Voice For Liberty

Tag: Wichita Eagle opinion watch

  • Government Art in Wichita

    Do we really want government art in Wichita?

    David Boaz, in his recent book The Politics of Freedom: Taking on The Left, The Right and Threats to Our Liberties writes this in a chapter titled “The Separation of Art and State”:

    It is precisely because art has power, because it deals with basic human truths, that it must be kept separate from government. Government, as I noted earlier, involves the organization of coercion. In a free society coercion should be reserved only for such essential functions of government as protecting rights and punishing criminals. People should not be forced to contribute money to artistic endeavors that they may not approve, nor should artists be forced to trim their sails to meet government standards.

    Government funding of anything involves government control. That insight, of course, is part of our folk wisdom: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” “Who takes the king’s shilling sings the king’s song.”

    When I read Rhonda Holman’s editorial City can be proud of its arts work in the July 15, 2008 Wichita Eagle, which starts with the stirring reminder that “The arts fire the mind and feed the heart” I thought that perhaps she was going to call for less government involvement in the arts. Anything so important to man’s nature surely, I thought she would agree, should not be placed in the hands of government.

    But my hopes were not realized, because soon she described the City of Wichita’s commitment to permanent spending on arts as “a bold and even brave investment in quality of life.” It appears that even the yearnings of our hearts and minds are subject to government management and investment.

    “Government art.” Is this not a sterling example of an oxymoron? Must government weasel its way into every aspect of our lives?

    And what about the “investment” in art, which Ms. Holman claims helps “drive the economy” through its economic impact and job creation? She, and Wichita City Council member Sharon Fearey rely on a study from 2007, which I discuss in Economic Fallacy Supports Arts in Wichita. This study tells of the fabulous returns on investment by governments when they invest in the arts. Like most studies of its type, however, it focuses only on the benefits without considering secondary consequences or how these benefits are paid for. Henry Hazlitt, in his masterful book Economics in One Lesson explains:

    While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

    It is, as Hazlitt terms it, “the special pleading of selfish interests” that drive much of the desire for government spending on the arts. Either that or elitism. Do newspaper editorialists and city council members believe that the people of Wichita can choose for themselves the art they want to enjoy, and then acquire it themselves? Evidently not, as the City of Wichita government has its Division of Arts & Cultural Services.

    (The material by David Boaz is from a speech which may be read here: The Separation of Art and State.)

  • Drug Runaround: Solved by Universal Health Care?

    A letter writer in the July 12, 2008 Wichita Eagle has issues with his health insurance coverage, and wants us to discard our present system in favor of universal health care coverage.

    Mr. Ronald Voth of Halstead (a candidate for the Democratic party nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives for the fourth district of Kansas in 2006) criticizes the health insurance company he uses. He doesn’t say how he obtained this coverage, but if he’s like most Americans that don’t receive their health care from the government, he and his family probably have an insurance policy selected and paid for by his employer. While many employers let their employees choose from a few variations of coverage, for most employees, they have to take what their employer is willing to provide. There isn’t much of a market for individual health insurance policies in America.

    If there were a large market for private health insurance, customers would have the benefit of companies competing for your business in free markets. This means that if Mr. Voth doesn’t like the coverage he’s getting from his current provider, he can change. But for most people whose policies are provided and largely paid for by their employers, switching insurance carriers is not a realistic option. This employer-provided coverage, a relic from the circumvention of World War II price controls, results in less competition for customers.

    With market-based competition comes innovation. With universal health care provided by government comes the opposite. I wonder if Mr. Voth knows that Canadians come to places like Wichita to get the health care they can’t get under their universal system? See Wichita’s Galichia Provides What Government Health Care Doesn’t.

    Mr. Voth claims that universal care systems in other countries are cheaper than ours, and that’s true. But we should ask why. The article referenced below states: “… because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn’t unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America’s high spending on research and development. M. D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.”

