BLOG
Public Nuisance Liability: A $572 Million Jaywalking Ticket?
What happens to a state when businesses don’t have some assurance that their good-faith efforts to comply with laws, regulations, and best practices will protect them from massive civil liability? Well, what would you do? If you thought that merely becoming unpopular could lead to your arrest in a given state, would you go there? That is the situation businesses may soon face when choosing whether to do business in Oklahoma. If I were counseling a business, I would tell them to avoid doing business in Oklahoma right now. All because the state pursued, and a district court granted, a short-sighted cash grab against those unpopular opioid makers. That decision is the subject of 1889’s latest paper. It’s not that the drugmakers were wholly innocent. There was a non-jury trial, which means that the judge, who typically only weighs in on matters of legal doctrine and civil procedure (the rules surrounding how a trial operates — any time a lawyer objects on TV, that’s civil procedure) was also the finder of fact. In this instance, he found that Johnson & Johnson had engaged in false and misleading advertising. That’s not good, but it’s normally a pretty minor offense. Think of it...
Schools Shouldn’t Have to Teach “Adulting,” and Likely Wouldn’t Anyway
It seems that every time I go online, I see another post from one of my friends bemoaning how they didn’t learn anything “useful” in high school. They point to skills such as filing taxes and taking out a loan as more important than the core academic subjects taught in schools. The Oklahoma legislature appears poised to give them their wish. House Bill 2727 would absurdly create “Adulting 101.” Adulting 101 aims to teach students about nutrition, car maintenance, household repairs, interpersonal skills, professional development, basic financial skills, and time and stress management. This bill reminds me of the movie title, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The good of this bill is that it recognizes some of the skills mentioned in the bill, like personal finance, are worthy of being taught in schools. It is also good that the authors see that these skills aren’t currently being effectively taught, when they very well can and should be. The bad is that the bill attempts to formalize the teaching of soft skills, like proper human interaction, that students should be learning organically by interacting with teachers and peers. Thus, the bill adds to the burgeoning mission creep of...
Still Reason to Celebrate the 1889 Land Run
In the latest example of the outrage mob, cancel culture, and the deep-seated need to get offended at everything, the 1889 Land Run has been canceled. You may remember a recent controversy surrounding Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC) and its decision to remove a monument depicting the 1889 Land Run. The irony is that OCCC most likely would not exist were it not for the land run, but I digress. In all honesty, I don’t have any special affinity for the monument. It wasn’t anything particularly special; merely a small slab of concrete with a depiction on it that was more myth than reality. Interim President Thomas was at least partially correct in his statement when he said that the monument was not historically accurate. However, what does draw my ire is the reason for the removal. In the statement, the Vice President of OCCC states that they removed the monument because it “celebrated cruelty and oppression.” Granted, the administration is fully within their rights to remove the monument for any reason, but it is unfortunate that they chose to paint the ‘89ers, and the 1889 Land Run in general, in such a light. In doing so, the administration went so far that they merely...
The Ethical Depravity of Surprise Medical Billing
Is it ethical to perform a service for someone without a good faith estimate of what you’re going to charge them? Would you let a mechanic make major modifications to your car without having the mechanic explain how those changes could negatively impact your driving experience or your car’s reliability? Perhaps — many modifications of this type are purely for enthusiasts, and they probably know all about the risks involved. But can you imagine letting a mechanic start modding your car without a price estimate? Unless your name is Bezos or Croesus, probably not. Asymmetrical information is what happens when one party to a deal has more information than the other. Since money is perfectly fungible — that is, one dollar is worth exactly the same as another — the seller or service provider in any given transaction usually knows exactly what she’s getting. The buyer, on the other hand, is usually receiving a good or service he doesn’t fully understand. Since the seller has access to the goods, or expertise in the services, she may have a duty to disclose certain information to the buyer. This could be anything from a retailer marking an item as a “second” if it has a cosmetic defect,...
1889 Institute Statement Regarding Continued Distancing and Mask Mandates
The 1889 Institute, an Oklahoma think tank, has released the following statement regarding the Governor’s recent announcement lifting state-level Covid-19-related restrictions and mandates and continued local restrictions. Oklahoma has moved into phase three of its vaccination schedule, meaning educators and critical infrastructure personnel are eligible to receive the vaccine. In addition, any- one eligible from one of the first two phases, including first responders, anyone over 65 and any adult who has a comorbidity, can still get the vaccine. The survival rate for people who are not yet eligible for the vaccine and contract SARS-CoV-2 is greater than ninety-nine percent. Governor Stitt withdrew the final remaining statewide restrictions last week. It is time for municipalities to follow suit. Any local restrictions relating to social distancing or mandating personal protection equipment such as masks should be immediately re- pealed. Additionally, all public schools should immediately transition to in-person instruction five days per week. Lockdowns and other restrictions have cost too much, and a recent CDC report shows their benefits were small. The data showed less than a...
