Voice For Liberty

Category: Wichita city government

  • Consider carefully costs of a new Wichita airport terminal

    As Wichita considers building a new terminal at its airport, we should pause to consider the effect an expensive new terminal would have on the cost of traveling to and from Wichita, and by extension, the economic health and vitality of our town.

    My reading reveals that airlines are starting to become alarmed at the high costs some airports charge airlines for using their facilities. A recent Wall Street Journal article (“Airports Start to Feel the Sting Of Airline Cost-Cutting Efforts” published on May 17, 2006) reads, in part:

    The same economic forces in the air-travel business that have created buy-your-own box lunches in coach and fully reclining seats for long flights in business class are now showing up in a split at airports. The split is creating tensions as cash-strapped airlines balk at paying for first-class airports. Air Canada, the main tenant of the new terminal in Toronto, says it can’t afford the high fees.

    Airports have long been considered economic-development tools for the communities that own them. Many, like Toronto, erected palatial terminals to showcase their cities and passed on the costs to airlines and passengers. Even as airlines have gone bankrupt, airport earnings have risen.

    Now, the combination of financial woes of traditional airlines and the explosion of low-cost competitors around the world is forcing big changes in airport design and operation. Airlines, which have already won concessions from employees, travel agents and suppliers, are now putting pressure on airports to cut costs and fees. And low-cost carriers have sparked the creation of bare-bones depots, like Schiphol’s “Pier H,” in Europe and Asia.

    “Many airport monopolies still operate in the dark ages. And our patience has worn out,” says Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association, the airline trade group that has spearheaded an attack on airport charges in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

    Closer to home, and very relevant to Wichita’s desire to attract additional low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines, we learn from the same article that Southwest is quite sensitive to the costs it faces:

    Denver International, which was attacked for its high fees when it opened in 1995, has since cut costs and reduced fees, winning back low-cost Southwest Airlines. And some airports, such as Schiphol and the Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany, have moved ahead by luring new airlines with low operating costs. In the low-margin airline world, a savings of a few dollars per passenger can turn an unprofitable flight into a money-maker, especially among discount airlines charging less than $100 per ticket.

    “Nowadays if you start to build a new terminal, you are no longer able to build a castle,” says Michael Garvens, chairman of the Cologne Bonn Airport, which opened a terminal for low-cost airlines in December 2004.

    We certainly don’t want to be placed in the position of Seattle, where Southwest cut its service there because of costs. From the article “Airport costs climb” from the Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) on March 5, 2004 we can read this:

    The $587 million cost of the South Terminal expansion at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is driving away at least one of the very carriers it was intended to attract. … But Southwest Airlines in January cut its daily flights between Seattle and Spokane from eight to five, reducing its overall daily flights through Sea-Tac to 36. According to Southwest manager of properties Amy Weaver, the move was largely due to the airport’s rising per-passenger costs for carriers.

    Talking to some people and reading some remarks, it seems as though not many are too concerned about the costs of a new terminal, as it will be paid for by federal money and airline fees. But someone pays those federal tax dollars, and now we learn that airlines, especially discount carriers, are sensitive to the fees they must pay to use airports.

    The Wichita Eagle recently reported that Wichita airport officials have been talking with the airlines, and the airlines are “happy with the prospect of a new terminal.” That is directly contradictory to the reporting contained in the two articles cited above.

    Local business leaders tell us that we must have an airport that makes a good first impression for Wichita. A grand airport terminal is impressive until you realize who pays for such things. I have been in terminals in fine cities — Denver and Salt Lake City come to mind — where the gate area is quite spartan, being built from corrugated steel in the manner of a warehouse. And if I remember correctly, in Salt Lake City the concourse I used was not even sealed to the elements.

    In Cincinnati, Comair, part of the Delta network, has its own remote gate area. That building is plain in its construction, but worked very well. (As Delta and Comair no longer fly to this destination from Wichita, I guess it doesn’t matter now.) I appreciated these facilities for what appeared to be their concerted effort to hold down costs.

