Protecting Vulnerable Children One simple foster-care reform would save the state money and revolutionize life for some of Oklahoma’s most vulnerable students. Page 6
In Case You Missed It In The Oklahoman, OCPA’s Jonathan Small made the case for an income-tax phaseout and other pro-growth measures.
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Oklahoma is relying on the honor system to prevent welfare funds from being used in casinos, liquor stores, and strip clubs.
Why is it okay for local school superintendents—but not for parents—to choose privateschool options for Oklahoma students?
In a recent debate in Bartlesville moderated by OCPA’s Brandon Dutcher, two Common Core combatants found an area of agreement.
Lawmakers are considering requiring child sexual abuse education in Oklahoma schools. Which is ironic if nothing else:
Mr. Obama and his base would like to eradicate the oil-and-gas industry.
Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism.
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Why would we give a pay raise to a teacher whose own district has identified her as ineffective?
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OCPA president Michael Carnuccio wonders if we’re locking up too many Oklahomans.
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PERSPECTIVE OCPA Staff
OCPA Trustees
Brandon Dutcher ...........................................Editor
Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City
David McLaughlin • Enid
Robert D. Avery • Pawhuska
Lew Meibergen • Enid
Lee J. Baxter • Lawton
Ronald L. Mercer • Bethany
Alex Jones .............................................Art Director
OCPA Researchers
Steve W. Beebe • Duncan
Lloyd Noble II • Tulsa
Lauren Aragon.................................................................Intern
G.T. Blankenship • Oklahoma City
Mike O’Neal • Edmond
Michael Carnuccio ...................................................President
John A. Brock • Tulsa
Bill Price • Oklahoma City
David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City
Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City
Clint Colbert ....................................................Office Manager
Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City
Melissa Sandefer • Norman
Brandon Dutcher .................................Senior Vice President
William Flanagan • Claremore
Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa
Josephine Freede • Oklahoma City
Richard L. Sias • Oklahoma City
Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City
Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City
John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City
John F. Snodgrass • Ardmore
Ralph Harvey • Oklahoma City
Charles M. Sublett • Tulsa
John A. Henry III • Oklahoma City
Robert Sullivan • Tulsa
Henry F. Kane • Bartlesville
Lew Ward • Enid
Robert Kane • Tulsa
William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa
Gene Love • Lawton
Daryl Woodard • Tulsa
Tom H. McCasland III • Duncan
Daniel J. Zaloudek • Tulsa
Trent England ..........Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Dacia Harris ..................................Communications Director Rachel Hays .........................................Development Director Alex Jones .....................................................Creative Manager Jonathan Small ................................Executive Vice President Teresa Yoder ........................................Director of Operations
Steven J. Anderson, MBA, CPA Research Fellow Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Vance Fried, J.D. Research Fellow Jayson Lusk Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow Matt Mayer, J.D. Research Fellow J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow
Perspective is published monthly by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Inc., an independent public policy organization. OCPA formulates and promotes public policy research and analysis consistent with the principles of free enterprise and limited government. The views expressed in Perspective are those of the author, and should not be construed as representing any official position of OCPA or its trustees, researchers, or employees.
Programs will be presented during January and early February in these cities: Bartlesville Edmond Enid
Lawton Moore Oklahoma City
Ponca City Shawnee Tulsa
What is “federalism”? How is it different from “states’ rights”? Why is it the most important and most creative structure in the Constitution? Come learn the answers plus get a special pre-legislative-session briefing at the second program in OCPA’s four-part series, “The Rule of Law and Liberty.” Visit our website or call 405.602.1667 for details and to register. You can also request a presentation in your own town.
Shining a Light on ‘Free’ Federal Money
Trent England Trent England (J.D., George Mason University) is vice president for strategic initiatives at OCPA, where he also serves as the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty. A former legal policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, England has contributed to two books, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution and One Nation under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and numerous other publications.
