On the 45th anniversary of the dark day when Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis, I feel the need to write about some political history. I grew up in the Dayton area. Most of my friends back home are black. I have always found it hard to believe that most of them constantly vote Democrat, when the party itself has run many of Ohio’s major cities into the ground economically for many years. But I shouldn’t be surprised. The Ohio Republican Party, often showing little difference between themselves and the Democrats, deserves blame as well. They have allowed Ohio to remain a tax and spend state with failing schools, high crime, union and corporate corruption, and annoying, bigoted nativist sentiments.

Though my family mostly votes Democrat I have always been a Republican. You might call me a recovering neocon turned Rand Paul Republican through a drawn out awakening from the statism I grew up around. Though I wasn’t a huge fan of Bush I believe–and did from my teen years–that historically the Republican Party has had the better track record on economics and foreign policy; even though I’ve never quite been in agreement with them on social issues. In high school I read John Stuart Mill and got my first taste of the importance of individual liberty. The history books I read suggested that the Republican Party, at least prior to George W. Bush, had a better track record on this, through the civil rights support from Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower, and the economic policies of Ronald Reagan. When the party was founded as the party of civil rights, its motto was: Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men.

Though some northern Democrats such as my late grandfather (who would have turned 86 today) were friendly to the black community in the first half of the 20th century, most of the party — especially in the south — had always been an enemy of civil rights. It had been the party of Jim Crow. Even in the North,  working class Democrats before the 1960s had a tendency to bigotry. The earliest labor unions were founded to protect “white labor.”  After both WWI and WWII, many blacks fled the south to work in the industrial cities of the northeast and midwest, and the white unions would fight hard to keep them out. This would continue until the 50s, when the struggle for racial equality reached new heights.

Prior to the 70s, most blacks were Republicans. They began a mass exodus to the Democratic Party when Johnson signed the civil rights bill, even though it only passed because of the Republicans in congress. Ironically enough, Johnson as a Senator opposed civil rights legislation vehemently.

Unfortunately the Republican Party never did anything to maintain those voters or get them back. The last Republican president to campaign in black neighborhoods and truly speak to issues that affected black communities in televised debates was Ronald Reagan. Had he not been such a drug warrior he might have repaired the frayed relations. Now, historically misguided baby boomers and gen-xers in the African-American community have taught their children the myth that Republicans are racist; some of it as a result of the aggressive anti-drug policies that were kicked up during the Reagan years. Of course, our opposition to Barack Obama makes it easier to keep this myth going even if this opposition is legitimate because the president’s economic and foreign policies have been counterproductive and downright wrong. Perception is everything.

Fact: the only thing the Republican Party ever did to set back black people in its entire history was the War on Drugs. But that was a bipartisan mistake and has been supported over the years by just as many Democrats. Many rising Republican leaders such as Rand Paul and Justin Amash are finally willing to admit prohibition doesn’t work and does nothing but disproportionately incarcerate black and Hispanic men for crimes where no physical or financial harm was wrought by them on another; just as gun laws do (ever heard of the “white and polite” rule?). As they do this, rising Democratic leaders such as Elizabeth Warren mock them as potheads or flip flop on the issue and do nothing to alleviate the problem.

I’m sick and damn tired of ignoramuses accusing the Republican Party of being racist for reasons most of them can’t even explain when the Democrats clearly are part of the problem and won’t admit it. At least Rick Perry, in spite of all his faults, signed the Peaceable Journey act into law to strike down the “white and polite” rule that was locking up minorities in Texas for carrying lawfully owned guns in their car for their own protection. Historically, you could carry a gun in your car in Texas for protection; but if you were ever stopped, there was a de facto “white and polite” rule. If you were white, and nice to the officer, he’d let it slide. If you were black or Tejano, good luck. You were probably going to be arrested. This disgusting remnant of the Jim Crow south was finally repealed when the Texas Republican Party pushed for the peaceable journey act. Now all Texans’ second amendment rights are respected. They are allowed to carry guns in their car without a permit. It keeps me safe when driving at night in Houston, that’s for sure.

Do you ever wonder why minority poverty and minority incarceration are highest in blue states? There are a lot of reasons; and support for prohibition — which I will define as locking someone up for possession or use of an item where no physical or financial harm was done to anyone else — is one such reason. The welfare state and teacher’s unions are to blame too; as well as opposition to school choice programs that allow black students to get out of the ghetto by doing something as simple as: STOP FORCING THEM TO STAY THERE! (I’m very passionate about education reform. You’ll see me write more on it in coming months).

It’s going to take more than a generation to get blacks voting Republican again. It starts with ignoring or even laughing at the Rovian notion that religious-right wedge issues like gay marriage and abortion are the answer. If the black community was really that passionate about social conservatism, they would not be voting overwhelmingly Democrat. Truthfully, young blacks are just as secular as young whites. The generational shift away from social conservatism transcends race. I’ve actually met fewer young blacks who are aggressively anti-abortion or anti-gay than I have young whites, and when you put the two together, the number is inconsequential. It is likely to remain that way. The liberals control the pop culture, and it has secularized the generation. The culture war is effectively over. Fortunately, secularism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive; rather they are highly compatible.

First, the GOP needs a message of economic empowerment in black communities; one that can be brought by a revival of vocational training opportunities and academic improvement that the free market can best provide. We must be able to explain why lower taxes and fewer regulations create jobs, lower the price of everyday goods, and raise local wages. We must aggressively promote upward mobility through school choice and a return of apprenticeships in skilled crafts and STEM fields.

Next, we must become the civil rights party again, by doing as Senator Rand Paul recently said:

“It is important that we always stand up for the Bill of Rights, whether the First Amendment, Fourth or Second. The Constitution is non-negotiable”

The Bill of Rights is like dominoes, knock down one and they all fall. We must become the party of civil liberties again.

Finally, it would help if the first president to pardon a high number of non-violent gun or drug offenders was Republican. Rand Paul could very well be that president. He’s probably not going to campaign on it if he runs in 2016. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he did so after being elected.

In his address to CPAC, he said:

“Ask the Facebook generation whether we should put a kid in jail for the nonviolent crime of drug use, and you’ll hear a resounding no,”

That would be as symbolic a move for the GOP as civil rights legislation was for the Democratic Party under Johnson. Tens of thousands of mostly black and Hispanic men, who have committed no physical or financial harm to anyone other than themselves, suddenly released back into society with their records expunged, so that they can get the help they need, get back on their feet and get back into the workforce. It’s the right thing to do. And the Republican governors (hint hint, Mr. Perry), should start now as congress gears up for this gun control debate.