    In Wichita, we should remember that fewer passengers used our airport in 2005 than did in 2004. In 2006, each month’s traffic has been less than that for same month from last year. We are told not to worry about this, that air traffic is down nationwide, but the decline in Wichita is several times that of the nationwide trend.

    (From the ATA Monthly Passenger Traffic Report, enplanements nationwide are down 0.6% for the first five months of 2006, compared to the same months from 2005. In Wichita, enplanements for the first five months of 2006 are 284,848, compared to 300,169 for the first five months of 2005. That is a drop of 5.1%.)

    At the same time our airport traffic is rapidly declining, AirTran, the local discount carrier, is experiencing increased passenger counts, meaning that we are becoming increasingly dependent on a discount carrier. (For the first five months of 2005, AirTran’s share of traffic in Wichita was 6.7%. For the first five months of 2006, AirTran’s share is 10.6%.)

    As the articles cited above tell us, these low-costs carriers are very sensitive to the cost of using airports. AirTran may not be concerned, at least not regarding its cost in using the Wichita airport, as our local governments reimburse AirTran for its losses.

    Airport officials tell us that fixing what is wrong with our existing terminal will cost nearly as much as building a new terminal. It is difficult for me to believe this. We must find a way to hold down the costs that airlines and travelers face when flying to and from Wichita. Our current airport officials do not seem to agree.

  • Wow, City Biggest Investor in Entertainment

    I cannot recall another city government that has spent so much money on entertainment. The city wanted to make downtown a destination but they but a bland science muesum on the best location. They have bailed out way to many private ventures all in the name of quality of life.

  • What’s Good for Gander Not Good For Goose

    The July, 2006 issue of Budget & Tax News reports that Gander Mountain is opposing the giving of tax breaks to its competitors. A quote from the article:

    Fairness Is Questioned

    However, Gander Mountain and its developer, Oppidan Investment Co., argue granting special favors to any one retailer leads down a slippery slope. “If you give [a tax break] to a Wal-Mart, should you give it to Target? If you give it to Home Depot, then should you give it to Lowe’s? And if you give it to Bass Pro, shouldn’t you give it to Cabela’s and Gander Mountain? How about we just don’t give it to anybody?” Oppidan CEO Mike Ayers said to the Toledo Blade for a March 22 article.

    When the CEO of Gander Mountain was asked why the company doesn’t take subsidies he replied:

    We believe in the American system of free enterprise and consider these demands to be anti-competitive and fundamentally inappropriate. We cannot in good conscience go down that road and maintain our integrity as a good corporate citizen. We think it’s wrong. So we are unwilling to accept the “everyone is doing it” argument and become part of the problem./blockquote>

    More from the Gander Mountain CEO:

    Resources that could be used for education or true economic development are being wasted on private retail developments. Communities have been paying big money to bring in low-paying retail jobs. Buda, Texas, for instance, gave Cabela’s subsidies worth $61 million, or about $271,000 for every full-time job, according to our estimates. Reno, Nevada spent $54 million, or $208,000 for every job. It also should be noted that incentives to lure retail into a community often do harm to businesses already located in the area. Local stores and other national firms like Gander Mountain, who don’t seek subsidies, are placed at a competitive disadvantage by this practice. Studies have also demonstrated that the promises of increased revenue, jobs, and economic growth are seldom fulfilled.

    I was quite astonished to read these articles, as Gander Mountain certainly received a lot of aid from Wichita. To be precise, I believe the aid that Wichita gave to Gander Mountain was not in the form of a tax break. Nor was it a subsidy, if by subsidy we mean an ongoing series of payments.

    Instead, Gander Mountain received an outright gift from our city and a sweetheart lease. Now that this company has apparently changed its mind about receiving government handouts, should Wichita ask for its money back?

    Update, July 8, 2006

    I received a communication from a representative of Gander Mountain seeking to correct a mistake I made in this article. It was the developers of WaterWalk, not Gander Mountain directly, that received the subsidy from the City of Wichita. That subsidy undoubtedly let the developers offer Gander Mountain an “attractive lease rate,” as the Gander Mountain representative wrote.

