While running errands last week, I was witness to an interesting phenomenon twice over. First, I passed a Walgreens that used yard placards to advertise $35 camp and sports physicals at their in-store clinics. Amazing! How rarely it is that one sees medical services competitively advertised with the true price right up front. Plus, it looks like customers can walk right in without insurance and without appointments, much like going to a restaurant and paying for a meal.

On the topic of food, my next stop along my journey was to grab a bite to eat at Bread Co. While scanning the menu on the wall, I noticed something I hadn’t ever seen before in Missouri — the calorie counts of all the food posted right next to the offerings. Amazing again! Free information at my disposal to make a decision about my health.

Why get excited over something so mundane? For one, there was a free exchange of useful information. The price system — much like the nutritional information system — is an amazing way of communicating information quickly and accurately. Second, in both instances the information was freely provided. Missouri restaurants, unlike some in New York City, are not required by law to include caloric information on their menus. But businesses here are still free to post that information as upfront as they’d like.

Best of all, businesses that choose to be more open with their information freely elect to bear the costs of collecting that information. The burden is usually on the customer to sort out the nutritional value of her food, but in some cases it may be in a restaurant’s business interest to display information more explicitly, or even to be more charitable. The result is a free and fair exchange of information or money that leaves both parties better off.

Ultimately, the most fascinating part of my journey was the fact that the businesses and I were free to choose. The businesses chose to offer certain services and bear those costs in the hope of attracting or retaining more customers. For my part, I could have purchased a sports physical if I wanted, but I didn’t need to. I could have purchased the healthiest sandwich on the menu, or the least healthy. I could have ignored the caloric content completely, and ordered dessert for dinner. No one got to tell me what to order, and I could have left the restaurant altogether if I had wanted. Information freely available at my disposal helped shape my decisions.

As usual, the more freedom and information we have as a society, the better choices we can make for ourselves and those we care about. And that’s always something to get excited about.

The Kansas City Star recently reported on Kansas City’s adoption of a long-range transportation plan to “emphasiz[e] energy conservation, environmental protection, public health and creat[e] places that are compact, walkable and bike-friendly.”

Conservation and improved public health are great, but expanding transportation options isn’t necessarily so. Plans to overhaul roads and transportation access require a careful consideration not just of costs, but especially of consumer demand. Millions of dollars spent on public transportation projects — whether for buses, light rail, or cars — need to be seriously evaluated not just in terms of cost, but also in terms of projected use based on actual demand, not wishful thinking.

Many of the problems (beyond cost alone) with the Kansas City transportation project were already highlighted in a 2008 Show-Me Institute policy study. Chief among present problems, however, is that long-term public financing can be uncertain and unsustainable not only because of state-level budget concerns, but also because many transportation projects are heavily subsidized at the federal level.

From the article:

The federal government is taking other steps to encourage alternatives to the car.

The Department of Transportation is loosening the criteria for picking rail projects, which could benefit Kansas City as it pursues a commuter rail network and a downtown streetcar line.

And [Transportation Secretary Ray] LaHood recently drew fire when he announced on his blog that the government would “discourage” transportation spending that negatively affects bicyclists and pedestrians.

“This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized,” LaHood wrote.

Relying exclusively on large public financing distributions may in fact distort the transportation options commuters actually want and would use. Most importantly, if citizens do demand alternative mass transit options, public financing needn’t be their only recourse.

Bertrand Russell was right about one thing, “There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.”

According to the Post-Dispatch, St. Louis city residents will soon face increased water and trash bills in response to budget pressures. The purported justification for these rate increases is because, in the words of one alderman:

“There is nothing left to cut,” he told the board.

In the very same meeting that the rate increases were approved, however,  $61 million in tax credits to Peabody Energy were also approved.

A great deal can be said about the problems with these tax credits, but it’s pure nonsense to assert that the city’s budget troubles require soliciting more funds from taxpayers, while simultaneously agreeing to “spend” that money on further tax abatements.

To simplify: The city budget is so strapped that cuts needed to be made across the board, including to the fire department, in conjunction with rate increases on water and trash services. The city budget is also so strapped that it can easily afford to forgo millions of dollars in tax revenue from Peabody.

If the city truly can’t find anything left to cut, perhaps it should start looking at tax credits.

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted some of the possible effects, including increased unemployment, of a bill on the governor’s desk concerning strip club regulation in Missouri. Similarly, Christine Harbin’s post earlier this month highlights some further potential economic ramifications of S.B. 586. Among other restrictions, included in the bill is a requirement that clubs close by midnight. There are further problems beyond the economic impact on those Missouri employees affected, though.

