Voice For Liberty

  • The wonderful and frightening uncertainty of competition

    Take education. Bureaucrats like to say, you will go to this school, because we said so, and you will be taught according to this program, because we said so and we know best. Those of us with confidence in markets think you could do better deciding for yourself. Neither the bureaucrats nor the freedom lovers…

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  • Schoolchildren Will Be Basically Proficient

    A few months ago I wrote how most states, when testing their schoolchildren, post results such as “80% of our state’s students are proficient in reading or math,” but when tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the number judged proficient falls to 30% or so. (See Every State Left Behind.) It was…

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  • How a good column on the bad lottery fell apart

    Mr. Scholfield tells us how the lottery is not a very good bet. He references a survey that tells us how about half of us believe we have a better chance of obtaining a retirement nest egg through winning the lottery rather than by saving and investing. He then tells us that the large majority…

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  • The Undercover Economist

    This is an enjoyable book that explains the basics of how economics works, which is to say, how the world works. Mr. Harford doesn’t go into any technical detail at all, so there are no charts and graphs to decipher (although a very few are used for illustration), and there are no mathematical formulas.

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  • AirTran subsidy is harmful

    From the beginning, we in the Wichita area have been told each year that the AirTran subsidy was intended as a temporary measure, that soon AirTran would be able to stand on its own, and there will be no need to continue the subsidy. Mayor Mayans said as much last year, and so did City…

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  • The “Free” Kansas Lottery Proceeds

    What’s ironic is that gamblers are worse off playing against the State of Kansas than the mob-run numbers rackets. As a letter-writer in the New York Times wrote: “They [organized crime] paid out about 85 percent of the amounts that were bet, retaining 15 percent or less for profits and expenses like payoffs.”

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  • air subsidies

    Yup…subsidies for AirTran pick a winner, and the losers. But consider the alternative. 400 dollar flights to anywhere. Do any free marketeers really prefer driving to Tulsa to fly to Austin? Wichita would shrivel up and blow away without economic development incentives. This one is not perfect. And, Delta has a gripe. But check prices…

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  • Separation of Sport and State

    I recently discovered that all over the country there are taxes being directed to Sports teams and Arenas. So, I created a site www.separationofsportandstate.com Please visit, and contribute by emailing the administrator.

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  • The Mystery of Capital

    The problem with most third world countries, Mr. De Soto tells us, is not that there is no capital, it’s that the capital is dead. Dead in the sense that it can’t be used to its full economic potential. It can’t be mortgaged, it can’t be divided into shares, and it simply can’t be used…

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  • Lack of Literacy is Threat to Liberty

    Writing in a recent commentary, Stephen M. Lilienthal of the Free Congress Foundation expresses concern over the literacy skills of recent college graduates. The findings of some recent studies are quite troubling.

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  • More good computer and Internet things

    Google Analytics If you have a website, you may be interested in knowing how many people visit your site. There are many web counters and other services to give counts of visitors and other statistics, but nothing I have seen comes close to Google Analytics. This free service, available at http://www.google.com/analytics, provides detailed analysis of…

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  • Tax increment financing in Iowa

    Readers of The Voice For Liberty in Wichita are well aware that I believe that when the government provides subsidies to businesses — either in the form of cash payments or preferential tax treatment — we create a corrosive business environment. Government picks winners and losers for political reasons, rather than letting the market decide…

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