Voice For Liberty

Author: Guest Author

  • Myth: Markets cannot possibly produce public (collective) goods

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The sixth myth — Markets Cannot Possibly Produce Public (Collective) Goods — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Markets Cannot Possibly Produce Public (Collective) Goods

    Myth: If I eat an apple, you can’t; consumption of an apple is purely rivalrous. If I show a movie and don’t want other people to see it, I have to spend money to build walls to keep out non-payers. Some goods, those for which consumption is non-rival and exclusion is costly, cannot be produced on markets, as everyone has an incentive to wait for others to produce them. If you produce a unit, I can just consume it, so I have no incentive to produce it. The same goes for you. The publicness of such goods requires state provision, as the only means to provide them. Such goods include not only defense and provision of a legal system, but also education, transportation, health care, and many other such goods. Markets can never be relied on to produce such goods, because non-payers would free-ride off of those who pay, and since everyone would want to be a free-rider, nobody would pay. Thus, only government can produce such goods.

    Tom G. Palmer: The public goods justification for the state is one of the most commonly misapplied of economic arguments. Whether goods are rivalrous in consumption or not is often not an inherent feature of the good, but a feature of the size of the consuming group: a swimming pool may be non-rivalrous for two people, but quite rivalrous for two hundred people. And costs of exclusion are applicable to all goods, public or private: if I want to keep you from eating my apples, I may have to take some action to protect them, such as building a fence. Many goods that are non-rivalrous in consumption, such as a professional football game (if you see it, it doesn’t mean that I can’t see it, too), are produced only because entrepreneurs invest in means to exclude non-payers.

    Besides not being an inherent feature of the goods per se, the alleged publicness of many goods is a feature of the political decision to make the goods available on a nonexclusive and even non-priced basis. If the state produces “freeways,” it’s hard to see how private enterprise could produce “freeways,” that is, zero-priced transportation, that could compete. But notice that the “freeway” isn’t really free, since it’s financed through taxes (which have a particularly harsh form of exclusion from enjoyment, known as jail), and also that the lack of pricing is the primary reason for inefficient use patterns, such as traffic jams, which reflect a lack of any mechanism to allocate scarce resources (space in traffic) to their most highly valued uses. Indeed, the trend around the world has been toward pricing of roads, which deeply undercuts the public goods argument for state provision of roads.

    Many goods that are allegedly impossible to provide on markets have been, or are at present, provided through market mechanisms — from lighthouses to education to policing to transportation, which suggests that the common invocation of alleged publicness is unjustified, or at least overstated.

    A common form of the argument that certain goods are allegedly only producible through state action is that there are “externalities” that are not contracted for through the price mechanism. Thus, widespread education generates public benefits beyond the benefits to the persons who are educated, allegedly justifying state provision and financing through general tax revenues. But despite the benefits to others, which may be great or small, the benefits to the persons educated are so great for them that they induce sufficient investment in education. Public benefits don’t always generate the defection of free-riders. In fact, as a wealth of research is demonstrating today, when states monopolize education they often fail to produce it for the poorest of the poor, who nonetheless perceive the benefits to them of education and invest substantial percentages of their meager incomes to educate their children. Whatever externalities may be generated by their children’s education does not stop them from paying their own money to procure education for their children.

    Finally, it should be remembered that virtually every argument alleging the impossibility of efficient production of public goods through the market applies at least equally strongly– and in many cases much more strongly –to the likelihood that the state will produce public goods. The existence and operation of a just and law-governed state is itself a public good, that is, the consumption of its benefits is non-rivalrous (at least among the citizenry) and it would be costly to exclude non-contributors to its maintenance (such as informed voters) from the enjoyment of its benefits. The incentives for politicians and voters to produce just and efficient government are not very impressive, certainly when placed next to the incentives that entrepreneurs and consumers have to procure public goods through cooperation in the marketplace. That does not mean that the state should never have any role in producing public goods, but it should make citizens less willing to cede to the state additional responsibilities forproviding goods and services. In fact, the more responsibilities are given to the state, the less likely it is to be able to produce those public goods, such as defense of the rights of its citizens from aggression, at which it might enjoy special advantages.

