improve it before our children have to go there.”
It is with that recent context that I read National Education Association Executive Director Bob Walsh’s simple and direct comment to one of Andrew’s recent posts:
National average Math SAT: 518
Rhode Island average Math SAT: 494
Barrington average math SAT: 580
East Greenwich average math SAT: 575
…
Central Falls average math SAT: 383
Working on the issues related to poverty will help teachers help students. It is as simple as that. And yes, it costs money, and to the extent you wish schools to be a partner in addressing the impact of poverty on students, it will require more money for schools. If you care about kids, or the future of our country (hopefully both), you will agree.
At first look, even the most free-market anti-unionists among us would have to admit a complex argument — which is not to say that resolution of the complexity would be amicable to the NEA. (N.B. — If Bob, or anybody else, has better data for what follows, I welcome it.) Comparing SAT scores and median household income for selected towns might, indeed, lead one to agree with Mr. Walsh:
Assuming, then, that the matter is “as simple as that” — that household income correlates with SAT scores — the ensuing question must be, “Is the impact of income the same as the ‘impact of poverty’?” Well, considering that Tiverton (PDF) and Barrington (PDF) have pretty much identical percentages of families living below the poverty level (2.9% and 3.0%, respectively), the answer appears to be “no.” In other words, “working on the issues related to poverty” would have to actually imply an effort to make everybody equally wealthy.
However, wealth being relative (and the market tracking to its scale), even a simplistic understanding of economic reality ought to be sufficient background for one to conclude that such leveling is simply impossible, least of all when forced through government policy. To the extent that government can affect household income at the middle-class range and above, it is mainly through the fostering of a healthy business environment that encourages entrepreneurship and the importation of existing businesses (e.g., by means of reasonable taxes, respect for businesses’ freedom and rights, and a light hand when it comes to employment regulations).
Whatever the strategy, of course, towns must work with finite resources. Subsidizing one area of the town’s affairs requires a decrease elsewhere. Granting exemptions and aid to businesses requires that money be redirected from some other area of municiple investment. So, since we’re dealing with Bob Walsh, the NEA, and SAT scores, let’s throw a specific municiple invesment — that devoted to teachers’ salaries — onto the same chart:
The first thing to note is that, if it’s class strife that Walsh seeks to foment, honesty should compel him to admit that step-10 teachers — most of whom need only to have been teaching for just 10 years, as I understand — make more than Tiverton’s median household income. With even a modest spousal contribution, their households would easily surpass Barrington’s.
More importantly (and less contentiously), note that teacher salaries do not appear to correlate with either median income or SAT scores. In fact, the salaries vary only negligibly from town to town. While median income may in fact be a measure worth considering when devising strategies to raise SAT scores, teachers’ salaries appear not to make a difference whatsoever. On the limited basis of these statistics, therefore, a town such as Central Falls (or Tiverton, for that matter) would be well advised to lower teachers’ salaries and redirect the savings toward such improvements as will increase average household income — and with the emphasis not on welfare-style poverty programs, but on working/middle-class economic activity programs.
Not to be flippant, but the most effective way to ensure that “schools [are] a partner in addressing the impact of poverty on students” might just be to decrease the degree to which they — as costly departments of the public corporation — contribute to the circumstances that perpetuate poverty. That, if one were to ask my wife, might involve investments to make the facilities encouraging to students, comforting to parents, and inviting to potential residents.
Jennifer D. Jordan of the Projo reports on yet another study showing Rhode Island not doing so well, the College Board’s yearly analysis of SAT Scores.
Here are the New England states ranked by math scores…
- Massachusetts 524
- New Hampshire 524
- Vermont 519
- National Average 518
- Connecticut 516
- Rhode Island 502
- Maine 501
- New Hampshire 520
- Massachusetts 513
- Vermont 513
- Connecticut 512
- National Average 503
- Maine 501
- Rhode Island 495
UPDATE:
I have to take a step back from using SAT scores as an indicator of Rhode Island’s educational performance relative to the nation. Take a comparison of Rhode Island to Illinois as an example. At first, the Illinois numbers look fantastic (609 math, 591 reading). But then look at how many students took the test in each state: 8,130 in Rhode Island versus 12,694 in Illinois, even though Illinois has about 12 times the population of Rhode Island (Chicago by itself is almost 3 times as large as RI).
I suspect that the cause is that there are still regions of the country (like Illinois) where the American College Test (ACT) is more common than the SAT, and that in those regions the only students who take the SATs are those planning to attend some hi-falutin’ Ivy League or west coast university, skewing the SAT median upward.
However, the regional comparison is still valid, as all 6 New England states have a high percentage of students taking SATs. [Open full post]
A recent USA Today/Gallup Poll showed that the gap between support for a generic Democrat and generic Republicans had narrowed to 2% (47%-45%, respectively). As the related USA Today story pithily explained:
The arrest of terror suspects in London has helped buoy President Bush to his highest approval rating in six months and dampen Democratic congressional prospects to their lowest in a year.
In short, as security issues came back to the forefront, the general public re-assessed their priorities and–as has historically been the case–tend to look more favorably upon the GOP with regards to the future of Iraq and the War on Terror. Don Lambro agrees with “security” angle, but also adds this:
Another factor behind the Republicans’ end-of-summer rise in the polls: They have spent the past month reminding voters, particularly their party’s base, what they have done for their states and districts. Despite all the justified criticism about wasteful pork-barrel spending, the fact remains that most voters like their tax dollars coming back to them in bridge, road and other public-works projects and members aren’t shy about reminding them about the bacon they’ve brought home.
We’ve certainly seen this born out as one of the central pillars of Senator Chafee’s reelection strategy. It’s a tried and true strategy and is effective in garnering support from most average voters (like RI Independents), as Lambro’s analysis of the poll seems to bear out . It also is in stark contrast to Mayor Laffey’s “no pork” approach, which is appealing to the more conservative GOP base (the Porkbusters crowd). Two different messages that appeal to two different sections of the GOP primary electorate. Which message will ultimately take hold? As with all else in this crazy race, it all depends on turnout.
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