I urge Republican governors to scour the records of the incarcerated. Find people, of any race, who were incarcerated for possession of a firearm without a permit but committed no violent or financial crimes on top of this possession, and expunge their sentences and/or reimburse their fines. The overwhelming majority of them will be minorities. Show these people the Republican Party is not the party of prohibition, but the party of liberty, by freeing them from the police state.

I also urge you to pardon those who are incarcerated for committing non-violent, non-financial drug crimes, at least for weed–which science has irrefutably proven (to the point where anyone who still denies it is stupid) is safer than alcohol or tobacco. But you might as well start with the non-violent/non-financial gun “offenders.” Think of the taxpayer money you will save! Your voters will thank you!

It’s sad. Most of my generation thinks Dr. Martin Luther King was a pro-gun control liberal and many baby boomers think he’d be a drug warrior. I assure you if he was alive today and saw the prison statistics resulting from gun and drug prohibition, he’d be ashamed. Not that he was a fan of guns or drugs. He was a preacher of non-violent resistance and would not have appreciated self-destructive behavior. However, he would have been against government locking people up for possession of either; especially with those in prison for non-violent offenses being so disproportionately non-white. He would not want self-destructive behavior to be met with police brutality and incarceration. I’m confident he would have seen it as a mission of the church to solve these problems, not the nanny state.

The pro-civil liberties, pro-economic growth Republican Party being [re]invented by fresh young faces like Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, as well as the many Gen Y Republicans supporting organizations like Young Americans for Liberty, is the one that will repair the GOP’s frayed relations with the black community, as well as other minority groups; Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, even gays. The Rove/Kristol/Graham/Santorum wings of Dominionism, prohibition, crony capitalism, disrespect for the Bill of Rights, and perpetual warfare is what destroyed the relationship in the first place. The sooner we realize this, and begin taking action, the sooner black Americans will begin coming back to the party they once loved.

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Aaron Alghawi obtained a B.S. in Economics from Texas A&M University in 2012, and is an At-Large Board Member of the Republican Liberty Caucus national committee.

Last night’s State of the Union address had a more positive tone than I had originally expected. But it still carried a hypocritical juxtaposition of calling on Americans to come together and adopt reforms that create jobs and lift the burden on businesses, improve our children’s educational opportunities, and achieve energy independence while also touting the divisive rhetoric that drives us against each other and drives us to blame the wrong causes for our current situation.

Much of what President Obama said tonight was true. It is true that mortgages were lent to those who could not afford them. It is true that companies are shipping jobs overseas and at the same time receiving tax breaks. It is true that with the death of Osama Bin Laden and numerous Al Qaeda leaders, America is much safer. And it is true that millions of new jobs have been created since he took office.

The positives may sound good when you phrase them as such. But the grim reality is that the problems America faces are so significant, that the good things that have happened under this administration are eclipsed. While these jobs were being created, millions of jobs were being eliminated. We still have fewer jobs than when the president took office. And whether he likes to admit it or not, his own policies have played a part in this anemic growth.

EPA regulations piled on by this administration have cost us over 5% of our GDP, and that’s just one federal department of many. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill will cost $30 billion that we don’t have. The Small Business Administration estimates that the compliance cost of our current regulatory environment is $1.75 trillion per year. President Obama alone cannot be blamed for this, as his predecessors and those in Congress passed many of these regulations prior to 2009.

The president failed to mention that government programs incentivized lending of mortgages to those who could not afford them. Federal laws demanded banks loosen their restrictions or face legal action. The Federal Reserve further incentivized banks to comply by offering them easy credit. They lowered interest rates causing investors to put their money into long term projects and many focused on residential construction.

With his re-appointment of Ben Bernanke to chair the Federal Reserve System, this inflationary policy of unnaturally and artificially low interest rates has continued. The Fed has injected trillions of dollars into our economy under this administration, money which is not backed by matching economic growth or a significant demand for US dollars. This has caused the value of our currency to drop, and commodities such as gasoline have jumped in price as a result of a speculative bubble.

President Obama could have partially alleviated this problem by promoting domestic drilling for oil and the construction of new refineries, while we wait for science to develop inexpensive renewable energy. Instead, he has chosen to stand in the way of domestic oil production, while we continue to send billions of dollars to the Saudi elite, and turn a blind eye as they send that money to violent, theocratic institutions all over the world. He turned down the Keystone oil pipeline which would run from our largest supplier of oil—Canada—to the world’s most high-tech refineries in Houston.

It would have created tens of thousands of new jobs, including many for union workers that support Obama enthusiastically. They have been denied this opportunity in favor of capitulating to a lobby of environmental zealots known for its dishonesty in promoting its agenda.

The president covered a topic that I have focused much of my attention on in recent years: education. While he briefly touted the importance of returning control to local communities and schools, the other solutions he proposed are not only wrong, but they would further damage a K-12 system that is already a miserable failure at meeting the needs of the 21st century economy.

The president proposed forcing students to stay in school until they are 18 and claimed this would improve overall education. With all due respect, this is dead wrong. We have to get out of this ‘everyone gets a trophy’ mentality and realize that some children just will not learn. By forcing them to stay in school they hold back those of our children who have the drive to succeed. It is sad and politically incorrect to mention this, but it is true.

It has been mentioned in the writings of Jim Blockey, a reform school teacher from Las Vegas, I’ve discussed it with Robert Mansfield of Pennsylvania; a man born to a drug-addicted mother who grew up on the streets of Philadelphia with nothing and who rose to success when he returned to school, got his GED and joined the Army where he rose to the rank of Sergeant.I have heard even more examples from my friends who attended failing government schools in the inner cities of Ohio.

Although early childhood education in this country is world class, by the time our children reach high school, students in European countries like Belgium beat us on a number of metrics. Students in Japan, South Korea and Singapore blow us out of the water. China isn’t messing around either. They are targeting their most skilled students and placing them into advanced programs. When those students come to our universities they trounce their American peers in mathematics and natural sciences, and then our broken immigration system forces them to return to China and use the skills that we taught them against us in the global economy. A better system would incentivize and enable them to become Americans, and grow our economy instead.