    (By the way, the high cost of health care can’t be blamed on high-paid CEO’s. If the CEO of a large insurance company that has 10 million customers is paid, say, $100 million a year, that’s only $10 per customer per year.)

    For more information about universal health care in other countries, the article The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care provides balanced criticism of the Canadian health care system.

  • Where’s Leadership on Oil Speculation?

    In the July 12, 2008 Wichita Eagle, Kenneth James Crist of Wichita blames oil speculators for ruining the U.S. Economy, writing that politicians should “do something positive to halt the rampant speculation in the stock market and oil futures that is really driving these runaway prices. All it really amounts to is tremendous greed on the part of a few, at the expense of the many.”

    I wish that Mr. Crist had read Futures Markets by the economist Walter E. Williams before writing this letter. In this article we learn this:

    The futures market, which takes into account both the present and the future availability of goods, is a vital part of a smoothly functioning economy. Unfortunately, that fact provides little comfort to people frustrated over the high prices of food and fuel. As such, it provides fodder for political demagogues, charlatans and quacks who rush in with blame and prepare “solutions” for the problems they themselves have created — the high prices for food and fuel are directly linked to the policies of the White House and Congress.

    That’s right. Futures markets — that’s where speculators buy and sell — provide a valuable service by assuming risk that others are not willing to take on, and by smoothing the price of commodities over time. Speculators assume risk. That is their essence. They may make huge profits in their leveraged trades, but they also bear the risk of, and the actual realization of, equally huge losses when their guesses are wrong.

    That illustrates an often overlooked property of futures markets. For one person — the “evil” speculator — to bet on the price of oil going up, someone has to take the opposite position, betting that the price will fall. Both can’t be right. One wins and the other loses. Is there sympathy for these speculators that lose in these trades?

    The action of a speculator taking a “long” position in markets is to buy low and sell high. This benefits consumers in the long run. By buying when prices are low, the speculator does cause prices to rise and be higher that they would be without the speculator’s buying. Then, selling when the price is higher, the speculator causes the prices to be lower than it would be if not for his selling. This is how the speculator smooths prices and assumes risk.

    Speculators can’t wait too long, either. From Greedy Speculators? published at the Cato Institute:

    The current political charge is, “the speculators are driving up the price of oil.” But think about it for a moment. If the price of oil is being driven above the market clearing price where supply equals demand, demand will fall and the speculators will be stuck holding huge, unintended stocks of oil. Holding oil in tanks and ships is costly, and speculators will not incur these costs for long, so the price will drop.

    We need to recognize the valuable role that speculators play in our economy. By focusing on an easy target, we fail to look elsewhere to find the true causes of our problems.

    For more information on the valuable role that speculators play in the economy, see chapter 22 of Walter Block’s book Defending the Undefendable.

  • Wichita Old Town Theater’s Bill Warren: No Ideas?

    Recently the Wichita City Council approved a no-interest and low-interest loan to Old Town Wichita theater owner Bill Warren and his partners. Citizen opinion in Wichita seems to be mostly outrage at this giveaway, and rightly so. See Wichita Old Town Warren Theater Public Hearing Remarks and Wichita and the Old Town Warren Theater Loan.

    Now, a post by Randy Scholfield on The Wichita Eagle Editorial Blog (Bill Warren wants your ideas!) comments on how Bill Warren wants Wichitans to send him ideas. According to the Wichita Eagle news story Warren wants filmgoers’ ideas, “Warren, who typically plans his theaters and renovations down to the detail, plans to turn much of the planning for the Old Town Warren remake over to the downtown moviegoing public.” (I guess that’s only fitting, as he asked the citizens of Wichita for a subsidy to help pay for it.)

    Wrote Mr. Scholfield in the blog post: “You’d think he and his partners in the Old Town Warren might have a revival plan worked out already, as a condition of the loan, right?”

    Now, when it’s too late, Scholfield asks the question. Perhaps he can recall his editorializing in favor of the Warren theater loan.