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Should the state officials you elect be informed about federal funds spent in Oklahoma? For that matter, should citizens have access to data that reveal the strings attached to federal dollars in our state? Oklahoma legislators are poised to debate these questions thanks to a transparency measure introduced by state Rep. Tom Newell (R-Seminole). More than a third of Oklahoma state revenue actually comes from Washington, D.C. The same is true in more than half the states. Many federal and state officials like to talk and act as if that money is simply a free gift. In fact, the increasing reliance of states on federal funding is one more way government officials are able to ignore or obscure the truth and, in some cases, violate the law. It is more fun to spend money than it is to earn it. This is true in politics: creating a new program or increasing funding to an existing one is a likelier path to popularity (and thus to power) than raising taxes in order to pay the bill. Of course, earning the money (or, in the case of politics, justifying raising the revenue) is not merely an unpleasant prerequisite. Spending money is always about tradeoffs, and recognizing the costs is just as important as seeing the benefits. This is what the late economist Milton Friedman meant when he pointed out that no one spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Government starts out with this problem; moving tax dollars between governments makes it much worse. Part of the inherent inefficiency of government comes from the fact that it is always spending somebody else’s
money. This is why revenue bills must start in the U.S. House and terms for House members are just two years, to maximize responsibility when it comes to spending those taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately, due to changes to the original constitutional design, Congress today is able to raise money with few constraints. In 1913, the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to create a progressive income tax. That same year, the creation of the Federal Reserve made deficit spending easier. Those changes set the stage for the New Deal, when total federal spending, federal transfers of money to state and local governments, and the national debt all surged. The New Deal was designed, in part, to make it clear that the federal government was in control. Part of this was done by making local governments and projects dependent on federal funds. This established a precedent for programs and congressional earmarks that sent federal tax dollars to state and local officials. Many of those officials as well as their constituents were overjoyed to have this “free” federal money. All this time the Supreme Court largely stood by and allowed federal power to grow, with one important exception. Attempts by Congress to force states to enact policies like motorcycle helmet laws or to otherwise commandeer state resources to enforce federal priorities were struck down as unconstitutional. Now the Congress became more crafty than the judges and state officials; instead of commanding states, Congress began to attach conditions to federal funds. Today, many of the federal
dollars that arrive in Oklahoma come with strings attached. What Congress could not do directly it does indirectly, foisting policy decisions on state and local programs. This means federal dollars sometimes drive up the costs of the very programs they are supposed to support. Federal funding also violates at least the spirit of the law. The Oklahoma state constitution prohibits deficit spending. Most state constitutions
contain a similar requirement. Congress faces no such requirement and routinely spends money it does not have. When states spend borrowed federal funds, they ignore or evade their own balanced budget laws. Federal funds that flow into the states distort decision making, extend federal power, and often carry hidden costs of their own. Accepting borrowed federal funds also allows states to evade their own constitutional balanced-budget
requirements. It is time to have a conversation about federal funds, in Oklahoma and across the country. Utah recently passed a law that required state agencies to report on the federal funds they receive and any strings attached to those funds. Rep. Newell’s plan would do the same for Oklahoma, allowing policymakers and citizens to finally pull back the curtain and begin an informed conversation about federal funds.
www.ocpathink.org
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Foster Better Education with Choice for Foster Children If Oklahoma is going to adopt sweeping reforms to serve foster children better, it shouldn’t just think about homes. It should think about schools. As state policymakers scrounge to find $150 million to implement a proposed plan to reform the foster care system, they should also implement a policy which would actually save money. By doing so, they could revolutionize life for some of Oklahoma’s most vulnerable children.