The Belgians and the Japanese emphasize on the importance of school choice and privatization of education. And the British and the Japanese both emphasize on the important of the individual. Their programs are customized to fit the abilities of each student. In Japan, education is mandatory till around 15 years of age, at which they get their equivalent of our GED. Their upper-tier secondary schools are optional, and yet over 95% of Japanese students continue their education beyond the mandatory requirements. These programs are customized as either vocational education or preparation for university.

And one third of these schools are private!

In Great Britain, when you are 16, you can stay in the system, go to a trade school, or if you are smart enough go straight to college. Some states have adopted similar programs right here in America, where gifted students can achieve associates degrees upon graduating. I propose that we don’t waste their time teaching things they don’t need in the career they want.

We need to take heed to what the Belgians, the British and especially our Japanese friends have done. We shouldn’t mandate education to 18; we should eliminate the high school diploma and require a GED at the end of what is currently 9th grade as they do in Japan. Then make tenth through twelfth grade a customizable and optional program. Let students have choices of vocational programs, college preparatory programs, and if they are skilled enough, let them go straight to college. Provide a system that can ensure our 18 year olds truly are adults by giving them the marketable skills they need to make a living wage instead of mooching off of mom and dad into their twenties.

The status quo is unacceptable! And it fosters this sort of environment. To those who are worried about the students who wouldn’t go to school beyond their GED, they can always take the unskilled labor jobs and then work their way up the ladder or choose to continue their education at a later time in life. What makes such a system work so well is that the market will determine what skills are needed and relevant programs will be supplied.

This one-size-fits-all everyone-needs-to-go-to-college mentality is causing us to fall behind the competition. It is creating an education bubble that will inevitably burst. Many of these college degrees are becoming useless, rendering starting salaries that are not significantly higher than a high school diploma. The focus must be on marketable skills. General education is never a bad thing and should be viewed as a virtue, but it can only go so far.

The best possible system we can provide for our children is a system of individual choice, with a supply of curriculum determined by the market economy’s demand. A system that empowers parents, rewards the best students, and the best teachers, and yes—a system that discourages and reprimands failure.

The president went on to claim that college tuition is too high, and if it continues to rise he will pull subsidies from those universities. He’s right to acknowledge the avarice of our university system: costing its students thousands in waste on unnecessary programs and fees that should either be privately funded or purchased a la carte at the individual level.

Yet, he fails to understand the prime reason why tuition has risen at twice the rate of inflation and four times the wage rate. The federal government’s guarantee of all student loans has given greedy academics and administrators an opportunity that they would not have in a free market. They have constantly jacked up their prices, knowing that the government would credit the money to them no matter what, and the students would get stuck with the bill.

In the state of today’s economy, no one between the ages of 18 and 22 with the exception of military, civil service and a few lucky kids who invested from their teen years would be able to apply for a loan at a bank to pay over $10,000 a year for full-time tuition and living expense financing unless they had either a parent or credit-worthy friend co-sign for them. I know because I borrow primarily from a credit union to finance my education. Without a co-signer I likely would not have been approved, and if I was approved, my interest rate would be over 10%.

But the government federally guarantees many financial options for students who have little to no credit history. This has allowed the universities to set their tuition and fees well above a true market rate. In a free market where the finance was out of pocket or credit-based, they could not do this. Their classrooms would sit empty at those prices, and they would go bankrupt. Ending the federal department of education would quickly slash tuition prices in half, and prices would finally begin to increase in conjunction with wages and inflation.

When my father went to college in the 1970s, you borrowed directly from the school. A full-time summer job was enough to cover a year’s tuition and much of your living expenses at a state university. My father came here a poor immigrant, went to a small private college, and worked part time as a manual laborer. He graduated on time and with two years of debt.

My generation has not been so lucky.

This achievement by my father is the American Dream that we should want for all of our children, and it is morally wrong to deny them the benefits of a free market where they have the power to control their own destinies.

The message of class envy is dividing us and acting against the interests of that dream. Claiming that a job creating class is not paying their fair share when the top 1% of earners pay nearly 40% of the income taxes and the top 10% pay 70% of income taxes is ludicrous. But loopholes favoring one business over another certainly must go.

Our country needs a fairer, flatter tax. We need low rates for all, but we need few to no deductions. Compliance with our current tax laws cost American businesses nearly half a trillion dollars every year. Corporate taxes only make up 9% of our federal revenue yet their punitive nature begs the question: are they really worth it? What if the economic growth that was unleashed as a result of their elimination put so many people back to work, that the income tax revenue increased not only to offset that 9%, but to surpass it?

President Obama mentioned that companies are receiving tax breaks while they offshore jobs, and he mentioned the importance of incentivizing them with tax breaks to bring those jobs back here. There are over one trillion American dollars sitting overseas because investors don’t want it to be taxed by both the foreign country and the United States upon its return. Presidential candidate Ron Paul, former candidate Herman Cain, and myself all support a common sense solution to this problem.

I call upon President Obama to eliminate taxes on all foreign money repatriated into the U.S. economy. Let these corporations and businesspeople know that if they use that money to create American jobs, they can bring it back tax free! This is something that everyone should get behind! One trillion dollars is a lot of money with the potential to create millions of new jobs. If the president and both parties in congress are serious about restoring this economy to greatness, then a bill will be brought up and soon eliminating the repatriation tax, and President Obama will not hesitate to sign it.

There is too much at stake here to play class warfare politics. If government stole the entire net worth of every billionaire on the planet, not just in the U.S., it would total up to $4.5 trillion. Under this administration, the national debt has increased by over $5 trillion . We have debt because we spend too much, not because we tax too little. Both parties are to blame. We cannot afford our so-called entitlement system as is and we cannot afford a foreign policy of being the world’s policeman.

Now that we are out of Iraq President Obama said he wants to take that money, spend half of it to pay down the debt and half to build our own infrastructure. What he failed to mention was that there are no actual savings from the end of the Iraq War. We borrowed and printed money to finance our operations there and continue to do so in Afghanistan. There is no sudden influx of revenue we can use to pay down the debt, there is only a smaller deficit.

The President must realize that this is a Now or Never moment to prevent our country from going the way of many great empires in history, destroying itself under massive debt from an affluent society at home and a thinly spread militarism.