Derailing Regional Transit in OKC
A few weeks ago, during a live chat sponsored by the Oklahoman, Mayor Holt was asked about the possibility of establishing regional transit in the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area. After the questioner praised Denver’s regional transit system, the mayor was asked about plans for an interurban rail system. Mayor Holt replied that “planning for regional transit is one of the biggest things happening in our community right now.” A couple of years ago, six cities (Del City, Edmond, Midwest City, Moore, Norman, and Oklahoma City) entered into a trust agreement, forming the Regional Transportation Authority of Central Oklahoma (RTA). While RTA is contemplating other modes of transportation, a commuter train would be the “backbone” of its regional transit system. All cities within the metropolitan area were offered the opportunity to join RTA. Some wisely chose not to participate. By categorizing this initiative as big, Mayor Holt is correct in at least a couple of ways. First, planning a regional transit system, particularly an interurban commuter rail, is a massive undertaking. Second, it comes with an even larger price tag. In the end, the voters will have to decide if this is a...
Accountability is Meaningless to Monopolists – Only the Free Market Can Discipline Public Schools
Occasionally when my wife and I lay out rules for my daughter, she will respond with rules for us. While we are certainly receptive to hearing her perspective, in our house, the parents have a monopoly on rule-making power. Monopolies are great for monopolists. Most people have a boss. Business owners may not have a supervisor, but they answer to customers. But a monopolist? When was the last time you tried to get a straight answer from a cable company, a trash collector, or an electricity provider? I’d imagine it was not a painless experience. They know they have you by the short hairs. Public schools are - near as makes no difference - monopolists. People with the time to homeschool or the resources to pay twice for their kids to be educated once are in short supply, and even among those who could afford it, few are willing. So public schools are the default option for most families. The only way to get a monopolist to stop acting like a monopolist is to introduce meaningful competition to his industry and geographic area. Accountability measures can certainly change behavior to a degree. Early on, when only math and English were tested, teachers of other core subjects began...
Public Funds for Public Schools: A Hollow Slogan
“No public money for private schools.” This slogan, employed against the idea of a system of public funding where parents would have a choice of which schools their children attend, is so void of meaning, so vapid in its reasoning, that it could only be employed by charlatans. Such is the wit and wisdom that went in the naming of the Public Funds for Public Schools OK Coalition (PFPS), which turns the slogan above into their name. This coalition of the usual suspects – unions, insider associations, and a couple of politicized ministries have a “goal of ensuring public funds remain in public schools.” Well, if they’re actually serious about that goal, they really should be advocating for shutting down public schools altogether, because the only funds being spent in the public schools that stay in public hands are those that buy land, buildings, and other assets that remain in public ownership. When it comes to the rest of the money, most of it is spent on people (teachers, administrators, custodians, bus drivers, counselors, coaches, groundskeepers, sports referees, food preparers, and clerical workers, to name a few) who, last I checked, are all private citizens. All of the...
Lawmakers Assist in Creating Yet Another Licensing Monopoly
Oklahoma has a licensing problem, with our licensing laws ranking as the 11th most burdensome nationwide. It’s to the point that we license occupations that very few other states do. That is the case for dental assistants, who are only licensed in 9 states. Many states that are known for burdensome regulations, like New York, have decided a license for this occupation is not necessary, the same conclusion we have reached at the 1889 Institute. Advocates of occupational licensing claim it protects consumers from bad actors and fly-by-night practitioners. However, this is generally not true. Dental assistants set up equipment, prepare patients for treatment, keep records, and schedule appointments. Their duties make them closer to administrative assistants than medical ones. While these jobs are important to the functioning of a dentist’s office, it’s unlikely any serious harm could arise from these duties. Rather than protect consumers, occupational licensing merely restricts the supply of labor in a licensed occupation. Licensing is never justified unless there is a failure of civil law or free markets that makes it difficult for patrons to obtain information, educate...
Some Legislators Don’t Understand: Open Government Is Good Government
As government has become bigger and more complex, it has become increasingly difficult for individual citizens to monitor its activities and finances. Cities used to provide law enforcement, firefighting, and basic infrastructure. Now they do detailed planning and provide all sorts of social services. States have seen their roles grow to include social services and environmental issues as well. School districts’ services have been pushed so far beyond education, understandably, they often seem to have forgotten their original mission – to educate children. Meanwhile, citizens are busy people. It would be a herculean, and more than a full-time task, for any one person to monitor in any detail every government that reigns over a single address. These include city, county, and state governments as well as school boards, planning commissions, zoning commissions, the federal government with its plethora of agencies, various special districts, and any number of other regulatory agencies - some elected like the corporation commission, others appointed like the federal EPA. This is why transparency in government is so important. It shouldn’t take extraordinary measures like hiring a...
