The most appallingly horrible proposal in recent history might be coming to Missouri, which makes it even worse. The Kansas City Star has the details on how supporters of a national public service academy are considering Kansas City as a location. Sarah touched on this a few months ago, and I am still mortified by the thought.

It is difficult for me to comprehend how some people think it is a good idea to take some of our best and brightest, and convince them to dedicate their lives to the government. How is this for a frightening statement from a Missouri official? 

Robert Stein, Missouri’s commissioner of higher education, said public service is the lifeblood of our country, but there is no institution dedicated to developing public-service leaders.

“We need to explore how to establish a public service academy that will prompt a cadre of new leaders into government at local, state, national and even global levels,” Stein said.

I have news for Mr. Stein: Working as a bureaucrat for the government is not the lifeblood of our country. Things like liberty, freedom, individualism, entrepreneurship — these are the lifeblood of our country. Making sure that someone who wants to be a hair braider has the proper license is hardly at the same level. Nothing will get us out of this recession like convincing an entire generation that the smart move is to get a cushy job with the government, you know, with nice benefits and a feeling of fulfillment that you are not harming others by engaging in capitalism.

Look, I worked for St. Louis County for six years. There is a level of government service that has to be performed by someone. But we need our leaders to come from society and have a broad range of experiences. That is how you gain wisdom and judgment. Trying to form a culture of insular government workers who never leave government service, and who at the same time attempt to be our permanent leaders, should terrify anyone who believes in individual liberty. It only takes a short tenure in the government’s employ before too many people start to believe that the government knows best, rather than free people or markets.

Bob Compton at Two Million Minutes is blogging about education in New Orleans. Like Compton, I’m impressed by New Orleans’ commitment to rebuild its school system and bring in charter schools. On the other hand, I find it disconcerting that nothing less than a natural disaster will instigate reform.

Compton lists three key components to success in New Orleans. I don’t get this one:

implement a rigorous instructional system that is high standard and can be followed to teach effectively even by the weakest teacher

What is an “instructional system”? Is that new jargon for “curriculum”? Weak teachers should be taught to improve, or be fired. You can’t wait and hope that some other factor will make up for weak teaching, because teaching determines the classroom experience.

I’m all for the other two items — namely, certifying talented teachers “regardless of where they come from” (hear, hear!), and spending enough time on crucial subjects. However, I think we should bear in mind that the relative importance of academic disciplines is subjective. Reading and arithmetic would require the most class time in an elementary school serving disadvantaged students, while music might be an essential course in a high school for the arts. Parental choice is a good way to sort out those priorities — a lesson that New Orleans has taken to heart, given that half of the schools in the Recovery District are charters, and they’re aiming for 80 percent.

There are two sides to every story. Here’s what Kit Bond says about government incentives for green jobs:

“It sounds really neat to think we’re going to have wind-powered jobs, except I don’t see cars going down the road with propellers on them.”

Bond argues that incentives for these jobs entail a lot of waste. The government provides a huge incentive, and the resulting jobs are few and far between. I’m inclined to agree with him. It’s nothing personal against the environment or job creation. When the state subsidizes any job, you can bet that it doesn’t make sense economically. Private businesses would step up to the plate if it did, without having to be coaxed by incentives.

Bracken Hendricks of the Center for American Progress, who is apparently an expert in PR, puts a positive spin on inefficiency:

“He made it sound like federally funded purchase of jobs when what we’re talking about is smart incentives and public investment in new infrastructure,” Hendricks said.

Edspresso links to this American Thinker essay about the causes of student achievement. The author, Robert Weissberg, contends that choice reforms like charter schools or tuition tax credits will not solve America’s education problems. When parents want their children to succeed academically, they take advantage of the vast market supplying books and tutoring, many of which products and services are reasonably priced. So, Weissberg says, if parents and students don’t seek out academic help after school, they’re unmotivated and no improvements in supply will help them.

It’s true that the education market isn’t limited to schools. But Weissberg’s reasoning contains a fundamental flaw: He does not acknowledge that information is costly. Wealthy, educated parents are more likely to provide their children with books and tutoring because they know about those resources and how their children will benefit. An illiterate parent won’t be able to read advertisements for tutoring, and is probably surrounded by other people who don’t hire tutors. Even when that parent finds out about a free after-school tutoring program, he may not have enough information to judge how tutoring will improve his child’s chances in life.

The illiterate parent is an extreme example. However, the same idea applies to parents with a little more education and wealth. Parents give their kids the educational opportunities they know about and can afford. Many parents think that education just means “school,” so they look to charter schools but not extra books or tutoring. (One of the goals of parental choice advocates should be to give parents access to information about different kinds of education, beyond the in-school variety.)

Weissberg is right that we shouldn’t count on the government to fix education or improve achievement. His error lies in assuming that the current market provides a free flow of information to parents.

The first is by David Nicklaus. He responds to the argument that immigrants take Americans’ jobs with this reasoning:

In an area where the overall population is declining or stagnant, this argument loses its potency. Without an adequate supply of labor, employers would be under pressure to move out of the region. Or, in many cases, the jobs wouldn’t get created in the first place.

Nicklaus concludes that immigrants to the Midwest are doing low-skilled work that wouldn’t get done otherwise because midwesterners are leaving the area.

Nicklaus’ points are relevant to Missouri, but immigration in general isn’t just about low-skilled labor. Will Wilkinson discusses immigration’s role in Toronto’s economic and cultural development:

Multicultural Toronto and cities like it prove that the institutions of liberal modernity are robust. Life within them is so good that people the world over flock to them. And newcomers do not take these institutions for granted. They have a stake in seeing them last. They can and do make them stronger.