Do not give up on bipartisanship, Mr. President. Despite the differences between you and the Republicans, you can still get started on these things. Take a look at the recommendations of the Erskine-Bowles commission. Find the things in there that you and the Republicans can agree on, and immediately pass them. It will not be the end-all-be-all solution, but it is far better than doing nothing.

We owe it to future generations to actually build them a future. I understand the pressures of an election cycle, Mr. President. But the best way to get reelected is to do right by the American people. Embracing the free-market, ending corporatism, foreign nation building, and unsustainable benefit programs is the only way to save the American Dream.

Thank you, and God Bless America!

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Aaron Alghawi is finishing his B.S. in Economics at Texas A&M University; he is a board member and Director of Student Outreach for the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Scrutiny of the Koch brothers has intensified since they were connected to the battle over public sector unionism in Wisconsin.  The latest incarnation of the “two minutes of hate” directed at the Koch brothers has taken place at my alma mater, Florida State University.  As DeVoe Moore professor of economics (and RLC Advisory Board member) Dr. Randall Holcombe explains at his blog, the knee-jerk reactions are severely overblown and unwarranted:

The Koch Brothers’ Philanthropy and Academic Freedom

Writer Brendan Behan once remarked, “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.”  I am an economics professor at Florida State University (FSU), and my department has been getting lots of publicity this week.

Our run in the spotlight started with an op-ed on May 1 in the local newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, in which the writers were criticizing a grant my department received from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation because, the writers argued, we gave up our academic freedom to get the money.  The story was picked up by the St. Petersburg Times, and seems to have gone viral after that.  I could pick and choose a few links to share, but when I just Googled “Florida State University economics Koch” Google returned 211,000 results.  You can see for yourself what people are saying.

I don’t object to the investigative reporting that is being done on this issue.  As a government-run institution, I am happy to have our activities scrutinized and for the press to inquire into our funding sources, and how we are spending our money.  In this case, however, I think the press coverage has distorted the facts.

The money from the Koch Foundation was intended to fund faculty positions, to provide money for graduate student stipends, and to fund some undergraduate programs.  All of the negative publicity has been with regard to the faculty positions.  The contract with the Koch Foundation says that a committee that includes a representative from the Foundation will screen and approve any hires on that money, that the Foundation will get annual reports on the activities it funds, and that it can withdraw its support at any time if it is dissatisfied.  The money is coming as annual grants to support one year’s spending.  None is going into an endowment.  FSU is being criticized for allowing the Koch Foundation to have a say in who we hire.

Here are some facts about our accepting this money.  We recognized at the outset that we didn’t want an outside organization telling us who we could hire, and agreed we would only take the money if the Foundation agreed to support candidates we wanted to hire.  If there were no mutually acceptable candidates, we would not take the money.

Further, if you look at the three faculty we added with the Koch money, only one of them actually went through the screening process described above.  In two out of the three hires, we identified a candidate we wanted to hire without any Koch Foundation screening, we presented the candidate to Koch, and they said they would fund the hire.  They aren’t telling us who we can or cannot hire.  If the Koch Foundation turned down a candidate we wanted (and, they have turned down none of our suggestions), we could always hire them with our own money (which means, money taken from Florida’s taxpayers).

The university also agreed that if during the grant period the Koch Foundation decided to withdraw its annual appropriation to support those hires, the university would fund the positions.  The Koch Foundation could not determine who we hired, or whether someone would be terminated.  They could only determine whether they would pay for a hire.

This seems reasonable to me.  More than a decade ago I wrote a book (which is for sale through the Independent Institute) describing the way that philanthropic donations often end up supporting causes that the donor would have found abhorrent.  Donors always make donations with the intent of furthering ends with which they agree, whether it is funding cancer research, or supporting a symphony orchestra… or the teaching of the virtues of the market system in an economics department.  Once the money is given, especially if it is in the form of a bequest, or goes into an endowment, there is always the risk that the money will be spent for things which the donor would not approve.

In our grant from the Koch Foundation, they protected their interests both by only agreeing to provide the money if it was spent on something we saw as our mutual interest, and by having the right to stop their payments to us if they were dissatisfied with how they were using them.  On our end, we protected our interests by agreeing (within our department) that we would only hire on those lines if the candidates were people we would have chosen anyway, and (as a guarantee from our university administration) that if the Foundation did withdraw their funding mid-way through the contract, the university would fund those positions.  Does this constitute giving up our academic freedom?

In addition to being able to hire three faculty in tight budgetary times—at no taxpayer expense—we are also supporting several graduate students and undergraduate programs with money from the Koch Foundation.  Nobody in the department objects to the hires we made, and we are happy to have the financial support for our students.  But, understandably, there are some faculty who are upset about the negative publicity the Koch money has brought us.

Perhaps one source of hostility toward this agreement stems from the fact that Charles Koch is well-known for supporting libertarian causes, and the publicity is intended as an attack on Koch.  As a faculty member in the Florida State University economics department, I may be too close to the situation to give an objective judgment.  The agreement was signed and the Koch money began coming to our department in 2009, and after two quiet years, all of a sudden this week the subject is getting a lot of press.

Source: Holcombe, Randall G., “Philanthropy and Academic Freedom at Florida State University.” The Beacon Blog, May 12, 2011.

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces cannot supply quality education.  Yet Americans would find the current politicized and monopolistic approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services, says Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education.

• Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties.
• Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets.
• Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address.
• And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries — “for free” — from its neighborhood public supermarket.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families’ choices about where to live.  Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones.  In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal.  Poor people — entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets — would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for “supermarket choice” fueled by vouchers or tax credits.  Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public supermarket administrators and workers, says Boudreaux.

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice.  The same could be true of education.

Source: Donald J. Boudreaux, “If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools,” Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704436004576299571015982098.html

School districts around the nation are facing budget shortfalls because of cuts in the education funding in state budgets.  Unsurprisingly, their response on a nationwide basis has been to cut teachers by the hundreds and leave administrative jobs largely untouched.  Our local school district here in Austin is typical.  They are expecting to have to make about $100 million in cuts and their proposed solution is to lay off 500 teachers and only 3 administrators, close 6 schools (including two rated exemplary) and increase class sizes.

Yet in all of these desperate plans to cut the budget, one very effective option is being overlooked, educational vouchers.