  • Myth: Markets only work when an infinite number of people with perfect information trade undifferentiated commodities

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The fifth myth — Markets Only Work When an Infinite Number of People With Perfect Information Trade Undifferentiated Commodities — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Markets Only Work When an Infinite Number of People With Perfect Information Trade Undifferentiated Commodities

    Myth: Market efficiency, in which output is maximized and profits are minimized, requires that no one is a price setter, that is, that no buyer or seller, by entering or exiting the market, will affect the price. In a perfectly competitive market, no individual buyer or seller can have any impact on prices. Products are all homogenous and information about products and prices is costless. But real markets are not perfectly competitive, which is why government is required to step in and correct things.

    Tom G. Palmer: Abstract models of economic interaction can be useful, but when normatively loaded terms such as “perfect” are added to theoretical abstractions, a great deal of harm can be done. If a certain condition of the market is define as “perfect” competition, then anything else is “imperfect” and needs to be improved, presumably by some agency outside of the market. In fact, “perfect” competition is simply a mental model, from which we can deduce certain interesting facts, such as the role of profits in directing resources (when they’re higher than average, competitors will shift resources to increase supply, undercut prices, and reduce profits) and the role of uncertainty in determining the demand to hold cash (since if information were costless, everyone would invest all their money and arrange it to be cashed out just at the moment that they needed to make investments, from which we can conclude that the existence of cash is a feature of a lack of information). “Perfect” competition is no guide to how to improve markets; it’s a poorly chosen term for a mental model of market processes that abstracts from real world conditions of competition.

    For the state to be the agency that would move markets to such “perfection,” we would expect that it, too, would be the product of “perfect” democratic policies, in which infinite numbers of voters and candidates have no individual impact on policies, all policies are homogenous, and information about the costs and benefits of policies is costless. That is manifestly never the case.

    The scientific method of choosing among policy options requires that choices be made from among actually available options. Both political choice and market choice are “imperfect” in all the ways specified above, so choice should be made on the basis of a comparison of real — not “perfect”– market processes and political processes. Real markets generate a plethora of ways of providing information and generating mutually beneficial cooperation among market participants. Markets provide the framework for people to discover information, including forms of cooperation.

    Advertising, credit bureaus, reputation, commodity exchanges, stock exchanges, certification boards, and many other institutions arise within markets to serve the goal of facilitating mutually beneficial cooperation. Rather than discarding markets because they aren’t perfect, we should look for more ways to use the market to improve the imperfect state of human welfare.

    Finally, competition is better understood, not as a state of the market, but as a process of rivalrous behavior. When entrepreneurs are free to enter the market to compete with others and customers are free to choose from among producers, the rivalry among producers for the custom of customers leads to behavior favorable to those customers.

  • Myth: Markets depend on perfect information, requiring government regulation to make information available

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading freely in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The fourth myth — Markets Depend on Perfect Information, Requiring Government Regulation to Make Information Available — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Markets Depend on Perfect Information, Requiring Government Regulation to Make Information Available

    Myth: For markets to be efficient, all market participants have to be fully informed of the costs of their actions. If some have more information than others, such asymmetries will lead to inefficient and unjust outcomes. Government has to intervene to provide the information that markets lack and to create outcomes that are both efficient and just.

    Tom G. Palmer: Information, like every other thing we want, is always costly, that is, we have to give something up to get more of it. Information is itself a product that is exchanged on markets; for examples, we buy books that contain information because we value the information in the book more than we value what we give up for it. Markets do not require for their operation perfect information, any more than democracies do. The assumption that information is costly to market participants but costless to political participants is unrealistic in extremely destructive ways. Neither politicians nor voters have perfect information. Significantly, politicians and voters have less incentive to acquire the right amount of information than do market participants, because they aren’t spending their own money. For example, when spending money from the public purse, politicians don’t have the incentive to be as careful or to acquire as much information aspeople do when they are spending their own money.

