Voice For Liberty

Tag: Economic freedom

Economic freedom means property rights are protected under an impartial rule of law, people are free to trade with others, both within and outside the country, there is a sound national currency, so that peoples’ money keeps its value, and government stays small, relative to the size of the economy.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Friday April 29, 2011

    George Soros: Not just sinister; also stupid. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. gives us another reason to ignore George Soros. Commenting upon an article in which Soros placed Friedrich Hayek in the “Chicago school” of economists, Woods wrote: “If you think Hayek was a member of the Chicago School, you are not entitled to an opinion on matters of economic thought, period. Hayek was of course an Austrian [economist]. The Austrians are not the same as the Chicago economists, differing in method, capital theory, monopoly theory, monetary theory, policy implications, and quite a bit more. … That is a freshman mistake, one that nobody who knew anything about Hayek or either of the relevant schools would have come within a million miles of making.” … An introduction to Austrian economics is Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School by Gene Callahan, available to read at no cost.

    Legislators at work for you 372 days a year. At least according to the way their annualized pay is calculated for the purpose of Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS). Mary Clarkin of the Hutchinson News reports on a method of calculating KPERS benefits for legislators that goes out of its way to calculate a large benefit for legislators. For example, legislators, when calculating their salaries for the purposes of KPERS, are treated as through they receive their daily legislative pay every day of the year, and then a few on top of that. Also, their subsistence pay, which is intended to cover the expenses of being in Topeka, is also included in salary calculations.

    Kansas doesn’t benefit from alternative certification. This excerpt from Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty by Clint Bolick illustrates the harm that excessive regulation of occupational licensure works against economic freedom and the public schoolchildren of Kansas. “Equally pernicious are teacher certification schemes. As a certified teacher, I can attest that none of my required classroom instruction (all of which was state-required) enhanced my core subject-matter competence. Despite the fact that they often turn out ill-trained teachers, schools of education fiercely defend their monopoly status over teacher certification, resisting alternative certification and entry into teacher ranks by professionals who are demonstrably competent in their subject matter. The scheme ensures that many bad teachers enter the school system while many good teachers are kept out. Licensing is not a proxy for competence, neither in teaching nor in many other professions. However, because licensing typically requires many hours of prescribed training, it is an effective means of limiting entry into professions. Licensing requirements are lucrative for schools that teach the prescribed courses and insulate licensed practitioners from competition. But they result in higher prices and fewer choices for consumers and destroy economic opportunities.” … According to National Council on Teacher Quality, alternative teacher certification policy in Kansas is among the most restrictive in the nation. These policies, as Bolick writes, give the state’s low-functioning schools of education a monopoly over the production of teachers, and deprives schoolchildren of many excellent would-be teachers.

  • Center for American Progress starts ideologically driven news organization

    A common criticism of anyone taking a conservative political position is that they should stop getting all their information from Fox News. Criticism like that works both ways, however, especially now that the Center for American Progress Action Fund, according to Politico, is “ramping up an in-house full-fledged, ideologically driven news organization aimed in part at tripping up Republican candidates on the ground in the early presidential contests.” In the coming weeks the ThinkProgress blog will be relaunched as this news organization.

    Some key points:

    • There are ambitious goals: “The newsroom side is absolutely competing with all the leading news organizations,” said Faiz Shakir, the editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress. “We’re not out there to peddle research — we’re out there to make news.
    • Disclosure requirements are good for my political enemies, but not for me: “ThinkProgress may quack like a duck, but it’s hardly just another media organization. For one thing, like the conservative groups that have drawn Democratic criticism, its parent 501(c)4 nonprofit doesn’t disclose its donors, which Palmieri justified on the grounds that, unlike those groups, they don’t produce political advertising.”
    • CAP Action fund is, of course, an arm of the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely associated with President Barack Obama’s administration and George Soros, who advocates many liberal and left-wing political causes: “Further, CAP Action Fund openly runs political advocacy campaigns, and plays a central role in the Democratic Party’s infrastructure, and the new reporting staff down the hall isn’t exactly walled off from that message machine.”
    • Oh, it’s a moral thing: “Rejecting a question from POLITICO about why CAP declined to reveal its donors while calling out the Kochs for not disclosing their donations, he [blogger Lee Fang, a vocal critic of Charles and David Koch] said ‘It’s fundamentally different when you have wealthy individuals that want to donate to a worthy cause, and the Koch brothers and some of their cohorts that are funding groups that are essentially just advancing their self interests and their lobbying interests.’” Fang and the others at Center for American Progress and its allied organizations are evidently not able to understand that the economic freedom that Charles and David Koch advocate is not necessarily in their own interests, if all they wanted to do is become richer. As Charles Koch recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market.”