Ordinarily the argument for school vouchers is that they will give underserved students access to a better education. But there is another argument in favor of them which is purely fiscal and ought to be considered by school districts which are short of funds. A voucher program can actually be used to increase the effective amount of money available to spend per student in the public school system by allowing some students to leave, but holding a portion of what would have been spent on them in reserve to underwrite the cost of educating the students who stay behind.

As an example, the Austin Independent School District, which is about average for the nation,  has 85,000 students and spends about $9100 per student. That’s a total budget of more than $750 million. Cutting $100 million out of that is a substantial reduction, but one which could be largely offset by a voucher program. If students in an affluent community like Austin were offered $6000 vouchers it’s likely that a significant portion of those enrolled — likely as many as 20% would consider attending private school with their families making up any additional cost. This would leave the school district with a net profit per student using a voucher of $3100.

Typical private schools in the Austin area charge around $8000 in tuition and while a few are much more expensive, many are less expensive, especially in the lower grades. $6000 towards that tuition would make it easy for middle class families to move their kids to private schools for a cost of at most $200 a month and likely less.

Admittedly the capacity for 17,000 or more new students does not exist in the current private school system in the Austin area, but the six schools which are being considered for shut-down — two of which are rated exemplary — could effectively be converted to private schools, even with the same teachers, staffs and buildings and handle much of that demand. Entrepreneurs would be eager to step in and take advantage of the opportunity and the school district would even make more money back from the rental of the facilities. Some of those schools could even operate very cost effectively as teacher-run cooperatives, a business model which can work very well in education and has low administrative overhead.

Issuing vouchers to 17,000 students while keeping $3100 per student in reserve would produce $51 million in additional revenue to the school system. Facility rental would add about another $32 million if education entrepreneurs and the school district are smart and work together. That total of $83 million would largely wipe out the shortfall and the rest would be easy to take care of with administrative cuts which are already being considered, or perhaps by selling the school district’s lavish administration building which is valued at $29 million.

This system might have to be phased in gradually. A lot of parents would leap at the opportunity, but it might take a few years before sufficient additional private school capacity were developed. However, an assisted privatization of schools which would otherwise be closed would greatly accelerate the process. In fact, the district might find it advantageous to privatize a few additional schools to create more capacity.

Many of these schools might very well be able to operate at below the voucher cost, especially in the lower grades. Private schools routinely operate at a cost of $5000 or less per student for pre-kindergarden through 3rd grade. The hard truth is that private education can do a better job for less money than public education traditionally does.

Of course, what this scenario points out is that it’s probable that without the huge administrative overhead — almost 50% of the AISD budget goes to administrative costs — and with decentralization you could cut the cost per student substantially and still provide an acceptable education, public or private.

For this kind of partial privatization plan to work you would need the cooperation of administrators and teachers, whose unions have traditionally been the main stumbling block to any kind of education voucher program. In this case, since the alternatives are larger class sizes, fewer schools and teacher and staff layoffs, logic would suggest that the unions would reevaluate their position on vouchers, or that teachers would see sense and take action on their own.

This proposal may seem radical, but it’s also practical and realistic and it would work in virtually every school district in the nation. Desperate times call for desperate measures and it’s time to put aside old assumptions and innovate to get more for our education dollars.  Smart school districts should look at school choice as an opportunity to serve all their students and their community better, not as a threat to the power of unions and administrators.

To the chagrin of some, the belt tightening numerous state governments are being forced to engage in is bringing some tough questions to light. When budget cuts are being made, institutions of learning often become collateral damage. Although no one finds this situation desirable, our current state of affairs and system demands it must be done.

Ugly situations such as the tussle between Governor Scott Walker and the teacher’s unions in Wisconsin are providing a small glimpse of what lies ahead, as keeping promises made through the years turns out to be an impossible task. When this discussion comes up, one of the oldest refrains we hear repeated religiously is that our public school teachers are underpaid. This has been said so many times and with such vigor that the wisdom of it has become all but conventional; questioning some things approaches futility once they become irreversibly ingrained.

Since good teachers are one of the most valuable assets a country can have, disputing their important contributions is unwise and unproductive. Any nation hoping to remain ahead of the pack will always have a need for qualified, competent teachers in order to truly stay great. But the debate has been framed to such a degree where anyone who even raises the idea of so much as tampering with collective bargaining arrangements is written off as an enemy of education who “has it in” for teachers.

Like many conservatives who dutifully denounce anyone who suggest military budget cuts as “weak on national defense” or “sympathetic to the Enemy”,  so many on the Left do the same for education: an opponent of bloated education budgets must of course be a “knuckle dragger who hates math, science, and the arts.” (With such free and open debate in the United States, one must wonder why we are unable to get our fiscal house in order.)

Both of these claims are specious and demonstrate how both sides of the political aisle shield from criticism the parts of government they would fight tooth and nail to prevent cuts from occurring in. But Department of Education funding is a subject whose discussion alone could be voluminous; all this drama over state and local school budgets in and of itself brings up an important answer to the “Are teachers underpaid” question/declarative statement.

The truth is, we will never truly know whether teachers are being overpaid or underpaid as long as public money is being used to provide their salaries.

Complaining that teachers are underpaid or shouting about too much pay (which I am not sure I have actually heard) misses the point: there is no way to know the answer. If education was truly a private marketplace, as many libertarians and some conservatives hope to establish, we would then know the true market price for sharp, committed teachers. Although it is not a government monopoly as some claim, state (and to some degree, federal) governments are so heavily involved that establishing a true market value for teacher pay is impossible.

This same concept holds true for military personnel, sanitation workers, and border patrol; all the elements of work funded by government lack the same discipline brought about by floating prices and voluntary exchange.

Do they perform a crucial service? Of course; that is not the question. Do we have a shortage of teachers that are actually teaching for the right reasons, motivated by a servant’s heart alone? Many think so, but that again is not relevant to the argument. Legislators, unions, and school boards can fight ceaselessly over salaries and benefits, but that is just it: the salaries and benefits are being arbitrarily determined, not allowed to coordinate in the way capitalist-centric competition would require. This is the reason people are often so unhappy with government services, particularly those at the federal even more than the state or local level: compensation is being determined not by voluntary competition, but by harnessing the force of law to divide up resources. When egos come into play, salaries and benefits are no longer being determined by impersonal means.