Oklahoma has a big mess on its hands in its foster care system, with high abuse rates and nobody, seemingly, minding the store. As legislators and policymakers work to implement reforms, they should consider a proven way to protect vulnerable children from abuse in schools—give them school choice. Court-appointed monitors recently found more than a thousand overdue child abuse and neglect investigations languishing in the Oklahoma foster care system. It would be bad enough to think that there might be a thousand children out there, waiting day after day in abusive situations for state bureaucrats who are too busy to rescue them. But it gets worse. Oklahoma only serves about 12,000 foster children, so a thousand delinquent investigations means the state might be placing children in abusive situations as often as one-twelfth of the time. How would you like to try those odds if these were your children? Those court-appointed monitors are in place because the state is resolving a huge class-action lawsuit against the foster care system. When the legislative and executive branches fumble an issue so badly that the courts take over and try to do jobs they’re not designed or equipped to do, everybody loses. Oklahoma should look for legislative
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solutions that protect vulnerable children. As they do, they should consider that homes are not the only places where children are abused. Children are abused in schools. Children who are known to be vulnerable, like foster children, are often singled out and targeted. Fortunately, there’s a reliable way to protect children from abuse in schools. It’s got a solid track record of success. And as state legislators scrounge to find $150 million to implement a proposed plan to reform the foster care system, they might note that this policy doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. School choice is not just about the quality of education. It does deliver a superior education, but it does much more. It gives families the power to exit abusive situations in schools. They can take action to protect themselves without waiting for lethargic bureaucracies, or school systems whose disciplinary processes are tied down by teachers’ unions and fear of lawsuits. Consider how school choice has already been found to protect an even more vulnerable population—specialeducation students—from abuse. With my colleague Jay Greene, I conducted a study of Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program, which provides school vouchers to special-education students.
The program currently serves 27,000 students. Greene and I conducted our study in 2003, surveying a large random sample of participating families. We found some truly stunning results. We asked parents of McKay students if their children had been abused in public schools. A shocking 47 percent said their children were bothered often and 25 percent said their children had been physically assaulted in their public schools. By contrast, only 5 percent were bothered often and 6 percent had been assaulted in the private schools they chose through the program. The same study points to how school choice can have particular benefits for students who struggle with socialization and appropriate behavior—a common enough problem both for special education students and foster children. We asked McKay families about how the change from an assigned school to a choice school affected behavior problems. While 40 percent said their children had behavior problems in public school, only 19 percent reported behavior problems in private school. If the program had only protected the students who were using it at the time we conducted our study, that would be an important benefit. However, we wanted to know whether there were other students out there who had tried the program and found it hadn’t
helped them. So we also surveyed former McKay participants—families that had participated in the program the previous year, but now were no longer participating. We found almost the same results with those families, strengthening the positive finding for the program. There would be no need to create a new program to provide school choice to foster children. Oklahoma already has two school choice programs: a special-needs voucher modeled on McKay, and a tax-credit scholarship program serving low-income students. Either or both of these programs could accommodate foster children with a slight modification—just write a line into the law saying foster children are eligible regardless of disability status or family income. Other states have already adopted this practice. Foster children are automatically eligible for two school choice programs in Arizona. “Lexie’s Law,” which is Arizona’s answer to McKay, includes foster children alongside special-education students. So does Arizona’s innovative new education savings account law, which gives foster parents control of children’s education funding to direct to a school of their choice. Meanwhile, in Florida, foster children of any income level are eligible for the state’s tax-credit
scholarship program for low-income students. Including foster children in school choice programs wouldn’t increase state costs a bit; in fact, it would save money. Because private schools are more efficient, they deliver a superior education at a lower cost. That means every time a student uses school choice, the public system’s costs go down by more than enough to make up for the amount spent on the choice program. A new Friedman Foundation study by Jeff Spalding finds that school choice saved more than $1.7 billion in the 20 years following the creation of the first modern choice program, in Milwaukee in 1990. Make no mistake. The only policy that will give us the educational revolution we need is universal choice. All children should have access to choice as a matter of basic concern for their well-being. There’s no reason children should have to suffer a calamity like a disability or orphanhood before we extend them this cost-free opportunity for a better life. And we won’t see educational entrepreneurship take off until there are enough students eligible for choice. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Nobody knows it better than Oklahoma’s foster children. If Oklahoma is going to adopt sweeping reforms to serve these children better,
it shouldn’t just think about homes. It should think about schools. Having failed to care for these 12,000 children when they needed it most, Oklahoma owes them something. With a single line of text in a new law, it could revolutionize life for some of its most vulnerable students.