    I apologize for this mistake. It is, in my opinion, a distinction without a difference. Giving money to one party so that they can give it to another is still a subsidy, and the introduction of a middleman probably added to what the city had to pay.

    Also, the City of Wichita built a parking garage for the use of Gander Mountain customers, as well as customers of other businesses, should any appear. This was reported to cost $2.1 million.

  • Arts funding in Wichita produces controversy

    As local government tries to decide which arts and cultural institutions are to receive government funds, controversy arises. A June 8, 2006 Wichita Eagle article titled “Arts panel biases alleged” tells how some funding applicants are upset that some of the members of the funding committee have ties to organizations that also applied for funds. In an editorial titled “Let Arts Funding Work” published in the June 10, 2006 Wichita Eagle, Rhonda Holman writes “The process may not be perfect, but it’s a precious opportunity for public dollars to be invested in the arts and attractions in a merit-based way that’s fair, open and accountable.”

    Later Ms. Holman makes the case that it is desirable to have experts decide how to allocate taxpayer funds amongst the various organizations that have applied. The old method, she writes, had no “scrutiny or oversight.” She pleads for the public not to lose faith in this new system of deciding who gets what.

    As I wrote in the past (Let Markets Fund Arts and Culture, How to Decide Arts Funding) there is a very simple way to decide which arts and cultural organizations are worthy of receiving funds: simply stop government funding. Let the people freely decide, though the mechanism of markets rather than government decree, which organizations they prefer.

    When people spend their own money on arts and culture there is no controversy. There can be no allegations of bias. But government spending always creates controversy. Someone is upset that they didn’t get as much as someone else. People who don’t or can’t use what the government-supported organizations provide are upset they have to pay for it. Much misguided effort goes into making the funding decisions. Instead of working to create and refine their product, arts organizations have to lobby politicians and commissions for funds.

    In the end, the public gets what the commission decrees, instead of what they really want.

    If arts and cultural organizations forgo government funding, they will learn very quickly if they are producing a product the public really wants. If they aren’t, they will have a powerful motivating factor to change.

    It may turn out that what people really want for arts and culture, as expressed by their selections made in a free market, might be different from what a commission decides we should have. That freedom to choose, it seems to me, is something that our Wichita City Council, Arts Council, and Wichita Eagle editorial writers believe the public isn’t informed or responsible enough to enjoy.

  • As expected, price controls harm Wichita travelers

    Writing from Tallahassee, Florida

    As reported in the Wichita Business Journal on May 12, 2005: “The average number of daily departures dropped to 45 in March 2006 from 54 in March 2005.”

    The effect of the AirTran subsidy is to reduce the price of airfare to and from Wichita. That is its stated goal. If the subsidy did not work to reduce prices, we would be wasting our money. The fact is that the subsidy does work to reduce airfares to and from Wichita. It also does what any economist could predict: it reduces the supply of air transport to and from Wichita. I think that’s why economics is called the “dismal science.” There really is no free lunch.

    The same article also reports this:

    Sam Williams, chairman of the Wichita Fair Fares campaign, believes that the airlines will see there is enough passenger growth to justify reinstating the lost destinations.

    “The numbers always showed that we had the ability in our catchment area to, over time, make this airport very successful,” Williams says. “Nothing has dampened my enthusiasm that that’s still going to happen.”

    I have a picture in my mind of a group of planners for, say, American or United or Northwest, planning whether to increase capacity to and from Wichita, or even if to stay in the Wichita market at all. If AirTran — a “new” airline with low labor costs — can’t earn a profit on its Wichita route at the fares it charges, how can the “legacy” airlines be expected to do so? And if they can’t earn a profit, how can we expect them to continue providing service in Wichita?

    The answer is this: we can’t expect the legacy airlines to continue their present levels of service in Wichita as long as we continue to apply price controls.

    For all the gushing over AirTran, try using it to get to some of the destinations I regularly fly to: Lexington, Jackson, Cincinnati, and Tallahassee. But I can get to these cities on most of the legacy airlines — the very airlines that we are punishing. If we lose the service of the legacy airlines, we will be in deep trouble.