Americans at one point understood this, desiring privatization in most elements of daily life and reserving government power for things few and far between; it is no longer clear that this same spirit is alive.

Add to this mix the presence of teachers’ unions willing to fight scorched earth battles over the slightest of reforms calibrated to make education more competitive; this muddies the waters even more when it comes to determining teacher salaries and benefit packages. Suggestions like school vouchers and merit pay; you know, the types of ideas that might pop up during any free market-oriented brainstorming session, are fought tooth and nail by entrenched bureaucracy that has caused much of the  inefficiency we see in America’s school systems. Opening up education to more competition and less suffocating regulation will move us toward a marketplace in learning, one that is bound to once again produce the most informed and problem-solving minds in the world.

Only then will we be able to truly know whether our teachers are being underpaid, overpaid, or being compensated sufficiently; until that time, the battle needs to be over returning freedom of choice to all levels of American education.

Before releasing his budget publicly, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) gave Senate Republicans a private briefing about the plan in early April. During that meeting, RLC Advisory Board member Rand Paul, a Tea Party-backed freshman from Kentucky, challenged Ryan in front of the rest of their party, according to two GOP aides briefed on the meeting.

Sen. Paul said Rep. Ryan’s plan did not do enough to cut spending and relied on too much deficit spending for too long, according to the aides.

Ryan gave it right back to him. The budget committee chairman went directly after Sen. Paul’s five-year budget plan, which he had clearly studied closely. Ryan’s criticism went roughly like this: yes, he said, you slash the Department of Education and make fast, dramatic cuts, but you don’t deal with entitlement spending. In the out years the deficit would sky-rocket, he said, making an air chart with his hand moving through the air and pointing sharply upward.

A GOP aide sympathetic to Sen. Paul said that Rep. Ryan’s criticism unfairly isolated a single part of his plan and treated as if it represented Paul’s global approach to deficit reduction. Paul does plan to announce a proposal for cutting entitlement spending, the aide said, but wanted to put the domestic spending plan out first.

The private challenge from Sen. Paul reflects criticisms of Rep. Ryan’s plan Paul also made to HuffPost. Paul thinks that Ryan’s approach doesn’t go nearly far enough.

“Here’s how bad it is: The president’s proposal, his ten year plan, is 46 trillion in spending. Paul Ryan’s alternative, which everybody is going crazy over, is still 40 trillion dollars in spending,” Paul told HuffPost. “My problem with the whole thing is that all of the proposals basically increase spending.”

Rand Paul said that Paul Ryan’s plan relies too heavily on deficit spending. “The president adds, I think, 11 trillion to the gross debt and Ryan’s plan adds eight trillion. I don’t think anybody up here realizes that we can’t withstand trillion dollar annual deficits,” he said.

A Ryan spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The House recently approved Ryan’s spending plan, but it was rejected by the Senate. A compromise budget expires at the end of September.

(Source: Ryan Grim at Huffington Post)

While Republicans in The Badger State Have Finally Gained a Backbone,
Some Wisconsin Teachers Have Failed Their Students

by Aaron Biterman

Recent protests in Wisconsin have captured the attention of residents in that state and anyone paying attention to politics nationally. Governor Scott Walker, elected in November after many years of total Democrat control, proposed what he calls a budget repair bill to close the $3.6 billion shortfall. The legislation, which has support from large majorities of the Republican-controlled House and Senate, will significantly curb the collective bargaining rights of public employees in the state and would require most government workers to contribute to their pensions and health care premiums.

Specifically, if passed, state employee wage increases will be in conjunction with inflation such that employee pension contributions will rise to 5.8% of each employee’s salary, health insurance premiums will rise to 12.6% of their total premium, state workers could opt out of paying union dues after current contracts expire, and union dues could no longer be collected automatically.

Governor Walker says that these items are necessary to prevent furloughs while also reducing the $137 million deficit, but the Wisconsin Educational Association (WEA) and President Obama claim that Walker is using his political power to take away worker rights while reducing union power in the state. Of course, as the 2012 election moves closer, Democrats nationwide are concerned about Wisconsin – a key swing state – and rightfully so. Democrats receive 65% of union contributions while Republicans receive roughly 1%; roughly 34% is given to non-partisan causes.

The WEA and the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers have a combined annual revenue of nearly $30 million, according to the Center for Union Facts. Additionally, while nearly 10% of private school teachers are fired due to poor performance annually, less than two percent of Wisconsin teachers are let go as a result of inadequate performance. This is because Wisconsin public school teachers are virtually untouchable after three years of service, after which they receive tenure.

Now Wisconsin teachers have taken to the streets of Madison to protest the budget-balancing act of their newly elected governor. Meanwhile, the 14 Democrats who are members of the Wisconsin State Senate decided to leave their state and their constituents to block the Walker budget repair bill. By hiding out in Illinois, the Senate Democrats have blocked the 20 votes needed to obtain a quorum because Republicans only have 19 State Senate votes to pass the bill.

Ironically, from 2006 to 2010, when Democrats controlled the legislature and governor’s office, the same Democrats who fled their state also spearheaded controversial legislation that Republicans were not able to block, including, but not limited to:
▪ State borrowing of nearly $1.5 billion despite an unemployment rate less than the national average;
▪ Raising taxes to the tune of $900 million on cigarettes, hospitals, oil companies, and real estate in 2007;
▪ Raising taxes with a $1.1 billion tax package in 2009 which broadened the corporate tax base, increased the top personal income tax rate, reduced the capital gains tax exclusion, and increased hospital taxes; and
▪ Each of these tax hikes was in conjunction with increases in spending.

In these examples, Republican lawmakers chose to show up and make their arguments in opposition to the Democrat majority. They did not flee to another state as the 14 Democrat State Senators have.

This brings us back to the sad truth about the Wisconsin union protests: Many teachers have left their students behind for their own self-interest.

That’s right; some teachers in Madison and Milwaukee have skipped school to enhance their own wages despite the fact that 90% of black fourth-graders in the state are not proficient readers, thereby making them last in the nation in this demographic group according to the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. In 2009, 19% of Wisconsin high school students failed to qualify for service in the U.S. military as a result of their poor scores on the Army’s Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). Student achievement in Wisconsin is disparate with mediocre results, yet some teachers had the nerve to leave their students in the dust to picket at the Capitol for days at a time.