Greg Forster Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a senior fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (Crossway Books, 2014). He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as in popular publications such as the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
www.ocpathink.org
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Tear Down This Wall Education is the source of personal reformation and the pathway to achievement of dreams. Throughout my writing, reporting, and teaching career I have supported education reform in the broadest sense. But after decades of observation and hoping against hope, I have lost all confidence that central planning and monopoly control will ever bring enough incremental boosts in knowledge to those who most need it, in the long run or even in stages. Cultural challenges arose along with the collapse of family structure and functionality over the past seven decades. All along, the mainstream educational policy presumption remained: One or another set of small changes (always including more money) would improve public schools and what happens inside them. Yes, individual students and particular teachers create arenas of adequacy or even excellence, and each of these deserve honor. But arenas of adequacy or excellence cannot overcome the problems of educational attainment America now faces. How am I frustrated? Let us count the ways.
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Nearly universal access to earlier and earlier formal education, pre-kindergarten for all, per-pupil spending increases, curriculum “reform,” achievement grants, intensified teacher training, mandated nutrition improvements, direct subsidies and income transfers to low-income individuals, expanded school lunch programs, special recognition for those pockets of excellence, teacher pay hikes, Title I expansions, remedial reading and writing, STEM mandates, more and more online course offerings through public institutions, more and more standardized tests and linkage of testing instruments to curricula designed by academics—all of these and many more, some dreamed and the rest of us hoped, would provide better results and better lives for more children. In one form or another, all these things were tried in Oklahoma, the vast majority of them with the sincere and informed support from most taxpayers and income generators, your humble servant included. The hope was that one or more of these would begin real change. But forgive those of us who have reluctantly concluded that in the end these changes were mere forms of perestroika. The
appearance of change in the midst of sameness, additional bricks in the wall. The time for real reform—school choice where students and parents, not bureaucrats, are in charge—is past due. No one reform step taken is a panacea, but freedom is the heart of the American message. Taken as a whole, freedom cannot be reconciled with monopoly. A walk down memory lane: Those of us who worked so hard on Oklahoma City’s MAPS for Kids (and, for several years before that, Project KIDS) understood government school buildings were inadequate, facilities outdated, learning environments less than ideal. When we began our work, nearly two decades ago, it seemed that school choice was a bridge too far. Along with others, I settled for what was within reach: Better facilities. We hoped better buildings would buy time for better teaching and better communities to nurture children. Yet, within days of passage of the MAPS for Kids referenda more than 13 years ago came new claims that the most significant local-level tax increases for public education in Oklahoma history were mere windowdressing. Even after MAPS for Kids, the fundamental argument made by defenders of the old ways was that more money, never more freedom, was the ticket to the future.
Of all the varied reforms of the past seven decades, charter schools (only created in 1999) still bear promise. KIPP Preparatory on the east side of Oklahoma City is the best instance. Stubborn as a Missouri mule, I still support incremental change, even the “tinkering” sort. Perhaps tinkerers can yet build better lives here and there, and in some cases expose more young people to the traditions that inform and undergird the American system. But let’s be honest. A strong case can be made that the time for incremental action is over, even as we remain hopeful about pockets of excellence. Until taxpayer resources follow individual students into the education setting that best meets particular needs, the glass of reform will be half empty, at best. The time for school choice as Oklahoma’s central education policy is past due. I advocate choice not because I think any one step taken is a panacea, but because liberty is the heart of the American dream. That dream must belong to more, not fewer, of us. If we would seek excellence and a brighter path for all our children, regardless of ZIP code or socioeconomic circumstances, if we desire liberty and justice for all, tear down the wall that keeps people locked in systemic failure. Tear down the walls that protect
declining assumptions about whether or not children can learn. As Ronald Reagan said at the Berlin Wall in 1987, “Beliefs become reality.” That is true, when belief is rooted in reality. Choose freedom over failure. Embrace the reality that freedom breeds excellence. Reject the dependence that breeds mediocrity. Tear down this wall.