    If we want to allow Mr. Williams’s dream of a successful Wichita airport to come true, we need to let market forces set fares. Any other solution will cause — and has already caused — our city harm.

  • AirTran subsidy is harmful

    (This is a longer version of my opinion piece that appeared in The Wichita Eagle last week.)

    From the beginning, we in the Wichita area have been told each year that the AirTran subsidy was intended as a temporary measure, that soon AirTran would be able to stand on its own, and there will be no need to continue the subsidy. Mayor Mayans said as much last year, and so did City Manager Kolb this year.

    But State Senator Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, on a recent television program, may have made a revealing slip when she referred to the AirTran subsidy as a “pilot program.” Now that the subsidy appears to be a permanent requirement, funded locally and perhaps statewide, we should ask ourselves if this subsidy is in our best interests.

    The benefits of the subsidy are regularly overstated — and sometimes by huge amounts. In 2004, the Chairman of Fair Fares claimed that the Fair Fares program was worth $4.8 billion in economic benefit to the state. No reasonable analysis could make a conclusion that the benefit is as large as this.

    Last year, the present Chairman of Fair Fares spoke before the Wichita City Council and equated what Wichita is doing to pricing in the airline industry with the role that Kansas played in the years before the Civil War. It hardly seems worth noting that one struggle was against the immoral institution of slavery; the other is a taxpayer-funded effort to override the natural workings of free markets.

    Yes, it is undeniable. Low airfares are preferred over high airfares, and it is probably true that airfares are lower than what they would be without the subsidy. But the airline industry is changing. As an example, carriers tell us they have eliminated or reduced the very high fares for walkup ticket purchases. We simply do not know what airfares would be in Wichita if there had not been the subsidy, so any estimate of how much has been saved is merely a guess.

    The harm the subsidy causes reveals itself in several ways. We may have less air service in Wichita due to the subsidy. Last year Delta canceled seven important daily flights. Was this in retaliation for Wichita’s decision to not subsidize Delta, as some claim? Or was it the law of supply and demand expressing itself: that when the price of something is lowered (lowering prices is the desired effect of the subsidy), less is supplied. There are fewer daily flights supplied to and from Wichita, from 56 last year to 42 today. As the subsidy lowers the price that airlines may charge for tickets but doesn’t do anything to reduce the costs of providing service, we should not be surprised to see more reductions in service.

    Backers of the subsidy claim it is necessary to keep businesses from leaving and to attract new businesses to our area. We should consider the converse: have businesses considered Wichita, and seeing a meddlesome local government, one that picks and chooses winners and losers, decided not to locate here?

    Local lawmakers abandon their principles to back the subsidy. Last year a Sedgwick County Commissioner assured me that he was a “free market” thinker, but was backing the subsidy nonetheless. Local business leaders, some who consider themselves believers in free markets, back the subsidy and have even formed private fundraising efforts to augment the subsidy.

    Consider this: if a subsidy is good for economic development, why shouldn’t we try the subsidy approach with other businesses? If we feel that, say, advertising rates in Wichita are too high, why doesn’t the city select one local television station and subsidize its operations, thereby compelling other stations to match the subsidized price? Or to help people with something that really hits home, why not grant a subsidy to one chain of grocery stores so that other stores have to lower their prices? Or in the case of a monopoly such as a local daily newspaper, why doesn’t the city or county fund a startup to supply competition? I think most Wichitans would consider these measures extreme and contrary to fairness. I find it difficult, though, to differentiate these actions from the AirTran subsidy.

    Whether to continue funding the AirTran subsidy is a bright line that we can choose to cross or not. On one side we see low airfares, and those airfares are highly visible. What we may not see as easily is the cost of a permanent expansion of government, government that intrudes increasingly on our lives and liberties. We also may not notice the loss of valuable information that prices in a free market supply, and without those price cues, we will not recognize the misallocation of capital and resources that follows.

    On the other side of the line is the harsh realization that Wichita has factors such as low population that work against low airfares. On this side, however, we will find liberty and free markets. You will find me on this side, lonely though it is.