Tightening restrictions in Missouri gives an automatic boost to the strip club industries along Missouri’s borders, which in some cases may be even more unsavory. Closing the Missouri clubs earlier than in other states will also unwittingly create more post-midnight (including cross-river) traffic — a public safety concern that effects more people than the clubs’ patrons.

Well-intentioned measures frequently have unintended consequences.

Consider Springfield’s proposal to ban smoking in workplaces. Most workplaces are smoke-free by choice, but some businesses — like cigar bars and hookah lounges — are built around smoking customers. Although it’s likely that the ordinance will make some exceptions, those exceptions themselves create a tilted playing field for competition.

If you don’t like strip clubs and smoking (and I certainly do not), the simplest solution is not to smoke and not to patronize strip clubs or smoky bars. This an example of how the over-regulation of an industry potentially creates conditions favorable to further problems — while solving none of those it was intended to solve — and, in the process, harming the livelihoods of people who have elected to work in affected industries (after all, erotic dancers need to eat, too).

The fairest (and most effective) way to kill an unsavory business remains not to patronize it.

In just a few weeks, Missouri will become the least expensive state in the nation to purchase cigarettes. In May, South Carolina legislators voted for a 714-percent tax increase on packs of cigarettes (effective in July), soon making Missouri the state with the lowest tax per pack.

Efforts to increase Missouri’s cigarette tax have been around for a while, and are often couched as an incentive to get smokers to quit and improve public health. The issue is now back on the radar in states like Missouri that are struggling to balance their budgets.

Using the Show-Me IDEAS tool, I was able to compare cigarette taxes across states. This chart shows the nation’s average tax at around $1.30 per pack, far higher than Missouri’s 17 cents per pack:

Click image to enlarge

Illinois legislators recently put a $1 per pack hike proposal on hold until later this summer. If this goes through in Illinois, smokers along the border and in the Metro East can look to Missouri for the cheapest cigarettes in the nation — but only if Missouri can hold on to its new title.

Although the majority of Americans don’t smoke, a new poll suggests that most voters would favor increases in tobacco taxes as an alternative to state budget cuts. This kind of discrepancy demonstrates one of the main problems with cigarette taxes — those least directly affected by the tax feel justified in imposing a tax on those most affected.

John Stuart Mill had it exactly right. Only six years before the appearance of cigarette taxes in America, he wrote in On Liberty:

The majority have not yet learnt to feel the power of the government their power, or its opinions their opinions. When they do so, individual liberty will probably be as much exposed to invasion from the government, as it already is from public opinion. But, as yet, there is a considerable amount of feeling ready to be called forth against any attempt of the law to control individuals in things in which they have not hitherto been accustomed to be controlled by it; and this with very little discrimination as to whether the matter is, or is not, within the legitimate sphere of legal control; insomuch that the feeling, highly salutary on the whole, is perhaps quite as often misplaced as well grounded in the particular instances of its application.

The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled Wednesday that a “police officer’s unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed is sufficient evidence to support a conviction for speeding in violation.”

In 2008, Mark Jenney was issued a ticket for traveling 79 mph in a 60 mph zone. At his municipal trial, the charge was revised to 70 in a 60 mph zone. Radar results were deemed inadmissible at all trial levels.

Traffic violation cases are increasingly becoming the locus of a fundamental reinterpretation of the rights of the accused, in ways that already begin to set a wider precedent for shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused.

Take, for example, the 2009 case of Gant Bloom in St. Louis, who fought — and won — his red-light camera ticket appeal. Representing himself, Bloom successfully argued that he could not be charged with running a red light, because the city could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he, rather than his girlfriend, was the driver of his BMW at the time of the incident.

The recent ruling in Ohio provides yet another reason why Missourians ought to be concerned about how traffic cases are handled, lest this nascent precedent that abrogates the rights of the accused for traffic violations be spread to other states and other areas of law.

A recent article in the Columbia Missourian highlights some of the steps being taken in Missouri to combat childhood obesity. Among the initiatives mentioned are the Walking School Bus and Farm to School programs:

More than 400 students from 10 Columbia public elementary schools participate in this Walking School Bus program, sponsored by the PedNet Coalition. A trained adult walks a set route each morning, picking up kids along the way and guiding them to school.

In addition to cutting costs for buses facing rising fuel expenses, the Walking School Bus is designed to increase physical activity for children in order to combat the country’s growing childhood obesity epidemic.