Patrick McGuigan Patrick McGuigan (M.A. in history, Oklahoma State University) is the editor of CapitolBeatOK.com and appears weekly as a commentator on NEWS 9, the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City. He is the editor of seven books on legal policy and the author or co-author of three books, including Ninth Justice: The Fight for Bork. A certified public school teacher, McGuigan is the author of thousands of articles and commentaries on public, private, and home schools.
How to Make Higher Education More Affordable A new semester is under way, which means many college students (and their parents) are again worried about things like tuition costs and student debt. In higher education, the key to containing and reducing costs is improved productivity, meaning “doing more with less.” Yet in a new report published by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, we found that Oklahoma has done the opposite. While productivity in the entire economy has risen (and possibly even somewhat in higher education), Oklahoma has avoided this trend. Oklahoma higher education has become increasingly costly, and staff overload has led to less productivity than a decade ago. Oklahoma has over 10 percent more non-faculty staff than the national average, adjusting for enrollments. Nationally, staffing per student declined about 10 percent from 1999 to 2011, suggesting probable productivity improvements. However, staffing per student rose about five percent in Oklahoma, suggesting possible productivity decline. As for the faculty, it appears that a small proportion of instructors at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University, for example, are doing most of the work. Large numbers of faculty carry modest teaching loads yet also have modest research accomplishments. If the bottom 80 percent of the faculty taught as much as the top 20 percent, these schools could operate with demonstrably fewer faculty members and reduce tuition fees and/or state appropriations. As a longtime university professor, I (Vedder) know directly that higher education is extremely inefficient, and moving resources from that sector to the competitive marketdriven private sector via tax reductions almost certainly will have positive economic effects. We believe higher education in Oklahoma can be improved
so as to enhance productivity and accountability. For starters, our data collection convinced us that there is a need for more sunshine and transparency. Uniform reporting of personnel data across all Oklahoma state universities in a transparent fashion—posted on the Internet—would be useful in improving external oversight of university expenditures. In addition, perhaps implicit state instructional subsidies should be sharply reduced for fifth- and sixth-year students. Perhaps funding should be based on the number of graduates rather the number of attendees. Perhaps the state should flatly prohibit duplicative, highcost programs. Why, for example, does Oklahoma have two Ph.D. in finance programs located 80 miles apart? Is this sort of expensive duplication necessary, especially when neither is considered among the nation’s top 75 finance programs? In any case, careful oversight from Oklahoma’s legislative and executive branches can lead to enhanced productivity and accountability in higher education.
Richard Vedder A distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University, Richard Vedder serves as director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), which conducts the “America’s Top Colleges” ranking for Forbes magazine. Anthony Hennen formerly served as administrative director and research fellow at CCAP.
Anthony Hennen Anthony is a senior at Ohio University studying journalism with an economics specialization. He has been an active member of Ohio University Students for Liberty since its formation in 2008 and currently serves as its leader.