    A common argument for state intervention rests on the informational asymmetries between consumers and providers of specialized services. Doctors are almost always more knowledgeable about medical matters than are patients, for example; that’s why we go to doctors, rather than just curing ourselves. Because of that, it is alleged that consumers have no way of knowing which doctors are more competent, or whether they are getting the right treatment, or whether they are paying too much. Licensing by the state may then be proposed as the answer; by issuing a license, it is sometimes said, people are assured that the doctor will be qualified, competent, and upright. The evidence from studies of licensure, of medicine and of other professions, however, shows quite the opposite. Whereas markets tend to generate gradations of certification, licensing is binary; you are licensed, or you are not. Moreover, it’s common in licensed professions that the license is revoked if the licensed professional engages in “unprofessional conduct,” which is usually defined as including advertising! But advertising is one of the means that markets have evolved to provide information– about the availability of products and services, about relative qualities, and about prices. Licensure is not the solution to cases of informational asymmetry; it is the cause.

  • Myth: Reliance on markets leads to monopoly

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading freely in markets, many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The third myth — Reliance on Markets Leads to Monopoly — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Reliance on markets leads to monopoly

    Myth: Without government intervention, reliance on free markets would lead to a few big firms selling everything. Markets naturally create monopolies, as marginal producers are squeezed out by firms that seek nothing but their own profits, whereas governments are motivated to seek the public interest and will act to restrain monopolies.

    Tom G. Palmer: Governments can — and all too often do — give monopolies to favored individuals or groups; that is, they prohibit others from entering the market and competing for the custom of customers. That’s what a monopoly means. The monopoly may be granted to a government agency itself (as in the monopolized postal services in many countries) or it may be granted to a favored firm, family, or person.

    Do free markets promote monopolization? There’s little or no good reason to think so and many reasons to think not. Free markets rest on the freedom of persons to enter the market, to exit the market, and to buy from or sell to whomever they please. If firms in markets with freedom of entry make above average profits, those profits attract rivals to compete those profits away. Some of the literature of economics offers descriptions of hypothetical situations in which certain market conditions could lead to persistent “rents,” that is, income in excess of opportunity cost, defined as what the resources could earn in other uses. But concrete examples are extremely hard to find, other than relatively uninteresting cases such as ownership of unique resources (for example, a painting by Rembrandt). In contrast, the historical record is simply full of examples of governments granting special privileges to their supporters.

    Freedom to enter the market and freedom to choose from whom to buy promote consumer interests by eroding those temporary rents that the first to offer a good or service may enjoy. In contrast, endowing governments with power to determine who may or may not provide goods and services creates the monopolies — the actual, historically observed monopolies — that are harmful to consumers and that restrain the productive forces of mankind on which human betterment rests. If markets routinely led to monopolies, we would not expect to see so many people going to government to grant them monopolies at the expense of their less powerful competitors and customers. They could get their monopolies through the market, instead.

    It’s always worth remembering that government itself seeks to exercise a monopoly; it’s a classic defining characteristic of a government that it exercises a monopoly on the exercise of force in a given geographic area. Why should we expect such a monopoly to be more friendly to competition than the market itself, which is defined by the freedom to compete?

  • Myth: Markets promote greed and selfishness

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading freely in markets, many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The second myth — Markets Promote Greed and Selfishness — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Markets promote greed and selfishness

    Myth: People in markets are just trying to find the lowest prices or make the highest profits. As such, they’re motivated only by greed and selfishness, not by concern for others.

    Tom G. Palmer: Markets neither promote nor dampen selfishness or greed. They make it possible for the most altruistic, as well as the most selfish, to advance their purposes in peace. Those who dedicate their lives to helping others use markets to advance their purposes, no less than those whose goal is to increase their store of wealth. Some of the latter even accumulate wealth for the purpose of increasing their ability to help others. George Soros and Bill Gates are examples of the latter; they earn huge amounts of money, at least partly in order to increase their ability to help others through their vast charitable activities.

    A Mother Teresa wants to use the wealth available to her to feed, clothe, and comfort the greatest number of people. Markets allow her to find the lowest prices for blankets, for food, and for medicines to care for those who need her assistance. Markets allow the creation of wealth that can be used to help the unfortunate and facilitate the charitable to maximize their ability to help others. Markets make possible the charity of the charitable.

    A common mistake is to identify the purposes of people with their “self-interest,” which is then in turn confused with “selfishness.” The purposes of people in the market are indeed purposes of selves, but as selves with purposes we are also concerned about the interests and well being of others — our family members, our friends, our neighbors, and even total strangers whom we will never meet. And as noted above, markets help to condition people to consider the needs of others, including total strangers.