  • Local economic development in Wichita

    Writing from Memphis, Tennessee

    Today’s Wichita Eagle (November 5, 2005) tells us of a new economic development package that our local governments have given to induce a call center to locate in Wichita. The deal is described as “one of the biggest the two-year-old economic development coalition [Greater Wichita Economic Development Coalition] has landed.”

    There is an interesting academic paper titled “The Failures of Economic Development Incentives,” published in Journal of the American Planning Association, and which can be read here: www.planning.org/japa/pdf/04winterecondev.pdf. A few quotes from the study:

    Given the weak effects of incentives on the location choices of businesses at the interstate level, state governments and their local governments in the aggregate probably lose far more revenue, by cutting taxes to firms that would have located in that state anyway than they gain from the few firms induced to change location.

    On the three major questions — Do economic development incentives create new jobs? Are those jobs taken by targeted populations in targeted places? Are incentives, at worst, only moderately revenue negative? — traditional economic development incentives do not fare well. It is possible that incentives do induce significant new growth, that the beneficiaries of that growth are mainly those who have greatest difficulty in the labor market, and that both states and local governments benefit fiscally from that growth. But after decades of policy experimentation and literally hundreds of scholarly studies, none of these claims is clearly substantiated. Indeed, as we have argued in this article, there is a good chance that all of these claims are false.

    The most fundamental problem is that many public officials appear to believe that they can influence the course of their state or local economies through incentives and subsidies to a degree far beyond anything supported by even the most optimistic evidence. We need to begin by lowering their expectations about their ability to micromanage economic growth and making the case for a more sensible view of the role of government — providing the foundations for growth through sound fiscal practices, quality public infrastructure, and good education systems — and then letting the economy take care of itself.

    On the surface of things, to the average person, it would seem that spending to attract new businesses makes a lot of sense. It’s a win-win deal, backers say. Everyone benefits. This is why it appeals so to politicians. It lets them trumpet their achievements doing something that no one should reasonably disagree with. After all, who could be against jobs and prosperity? But the evidence that these schemes work is lacking, as this article shows.

    Close to Wichita we have the town of Lawrence, which has recently realized that it as been, well, bamboozled? A September 29, 2005 Lawrence Journal-World article (“Firms must earn tax incentives”) tell us: “Even with these generous standards for compliance, to have 13 out of 17 partnerships fail [to live up to promised economic activity levels] indicates that the city has received poor guidance in its economic development activities.” Further: “The most disconcerting fact is that Lawrence would probably have gained nearly all of the jobs generated by these firms without giving away wasteful tax breaks.”

    On November 6, 2005, an article in the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader said this:

    The Herald-Leader’s investigation, based on a review of more than 15,000 pages of documents and interviews with more than 100 people, reveals a pattern of government giveaways that, all too often, ends in lost jobs, abandoned factories and broken promises.

    The investigation shows:

    Companies that received incentives often did not live up to their promises. In a 10-year period the paper analyzed, at least one in four companies that received assistance from the state’s main cash-grant program did not create the number of jobs projected.

    A tax-incentive program specifically for counties with high unemployment has had little effect in many of those areas. One in five manufacturing companies that received the tax break has since closed.

    There is spotty oversight of state tax incentives. The state sometimes does not attempt to recover incentives, even when companies don’t create jobs as required.

    …

    Unlike some other states, Kentucky makes little information about incentives public. The Cabinet for Economic Development refuses to release much of the information about its dealings with businesses, citing proprietary concerns. The cabinet has never studied its programs’ effectiveness, and it blocked a legislative committee’s effort to do so.

    The Herald-Leader’s examination of Kentucky’s business-incentive programs comes when, nationally, questions are mounting about the effectiveness and legality of expensive government job-creation efforts. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide by spring whether trading tax breaks for jobs is legal or whether they amount to discrimination against other companies.

    Meanwhile, states continue engaging in costly economic battles for new jobs, even though research strongly suggests that few business subsidies actually influence where a company sets up shop.