OU ‘Reviewing Its Relationship’ with Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Program The University of Chicago is cutting ties with the Confucius Institute, The Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz reported on September 28, 2014. “The university’s announcement this month that it won’t renew its Confucius Institute on campus challenges one of Beijing’s top propaganda efforts. It may prompt other schools to consider ending the operations, which are set up and controlled by the Communist Party.” It’s not just Chicago. “This year, several high-profile schools, like the University of Chicago and Penn State, jettisoned the program,” Arthur Kane reported on October 13 for Watchdog.org. “But other large schools like Columbia University, UCLA, Colorado State University, and the University of Oklahoma still have Confucius Institutes on their campuses, according to the CI website.” When asked about it, University of Oklahoma spokesman Catherine Bishop told Kane: “In light of the State Department memorandum and the recent actions of some other higher education institutions, the University of Oklahoma is reviewing its relationship with the Confucius Institute program.” —Editor
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Who Should Decide What’s for Lunch? “Mystery mush entrees, mystery mush desserts, and a solitary roll next to a mound of canned corn—teens are tweeting photos of these unappetizing school lunches under the hashtag #thanksmichelleobama,” USA Today recently reported. It’s happening here in Oklahoma, too. News reports out of Chickasha, for example, revealed what is simply one more unintended consequence of Michelle Obama’s school lunch room rules imposed by the “Healthy HungerFree Kids Act.” Ironically, the “HungerFree” act is doing precisely what it purports to avoid: causing hunger. Served what the school district calls a “munchable,” Chickasha student Kaytlin Shelton took a photo of the slim pickings she was served for lunch, which consisted of lunch meat, a couple of crackers, a slice of cheese, and two pieces of cauliflower. The skimpy portions meet the new federal guidelines, which require schools to follow rules placing limits on the number of calories and minimums on the number of fruits and vegetables that must be plated. This isn’t the first time students have complained that they’re not getting enough to eat. The complaints also come amidst further concerns about federal over-reach limiting what can be sold in school bake sales and classroom parties. One of the bigger issues with the federal guidelines is the increase in food waste. According to a couple of recent papers by Cornell economists, the new school lunch rules are increasing food waste. One study, in the journal Public Health Nutrition, found that requiring schools to place additional servings of fruits and vegetables on kids’ plates in a school lunch line (as is required by new standards) causes a small increase in fruit and vegetable consumption but also a huge increase in waste. Some of the media discussion surrounding the findings suggests that: “For every one to two children who eat fruits or vegetables under the new
federal guidelines, five throw them away.” This results in $3.8 million worth of food being thrown away each year. Another study by some of the same authors, appearing in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at the effects of another school lunch policy: banning chocolate milk. While removing chocolate milk from school cafeterias may reduce calorie and sugar consumption, it may also lead students to take less milk overall, drink less (waste more) of the white milk they do take, and no longer purchase school lunch. Although more students took white milk after the chocolate milk ban, they wasted about 29 percent more than before the ban. David Just and his colleagues at Cornell have been studying all kinds of ways to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among school children by doing things like re-orienting lunch lines, placing kid-friendly stickers on fruits and veggies, providing economic incentives, changing payment methods, and more. I like this experimental approach to seeing what works— particularly when paired with research on cost-effectiveness. But, as their research shows, simply banning foods or mandating that schools plate more fruits and veggies is largely ineffective and wasteful. Even before the law was fully implemented, one school official noted: “Nothing is achieved when money is spent on food that children won’t even be able to consume and nothing is more disheartening … than to see perfectly good and perfectly untouched food thrown into the trash.” And, yet another complaint is the rising cost of school lunch, which encourages kids and parents to substitute away from the governmentsubsidized meals. Federal officials focused on the school lunch program are trying to do too much. We have a mess—a convoluted mix of policies that try to get enough calories in the bellies of poor kids so they’re not
starving at night while simultaneously trying to get the richer kids who can have anything they want at home to eat a few more carrots at school. The point isn’t that parents and local school boards shouldn’t think about how to improve their children’s health. The key question is who is in the best position to make this determination? And, whether there is scientific evidence on the costs and benefits of the policies being imposed. It’s easy for someone in Washington to enact mandates without any knowledge of the location-specific costs and trade-offs. As a USDA report put it, “Policymakers face hard choices because the children served by the National School Lunch Program have diverse nutritional needs, making a single policy for all difficult to craft.” We need more research on the impacts of school lunch room policies before they’re implemented. And, local parents and teachers need to be empowered to creatively address their children’s lunchroom challenges rather than being tasked to following the myriad complicated dictates from Washington.
