By James Barfield

In the business world, there’s an old adage that says “look before you leap.” So, upon hearing that the Wichita city council was going to hire the only city manager candidate interviewed, I decided to do some looking. What I have seen thus far, has not been all that pretty to me. One of the reasons for the “rush,” we were told, is Pat Salerno is a finalist for the same position in Durham, North Carolina. What we were not told was that he was a finalist in Durham in 2001, and was not selected. Also, this candidate was passed over in recent months by two cities in Florida, Naples and Fort Meyers. Both took a pass after initially interviewing Pat Salerno for a city manager position.

In talking with people in Sunrise, Florida, I found several people who gave Pat Salerno glowing comments regarding his economic development achievements. However, I could find no one who said they would hire him again. They listed several reasons as to why not. Chief among them were the following:

• Pat Salerno likes to run a “one man show.”
• City commissioners in Sunrise were not allowed email privileges.
• Also not allowed were city issued cell phones.
• In his 18 years of service, he constantly refused to provide information to city commission members and staff.
• He refused to hire an assistant city manager, even though there was a line item in the budget authorizing him to do so.
• He refused to hire a deputy fire chief, or a deputy police chief for 18 years.
• He has hired not a single minority department head in his 18 years of service.
• He is not considered by any to be a “people person.”
• He does not embrace the idea of “open government.”

And last but certainly not least, Pat Salerno administered a $270,000,000 city fund that was used in part to invest in sub prime real estate, without the knowledge of commission members. Commission members found out about this fund by reading a newspaper article in the Miami Herald newspaper. The fund was later frozen.

One Sunrise commissioner was quoted as saying “When you’ve got Pat Salerno doing everything, what’s the use in having a commission.” The same commissioner accused Salerno of “acting without the advice and consent of elected leaders.”

I would like to ask the citizens of Wichita, is this not the same kind of feedback that preceded the hiring of one George Kolb? Furthermore, is this what you want in a new city manager? I certainly don’t.

I for one, don’t find the need to rush justified. We seem to have a very good interim manager in place. Did we not learn anything from the hiring of George Kolb? As a business man, I like the idea of “look before you leap.”

An article in The Wichita Eagle “Plan offers hope for city’s troubled heart” (November 14, 2007) reports on the development of a plan named New Communities Initiative, its goal being the revitalizing of a depressed neighborhood in Wichita. The saddest thing in this article is the realization that there is consideration of a plan for large-scale government intervention to solve problems that are, to a large extent, caused by government itself.

The article laments low high school graduation rates and the low proficiency in math and reading. We should make sure we remember that almost all these children have gone to public schools, that is, schools owned and run by government. Plans to improve public schools almost always call for more spending. While education bureaucrats do not like to admit this, spending on government schools in Kansas has been increasing rapidly in recent years. The results of these huge spending increases are just being learned, but it is unlikely that it will produce the dramatic results that are needed.

There is a simple solution to improving schools that won’t cost more than what is already spent, and should cost even less: school choice. In parts of our country where there is school choice through vouchers — or better, through tax credits — it is low-income parents who are most appreciative of the chance for their children to escape the terrible public schools. Further, there is persuasive evidence that when faced with viable competition, the public schools themselves improve.

In Kansas, however, there is little hope that meaningful school choice will be implemented soon. Although Winston Brooks, superintendent of Wichita schools, says he is open to competition and accountability, it is a false bravado. The political climate in Kansas is such that it is nearly impossible to get even a charter school application approved, much less any form of school choice with real teeth. (See “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” January 3, 2007 Wall Street Journal.) As the government schools consume increasing resources, parents find it even harder to pay taxes and private school tuition. So the government schools, responsible for graduates who can’t read and calculate, extend their monopoly.

A continual problem in depressed areas of cities is low employment. Government again contributes to this problem by creating barriers to employment, most prominently through the minimum wage law. People have jobs because their employers value the work the employees perform more than what they pay them in wages and benefits. When government says you must pay a higher wage than what the potential employees can contribute through their labors, these low-productivity workers won’t be hired. As the minimum wage rises, which it is on the federal level, it becomes even more difficult for the least productive workers to find jobs.

The reason that some young people find it difficult to get jobs is that they don’t have the education, training, or experience to be very productive at a job. While no one likes to work for only, say $3 or $4 per hour, working for that wage is preferable to being unemployed when the minimum wage is $6 per hour. While working for $4 per hour the worker gains experience at a specific job, and experience at holding any job in general. Soon, as workers become more productive, their wages will rise. Sitting on the sidelines not working or wasting time in a government job-training program does the workers no good.