    As has often been pointed out, the deepest foundation of human society is not love or even friendship. Love and friendship are the fruits of mutual benefit through cooperation, whether in small or in large groups. Without such mutual benefit, society would simply be impossible. Without the possibility of mutual benefit, Tom’s good would be June’s bad, and vice versa, and they could never be cooperators, never be colleagues, never be friends. Cooperation is tremendously enhanced by markets, which allow cooperation even among those who are not personally known to each other, who don’t share the same religion or language, and who may never meet. The existence of potential gains from trade and the facilitation of trade by well-defined and legally secure property rights make possible charity among strangers, and love and friendship across borders.

  • Myth: Markets are immoral or amoral

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading freely in markets, many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The first myth and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Markets are immoral or amoral

    Myth: Markets make people think only about the calculation of advantage, pure and simple. There’s no morality in market exchange, no commitment to what makes us distinct as humans: our ability to think not only about what’s advantageous to us, but about what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral.

    Tom G. Palmer: A more false claim would be hard to imagine. For there to be exchange there has to be respect for justice. People who exchange differ from people who merely take; exchangers show respect for the rightful claims of other people. The reason that people engage in exchange in the first place is that they want what others have but are constrained by morality and law from simply taking it. An exchange is a change from one allocation of resources to another; that means that any exchange is measured against a baseline, such that if no exchange takes place, the parties keep what they already have. The framework for exchange requires a sound foundation in justice. Without such moral and legal foundations, there can be no exchange.

    Markets are not merely founded on respect for justice, however. They are also founded on the ability of humans to take into account, not only their own desires, but the desires of others, to put themselves in the places of others. A restaurateur who didn’t care what his diners wanted would not be in business long. If the guests are made sick by the food, they won’t come back. If the food fails to please them, they won’t come back. He will be out of business. Markets provide incentives for participants to put themselves in the position of others, to consider what their desires are, and to try to see things as they see them.

    Markets are the alternative to violence. Markets make us social. Markets remind us that other people matter, too.

  • Attacks on ALEC hypocritical and unfair

    By Steven Greenhut

    SACRAMENTO — A cadre of liberal groups has decided the scourge of the nation is a little-known conservative organization that provides model legislation to state legislators across the country.

    Overheated criticisms of the American Legislative Exchange Council have been echoed throughout the media following the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Fla., because ALEC had advocated the “Stand Your Ground” laws that anti-gun-rights activists blame for the tragic shooting.

    The public rap against ALEC is that, as the Atlantic magazine recently explained, “[I]t’s a shadowy back-room arrangement where corporations pay good money to get friendly legislators to introduce pre-packaged bills in state houses across the country.”

    Atlantic highlights ALEC Exposed, a group run by a former Justice Department official who created a wiki site spotlighting more than 800 bills that emanated from the supposed ALEC star chamber. Other groups, including a conspiracy-minded outfit that claims ALEC’s efforts to battle voter fraud are designed to keep black people from voting, have been strong-arming corporate sponsors into abandoning ALEC. Given the backbone-challenged nature of corporate America when it comes to political matters, it’s no surprise the scare tactics are working.

    Even ALEC this week announced it is backing away from gun rights and social issues and focusing entirely on free-market economic and business issues. I agree with that decision and personally find “Stand Your Ground” laws to be misguided despite my strong support for gun rights, but it’s too bad these reasonable changes — ones that will bolster the organization in the long run — came across as capitulation. That will only embolden ALEC’s enemies. And those enemies have few good arguments, which is why they spin their conspiratorial yarns and try to make it seem as if ALEC is doing something unethical or unconventional. These leftist critics don’t like ALEC simply because ALEC advocates policies they oppose.

    ALEC’s structure isn’t that different from the one taken by “mainstream” organizations such as the National Conference of State Legislatures, whose foundation includes donors of at least $25,000 that’s a who’s who of corporate America: AT&T, Walmart, Visa, Time Warner Cable, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. These donors include the National Education Association, which is a prominent labor union.

    Even worse, NCSL uses taxpayer dollars to fund many of its activities, which is something ALEC most definitely does not use. NCSL takes positions on issues. It champions itself as a nonpartisan forum for legislators to debate issues, but many critics recognize its left-of-center tilt.