When it comes to teacher quality, Wisconsin’s results are even worse than its student achievement rates. The National Council on Teacher Quality gives Wisconsin a “D” (with “F” meaning a total failure) in four out of five categories from its 2009 “State Policy Yearbook.” The state fails to deliver well-prepared teachers, expand its pool of teachers, identify effective teachers, and remove ineffective teachers. Specifically, the study concluded that Wisconsin “fails to make evidence of student learning the preponderant criterion in teacher evaluations” and “lacks an efficient termination process for ineffective teachers.”

The essential truth about the budget repair bill is that teacher union bosses across the country are watching Wisconsin. They know that if a Democrat-leaning state like The Badger State reduces the special privileges of its state employees, they could lose tens of thousands of forced dues dollars, some of which are earmarked for the campaigns of politicians like President Obama. States like Alabama, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia are considering following Governor Scott Walker’s lead on this issue to nip their budget shortfalls in the bud, too.

Freedom of association is a constitutional right and workers should be free to come together to organize. By the same token, teachers who don’t show up to class, legislators who run to another state, and doctors who write false sick notes should be held accountable. Thank you to Wisconsin’s teachers who continue to show up for work. These are the teachers that Wisconsin students can look up to as examples. Those who are not showing up have embarrassed themselves and their profession, and that’s the sadness in the Wisconsin union uprising.

Assuming the budget fix moves forward, there are some positives in the situation, too: the budget may finally balance, other states could follow the Wisconsin model, and a much-needed discussion about the special privileges that union power wields for public sector employees will have entered the public cognizance. We owe a debt of gratitude to Governor Walker and the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature for their collective backbones.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Aaron Biterman is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is a certified teacher in The Badger State. In 2007, he moved from Wisconsin to Virginia, where he currently resides. He is an Advisory Board member of the Northern Virginia Tea Party and is Vice-Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus.

One of the reasons our public discourse is often centered on personalities and meaningless traits of candidates for office can be traced directly to the large scale deterioration in the quality of education the vast majority of our students receive. Most of us have simply becoming comfortable with the thought of Americans receiving a sub-par public education, knowing full well hefty numbers are content to coast through with minimal expenditure of effort. Even as our annual test results sound alarm bells annually regarding our standing among other industrialized nations, parents and taxpayers are willing to shrug it off under the assumption that kids in the rest of the country are getting the same abysmal education that their child is. This in and of itself serves as an indictment of federal control over schooling.

The maddeningly mediocre standardized scores of students in math and science have been well documented: that this is a problem in need of addressing has been the crux of countless articles and boilerplate speeches. We do not need to be bombarded with more hand wringing over this issue; rehashing the inequities of our nation’s current public school system is a topic that has been repeatedly flogged to the point where the bulk of us are immune to further opining. Solving the problems of subpar math and science scores is something worth examining, but this piece will focus instead on an aspect of education that, though discussed far less, carries with it potentially crippling consequences for a responsible republic.

What receives far less attention is the disheartening state of civics, history, and economics instruction in our high schools and universities. Whether in the context of public or private institutions (though one could postulate which form of education, by and large, imparts the most enlightenment to students with regard to these subjects), the vast majority of U.S. students graduate and enter the work force or college with a tangibly inadequate grasp of the traditions and schools of thought that make America distinctly American. Since high schoolers who are eligible to vote during their senior year lack exposure to the components that guarantee American liberty, we should almost thankful that their voting patterns are what they are.

The widespread lack of awareness regarding the principles of freedom in our school curriculum is a virus effecting even the most politically active among us. The bulk of our high school graduates’ history diet has consisted of what economist Thomas Woods facetiously refers to as the “Official Version of History”, meaning they are only exposed to what has been previously approved by the government’s court historians and stenographers. Essentially, they are determined to strip American history down to a few overly simplistic talking points. ‘If it cannot be neatly summed up in a span of three sentences, then it must not be relevant’ is the mindset these registrars of history want our students to leave school possessing.

If you still own it, flip open your high school (or junior high) text book to confirm this conundrum. Without fail, it will read something along the lines of: The Civil War was solely fought by the Abraham Lincoln against those godless, heathen Southerners under the evil, swastika-equivalent Confederate flag. The FDR rescued us from the Great Depression, and oh, by the way, some C list actor was President during the greed-soaked 1980s. Admittedly these are exaggerated characterizations, but they to some degree reflect the broad brush strokes our text book history is painted in. Almost no discussion is allotted to the robust debates that surrounded the states’ rights arguments of the South, the chartering of the Federal Reserve system, or the enshrinement of the income tax into our daily lives. Any dissent from the conventional commentary is tossed out as illegitimate. Praise is meted out to the strong armed Presidents who, curiously enough, always presided in office during wartime. Why the Commander-in-Chiefs whose patient diplomacy saved our country from bloodshed are never given their due is a curious fact that cannot escape the notice of the most casual of observers.

But the underlying issue persists: we are given a one sided view of history, a sketch hashed out by men and women universally statist in their orientation. This simply means that their first reflex is to defend the actions of the State (the government in Washington) and downplay the contributions of those in the private sector (a.k.a. individuals who work and create things for a living.) Considering most of these text book authors are themselves die-hard Democrats who speak of FDR only in reverent terms, they are occasionally willing to question the actions of Republican presidents. This is a fact many conservatives often point out, though one might wonder how things would unfold if the shoe was on the other foot and the actions of Republican actions were the ones beyond reproach. But overall, the crude philosophy behind these authors is one which says the rubes working 50 hours a week in flyover country need the sages in Washington to guide the long term course of their economic well-being.

When times of crisis arrived, according to our inerrant textbooks, blames should never be heaped on Congress or the White House, while the worst of scorn is to be reserved for the so-called greed of those in the private sector. So the scenario is set; we receive our college diploma instilled with the notion that the government in D.C. should be the unquestioned focal point of power. It is through this clouded lens that our erroneous focus on politics stems, causing our first instinct on policy issues both economic and social to inevitably be a rush to Washington so our point of view can receive a hearing. After all, we are taught, this is where the power lies; not in our state legislatures, city councils, or family units as the Founders intended. No, it rests with the all powerful bureaucracy situated in the District of Columbia. And it is a vicious cycle, as the teachers schooled in this Washington-centric thought are the very ones imparting misguided knowledge to our next generation.