    It’s the big-government, freedom-killing policies that Center for American Progress supports that are not moral. As seen in the video presented Monday by Walter E. Williams, most government programs exist to take property from one American and give it to another to whom it does not belong, thereby making us all poorer in the process. After these government programs become ensconced, we end up with a country that is not able to care for itself and make arrangements for even the most important things such as retirement and health care, as George Resiman explained.

    Center for American Progress news team takes aim at GOP

    By Ben Smith & Kenneth P. Vogel

    The liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund is ramping up an in-house full-fledged, ideologically driven news organization aimed in part at tripping up Republican candidates on the ground in the early presidential contests.

    The group, executives told POLITICO, now has 30 writers and researchers at ThinkProgress, its blog, which is being redesigned and relaunched in the coming weeks. The editorial staff, similar in size or larger than that of many political websites, marks the latest phase in the deliberate, decade-long construction of a liberal infrastructure for reporting, research, and hammering home a message that the right is scrambling to match.

    “We see ourselves as a content provider,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the president of The Center for American Progress Action Fund, the group’s advocacy arm. “There actually is an echo chamber now.”

    Continue reading at Politico

  • ‘I, Pencil’ in audio argues for economic freedom, not government control

    The Foundation for Economic Education has released an audio version of the booklet I, Pencil. Written by FEE’s founder Leonard E. Read and first published in 1958, its message proclaiming the importance of economic freedom has not diminished with the passage of time.

    This audio recording, which you can listen to on your computer or mp3 player, is just short of 15 minutes in length. But it this short span it makes a compelling case for economic freedom instead of government control and planning.

    In Wichita, we have a mayor, city council, and business leaders that are steering us down the path of government control instead of freedom. We locally — and in Topeka and Washington too — need to heed the lesson of I, Pencil on the impossibility of government planning to control and regulate our economy:

    I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

    The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand — that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding — then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

    Listen to the recording by clicking on I, Pencil. Or, read it by clicking on I, Pencil.

  • Soros events, catering to liberal causes, largely escape notice

    This week George Soros is hosting two conferences that seek to influence and change the international financial system and the news media. In contrast to a conference recently hosted by Charles and David Koch, the Soros events have received little advance attention, and it seems likely that there will be little reporting afterward.

    A search of Google news shows just a handful of stories mentioning these events. The Boston Globe has short mention of the event taking place in New Hampshire, presumably only because it is in the neighborhood. But Dan Gainor of Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, has the details on these two events and who is attending.

    The New Hampshire event, previewed by Gainor in the Wall Street Journal piece Unreported Soros Event Aims to Remake Entire Global Economy, is intended to “‘establish new international rules’ and ‘reform the currency system.’ It’s all according to a plan laid out in a Nov. 4, 2009, Soros op-ed calling for ‘a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.’” The goals of the conference are lofty — and scary. Soros has written that “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.” As described by Gainor, this conference appears to exist to counter the threat Soros sees: “That’s what this conference is all about — changing the global economy and the United States to make them ‘acceptable’ to George Soros.”

    At the same time in Boston, Gainor reports (Two Soros Events Aim to Remake Financial Order and Media — So Where’s the Reporting?) that about 350 will gather for a conference on media reform. “Everywhere you they go in Boston, they’ll be making more left turns than NASCAR. It’s an event filled with lefties dissatisfied that the news media aren’t even more liberal, and their goal will be to make that happen.”

    Proposals for government funding of news media and a return to the fairness doctrine will be big topics, says Gainor.

    Contrast with Koch event

    The virtually non-existant news coverage of these two Soros events stands in stark contrast to the frenzy whipped up by media in anticipation of the recent Koch-sponsored conference in January. This is despite the fact that several journalists are speaking at the New Hampshire event, and the Boston event is all about news media.

    The Koch event was also protested, and the protests widely covered in the news. It appears there are no plans by anyone to protest the Soros events.

    Perhaps David Boaz offers insight when he wrote: “One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, while a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.”

    The message of capitalism, free markets, and economic freedom is powerful. When people realize its benefits and its ability to foster civil society and prosperity for everyone, the special interests that live off government intervention are threatened. As Boaz notes, if people choose to reject freedom and live under some other form of order, libertarians have no problem with that.