The difference between the two programs is that the Walking School Bus is grounded in the volunteerism of adults willing to walk with children to school, with the end of incentivizing good habit formation, whereas Farm to School is a government program that encourages the use of local food in school lunches. There are a couple of problems with the latter. As Sarah Brodsky and Caitlin Hartsell have pointed out, it’s incorrect to conflate “local food” with “healthy food”; food produced locally may not always be healthy, and food that is healthy may be imported from outside a given region. Mandating that school food be locally procured is also costly, because price-based competition from a large portion of the potential market for food is left unconsidered, and the increased demand for local food contributes to a rise in its prices.

It can also be a costly mandate for local farmers, who must cope with changes in the types of crops that they grow. A Columbia school district official admitted:

“We’re essentially asking farmers to start to grow what we want them to grow. And that’s a big risk for them.”

It is indeed a risk for Missouri farmers, who must diversify their crops to meet a new form of demand. Modern farmers maintain a delicate balancing act of running up huge debts in acquiring machinery that is geared specifically for the crops they have elected to raise. Mandating that schools provide local food presents an opportunity for local farmers, but also places a burden on them to raise a diversity of crops year-round — for many, a costly and impractical endeavor. Missouri farmers will be taking more than a “big risk” here and now; this involves their whole financial life plans.

Tackling the difficult issue of childhood obesity requires daily diligence in habit formation, because parents ultimately control the health of their children. One or more healthy meals served at school every day can be negated by a pantry full of junk food at home. This is not to say that schools shouldn’t care about serving healthy food — indeed, school lunch programs that focused on meeting nutritional guidelines, whether or not the food is locally procured, would better balance costs with student health.

Similarly, a mandated exercise class during the school day doesn’t affect the inactivity of kids who stay indoors and play video games all day on the weekends and during the summer. Yet initiatives like the Walking School Bus program directly incentivize the most important players on this issue — the parents and children themselves. Children are habituated toward associating activity with involvement with their peers, and parents are given an easy, safe, and inexpensive way of getting their kids to school that may benefit the community (e.g., through reduced traffic congestion near schools) at the same time. Yet again, volunteerism creates a win-win for everyone.

The State of Missouri recently announced that it would offer an extra $50 in rebates to consumers who participate in the Energize Missouri Appliance Rebate Program. The additional money comes as an incentive to help participants in paying the cost of recycling their old appliances.

But just what are the costs of recycling these appliances? Missouri’s State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate program (SEEARP) is explicitly restricted to the replacement of existing appliances. Further, there are essentially no qualifications on eligibility for replacing older appliances.

Thus, a couple looking to buy necessary appliances for their new home are not given the government incentive to purchase energy efficient appliances, but homeowners with already functioning appliances are.

What happens to the old appliances? In order to qualify for the rebate, consumers must show proof that the appliance was “properly recycled.” Recycling appliances, however, is tricky business. Most of the materials aren’t biodegradable, so the appliances have to be broken down into their parts and either sold as scrap or, in the case of metals, reprocessed altogether. How much more earth-friendly could this process be compared to simply repairing and using an existing appliance for as long as possible? Further, for the appliance to be recycled, its parts need to be in a minimally workable condition in order to be repurposed. Otherwise, the scrap ends up in a landfill. On the other hand, if the appliance could be repaired, why would anyone replace it? Answer: because you can get a government discount on a new one.

Not only does the SEEARP program then distort the market, it incentivizes consumers, who by and large have no real need for new appliances, to wastefully and expensively toss workable ones. Supporters of initiatives like the rebate initiative may argue that the continued use of such appliances generates a negative environmental impact. While that might perhaps be marginally true, there remain serious environmental, and economic, problems with this argument. For one, the process of recycling old, functioning appliances itself requires a great deal of energy. Further, energy-efficient appliances may even encourage individuals to consume more energy overall. Incentivizing the disposal of viable machinery also misallocates resources that could have been spent on encouraging growth in other areas of the economy. Remember: The rebate program does not simply encourage people to buy energy-efficient appliances, but to replace their old — functioning or not — appliances.

Additionally, in order to qualify for the rebate, consumers are limited to select Missouri retailers. This might not be cost effective for the consumer, who, for instance, could potentially find a better deal online — and it’s certainly not cost effective for Missouri.

Because the rebate program only applies to recycling an appliance, consumers are further disincentivized from selling, or donating, these appliances to others who might need them. Those who actually need to purchase appliances, either new or used, are therefore harmed by the program, both because workable, used appliances would need to be recycled, rather than sold or donated, by owners replacing them with energy efficient appliances, and because those who want to purchase a new appliance do not qualify for the rebate.

The truly green solution is to let consumers decide without government prodding when, and how, to replace their appliances.