The article mentions the plight of children whose parents are in prison. More generally, this neighborhood is plagued by crime and gangs. While I do not know the proportion of these people that are in prison for crimes related to drugs, it most surely is high. Gangs exist almost solely because of the trade in illegal drugs. The government’s prohibition of drugs, then, plays a huge role in the problem of crime.

The solution is to legalize drugs. Legalize all drugs, without exception. This should not be interpreted as an endorsement of drug use, as drug abuse is a serious health problem for many people. The health problems that drug abuse causes might even increase after legalization. But the crime problem would cease to exist. No longer would people be in prison simply because they are drug addicts. With legalization, the price of drugs would rapidly decline to perhaps the cost of a pack of cigarettes or a few cocktails each day. No longer would drug addicts have to raise several hundred dollars per day through crime. No longer would gangs find selling drugs profitable, and they would likely disappear. Do the owners of liquor stores shoot each other over turf wars, and do their customers engage in crime each day to pay for their fix of cheap alcohol?

The alternative to legalization of drugs is more law enforcement aimed at decreasing the supply of illegal drugs. This government action, if successful, has this consequence: by reducing the supply of drugs, it increases their price, thereby making it even more lucrative to deal in illegal drugs.

Then there is the government’s war on poverty. The economist Walter Williams recently wrote this:

Since President Johnson’s War on Poverty, controlling for inflation, the nation has spent $9 trillion on about 80 anti-poverty programs. To put that figure in perspective, last year’s U.S. GDP was $11 trillion; $9 trillion exceeds the GDP of any nation except the U.S. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita uncovered the result of the War on Poverty — dependency and self-destructive behavior.

In the same article:

There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. Among whites, one segment suffers a 6 percent poverty rate, and only 9.9 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. The other segment suffers a 26.4 percent poverty rate, and 52 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations among blacks? … The only distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage — lower poverty in married-couple families.

In 1960, only 28 percent of black females ages 15 to 44 were never married and illegitimacy among blacks was 22 percent. Today, the never-married rate is 56 percent and illegitimacy stands at 70 percent. If today’s black family structure were what it was in 1960, the overall black poverty rate would be in or near single digits. The weakening of the black family structure, and its devastating consequences, have nothing to do with the history of slavery or racial discrimination.

Williams and Thomas Sowell, who have studied the issue extensively, conclude that it is government anti-poverty programs that are the cause of a permanent underclass. These programs should be canceled.

We see that government — through its poor schools, the raising of barriers to employment through minimum wage laws, the prohibition of drugs, and the culture of dependency and family disintegration supported by welfare — has been a contributing factor, probably the most important factor, in the decline of this neighborhood. It is foolhardy to believe that more government programs can reverse the damage already done by past and present government programs. While I’m sure that the intent of the New Communities Initiative and its coordinating members is noble, the reality is that government intervention is dangerous to the future of Wichita and to this neighborhood.

Listen to this article in audio by clicking here.

As Wichita considers the need for a new public library, a more central and fundamental question goes unconsidered: what is the role of the public library today, and do we really want one?

Consider the difference between public and private institutions. The public institution has to satisfy only a small group of people, namely the politicians that fund it. Yes, once in a while voters get to select the politicians, but issues such as a library are usually far down the list of important topics, notwithstanding a recent Wichita Eagle editorial promoting a public library as “one of the most important cultural institutions in a community. It’s an investment in our future, a symbol of our values and aspirations.”

Private institutions, or businesses, on the other hand, are voted on every day by customers, who choose one over the other for their own personal reasons. This is the idea of “consumer sovereignty.”

Public institutions, open to all, appeal to few in the end. The problem caused by unwanted “customers” at the central library is well known, and must serve to decrease its usage by some large amount.

Reading the 2006 annual report of the library, it appears that 34% of the loans made at the central branch were art, music, and video. (Due to the way the library presented the figures, I couldn’t determine this number for the branches.) Disregarding the presumably small number of artworks loaned (in comparison to the number of DVDs), the library is competing with services provided by the free market, namely video rental stores.

Even the loaning of books competes with bookstores. The library reports tells us that the value of the books the library circulated — that is, what it would cost if each person who borrowed a book had bought the book instead — is $29,068,288. I am tempted to ask what the City of Wichita has against local bookstore owners. But the reality is that the library competes rather poorly with bookstores. It has been many years since I relied on the library for timely books in my field, computers and software engineering. I found the shelves filled with titles referring to software and computers long out of date.