    But Boaz qualifies this. Such a choice must be voluntary. That’s not what Soros and his supporters have in mind. Their intent is to expand the role of government, and since government operates by force and coercion, this expansion is not voluntary. The more Soros has his way, the more the freedom and liberty of Americans is at risk.

    We ought to take note of these conferences. But with a virtual news blackout, most people won’t be aware of them and the plans being made.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Wednesday April 6, 2011

    Economics in one lesson next week. On Monday, four videos based on Henry Hazlitt’s class work Economics in One Lesson will be shown in Wichita. The four topics included in Monday’s presentation will be The Lesson, The Broken Window, Public Works Means Taxes, and Credit Diverts Production. The event is Monday (April 11) at 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Lionel D. Alford Library located at 3447 S. Meridian in Wichita. The library is just north of the I-235 exit on Meridian. The event’s sponsor is Americans for Prosperity, Kansas. For more information on this event contact John Todd at john@johntodd.net or 316-312-7335, or Susan Estes, AFP Field Director at sestes@afphq.org or 316-681-4415.

    Opinion on tax levels. From Rasmussen, 64% Say Americans Are Overtaxed, Political Class Disagrees: “Roughly two-out-of-three voters think Americans are overtaxed, and nearly as many say any federal tax increase should be subject to a vote by the American people. … But the Political Class strongly disagrees. While 79% of Mainstream voters think Americans are overtaxed, 87% of those in the Political Class don’t share that assessment.” … Political class is a group Rasmussen defines by their answers to these questions: “Do they generally trust the judgment of America’s people or the judgment of its political leaders? Do they view the federal government as its own special interest group? Do they see big government and big business often working together against the interests of consumers and investors?” More on the political class is at 67% of Political Class Say U.S. Heading in Right Direction, 84% of Mainstream Disagrees.

    Freedom leads to wealth and prosperity. Among the nations of the world, and among the states of the U.S., economic freedom leads to higher incomes and prosperity. Unfortunately, the City of Wichita has taken a step backwards in terms of economic freedom based on yesterday’s elections, and the long-term prosperity of our city is certain to suffer as a result. The state of Kansas suffers losses due to out-migration of people and income each year. This short video by Josh Hall explains. Summarizing, he says: “Individual freedom in economic life leads to economic progress. If you care about growth and prosperity, you can’t ignore the importance of economic freedom.” This video is available on YouTube through LearnLiberty.org, a site which has many other informative videos.

  • Wichita elections a blow for economic freedom

    Results from yesterday’s elections for Wichita mayor and city council members were in contrast to the message voters have sent in recent state and national races. There, voters expressed a preference for smaller government, less government spending, and less debt. For these Wichita city offices, however, voters — with one exception — voted for those who promised more government intervention and less economic freedom.

    The winning candidates, of course, didn’t mention the loss of economic freedom in their campaign pitches. But their promise to grow government means just that. Yes, they promise to carefully scrutinize city spending and incentives on a case-by-case basis, insisting they are wise enough and knowledgeable enough to determine which projects are worthy of taxpayer support, and which aren’t. They all say that, always.

    The winners in yesterday’s election — besides the officeholders — are those who will benefit from having a compliant and emboldened mayor and like-minded council members in office as they seek to earn their fortunes at city hall at taxpayer expense. We see these people and their names on the campaign donation reports of many of the successful candidates. Their interest is not good government, but personal enrichment. They generally contribute to all city council members regardless of political stance. It’s difficult to see how someone who has a consistent political ideology they believe in could contribute to all city council members. But they do.

    The incumbents who won re-election — Mayor Carl Brewer and council member and Vice Mayor Jeff Longwell — have already proven themselves to be totally captured by these special interests. Now the new council members have a decision to make: Do they stand up for limited government and economic freedom in Wichita, or do they join the mayor and other council members on the side of the crony capitalists?

    I’ll be surprised if any council member — excepting Michael O’Donnell — ever votes against any of the projects our city’s crony capitalists bring forward.

    This is not a happy day for the future of Wichita. While today’s Wichita Eagle editorial wrote of the mayor’s “enthusiasm for Wichita and optimism about its future,” we need to question the assumptions underlying his sentiments. Is it “optimistic” when a city feels it must dish out corporate welfare to any company that hints of leaving town for purportedly greener pastures? Is it “enthusiasm” when a government that doesn’t trust its citizens to build, work, and live where they want — instead pushing through a heavy-handed, taxpayer-funded downtown plan?