Price Transparency: the Silver Bullet for Combating Healthcare Costs
Rising healthcare prices have long been an issue for this country. This is largely due to both the third-party payer problem and a lack of price transparency. The lack of stated prices from providers makes it impossible for consumers to get the best price for any procedure. They can’t even know what they owe until after the procedure is over. No other industry is able to operate in this way. Insurance used to only be purchased for catastrophic instances such as cancer, heart attacks, and life-threatening surgery – true “disaster” insurance. Now consumers purchase insurance to cover things as inconsequential as an office visit for the common cold. Instead of paying directly out of pocket for healthcare services, most patients are covered by either insurance or government programs. This creates a disconnect between the consumer and the producer. Since the consumer is not paying the full cost, they are more likely to agree to unnecessary tests and procedures. And since the producer does not have to disclose the full cost to the consumer, they are free to charge whatever they wish. Without price transparency, healthcare services are not a true market. The airline industry used to...
Train Wreck Legislation Demonstrates the Need for Public Testimony
The Oklahoma legislature continues to impose new mandates on individuals and businesses that grow government and restrict free and open markets. This despite being comprised of a supermajority of legislators affiliated with a political party that claims to support limited government and individual liberty. One can apportion blame for such myopic legislation in several ways. Among the contributing factors is a concerning lack of public testimony in the Oklahoma legislative process. Public testimony allows for viewpoint diversity. On occasion throughout my career, I have witnessed public testimony inspire legislative epiphanies, causing a legislator to ask a thoughtful, probing line of questions. Unexpected testimony often changes minds. A recent hearing of the House Transportation Committee serves as just one recent example of the testimony deficiency in the Oklahoma legislative process. The committee unanimously approved House Bill 1048, sponsored by Representative Dell Kerbs, which mandates that private railroads maintain at least “two crewmembers in the control compartment of the lead locomotive unit of a train.” The committee heard from the bill sponsor followed by a couple of...
Health Savings Accounts are Key to Solving Health Care Woes, and States Can Help
Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which were enacted into federal law in 2003, are a key reform for the future of health care policy, as explained in a recent 1889 Institute paper. HSAs are personal savings accounts with significant income tax advantages. Deposits to an HSA from current income are not taxed, whether an employer makes the deposit or the HSA’s owner does. Investment or interest earnings deposited in HSAs are not taxed. If an HSA holder spends HSA funds on certain health care expenses (most qualify), the withdrawal is not taxed. Once retired, an HSA holder can withdraw funds to spend on something other than health care and pay income tax on that withdrawal without any other penalty. HSAs can only be established for those with federally-defined high deductible health insurance plans (deductible minimums of $1,400 per individual or $2,800 per family). There are a number of reforms the federal government could and should make to the HSA law that would make it much more meaningful. There are at least a couple, though, that states can and should pass in order to make HSAs work better, along the lines of how they were intended. HSAs are meant to counter the third-party...
Whose Job Is It Anyway? Parents Versus Bureaucrats in Educating Kids
One of the major principles of the school choice movement is the idea that parents should be empowered to choose where and how their children are educated. This seems like a fairly simple idea: parents are responsible for their children and should direct their education. For some reason, many of those opposed to school choice can’t seem to grasp this. Either that or they reject the premise entirely. In fact, they seem to hold the idea that it is the government’s role to educate children and view anything that breaks the status quo as a threat. In a recent opinion piece for The Oklahoman, one writer attempted to invoke scripture in his rebuttal of the effort to expand school choice in Oklahoma. As far as I can tell, the Bible doesn’t have a whole lot to say about the American education system; however, it does seem to heavily indicate that parents have the responsibility to raise their children. Ironically, I believe that the very verses the author vaguely cites to support his argument actually form a basis of the school choice movement. In Psalm 127, Solomon states that children are a blessing from the Lord. He goes on to say that children are like “arrows in the hand of a...
Want More People Earning Nothing? Raise the Minimum Wage
Among the many policy proposals supposedly intended to help those harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns is a fresh push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. However, the minimum wage, though often a popular policy, hurts more than it helps. Although the federal minimum wage is set at $7.25, policymakers would be wise to remember the real minimum wage is $0. Perhaps the one silver lining of suddenly mandating $15 per hour would be the sudden and massive job losses so that no one could ever argue again that minimum wages don’t put people at that $0 no-job minimum. The most fundamental laws of economics are the laws of supply and demand. When the price of a product is increased, in this case, labor, the demand for said product falls. The result of a minimum wage increase would be increased unemployment. The first minimum wage instituted in 1938 resulted in the loss of at least 40,000 jobs. A 2006 review of over 100 minimum wage studies found that about two-thirds found negative employment effects. The most recent study from the Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour would result in 1.4 million fewer jobs....