Today, if you want to borrow a recently-released book, especially a bestseller, you are likely to find yourself waiting in line behind dozens of borrowers, each with up to two weeks to use the book. This makes buying the book an attractive alternative, which is often what I do.

If you want to read a classic, good luck to you. I wanted to read Capitalism and Freedom, one of Time Magazine’s 100 most important books published since World War II. But, the library didn’t own it.

Could a privately-owned library be what Wichita needs? Could it do a better job? How would such a library work?

As it turns out, I can’t find an example of a city with a private library. That alone doesn’t mean a private library couldn’t work. It is, I believe, more a symptom of our increasing reliance on government instead of private solutions.

There are many ways a private library could work. Patrons might be charged a small admission fee. Patrons might buy monthly or annual memberships for unlimited use. There might be a fee for checking out items, perhaps based on the newness or popularity of the item and the length of the loan period. Items might carry advertising. Meeting rooms and other services could carry rental fees.

The point is that the library would be directly accountable to its customers who use the library, instead of a governing board, the city council, and the “public,” whoever that is. The library, wishing to earn a profit for its owners, would have strong motivation to provide services that people are willing to actually pay for. It would be free to act on its own to raise capital and provide these services, instead of complaining about the lack of funding, which is the case with the current library, as with nearly all other cultural institutions, too.

Plans for new libraries call for coffee shops in the mode of Starbucks. Will the refreshments served be free? Of course not. So charging for some services is okay, it seems.

What about people who can’t afford even the small fees a private library might charge? We are all already paying these fees now in the form of taxes. We are already paying for a library, both those who use it and those who don’t. Spreading out the costs over everyone doesn’t make it more affordable for the town as a whole. As Thomas Sowell recently wrote: “This was all before politicians gave us the idea that the things we could not afford individually we could somehow afford collectively through the magic of government.”

I wish that the Wichta Eagle editorial board would consider the alternative to government provision of things like libraries, entertainment facilities, airports, arts and culture, schools, and many other aspects of life. Relying on coercive government action over individual and voluntary group initiative makes us less free as a country and city.

Payday loans are expensive, a recent Wichita Eagle articles tells us. If someone needs to borrow money and has access to a loan from almost any other source, they should avoid payday lenders. But the reality is that there are people who have poor credit and are not able to obtain credit through the usual channels such as banks, credit unions, credit cards, and family and friends. These people may have but one source for loans: the maligned payday lenders.

Why can’t these people borrow from traditional, “legitimate” lenders? The answer is that making small loans to people who have a history of credit problems is expensive. Wishing it weren’t so and imposing government regulation won’t change this fact.

Community activists call for existing banks and financial institutions to offer small loans at reasonable interest rates. One institution in Wichita, Communities United Credit Union, did just that. But earlier this year it failed after suffering losses from bad loans, providing more evidence that it is costly to offer small loans to credit-challenged customers.

If existing financial institutions are to make small loans to credit-challenged borrowers, they should do so only with the reasonable expectation of earning profits from these loans. To do otherwise is to abandon their responsibility to their investors, and, should I learn that my bank or a bank I had invested in was making risky loans without being compensated for the risk, I would withdraw my investment in that bank.

An irony is that existing government regulation may be a contributing factor as to why payday loans are so prevalent. In an Wichita Eagle article from earlier this year, we read “Some bankers are reluctant to offer them [small loans] because their industry is so tightly regulated …” These regulations either prohibit or add to the cost of making small loans, bankers say.

Furthermore, usury laws, which limit the interest that banks and other traditional lenders may charge, are perhaps too restrictive. If traditional banks and credit unions could charge, say 25%, 40%, or even 50% for small loans, they might find it profitable to do so. An interest rate of 50%, while high, is certainly preferable to the several hundred percent rates that payday loan borrowers who roll over their loans pay.

Those who call for a limit on the interest rate that payday lenders can charge may very well drive these lenders out of business. I suspect that is their unstated goal. If they are successful, where will credit-challenged borrowers go for loans? As shown above, traditional lenders are not serving these borrowers.

A group named Sunflower Community Action says that payday lenders prey on poor people who have few financial options. I believe this group is misinformed on two points. First, the transaction between the borrower and lender is voluntary. Neither party is coerced, so there is no “preying.” Second, it is true that poor people have few options. Eliminating payday loans removes one more option, an option that evidently some people use. To its credit, this group promotes financial education and literacy, which is the best weapon to fight the cycle of poverty that some find themselves stuck in.