    We might want to be optimistic and hope that our local Wichita and Sedgwick County leaders are smarter than those in Lawrence and Lexington. Evidence shows us, however, that this probably isn’t the case. Our own local Wichita City Council members have shown that they aren’t familiar with even the most basic facts about our economic development programs. How do we know this? Consider the article titled “Tax break triggers call for reform” published in the Wichita Eagle on August 1, 2004:

    Public controversy over the Genesis bond has exposed some glaring flaws in the process used to review industrial revenue bonds and accompanying tax breaks.

    For example, on July 13, Mayans and council members Sharon Fearey, Carl Brewer, Bob Martz and Paul Gray voted in favor of granting Genesis $11.8 million in industrial revenue bond financing for its expansion, along with a 50 percent break on property taxes worth $1.7 million.

    They all said they didn’t know that, with that vote, they were also approving a sales tax exemption, estimated by Genesis to be worth about $375,000.

    It is not like the sales tax exemption that accompanies industrial revenue bonds is a secret. An easily accessible web page on the City of Wichita’s web site explains it.

    But perhaps there is hope. The Wichita Business Journal has recently reported this: “The city and county are getting $2 back for every dollar they spent over the past 18 months on economic development incentives, according to an analysis of GWEDC-supplied data. The report was presented at Thursday’s GWEDC investor luncheon at the Hyatt Regency by Janet Harrah, director of the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at Wichita State University.” Personally, I am skeptical. I have asked to see these figures and how they are calculated, but I have not been able to obtain them.

  • How to decide arts funding

    Writing from Miami, Fla.

    In an editorial in The Wichita Eagle on August 9, 2005, Randy Schofield wrote, explaining why government should support culture: “Because cultural amenities make Wichita a more desirable place to live, work and visit, and thus help realize Wichita’s quality of life and economic development goals.” We might examine some of the ideas and reasoning behind this statement.

    Do cultural amenities make Wichita more desirable? That’s quite a judgment to make. Personally, I enjoy many of the music events held at Wichita State University. I look forward to attending the recitals in the Rie Bloomfield Organ Series, and the piano recitals by Professors Paul Reed, Julie Bees, and Andrew Trechak are the highlights of my cultural season, and, sadly, largely unappreciated by the rest of Wichita. But that’s my taste and preference.

    There is a common tendency to judge “highbrow” culture — art museums, the symphony, opera, etc. — as somehow being more valued than other culture. But what people actually do indicates something different. When people spend their own money we find that not many go to the piano recital, the symphony, or the art museum. Instead, they attend pop, rock, or country music concerts, attend sporting events, go to movies, eat at restaurants, rent DVDs, and watch cable or satellite television. I’m not prepared to make a value judgment as to which activities are more desirable. In a free society dedicated to personal liberty, that’s a decision for each person to make individually.

    Because there is the tendency to judge highbrow culture as highly valued, governments, as is the case in Wichita, often subsidize it or pay for it outright. Generally, governments don’t subsidize the “lowbrow” culture events that I listed above. So why does highbrow culture require a subsidy? There can be only one reason why: the public, as a whole, does not place as much value on this culture as it costs to produce it. There is simply no way to conclude otherwise.

    Consider the movie industry. It, to my knowledge, does not receive government subsidies. Yet, it is able to make a profit most of the time, even though it faces fierce competition from many other ways people can spend their leisure dollars. The movie industry has also faced many challenges arising from new technologies: television, videocassette recorders, and cable television come to mind. How has this industry survived? By focusing on the customer, by determining what people are willing to spend their money on, and by producing products that people value enough to buy. Since the movie industry does not receive government subsidies, it has to do this. It has to meet customer needs and desires and do so efficiently. Otherwise, it starts to lose money. These losses are a signal to management that they aren’t satisfying customers, or not running their business efficiently. They have to change something, or they cease to exist.

    When an organization receives government funding, however, it is isolated from the marketplace and its customers. If the organization doesn’t generate enough revenue to cover its costs, it simply asks the taxpayer to pay the difference and it goes on to the next year. The vital imperative to change, to improve, to serve the customer, it doesn’t exist. That’s exactly what is happening with Exploration Place. It has operated at a loss for four years. By accounts, the museum’s exhibits are tired. In the face of mounting losses, they weren’t able to change in ways that the public valued. Yet, the Sedgwick County Commission has given it funding to stay open for a little while longer, and the museum is asking for $2.8 million per year.