    The takeaway is that it’s easy for people to succumb to the mayor’s false promise of economic prosperity through government intervention. The message of economic freedom, of free people conducting their affairs with minimal interference, is more difficult to believe in for many people. Unfortunately, Wichita does not have a newspaper that believes in economic freedom and limited government, preferring instead the big-government approach to managing a city and its economy. Unlike in other recent elections, this time voters largely followed recommendations made by the Wichita Eagle editorial board.

    Going forward, we can expect a proposal for a tax increase of some sort soon. Some desire a citywide sales tax for the purposes of economic development. These ideas, along with any others expanding the reach and power of city government, will probably not face much resistance from the new city council.

  • Kansas fiscal policy is stifling the state’s economy

    Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute explains that Kansas economic policies are leading to the growth of government at the expense of private sector economic activity. Separately, KPI released figures showing that it will be very difficult for the state to meet the revenue projections made for the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30, 2011. Kansas tax collections in March were below projections, meaning even more trouble balancing the current year budget.

    State Fiscal Policy is Stifling the Kansas Economy

    By Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute.

    Kansas’ fiscal policy has stifled the state’s economy for more than a decade and the effects are now being severely felt. Policy debates are often thought of in terms of party identification but the dividing line in Kansas is about the size and role of government; specifically, limited government versus large, expanding government. Most major policy debates really come down to whether government or taxpayer interests take precedent.

    For example, last year’s 19 percent sales tax increase was designed to allow government spending to increase by more than $200 million. Efforts to instead have government operate more efficiently were rebuffed by the demand for higher revenues, even though both academic studies of the proposed sales tax increase concluded it would cost thousands of jobs. The February employment report from the Kansas Department of Labor confirms those predictions.

    Kansas employmentKansas employment

    Kansas continues to lose private sector jobs, while government jobs increase. The adjacent table shows a loss of 12,100 private sector jobs over the last year; you have to go back to 1997 to find fewer jobs in February. To fairly compare February employment to the July implementation of the sales tax, we have to use seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Department of Labor. On that basis, there are 23,200 fewer private sector jobs since the sales tax increase.

    There’s been talk of repealing the sales tax but opponents say it would make it harder to balance the state budget. That’s true, but it can be done by having government operate more efficiently, eliminating programs no longer deemed effective, and treating government employees the same as all other taxpayers. Others oppose repealing the sales tax because they’d rather retain it and use the revenue to begin reducing income tax rates. The March to Economic Growth Act (MEGA) would restrict the growth in state revenue and ease the tax burden but opponents are concerned about the impact on government. Never mind that Kansas has one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the country (number 19 according to the Tax Foundation and getting worse) and that jobs and population are migrating to states with lower tax burdens.

    Last year’s smoking ban was another fine example of putting government interests first, with state-owned casinos getting an exemption. Opponents of an effort to remove that exemption say it would cost state-owned casinos millions of dollars in lost revenue and reduce state tax revenues. Bar owners said the same thing last year but their concerns were dismissed.

    And then there’s the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS). The debate over resolving a KPERS deficit of at least $9.3 billion is perhaps the most egregious example of fiscal policy favoring government growth. KPERS is one of the worst funded plans in the country and provides benefits many times greater than received by most private sector workers. Fully funding it will have catastrophic impact on taxpayers and the economy, but even minor benefit reductions are vehemently opposed. Even a proposal to reduce benefits for employees not yet hired can’t get off the ground.

    Continuing to strip taxpayers of their economic freedom so that we can sustain and grow government will eventually cause the state’s economy to implode, as governments in California, Illinois and many nations are currently experiencing. This isn’t theory, it’s history — and we should avoid repeating it.

  • For New York Times, facts about Kochs don’t matter

    Perhaps it’s a small matter. But maybe not, as a New York Times op-ed chose to mention it in the limited space these things have.

    In today’s newspaper and yesterday’s online version, David Callahan wrote this: “One such group is FreedomWorks, which has received significant amounts of money from the Koch brothers and is a force behind both the Tea Party political movement and the conservative libertarian policy agenda it espouses.”

    The problem is that the alleged financial support from the Koch brothers to FreedomWorks doesn’t exist. A page on the Koch Industries website states: “For example, neither Koch companies and foundations nor members of the Koch family have ever contributed to FreedomWorks.” This was repeated in a Washington Examiner interview with Dr. Richard Fink, who heads the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and serves as an executive vice president of Koch Industries.

    While this might seem like an inconsequential error, the op-ed’s topic is political contributions — those who make them, and those who receive them. So it’s not unreasonable for a prominent newspaper to get the facts used to bolster its argument correct.