    “A number of Utah lawmakers are so upset at the liberal tendencies of the National Conference of State Legislatures they are thinking of picking up their marbles and going home,” wrote the Salt-Lake Tribune’s Paul Rolly in a 2009 column. Delegations from other states expressed similar concerns.

    “Between the Senate and the House, the Utah Legislature pays about $100,000 in dues annually to the NCSL,” Rolly added. “Some lawmakers now are saying that money could be better spent. They’re also taking a harder look at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), as an alternative national association for legislators who traditionally takes conservative and pro-business stands on most issues.”

    ALEC clearly has grown as an alternative to this group. As is often the case, so-called mainstream trade associations and organizations almost always tilt in a liberal direction, even while claiming to be fair-minded and nonpartisan. It’s not surprising that government-funded organizations end up promoting more government funding and rarely push for reforms to roll back the size of government.

    I find this so often in so many spheres. The National League of Cities and its state chapters instantly jump to mind. They dominate the urban-related agenda in most capitols, but that group’s priorities are skewed hard to the left, as the group favors bigger government, controversial urban redevelopment policies and allowed the massive pension increases of the past decade to explode without complaint. I know of more conservative city officials who have talked about coming up with an alternative that researches and advances free-market-friendly issues rather than jumping on board the big-government status quo. What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that how our system is designed to operate?

    Since when is it awful to create a privately funded organization that advances constructive policy ideas? It’s far better to have corporate sponsors voluntarily pay for the group than to force the rest of us to pay for it through our tax dollars, which is how NCSL and many other organizations operate. Why aren’t activists targeting agenda-driven groups that live off of taxpayer dollars? We know the answer — they agree with those groups’ agenda and disagree with the agenda of conservative alternative organizations such as ALEC.

    By the way, Atlantic and other critics can complain about “pre-packaged conservative legislation,” but interest groups from the left and right often promote model legislation. It’s a good way to get policy preferences in play. This isn’t nefarious. Consider also that lobbyists often write bills on behalf of legislators. We know that members of Congress rarely read the bills they vote upon, even on hugely significant matters such as national health-care policy. What ALEC does is far less nefarious than the standard operating procedure in the U.S. Capitol and state capitols.

    Leftists don’t like the policies ALEC promotes, so they are using intimidation tactics to shut it down. It’s that simple. They are within their rights to do this, but let’s at least recognize that it flows not from any problem with how ALEC operates, but from the most transparent political motives.

    Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. He is based in Sacramento, Calif.

  • Kansas should improve economic climate, rely less on incentives

    By Maurice McTigue, Vice President and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He participated in the forum produced by Kansas Policy Institute this week.

    Kansas policymakers left for recess on the heels of a very disappointing jobs report last week. According to the latest jobs report, the state ranked fourth in terms of jobs lost with a 5,700 decrease in employment. As legislators prepare to return in a couple weeks, they should consider what’s best for the Kansas economy. That is, pursue goals that make Kansas a better place to do business than any other state.

    Kansas has a history of giving incentives to attract business. Despite this, businesses are leaving, and taking jobs and revenue with them. Legislators should look at all the hoops businesses must go through in Kansas and decide what hurdles can be removed to eliminate uncertainty and make the state more attractive for investment. Instead of asking what subsidy Kansas can give firms to get them to do business here, policymakers should ask existing business what it needs to operate more efficiently and effectively.

    Certainty is a key component to sound economic development because it allows businesses to make permanent plans and decisions.

    If Kansas had an economic climate that made it the best place to do business, regardless of outside contracts, defense restructuring, or inside subsidies, Boeing might not be leaving in 2013. If businesses understand the tax and regulatory landscape, and can count on it to be permanent, they can make good decisions. Outside factors are offset by a predictable and stable economic climate that allows them to be profitable. Certainty keeps jobs in Kansas creating revenue, not incentives.

    The problem with incentives is that they are not free, and result in a cost to someone else since they come from tax revenue. The referendum on the Ambassador Hotel tax exemption in Wichita illustrates this lose-lose situation. If the hotel needs a tax credit to do business, it was likely not competitive in the first place. Businesses and taxpayers naturally oppose unfair advantages, and once subsidies are gone, the business may fail anyway.