    Some might say that it doesn’t really matter much if a government gives a little money to a highbrow cultural program. But consider from where the government gets the money. It has to tax people, and that leaves people — not by their own choice — with less money to do the things they really want to do. That makes our city, as a whole, poorer than it would be otherwise, as people aren’t able to spend their money on the things they value most. The government, instead, tells us that we have made the wrong choices, and they are going to correct our poor judgment.

    The way to determine what the people of Wichita truly value is to price things at their true cost. People, by freely choosing how they spend their money, will tell us what they value.

    In his editorial, Mr. Schofield also said: “The city needs a fair, objective way to evaluate cultural programs and award funding.” I submit that it is not fair to ask one group of people to pay for the leisure activities of another group, no matter how much we value those activities. This is what happens when the city spends tax money on culture. For the evaluation as to which programs are worthy, a free market will tell us that. People will vote, using the votes they really value — their own personal dollars — and decide which programs are valued. When governments or commissions spend taxpayer money, they don’t have to consider value.

    “It’s a good first step to bringing some discipline to the arts funding process.” The free marketplace of ideas where true costs are charged provides all the discipline required. How can we expect politicians and arts commission members to exhibit discipline when they aren’t spending their own money?

    “No, government can’t support every cultural arts organization.” Finally, a statement from Mr. Schofield that I can agree with!

    “But it can help protect Wichita’s cultural investment by providing a dependable source of funds for proven programs and clear oversight and accountability for taxpayers.” There are no “proven” programs as long as they accept government funds, especially when they know the source of funds is dependable. That dependable source of funds allows them to ignore the market and their customers. The way to prove a program’s worth is to price it so that it pays for its entire cost of production. Then, see if people are willing to buy.

    Would there be any arts and culture in Wichita if government stopped funding cultural programs? I don’t know, but I imagine there will be. It might turn out that the culture we would have would be better than what we have now, because the operators of cultural programs would have to produce what people want badly enough to pay full freight for. We don’t really know. But we do know that the alternative is worse. It’s more government and more commissions making decisions for us, deciding what we should do with our own money and time.

  • The misplaced morality of public officials

    In Wichita some public officials, particularly mayor Carlos Mayans, are seeking to eliminate adult businesses and stores selling pornography. This focus on private morality lies in sharp contrast with government’s large-scale acts of public immorality.

    If government allows people to gamble, look at nude dancers, or buy pornography and sex toys, it is not government that is “sinning” or acting immorally. Government is not requiring that we do these things. Government is merely allowing those who wish to do so to engage in these activities.

    But when government — say the Wichita City Council — takes the property of one person and gives it to another person to whom it does not belong, government is actively and purposefully committing an immoral act.

    How do we know that it is immoral when government takes money from one person and gives it to someone else? We can learn from the insight of Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850), writing in his short book The Law:

    But how is this legal plunder [theft] to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

    It doesn’t matter to whom the money is given: poor people, homeless people, airlines, farmers, banks, artists, downtown developers, problem gamblers, nonprofit organizations, students, schools, civic groups, museums, sick people, children, public amenities, or businesses under the guise of economic development. It doesn’t matter how much they need it, or how deserving they may be. It’s simply wrong for a private person or government to take money from one person and give it to another. The economist Walter E. Williams also makes this case succinctly:

    Can a moral case be made for taking the rightful property of one American and giving it to another to whom it does not belong? I think not. That’s why socialism is evil. It uses evil means (coercion) to achieve what are seen as good ends (helping people). We might also note that an act that is inherently evil does not become moral simply because there’s a majority consensus.

    This is not to say that we should not support some of the people or groups mentioned earlier. We should do so voluntarily, however. To help someone through an act of charity is noble. There is nothing good or moral happening when governments tax one person and give the proceeds to someone else.

    So when government officials want to control private morality, remember government’s large-scale acts of public immorality.