Restricting immigration is just like restricting trade in food, electronics, or any other commodity. In fact, it can actually be worse than some of those forms of protectionism, because people are an extremely valuable resource.

Neal McCluskey comments on a KIPP charter school in New York that is being forced to let its teachers unionize:

But this is the chance you take when you run a charter school: No matter how much you want to act like a private school, sooner or later the public-schooling powers will remind you of what you really are.

I still think it’s worth it to take the chance. Charters introduce choice, competition, and specialization into the public education system and make it a little bit less coercive. When families can choose a charter school, it’s no longer, “You have to go to the closest school building, or else.” And the fact that one KIPP school is being threatened by imminent unionization doesn’t mean that every charter is about to lose its character. I’m sure the unions will try, but charters may be able to stay one step ahead — at least until some other reform gives families more options.

However, this should serve as a warning to parents who want to transfer their children from private schools: Charters are not exactly the same as private schools. There are attendant drawbacks to public financing of any school.

I’m amused by this editorial in the Kansas City Star. It laments the fact that police in Missouri and Kansas can’t pull over drivers just for not wearing a seat belt. Then it says that raising the fine for not wearing a seat belt, from $10 to $100, is uncalled for.

If driving without a seat belt is so bad that the police should pull you over for it, then it should be discouraged with a noticeable fine. If, however, the fine is not worth more than such a paltry amount, then the police shouldn’t stop you for that in the first place.

This is a scary follow-up to my last post on exotic animals. Missouri has almost no regulations about owning large carnivores? And the requirement that people notify their local sheriff if they own a lion isn’t enforced? I blog again and again about excessive regulations, and now it turns out that in one of the few instances where detailed regulations would be appropriate, there aren’t any.

Something’s wrong when there’s more state oversight of manicurists at the mall than of people who keep tigers in their homes. It must be because cats and dogs aren’t lobbying for the government to erect barriers to entry, to keep out more exotic competing animals.

The Missouri House has passed a bill that would require large carnivore owners to: a) get a permit; b) provide the animal with “adequate” food and care; and, c) put up a sign that they have a potentially dangerous carnivore.

The requirement to feed the animal is meaningless. I’m not worried about the owner feeding the animal, I’m worried about the animal feeding himself. Big carnivores like lions do not eat set portions three times a day — they kill prey whenever they can get it. In other words, they’re always hungry. It’s not like you can make a lion less dangerous by feeding it on a schedule, the way you can make a toddler less irritable by giving him a snack.

Posting a sign is also not enough. Large carnivores do not read signs, are difficult to contain, and may leave their designated premises to go hunting in the surrounding neighborhood, despite the owner’s intentions.

Large carnivores belong in zoos — not in homes.

The Kansas City Star reports on Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office, and the effect on Kansas and Missouri. Didn’t everybody do something like this in kindergarten? Once you’d been in kindergarten for 100 days, you had to bring in 100 pennies or marbles, or whatever, and learn about triple digits.

The Star explains that most of the money that will be coming our way isn’t being spent yet. This illustrates one of the drawbacks of the fiscal stimulus — Washington doesn’t act with the exact timing necessary to step in and avert recessions.

Anyone who doesn’t yet read State House Call should start, if only for John LaPlante’s awesome reactions to statements like this one. After Kansas’ insurance commissioner declared that sick people should be able to purchase insurance as if they were healthy, LaPlante responded:

Yeah, it would be great if I could walk into Best Buy and come out with a 50 inch TV and not have to pay for it.

Plus, he explains economic principles. Read the whole thing.

No insurance plan is going to cover every illness. It would be so expensive that no one could afford it. And no one would want it, anyway. People buy insurance to cover a limited number of potential events, not every possible occurrence. When you get up in the morning, you don’t buy insurance for everything that might happen that day.

Given that health insurance will never cover all ailments, insurance mandates don’t make sense. Whenever the state imposes a new mandate, insurance companies will comply with it by moving away from covering other diseases (and, of course, by charging higher prices).

Legislators should keep that in mind when they consider this mandate for eating disorders. If it becomes law, the mandate will mean that other disorders go uncovered.

Daniel Hamermesh at Freakonomics writes about the silliness of “local” production and employment restrictions. Like the “locavore” consumption enthusiasts, the proponents of these policies think that if you just confine yourself to a small geographic area, scarcity and other facts of life don’t apply to you. Hamermesh points out that when places thus tie their hands, they forgo gains from trade and specialization. Then he turns prophetic:

Even worse, if it were to spread so that national governments helped to “protect” local companies and employees even more than they now do, we would be headed rapidly down the protectionist road that helped produce the Great Depression. I hope this truly stupid idea is localized and does not spread.

Let’s accentuate the positive: Nowadays, almost nobody is truly local. Look at this locavore blog, which chronicles the local food movement in all its obsessive-compulsive glory — by posting lists of stuff people ate, where it came from, etc. This is from the “About This Site” description:

Spanning the United States, the group is committed to challenging themselves to eat mainly local food during a specific period of time during the year.

First, if eating local is good, why do they do it only during a specific period of time? is that because during other periods of time, no food is grown in their areas and they would starve? It gives new meaning to the term “fair-weather fan.”

Second, it says the bloggers come from all over the United States. That doesn’t sound very local to me. I think the locavores intuitively understand that it’s counterproductive to restrict the exchange of information. Now, if only they could apply that concept to the food supply. …