  • The Threat of Social Progressives

    In the July 5, 2008 Wichita Eagle, a Mr. Chet Syres of Hutchinson contributes a letter promoting the virtues of liberalism, proponents of which he now wants us to call social progressives.

    I remind Mr. Syres that leftists stole the terms “liberal” and “progressive” from the classical liberals. From For A New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard:

    One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as “liberals,” and the purest and most militant of them as “radicals”; they had also been known as “progressives” because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words “liberal” and “progressive,” and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, “Neanderthal,” and “reactionary.” Even the name “conservative” was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of “reason” as well.

    In recent years, it is liberals themselves that have given their mis-appropriated term a bad name by advocating the policies that Mr. Syres now sells under a new name: social progressivism. Who could be against progress? Only Neanderthals, of course.

    But look under the covers. Does raising the minimum wage help those who its proponents want to help? For those lucky enough to retain their jobs after an increase in the minimum wages, yes. For those who lose their jobs, no. For those who have made their way through the public schools (the grand achievement of social progressives) without graining much in the way of skills, and therefore can’t find a job at the new higher wages, no. See Problem of Low Wages Not Easily Solved.

    Then there is Mr. Syres’ desire to tax the rich at higher rates, for they are not paying their “fair share.” Trickle-down economics does not work, he says. But the problem is that government can’t create wealth. All it can do is to transfer money from one person to another. Instead, it is people who create wealth and a higher standard of living, most often by accumulating and investing capital. The less capital there is to invest — and taxes reduce that — the less economic progress can be made. With less capital, workers have to dig ditches with shovels instead of power machines. Which would you rather work with? Who earns a higher wage, the man with a shovel, or the man operating a power backhoe? But without someone accumulating wealth and capital, there can be no backhoes, only shovels, and even they require the accumulation of some capital.

    Mr. Syres says he wants to promote “social justice” through charity implemented through legislation. Is progress made when voluntary charity is replaced by government programs, fed by taxation? Is progress made when the voluntary cooperation of free people trading in free markets is replaced by the heavy hand of government coercion? Of course not, except for those who believe that they know better than everyone else how things should be, and seek to implement their ideas through expanded government. These are the social progressives, and they are a threat to liberty and prosperity.

  • A Believer in Good Government Programs

    An audio version of this post is available here.

    A Mr. Greg Abbott of Clearwater, Kansas makes the case in the June 13, 2008 Wichita Eagle that there are many good government programs: the interstate highway system, the post office, the air traffic control system, police and fire departments, etc.

    I believe the writer makes a huge error in logic by assuming that because these programs exist and have been provided by government, then they are good things to have, and that these things can only be provided through government. To make this conclusion requires a huge leap and a good measure of misplaced faith in the institution of government.

    Many of the programs the writer cites as examples of good government programs are frequently criticized. The interstate highways in our nation’s cities are often congested to the point where loss of time spent stuck in traffic is a serious problem. Then there is the problem of safety of the nation’s highways, on which some 40,000 people die each year, and many more are seriously injured. Walter Block writes “As far as I am concerned, [these deaths are] taking place in spite of, not so much because of, the actions of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, despite their tendency to take credit for anything positive that happens on their watch, as do all statist agencies.” I recommend his article Deaths by Government: Another Missing Chapter.

    The post office? Do many people rely on the post office for delivery of critical shipments when private alternatives such as FedEx and UPS are available?

    As for flood control, the federal government’s flood insurance program, by suppressing signals that would be expressed in the price system as insurance premiums, if there was indeed a free market for such insurance, has lead to numerous deaths. Ask the residents of New Orleans how they feel about government levees and government flood insurance. See How Government Insurance Destroyed New Orleans.

    Need I continue? Each government program Mr. Abbott mentions has severe problems, and most crowd out efforts by private enterprise to provide alternatives.

    There is a truth in the writer’s letter in this sentence: “We need to wake up and realize that we all depend on the government.” That this is true is profoundly sad. Government, Mr. Abbott, operates through force and coercion. Wouldn’t it be better if we could solve problems and provide services through the voluntary cooperation of people?