Education’s Iron Triangle Traps Parents, Teachers, and Children
The triangle is structurally extremely strong. Most roofs are constructed of triangular trusses. They provide for great strength with an economy of resources. Depending on the material used to construct them, trusses can be nearly indestructible. An iron or steel truss, launched into the air by a tornado, would be a very destructive projectile, doing far more damage to the structures it impacts than it would itself suffer. This describes well the political interests that so successfully resist change in public education—the iron triangle (a characterization not original with me). The term is generally used to define the close, supportive relationships among government agencies, legislative bodies, and special interests. There are lots of iron triangles: renewable energy and the environmental lobby; urban renewal and the developers who partner with government to carry it out; the military-industrial complex; and the biotechnology, health care, hospital triangle, to name a few. None are so resilient and sometimes perplexingly powerful as the education iron triangle. I have lived and worked in public policy in three states: Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma. I have studied and written...
Central Planning in Land Use Threatens Liberty
Central planning suffers from a fatal flaw: insufficient knowledge. No single individual or group of individuals possess the knowledge or wisdom to make decisions that maximize individual and collective prosperity. However, taking advantage of positions of power and privilege, central authorities often seek to impose a particular order on the general public. One of the most apparent manifestations of central planning is governmental control of land uses through comprehensive design. With a utopian vision, planners deploy laws, policies, and practices such as zoning, comprehensive planning, urban renewal, and environmental protection to impose an aesthetic, a lifestyle, or a mission upon the people. Whether it is a brick-clad business district, a walkable city, or mandatory green building practices, planners pursue a city that may or may not reflect the desire, will, or preference of the governed. Cities are incredibly complex. Whether that city is home to thousands or hundreds of thousands, each individual is unique in how they interact within the human environment and with different objectives. To understand the complexity involved in designing and organizing something as...
What GameStop Can Teach Us About Good Governance
What we refer to as the law, written statutes or regulations outlining specific penalties for certain behaviors, doesn’t govern most every day interactions. There’s no law saying that you have to get in line at the grocery store, but everyone does, because that’s what we’ve always done. We rely on traditions built up over decades, knowing that unwritten rules of fair play will be observed. What happens when we throw out those rules? A quick escalation of rule-breaking, one that makes everybody worse-off. The recent kerfuffle with GameStop is illustrative, and it should serve as a warning to those willing to erode governmental traditions for short term wins. What happened? Most recently, Robinhood - a website that allows users to trade stocks without a per-trade fee - stopped allowing trades of certain highly-volatile stocks, including GameStop. The net result is that the populist traders who use Robinhood were locked out of these trades, while the elites still had access through traditional hedge funds. Outrage was swift, with a class action suit filed, and Robinhood quickly reversed its decision. But these actions and reactions didn’t happen in a vacuum: the volatility of the...
The Economic Fantasizing of Pete Buttigieg
A recent article described a brief dispute during a confirmation hearing between Senator Ted Cruz and President Biden’s pick for Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. In response to Cruz complaining that Biden’s executive order killing the Keystone XL pipeline eliminated 11,000 jobs, Buttigieg is described as responding, and an accompanying video confirms the characterization that “Biden’s climate agenda will create a net increase in jobs.” The problem is, good as it sounds, Buttigieg’s response, commonly given by climate activists when challenged on jobs, is pure, unmitigated, economic balderdash. Here’s why. What makes the climate job-loss deniers sound almost reasonable, and a source of their faith that green technology will create jobs, is that new technology has generally done exactly that. Buttigieg and others like him presume, therefore, that any new technology, regardless of its origin, will do the same. After all, every time big new innovations, from steam engines to robotics, have come along, some have worried that people would be put out of work. As it turns out, these innovations have been disruptive, but any job losses were temporary. History teaches that new...
Stress of School District Funding During Covid-19 Made Worse by Bad Policy
If a business loses hundreds of customers to a competitor, are they justified in thinking they will retain the same level of profit? Of course not, that’s absurd. However, Oklahoma school district administrators appear to think so. A recent article in the Oklahoman discusses the financial impact of the mid-year funding adjustment for Oklahoma school districts. School administrators bemoan the adjustment, citing the hardships of the pandemic. This reduction should come as no surprise, however, considering how Oklahoma’s school district funding is set up. State appropriated school district funding is allocated based on Weighted Average Daily Membership (WADM), a convoluted “per student” funding measure. WADM is then used to calculate how much funding a school district will receive from the state. In essence, the more students you have in your district, the more money the district will receive overall. It follows that if a district loses students, it will not receive as much funding, and if a school district gains students, it will receive more funding. In 2020, school districts decided to shut-down in-person learning during the pandemic but were not adequately prepared to continue...