    To compete, Kansas should first think about businesses and people trading in the local economy and what permanent changes it would take to expand those businesses, instead of offering subsides. For sustainable economic growth, it is better to have 1,000 local businesses hire one extra person than use an incentive to bring in one business that may hire 1,000. Those jobs stay because of the permanent and positive business climate generating revenue, as opposed to jobs resulting from incentives that may leave and cost revenue dollars.

    Once achieved, economic competitiveness is not something that can then be forgotten. A major role for any economic development agency should be vigilance in seeking competitive improvements. This includes monitoring processes and procedures that make the state unproductive and advocate for their removal or reform.

    Key battles on taxes and the budget lie ahead; jobs and Kansas’s future are at stake. Let’s hope decision makers see fit to avoid merely doing things as they have always been done. Most incentives or subsidies are payments to compensate for things in the economy that need to be fixed, but nobody wants to make the necessary changes. A better economic development program is cultivating a climate where it is unnecessary to offer any special incentives to encourage business and investors to come to your state.

  • Harm of NCLB to be eclipsed

    By Dr. Walt Chappell, member, Kansas State Board of Education.

    Recent ads in Kansas newspapers have told the truth about the unacceptable level of reading and math scores for Kansas students. Yet, for Diane DeBacker, the State Education Commissioner, and education lobbyists to continue to deny these documented results from Kansas schools is a disservice to our students, their parents and taxpayers. This massive cover-up has gone on for years and needs to stop.

    All outside indicators of how well our schools are doing show that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates have been a major disaster and a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. Our students are not dumb plus our teachers and school administrators are doing what they have been told. But, largely due to these bureaucratic regulations, most students who graduate from American’s schools have not been taught the employable skills needed to compete for jobs in the global economy.

    This is not just a Kansas problem. Anyone willing to look at the facts can clearly see that major changes must take place in what and how we teach America’s children the concepts and skills they need to be productive adults. Yet, the Federal and State education bureaucrats and their lobbyists keep claiming that there is nothing wrong with public education — just give them more money to spend.

    Since the Montoy court decision in 2005, the Kansas legislature has appropriated $1 billion more for schools. But for the past 10 years, NAEP, ACT and SAT test scores still show that only about one-third of our students are “proficient.” With this new money, Kansas school districts hired over 6,000 new employees. And, since 2005, they had accumulated $868 million in unspent cash balances — an increase of 90 percent. Clearly, spending more tax dollars is not the answer to higher student achievement.

    In Kansas and the nation, one in four students do not graduate. Of those who do graduate and go to college, over 30 percent need remediation. Only half finish college yet most end up with huge student loans to repay — whether they earned a degree, can find a job, or not.

    A national commission has reported that 30 percent of high school graduates do not score high enough on aptitude tests to qualify to join the military. And, since the NCLB emphasis is only on teaching and testing reading and math, few students graduate with knowledge or skills for any other career.

    Clearly, the NCLB mandates from federal bureaucrats are failing to prepare our students and putting our teachers in a “no win” position of “teaching to the test.” But, the majority of the State Board has “rubber stamped” Diane DeBacker, the Kansas Commissioner of Education’s request that Kansas schools comply with the new Federal mandate to replace the Kansas standards with something new called the “Common Core Standards,” or CSS.

    However, there is no research to show that CCS will improve student achievement or that they are more relevant to what students need to learn. Yet, like NCLB, they will force teachers in every school to focus primarily on just reading and math so students can pass computerized national tests — which will replace the state assessments. As a result, there will be less time to teach all other subjects such as science, technology and careers.

    CCS are an unfunded federal mandate which will cost Kansas taxpayers millions of dollars to implement. These “new” standards were written by unknown, unelected, and unaccountable academics who have close ties to private publishing companies which will make billions of dollars of profits at the taxpayers, students and teachers expense. As a result, no Kansas elected official will be allowed to make key decisions about what and how students are taught in any K-12 school.

    The Kansas legislature and local school boards need to be strong and say “enough of this nonsense.” NCLB has not worked and CCS will be more of the same — but worse.

    Our students and nation are at risk of losing much of what previous generations have worked hard to achieve. Let’s put an end to the federal NCLB and CCS in Kansas schools, and let our teachers teach the employable skills our students need to earn a living wage and keep America strong.

    More information that Chappell has gathered may be found at his website, Walt Chappell: Main Issues.