    Generally, this is another example of the political Left’s obsessive slamming of Charles and David Koch, to the point where things like facts don’t matter, not to mention the politics and economics. As an example, critics portray the Kochs as pursuing policies that benefit only themselves. But the reality is different. As we are learning, it is easy for a corporation to mine the halls of government for subsidy, special tax treatment, and regulations that benefit it and harm its competitors. Competing in the marketplace, where consumers are king, is more difficult. These free markets, however, are what Charles and David Koch believe in and have supported for decades, because economic freedom makes everyone more prosperous. As recently written in the Weekly Standard:

    The second charge was that the Kochs’ talk about free markets was merely cover for economic self-interest. But if that were true, why doesn’t every major corporation full-throatedly support limited government? Are we really to believe that Koch Industries is the only self-interested corporation in America? The reality, of course, is that an easier way to advance corporate self-interest is the one taken by most giant companies: securing monopolies, bailouts, tariffs, subsidies — the opposite of free enterprise. “It’d be much safer economically to sit on the sidelines or curry favor with the Obama administration,” said Richard Fink.

    It was impossible for the liberal activists to acknowledge that libertarians might actually operate from conviction. Charles and David believed in low taxes, less spending, and limited regulation not because those policies helped them but because they helped everybody.

  • Weekly Standard: The left’s obsession with the Koch brothers

    Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard has written a profile of Charles and David Koch and Koch Industries, focusing on politics and the attacks by the political Left.

    A key passage in the story explains what those who believe in economic freedom have known all along: If Charles and David Koch really wanted to make a lot of money for themselves, they would act like most corporations: seek fortune through government intervention, not through competition in free markets:

    The second charge was that the Kochs’ talk about free markets was merely cover for economic self-interest. But if that were true, why doesn’t every major corporation full-throatedly support limited government? Are we really to believe that Koch Industries is the only self-interested corporation in America? The reality, of course, is that an easier way to advance corporate self-interest is the one taken by most giant companies: securing monopolies, bailouts, tariffs, subsidies — the opposite of free enterprise. “It’d be much safer economically to sit on the sidelines or curry favor with the Obama administration,” said Richard Fink.

    It was impossible for the liberal activists to acknowledge that libertarians might actually operate from conviction. Charles and David believed in low taxes, less spending, and limited regulation not because those policies helped them but because they helped everybody. “If I wanted to enhance my riches,” said David, “why do I give away almost all my money?”

    We’ve just seen the results of how an “aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting” can succeed, as we’ve learned that General Electric has been successful in avoiding income tax liability. GE, whose chief executive is said to be close to President Obama, also invests in industries like wind power that receive government subsidy, without regard for the underlying economic benefit of these investments.

    But Charles and David Koch believe that economic freedom and free markets are the best way to generate prosperity for everyone, and the Weekly Standard article shows they have worked for decades to promote this message.

    What may really gall liberals is that while believing that a powerful and expansive government is good for the country, they have created a complicated machine that a politically-favored company like GE can exploit for huge profits, all without creating anything that consumers value. Charles Koch calls for an end to this, as he recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.”

    The political Left just can’t believe that anyone would write that and really mean it.

    The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics

    The left’s obsession with the Koch brothers
    By Matthew Continetti

    … For decades David and Charles have run Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate that employs around 50,000 people in the United States and another 20,000 in 59 other countries. Depending on the year, Koch Industries is either the first- or second-largest privately held company in America — it alternates in the top spot with Cargill, the agricultural giant — with about $100 billion in revenues. David and Charles are worth around $22 billion each. Combine their wealth and you have the third-largest fortune in America after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Like most billionaires, the brothers spend a lot of time giving their money away: to medical and scientific research, to educational programs, to cultural institutions, and to public policy research and activism.

    That last part has caught the attention of the left’s scouring eye. For unlike many billionaires, the Koch brothers espouse classical liberal economics: They advocate lower taxes, less government spending, fewer regulations, and limited government. “Society as a whole benefits from greater economic freedom,” Charles wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Judging by the results of the 2010 elections, there are millions of Americans who agree with him.

    Over the years the Kochs have flown beneath the radar, not seeking publicity and receiving little. But then the crash of 2008 arrived, and the bailouts, and the election of Barack Obama, and pretty soon the whole country was engaged in one loud, colossal, rollicking, emotional argument over the size, scope, and solvency of the federal government. Without warning, folks were springing up, dressing in colonial garb, talking about the Constitution, calling for a Tea Party. Some of them even joined a group called Americans for Prosperity — which the Kochs helped found and partly fund.

    Continue reading at the Weekly Standard.