Jayson Lusk Agricultural economist Jayson Lusk is the Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow at OCPA. The author of The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate (Crown Forum, 2013), Dr. Lusk is Regents Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair at Oklahoma State University.
www.ocpathink.org
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Dr. Coburn Comes Home In the fifth century B.C., on a farm outside of Rome, there lived a man named Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus who, when his country was in crisis, stepped away from his plow, assumed great authority, and led his people to better times. Then he voluntarily relinquished that power and went home—twice. Cincinnatus came to mind as we watched Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s farewell address on the Senate floor on December 11. Like Cincinnatus, he answered his country’s call on two occasions, when he was elected to Congress in 1994 and again when he went to the Senate 10 years ago. Like Cincinnatus, he voluntarily laid those titles and honors aside. And like Cincinnatus, Tom Coburn left his nation better than he found it through his selfless service and sacrifice. His farewell address was a mirror
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of his career in public service, which also included service as an OCPA trustee. America was founded on basic constitutional principles of limited government and balanced powers, he reminded his colleagues. The founders were wise, he suggested, and that wisdom is still reflected in our founding documents for anyone who takes the time to read them. And he reminded us that “one Senator” can have value when he stands for those principles. Throughout his time in Washington, that one Senator was Tom Coburn. Whether he was delivering stirring, commonsensical speeches or publishing annual compilations of government waste—or whether he was teaming up with our own Jonathan Small to argue against the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in Oklahoma, or partnering with Brandon Dutcher to call for the
creation of a transparency website—the Coburn era was one in which everyone knew exactly where he stood. That was obvious at each election when the voters here at home re-elected him with resounding majorities. We knew we had something special from his first moments in the public spotlight. Here was a man of firm and unwavering principle with absolutely zero personal ambition. He could have taken the easy way and stayed home in Muskogee, practicing his first love of medicine. But he stepped away from that plow like Cincinnatus, and now he returns to it. And Oklahoma says thank you to perhaps the best man who has ever represented us in Washington.
To view Sen. Coburn’s farewell address, visit ocpa.us/1E8NbtF.
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@OCPAthink 1. OCPA executive vice president Jonathan Small prepares to speak last month in the nation’s capital at the States and Nation Policy Summit, hosted annually by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Also presenting at this year’s ALEC meeting were OCPA vice president Trent England, who spoke at the energy subcommittee meeting, and OCPA research fellow Steve Anderson, who spoke at the “Freshman Boot Camp.” 2. Work continues on the new Advance Center for Free Enterprise, located to the west of OCPA’s main office. The Center will host lawmakers, executive-branch officials, and policy staffers for training sessions on how to apply core principles to difficult public-policy issues. The Center will also be a valuable resource for students, as OCPA partners with schools and nonprofit organizations to host programs teaching students the principles of liberty and the importance of our freeenterprise system.
www.ocpathink.org
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From the Desk Of Brutus the Anti-Federalist “It is a truth confirmed by the unerring experience of ages, that every man, and every body of men, invested with power, are ever disposed to increase it, and to acquire a superiority over every thing that stands in their way.” –Brutus, Essay I (October 18, 1787) Why is it that in a country founded in freedom and whose citizens fought amongst themselves to end slavery does the chokehold of labor unions remain so strong? Though twenty-four states have right-to-work laws that prohibit labor unions from making membership in them a condition of employment, twenty-six states still force union membership on workers. Even in right-to-work states, labor unions are being reinvigorated by a pro-labor union group of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). When it isn’t federal bureaucrats, it is foreign companies trying to increase the cost of production in America to make their unionized workers more competitive, as Germany’s Volkswagen is doing in Chattanooga, Tennessee. How can labor unions keep losing at the ballot box, yet continue to hold such power over America? The answer lies in a New Deal law passed at the height of the Progressive Era. On July 5, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act), which encouraged “the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.”
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The Wagner Act federalized labor laws, thereby taking away the power of states to develop competitive economic policies for their employers and workers. Twelve years later, a Republicancontrolled Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act (known as the Taft-Hartley Act) over President Harry Truman’s veto. The Taft-Hartley Act tried to restore some of the power states had over their workplaces by allowing states to “opt-out” of the Wagner Act’s forced unionization requirement. Over the last sixty-seven years, twenty-four states passed right-to-work laws, with Indiana and Michigan both doing so in 2012. Between the federal presumption that every state is a forced unionization state unless it opts out and the NLRB’s issuance of rules that make it easier for labor unions to unionize workers and harder for employers to fight back, the fundamental framework of federal law favors labor unions and force over freedom. It isn’t just a worker’s freedom to choose that is eliminated by federal law. It is the very fabric of the Constitution’s federalism tapestry that
is cut. Specifically, the Founding Fathers envisioned a country in which the states acted as laboratories of competition. They believed that by limiting the powers of the federal government, the states would be free to compete over a broad range of policies. This robust
The private sector job growth in the 24 right-to-work states has boomed. competitive landscape would spur innovation and more rapidly identify solutions that worked. Despite the continued pro-union bias of federal law and the NLRB, the Taft-Hartley Act’s opt-out power has allowed states to compete broadly on the issue of jobs. The results aren’t
The closed GM Moraine Assembly plant in forced-unionization state Ohio.
good for labor unions, which is why the NLRB is doing all it can to empower labor unions in right-to-work states. From 1990 to today, the private sector job growth in the twenty-four rightto-work states has boomed. The net percentage change across those states is more than 46 percent, with North Dakota and Nevada the best at above 99 percent and Alabama the weakest at 20 percent. In contrast, the net percentage change in the twenty-six forced unionization states averaged only 19 percent, with Colorado the strongest at 67 percent and Connecticut the weakest at 0.5 percent. America’s right-to-work states unequivocally dominate the job growth competition among the states. Of the twenty-five states with the strongest job growth, eighteen are right-to-work states, as twenty-one of the twentyfive weakest are forced unionization (including Indiana and Michigan, which were forced unionization from 1990 to 2012). And, contrary to labor union claims, right-to-work does not lead to lower wages. In fact, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the wage gap between right-to-work states and forced
unionization states has been shrinking over the last thirty-five years. The economic reality of global competition even forced labor unions to move to two-tiered contracts where existing union members remain on higher pay scales, as new union members doing the same job get paid far less. Decades of favorable federal law and hundreds of millions of dollars in dues have entrenched labor unions as America’s most powerful special interest. That power is used to deny freedom to America’s workers and crush competition among the states. America could afford high-cost federal policies when it dominated the global marketplace, but the entrance of high-end competitors like Germany and Japan in the 1970s and low-end competitors like China and Indonesia in the 1990s renders such policies detrimental to our workers and their companies. It is time to let states compete with each other and the world. Let freedom and competition ring from coast-tocoast.
This column originally appeared in The Torch, a publication of The Liberty Foundation of America. Find out more at libertyfound.org. www.ocpathink.org
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QUOTE UNQUOTE “What puzzles me is why journalism should be so reflexively on the side of the government. During the Watergate era, we heard about the ‘watchdog press,’ the ‘adversary press,’ the press as the ‘fourth branch of government.’ That old skepticism about government, largely illusory then, hardly survives today even as a pose. Today the press seems to see itself as government’s partner, assisting and promoting the expansion of the state.” Joseph Sobran
“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censored, checked, valued, enrolled, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.”
“It appears policymakers, the education establishment, and even a vocal minority of parents in Oklahoma are in a state of denial when it comes to what’s happening.” Former Gov. Frank Keating and former state treasurer Scott Meacham, discussing the woeful levels of educational performance in Oklahoma
“Every time we have methodically and conscientiously cut taxes, we have seen jumps in revenue to the point that we are now seeing record revenue collections.” Oklahoma House Speaker Jeff Hickman
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
“A small group of 400 of America’s most successful earners in 2010 ... paid almost as much in federal income taxes as the entire bottom half of America’s 135 million tax filers.” Economist Mark J. Perry