  • Support the Wichita School Bond Issue For Our Community

    In a letter printed in the May 30, 2008 Wichita Eagle, Margaret Wooldridge of Park City, Kansas criticizes opponents of the proposed bond issue for USD 259, the Wichita, Kansas public school district. The mysterious “Boondoggler” at Wichita 259 Truth exposes the several problems with this letter in the post BOE Meetings and Letters.

    In my opinion, the worst part of this letter is where the writer invokes the spirit of President Kennedy with the plea “We need to ask ourselves not what our community can do for us, but what can we do for our community.”

    But is the “community” the only way to organize and get things done? By community, I believe Ms. Wooldridge really means government, which develops one-size-fits-all solutions that squash individuality, entrepreneurship, and creativity. Then, it enforces its solution through force and coercion. So if you don’t agree with what the community decides is best for you and your children, what then do you do?

    According to this letter writer, you must have an agenda if you don’t agree with what she wants us to do, which is to “try working for the students of USD 259.” Isn’t that an agenda right there, Ms. Wooldridge, one that suits your personal needs? I might also remind readers that the taxpayers of the community work hard enough to supply the Wichita public schools with some $577 million this year.

    To understand more about the dangers of the collectivist sentiment this letter writer relies on, I recommend reading the introduction to Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. About Kennedy’s statement he wrote: “Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.”

  • Let’s Spend on Wichita School Facilities, But Not Maintain Them?

    A writer in The Wichita Eagle (May 21, 2008) makes the case that since one of the persons opposed to the proposed USD 259 (Wichita public school district) bond issue in 2008 hasn’t been in a Wichita public school for many years, he isn’t as credible as he could be. If he would take a tour of the schools, he would better understand the magnitude of the problem.

    As the person who is the subject of this letter, I can say that I don’t agree with the premise of this writer. That’s because I agree that some school buildings and facilities are in poor condition.

    What’s really puzzling about the letter is this: “I have absolutely no faith that the school board will properly maintain any new sports facilities should the bond issue pass.” So this letter writer wants us to spend many millions on sports facilities and upgrades, but has no faith they will be properly cared for. Does this make any sense?

  • Investment in Wichita Public Schools

    Part of the Wichita Eagle opinion watch series. An audio broadcast of this article may be heard by clicking here.

    A letter writer in the April 27, 2008 Wichita Eagle makes the case that investment in USD 259 (the Wichita, Kansas public school district) has a good return.

    By way of comparison, the writer argues that the Wichita airport, having been built with public funds, represents “an investment return.” Whether it represents a good return on investment the writer doesn’t say, but I believe he means that the airport was a good investment of public funds.

    The mere fact that the airport exists, however, doesn’t prove a good return on investment. Since the airport is owned by government and doesn’t calculate its profit or loss in a competitive market, we can never know how wise is the “investment” made in the Wichita airport.

    Then the writer really gets off track. He speaks of “my own school bond issue within my family,” that being day care, preschool, K through 12, then a degree at the University of Kansas and a master’s degree. These activities are all voluntary choices that the writer and his family made. Taxation by the government, however, is not voluntary. The writer might also be reminded that it may be a voluntary choice to attend the University of Kansas, but the people of the State of Kansas have no choice but to fund its operations.

    Finally, the writer states “Some opponents of the school bond issue have even said the kids in USD 259 don’t need tornado shelters. That is ridiculous.” It is true that 60 schools in the Wichita school district don’t have safe rooms, and this situation is the result of decisions made by the school district and its board. They had an opportunity to build more safe rooms as part of the bond issue in 2000, but they decided to spend the money on other things. Similarly, each year the district has a large capital budget to spend, and each year they decide to spend it on things other than safe rooms. Blame for the lack of storm shelters, therefore, rests solely with the Wichita school district. They have decided that other things are more important.