This spiral contributes to a nation of graduates taught that every problem of societal import should be factored into their vote for U.S. Congress or the Presidency. Even elected officials who are familiar with the precepts of federalism are willing to discard them; this makes sense from the standpoint of sheer survival. Considering 51% or more their constituents long ago did the same, it would be foolish to exert energy to do away with the federal giveaways never authorized by the Constitution. ‘If the constituents are unaware of this, why bother explaining it’ is the logic followed by many seeking higher office. Why lay out these concepts in a thoughtful manner when focusing on esoteric side issues of your opponent’s personal life is the simplest route to punching your ticket for fancy titles? A distracted electorate willing to formulate its philosophy from ten second sound bites has little interest in following genuine policy debates; this all has as its root problem our lack of formal schooling in these matters.

It is only the natural course of things for a nation that gets at best a cursory lesson on these matters from their teachers and professors. If things like trade and monetary policy received little to no focus during our formative years, why should we take precious time to learn about it now? Focusing on electing the “first this” ,“first that”, or the height and weight of a candidate takes precedence in society where weighty ideas are watered down or completely skimmed over during election season. Sure, issues like “education” and “health care” might be relayed to exit pollsters as an explanation for why one voted for a particular party, but this just further underscores our inherent dilemma. Most of the “issues” named as reasons for voting one way or the other are not even within the federal government’s domain to begin with, making one wonder if the majority of American voters are even familiar with the duties those they are voting for are to carry out. Saying the president’s job is to “run the economy” is a frightening answer commonly given to the inquiry of just what it is that a president actually does. Giving someone a job which infers tremendous powers without clarity on the profession’s description is a dangerous way to run the affairs of a business, much more so the affairs of an entire country.

That we have been engaged in such a practice for several generations should make our current problems less of a shock. This leaves the door ajar for politicians to prey on voter prejudice and angst, since solving shortcomings in society and voting for federal office are now seen as one in the same. That this was never the intention of our Founders has never been relayed to scores of voters flocking to the booth every two to four years.

Come to think of it, how many of us were at least made familiar with the theories of men like Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek prior to college (if we even so much as learned their names). This author can state with confidence that he did not know the free market theories of these bright and influential men until a good while after high school graduation. Only in lower level college economic courses is the name of a man responsible for shaping much of our economic thought usually first spoken of, with this being only a quick mention of John Maynard Keynes. How do we expect to have a citizenry ready to wrestle with the tough issues of fiscal and monetary policy when they are not even presented with evidence with which to formulate an opinion? Even if the theories of Marx and Engells are placed on equal footing with those of Schumpeter and Hernando de Soto, we will be made all the better for having had the debate during our schooling. But the only mention of economics that meets our ears prior to entry into college are vague concepts which always mirror the big government approach espoused by Keynesians. A man’s theories that have been largely disproven by events in the real world are taken as gospel by the vast majority of academia; one could hardly expect the generic high school teacher to take on such established orthodoxy, especially one given an aura of invincibility by its adherents in collegiate economic departments (with George Mason, Chicago University, and Grove City College being notable outliers.) Since such a lack of focus is placed on monetary policy, it is no surprise that institutions like the Federal Reserve are never part of our public discussions when presidential election season rolls around. Tinkering with the tax rate by several percentage points is taken as the boldest action a candidate can propose. Though this is highly important, the other side of the coin, which is how loose we are going to be with interest rates and the creation of our currency, is a Grand Canyon-sized deficiency in our dialogue. Devoid of debate over many of the matters that will truly impact America’s economic wellbeing, we continue to replace one politician with another, all the time wondering why we continue to see things deteriorate and our position in the world erode. Perhaps at some point a critical mass of the public will begin demanding that the panderers pandering for our votes will talk about things which truly make a difference, such as where our money comes from and why it is constantly losing value. Many of our elders will lament that “back in their day, product X or Y cost (insert shockingly far lower price here)”, but rarely do we stop and ponder if this is inevitable or if something else is at work. Show me a legitimate candidate for president that actually tries to tackle the complexity of central banking and endorses some form of a gold standard, and I will show you a candidate who is now certifiably illegitimate. And this, like the scant attention paid to history in our high school years, can be traced directly back to the failings of our educational system.

An invaluable benefit would be granted to American society if we had some thoughtful lessons on monetary policy and price inflation for our children during the time they spent in class. Even a class on budgeting in junior high or high school would be welcome sight. Who knows, maybe some heroic school teachers are taking time to educate their students on these matters, but by and large its surface is left unscratched in legions of school districts. We must hope for the sake of a sound currency and lack of societal chaos down the road that this widespread trend will soon reverse itself.

In conclusion, we must take responsibility ourselves to ensure that an expanded teaching of history is once again a part of our student’s educational experience. Private and home schools will likely be the place where this movement initially takes root, considering there is more flexibility allowed in these environments than in government run monopolies masquerading under the title of public schools. But fostering an appreciation for the workings of constitutional government and the philosophical groundwork behind it can help to slowly stop the ebb of statism corroding our country’s institutions and prestige. We do not need to shy away from presenting both sides of an economic argument, as those of us with an unshakable commitment to free markets will naturally understand that, free from government interference, the stronger argument will win out. Recalibrating and reinforcing our views on government will cause them to eventually find a home in public school classrooms, though this will be viewed with scorn by many officials in the education hierarchy uncomfortable with the language of liberty. One could almost picture it now: ‘Wow, we can’t have our children’s minds cluttered by men like Adam Smith and Walter Williams!’ a tenured official might exclaim, their disdain simply masking unfamiliarity with economic matters. But a citizenry that can unflinchingly explain their views will no doubt influence the debate to the point where the lines of demarcation they draw on such matters will slowly make their presence known in the government schools. Only at this point will a coherent discussion ensue in our political conversations. Until then, we will continue to be ensnared in navel gazing and incessant sniping over trivial matters, all the while guaranteeing a demise that before long becomes all but inevitable.

On Saturday afternoon, Governor Gary Johnson was in Austin for a barbecue at Bartholomew Park sponsored by the Republican Liberty Caucus of Central Texas. RLC Chairman Dave Nalle captured the Governor’s remarks on video (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). He touched upon his background in business, his run for governor, and his positions on various political issues. You can watch and listen below:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4: