This past week, the following was sent to all Texas legislators and all daily newspapers in Texas.

Defenders of government schools claim that those schools do a better job of educating students than private schools. And the advocates for school choice claim that private schools do a better job. Both sides can cite numerous studies to support their position. If we are going to claim that either private or government schools are better, we must first answer a crucial question: Better by what standard?

The needs, desires, and interests of students are not monolithic. These vary widely, and what is better for one student may not be better for another. The standard of what is better will vary from student to student. The standard will be unique to each individual.

In the context of the school choice debate, it doesn’t matter whether private or government schools do a better job. The purpose of school choice is to enable parents to decide which school is best for their children. For some, a private school may be better. For others, a government school may suffice. However, this is a decision that parents, not politicians and bureaucrats, should be making.

Unfortunately, much of the debate over school choice focuses on a group. For example, the studies cited by both sides of the debate always focus on the test scores of some group, such as fourth graders. Whether those scores are exemplary or abysmal, they tell us nothing about the individuals comprising that group.

If the focus is on the group, then the needs, desires, and interests of individuals are ignored. This collectivist notion gives rise to the contradictory claims made by the two sides of the school choice debate. It focuses on what is best for one group or another, rather than what is best for individuals.

For example, exemplary scores for a group do not mean that every member of that group is doing well. And if the scores for a group are abysmal, it doesn’t mean that every student is struggling. When we look at the group rather than individuals, we miss what is happening to actual human beings.

The arguments put forth by school choice opponents imply that they know what is best for all Texas students. They believe that they, politicians, and education bureaucrats are the ones who should decide what ideas and values young Texans should be taught. “Give me a child till he is seven years old, and I will show you the man,” St. Ignatius Loyola stated. His words are true. The ideas and values that individuals learn at a young age often shape the rest of their lives. Parents understand this, and they want more control over what their children are being taught.

If we truly want what is best for every individual student, then we must begin by adopting the proper standard. We must adopt a standard that applies to every individual, no matter her age, family income, race, ethnicity, or any other characteristic.

The only standard that applies to all individuals is the freedom to pursue one’s own happiness and to act according to one’s own judgment in that pursuit, so long as one respects the freedom of others to do the same. We have the freedom to choose our barber, mechanic, grocer, and accountant. And we make those choices based on what we believe to be better. We consider our needs, desires, and interests when we make such choices. We recognize and accept the fact that others will choose a different barber, mechanic, grocer, and accountant. It is time that we also accept the fact that others may choose something other than government schools. It is time to enable parents to have the freedom to choose the school for their children through school choice.

Parents know their children better than anyone else. Parents, along with their children, are the ones who should decide which school is better.

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BRIAN PHILLIPS

Brian Phillips is the founder of the Texas Institute for Property Rights. Brian has been defending property rights for nearly thirty years. He played a key role in defeating zoning in Houston, Texas, and in Hobbs, New Mexico. He is the author of three books: Individual Rights and Government Wrongs, The Innovator Versus the Collective, and Principles and Property Rights. Visit his website at texasipr.com.

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

— William Shakespeare

When has this ever been more true?

Even the Pope is a Communist.

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“Make yourselves sheep, and the wolves will eat you.”

— Ben Franklin

Done. And done.

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“A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights he does possess.”

— Ayn Rand

Today, the laws and cultural trends have entirely inverted this truth. Today it’s plausible to say, “A group, as such, has unlimited rights — so long as it’s a protected group. Whites, for example, are not protected (unless members of The Party.) Blacks, Hispanics and (in some cases) Asians are protected. Christians are not protected; Muslims have unlimited protection and may do literally anything they wish. Gays and lesbians have almost unlimited rights, and transgenders have unlimited rights with no inhibitions whatsoever (you may not even criticize a transgender). Democrats are protected; Republicans are not protected unless they go along with the Party, and Trump supporters enjoy no protections whatsoever. You gain no rights through your individuality; you ONLY have rights based on your particular group membership (most of those memberships not being chosen, such as race).”

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“Misinformation” is a meaningless concept when described or condemned by dishonest, totalitarian ideologues.

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“Bad communication ends a lot of good things.”

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Biden Orders Creation Of Interagency Team To Investigate ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (says a headline)

“Look! It’s a UFO! Never mind about the annihilation of the country. Just focus on the Martians.”

Biden is the sick joke that is Obama’s legacy.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Countries with greatest (based on 2020 data: Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark) – those that are most capitalistic – are the most prosperous and rank also the highest in human wellbeing metrics, such as life span, literacy, and life satisfaction.

Yet the anti-capitalist movement is alive and well, particularly among environmental activists. Recently, climate crusader Greta Thunberg called for downfall of capitalism, blaming it for man-made climate change (as well as for colonialism, oppression, genocide, racism, and social injustice).

Climate change has been harnessed by the anti-capitalist movement as a cause to unite the largest number of supporters, including governments and business. Some governments (including the UK and Canada) have passed laws committing them to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and corporations are complying with ESG goals and plans to abandon fossil fuels.

But is capitalism to blame for climate change and the ills that the anti-capitalists accuse it of?

To answer, we need to understand what capitalism is. The term is used casually today to refer to the dominant mixed economy system, where some elements of capitalism, such as free trade and private ownership of property, are mixed with government control and public ownership. Even corrupt mixed economies where politicians hand out favors to businesses that make political contributions are called capitalism, albeit with the label “crony” attached.

However, capitalism is not a mixed economy, or crony “capitalism” (or any other modified capitalism, such as state “capitalism,” welfare “capitalism,” or “anarcho-capitalism”). In its original meaning capitalism is “laissez-faire:” a system of freedom based on voluntary trade, or as Ayn Rand defined it: “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”

In capitalism, freedom is ensured by individual rights which the government protects (through police, armed forces, and the courts) without playing any role in the economy (“all property is privately owned”).

In capitalism, governments cannot initiate physical force; their sole role is to protect their citizens against the initiation of physical force and fraud by criminals or foreign invaders, through deterrence or retaliation. That rules out capitalism as the cause of colonialism, oppression, and genocide. (Absolute monarchies and other forms of dictatorships that initiate force, whether communist, fascist, or theocratic, were and are to blame).

Capitalism is also not the cause of racism or social injustice. In capitalism, all individuals have the same rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of skin color or social status. Capitalism penalizes racist or other irrational discrimination, say that of a business owner who only trades with people of particular skin color and thus limits his investors, supply chain, labor pool, and customers – and his economic success.

Neither does capitalism cause climate change. Climate has always varied greatly. Human industrial activity has had some impact on the atmospheric carbon levels and the global temperature in the last 150 years, during which there have been only mixed economies and centrally planned countries. With its freedom and protection of rights, capitalism would have encouraged rapid innovations as adaptive solutions to any negative impacts of climate change, whether natural or man-made.

Greta and her fellow anti-capitalists want to take down “capitalism” – the mixed economy – and replace it with a centrally planned socialist economy. We have had a taste of that when governments everywhere expanded their power in the name of fighting climate change: state-mandated net-zero carbon emission targets, “just-transition” to clean energy legislation (in Canada), barring new oil and gas pipelines, banning gas-powered vehicles while subsidizing EVs, mandating ESG reporting, etc.

Although there has been some pushback on such measures by industry leaders, most businesses have quietly gone along, by adopting net-zero targets and plans to abandon fossil fuels. But they should not go along, because if they do, statism will only expand, eventually leading to absolute tyranny where the state dictates every aspect of people’s lives. For examples of industry leaders speaking up, see Terence Corcoran’s Financial Post editorial.

If companies want to stop ever-expanding statism and the problems it has caused (energy crisis, food crisis, war, inflation), they must quit supporting it and defend capitalism and freedom. That includes defending their own freedom to operate and to return to their proper role – what they do best: produce and trade goods and services that our lives depend on, including innovative solutions to energy, pollution, and adapting to climate change.

More business leaders standing up to statism and defending capitalism would affect political change towards freedom for business and the rest of us. More wealth creation and prosperity for all would ensue, deflating the tires of the anti-capitalism movement and accelerating human flourishing.

I would never support state rights over individual rights. But when the federal government starts to show ZERO support for individual rights, it’s time to run to the state for protection, if you can. States like New York, California, etc. will never offer such protection, but states like Florida and Texas will, at least for now. That’s why secession starts to make sense.

The goal isn’t a strong government. The goal is protection of the individual’s sovereignty over his or her life. The federal government of the United States grew too big, too powerful and too concerned with its own welfare over and above the welfare of any actual people. Like it or not, this tyrannical government is now at least as bad as (I would say worse than) the British empire toward the colonists in 1776.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”—David Horowitz

A reflection on the abuse of government authority.

February 9, 2023 by Richard L. Cravatts 4 Comments

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George Santayana’s admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” was apparently lost on progressive Democrats in Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.), who appealed to President Biden to address what they recklessly described as “corporate price gouging in the real estate sector.” In a January 9 letter to the White House, 50 members of Congress urged the administration to use various agencies to impose a nationwide program of rent control, since, as the letter asserted, “the rent is too high and millions of people across this country are struggling to stay stably housed as a result.”

What the letter writers have conveniently forgotten, of course, is that the rental housing market is still reeling from the rent and eviction moratorium questionably implemented by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the midst of the Covid pandemic in the form of the CARES Act Section 4024(b). As a result of that moratorium, property owners—who themselves had to continue paying mortgages, property taxes, utilities and other operating expenses—found themselves with tenants who could decide whether or not they could afford their present rent, resulting in months of losses to property owners as tenants simply refused to pay rent—whether or not they could afford to. So the “corporate price gouging” cited in the Congressional letter may simply reflect the real estate industry’s effort to begin to recoup the significant losses experienced during the moratorium.

Rent control is not a rent moratorium, but it does reward tenants and punish rental property owners by a process euphemistically defined as “rent stabilization,” but which is actually a government attempt to control what rent a private property owner can receive from a tenant, with the assumption that private landlords can, and should, provide affordable housing to needy renters by absorbing losses forced on them in what should be an unencumbered marketplace.

Even if the Biden administration were successful in implementing a nation-wide program of rent control, the likelihood of which is questionably legal at best and well beyond federal authority and reach, rent regulations have historically resulted in the exact opposite effect intended by the municipalities that implemented them.

While policymakers have often looked to regulation in private marketplaces to induce desired social benefits, the lesson of rent control is simple: Not only has it consistently failed to serve those very individuals it was designed to help —namely, the poor and elderly —but it has a number of perverse effects, specifically, of actually creating a scarcity of affordable housing, speeding the deterioration of existing rental stock, polarizing owners and renters, and skewing the marketplace with artificially high and low rent levels.

Long positioned by its advocates as a government-sponsored housing program, rent control is, in fact, paid for exclusively by private owners of rental property. Its policies determine what rents may be charged, when and by how much rents can be raised, what actions an owner may take to evict or replace a tenant, whether and when an owner may occupy his own property and at what price, if at all, a property may be sold or transferred, or even if it can be demolished. Critics of rent control policies contend, in fact, that such regulations amount to an unconstitutional “taking” of private property without just compensation.

The fifty signers of the letter to the White House contend that something must be done about housing affordability. And if that something is a new rent control program, they and the other housing advocates looking at that option would do well to consider how rent control created far more problems than it solved in the housing markets that chose to use it:

• The onerous effects of rent control do not penalize the corporate “gougers” the Democrats fantasize about in their letter as much as they do the small property owner, often of limited means and with less income than some of their tenants. In fact, while housing activists and liberal policymakers like to envision landlords as greedy operators of vast real estate empires, exploiting tenants at their will, the reality is that, as a Brookings Institution study found, “40 percent of residential property units are owned by individual investor landlords.” Moreover, the study found, “among those owning residential investment property, roughly a third are from low- to moderate-income households; property income constitutes up to 20 percent of their total household income,” and that, while the Democrats seek to protect only tenants, rent control will adversely affect their other constituents—property owners— since “unstable rent payments are even more detrimental for individual investors—often referred to as ‘mom and pop’landlords—who carry greater financial vulnerabilities.”
• Cities with rent-regulated housing have a great disparity in the rent levels between rent-controlled units and market-rate units. The Cato Institute’s William Tucker revealed how price controls, including rent controls, typically create a ‘shadow market’ in which demand exceeds supply, creating a shortage —in this case of affordable rental units. Renters who cannot access controlled units, therefore, are faced with the option of having to choose from units elsewhere in the market with disproportionately high rent levels. “Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents,” Tucker wrote, “data . . . collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control.” Moreover, Tucker observed, “inhabitants in cities without rent control have a far easier time finding moderately priced rental units than do inhabitants in rent-controlled cities.”
• Rent control makes controlled units scarcer by encouraging renters never to give up their units. Without a means test, with a scarcity of other controlled units to move to, and with the minuscule vacancy rates characteristic of cities with rent regulations, tenants have many disincentives to move or even look for alternate housing. Couples renting controlled large units with multiple bedrooms will continue to rent that unit long after their children have moved out, creating an inefficiency of housing use and preventing a new family who needs extra bedrooms from moving into a unit suited for them. Faced with controlled rents, a landlord is also naturally inclined not to want low or moderate-income renters, choosing instead those more affluent and secure tenants who are less likely to default on their rent payments and more likely to enhance and upgrade their unit.
• There is no way—short of the creation of onerous and coercive new local bureaucracies—to efficiently, fairly, or accurately assess tenants who are elderly, disabled, or ‘low or moderate’ income, those individuals generally identified as being most in need of rent protection. Housing activists, and the rent control boards who have historically served as their aggressive advocates, have assiduously resisted any attempt at means testing, positioning it as invasive and in violation of tenant privacy. But while they are happy to let tenants self-assess their right to landlord-subsidized housing without any review of their actual ability to pay, they see no problem in evaluating every financial detail of a landlord’s ownership—up to and including determining the return he or she can enjoy on a property, how the property is maintained or improved, and at what profit it may be operated or even sold.
• Related to the decline in the market value of buildings put under rent control is the trend of owners to defer maintenance and repairs, since in the face of controlled rents, an adequate return on investment is difficult to realize. While tenants benefit from fixed rents, they often have to live in properties that are deteriorating and offering fewer amenities since owners cannot afford any extra expenses or investment in the face of limited rents.
• A decline in the market value of properties, of course, can also significantly impact the tax base of a municipality, meaning that taxpayers in rent-controlled cities may often end up with lower property tax revenues and reduced public services and facilities as a result. A study by the Duke Financial Economics Center found that in Saint Paul, for example, “the introduction of rent control caused an economically and statistically significant decline of 6-7% in the value of real estate . . ,” and that, more importantly to the city’s taxpayers, “rent control [could result in] an aggregated loss of $1.57 billion in property value and a 4% expected shortfall in property tax revenue.”
• Rent regulations serve to discourage homeownership opportunities and the creation of new housing. In regulated housing markets, investment capital also is not likely to flow in the direction of new construction. Investors are unlikely to put capital at risk when government interference limits their return, exposes their projects to uncertain approvals and permits, and offers no long-term guarantees for future rent levels and cash flows. A building permit analysis by HUD of the Saint Paul real estate market “shows an 84 percent decline in building permit activity in the six months since St. Paul passed rent control compared to the same period a year prior,” since, contrary to all rational real estate economics, even builders of new housing units faced the prospect of rent controls—a huge disincentive to build any new housing in the first place.

If policymakers decide they seek to provide more affordable rental housing for the country’s deserving tenants, it is clear that rent control is neither equitable nor efficient in providing that benefit. If property owners are called on to subsidize renters, then they need to be compensated fairly for the losses they experience in a regulated housing market. That compensation takes many forms but has included property tax abatements, building permit variances and tax incentives for creating new affordable housing, or rent vouchers (similar to HUD’s Section 8 program) to bring rents up to market levels when tenants could not otherwise afford to live in those units.

But it is an abuse of government authority to interfere with how landlords and tenants deal with each other in private markets and what rents are offered and accepted, especially since rent control, as has been shown, unfairly places the burden of providing affordable housing to the nation’s neediest tenants solely on the heads of private property owners instead of having all taxpayers provide that benefit through rational, productive, and efficient government actions that do not penalize landlords in inequitable, constitutionally-questionable ways.

Richard L. Cravatts

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Slow Death of the University: How Radicalism, Israel Hatred, and Race Obsession are Destroying Academia.

State of the Union speech? By Biden? Seriously?

Republicans — all of them — should have stayed home.

You don’t show unity with a dictatorship. You don’t honor the Constitution by dignifying this insanity; instead, you legitimize the Constitution’s destruction.

Having said that, the Republican response to the creepy puppet’s tirade was excellent:

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas:

The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left, Sanders said, “The choice is between normal or crazy, and it’s wrong”.

“Upon taking office just a few weeks ago I signed executive orrders to ban CRT, racism, and indoctrination in our schools, eliminate the use of the derogatory term ‘Latinx’ in our government, repealed COVID orders and said never again to authoritarian mandates and shutdowns,” she said.

“In the radical left’s America, Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race, but not to love one another or our great country,” she said.

“And while you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” Sanders said. “Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.”

“Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols … all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is — your freedom of speech,” she added. [source: NEWSMAX]

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Joe Biden misinforms, ignores, and attacks—and then calls for “unity,” as the country collectively slides into ruin.

By Victor Davis Hanson

After listening to the State of the Union address, Americans know why the latest Reuters poll has Joe Biden at 41 percent approval. 

Vice President Kamala Harris polls even lower—despite the obsequious efforts of the most biased media in history that has, in effect, merged with the Democratic Party. 

The nation was reminded again why only 37 percent of Biden’s own party want him to run again. 

Only a quarter of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction under his leadership.

Given all that, what could a president possibly tell a nation when he entered office inheriting a 1.4 percent inflation rate only to spike it to 7 percent? How did Americans’ 30-year mortgages of 2.7 percent soar to 6.5 percent in less than two years?  

How does a president explain that eggs climbed to $7 a dozen, or a thin steak hit $15 a pound, or a sheet of plywood reached $95?

How does a president explain to Americans that gas averaged $2.39 a gallon when he took office and, even after draining the strategic petroleum reserve, it is still  $3.50 a gallon—and recently spiked at $5 a gallon in many states. 

Can Joe Biden explain why once affordable, or even cheap natural gas more than tripled in price in less than a year? 

What can a president say when in his first two years, over 5 million foreign nationals poured into the United States—all illegally across a nonexistent border? 

How could Biden explain the humiliation in Afghanistan?  The draining of our arsenal of key weaponry? Or the inability to take down a communist Chinese spy balloon when it first brazenly floated above America—photographing military bases and missile sites as it crossed the entire United States with impunity?

We know the answers to all these questions. 

Joe Biden simply did on Tuesday in his state of the union address what he always does: misinform, ignore, and attack!

Misinform.  After sending inflation, energy, and interest rates to astronomical rates, and then seeing them momentarily taper off a bit, Biden declares that he “lowered” these indices that remain far higher than they were when he entered office. 

He brags about a low unemployment rate. But Biden never discloses the better indicator of the labor participation rate that has declined under his tenure—or the fact he inherited a growing economy naturally rebounding on autopilot from a disastrous two-year COVID lockdown.

Ignore. Consider what he will never mention. China just violated international law and U.S. airspace. How did Beijing assume rightly that they so easily could get away with it? 

There is no southern border. Joe Biden destroyed it. 

He greenlighted over 5 million illegal aliens to enter the United States without audit or legality—even as smuggled Mexican drugs kill 100,000 Americans each year.

He never will concede he stopped the building of the wall. He omits that he demonized innocent border patrol officers. He nullified the immigration laws he swore to uphold.

Biden ignores the $4 trillion he has borrowed in just two years to inflate the national debt, now on its way to over $32 trillion this year. The middle class has bled 20-30 percent of their 401k retirement plans representing years’ worth of lost hard-earned savings.

Yet Biden promised hundreds of billions of dollars more in borrowing with no idea of how to pay back the already crushing national debt that will incur $450 billion just to service this year alone.

He skipped over how he demolished U.S. deterrence abroad after the greatest humiliation in modern military history, with the flight from Kabul and the abandonment of billions of dollars in military equipment. 

He never mentions that Russia went into Ukraine because Vladimir Putin saw no downside after this debacle in Afghanistan, or that Biden’s own inept remarks about not worrying over a Russian invasion of Ukraine if it just proved to be “minor” probably played some role.

Attack! Remember, Biden comes to life only when he smears his enemies while calling for “unity” and “bipartisanship.”  

Only then his voice rises, his brow furrows, and his face reddens. He claims that  “the rich” avoid “paying their fair share,” even as he knows that just one percent of the country pays over 40 percent of all income taxes. 

Biden somehow demagogued the lethal violence of black police officers against a black victim in Memphis into evidence of America’s supposed racism. He smeared all law enforcement—even as inner-city violent and hate crimes soared as never before. 

He utterly lied about Republicans demanding a sunsetting of Social Security and Medicare. 

He beat the dead horse of January 6 (while insanely connecting it to the attack on Paul Pelosi!), despite the stacked congressional investigative committee and the suppression of critical video evidence and email communications involving security lapses.

In sum,  it was the same old, same old dishonest Joe Biden: misinform, ignore, and attack—and then call for “unity” as the country collectively slides into ruin.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.

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