The Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board approved a potential new charter’s application for a final review last week. While we are excited to see the possibility of a new charter school opening in our state, we know that there could be so many more currently operating if it weren’t for the board’s continuous roadblocks.
Clarksdale Collegiate Prep, which is wanting to extend its existing K-8 charter school to grades 9-12, met all of the necessary criteria for the second stage of the charter school approval process – an evaluation to ensure the quality of the school meets the board’s standards. It met the Stage 1 requirements, the application completion check, earlier this year and will move on to Stage 3, an independent evaluation team review, for final authorization.
However, the Authorizer Board denied the Stage 2 application for Level-Up Academy, which would have created a K-5 charter school in Greenville. The board cited funding concerns, implying the enrollment projections would not produce enough revenue to operate.
This is not the first time the Authorizer Board has denied applications for charter schools in Mississippi.
When the Mississippi Legislature enacted the “Mississippi Charter Schools Act of 2013,” many hoped there would be a multitude of charter schools opening across the state as a way to give Mississippi children alternative options for their education. But this hasn’t been the case.
According to a report published last year, from 2014-2021, there have been 56 charter school applications submitted, not including the dozens of other letters of intent for potential charters. Of those 56 applications, only 8 were authorized for operation. That’s a 14% acceptance rate.
While some applications may have contained credible evidence for denial, the majority of flaws found in these applications were minor. It’s nearly impossible for any piece of writing to be perfect, let alone a 400-page document.
The stated mission of the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board is to authorize high-quality charter schools that will expand opportunities for underserved students in our state. Its job should be to work with applicants to ensure they are acceptable, not block applications that aren’t 100% perfect.
According to Magnolia Tribune, charter school students in Mississippi perform at the same level or even better than traditional public school students. Considering the fact that Mississippi’s charter school law requires charter schools to only operate in failing school districts, this shows charters are making a difference in many children’s educational journeys.
Mississippi First conducted a survey a few years ago, with results showing that over 75% of parents in charter school communities support charter schools and almost 100% of parents are satisfied with the academic progress of their children.
The data shows that charter schools are helping Mississippi children. No one is requiring students to attend charter schools, but those who want to should be able to do so. But with the board’s continuous disapproval rate, fewer children have that option.
It’s time the Authorizer Board began seeing the bigger picture, rather than the insignificant details that won’t necessarily affect a school’s performance, operation or sustainability.
It’s time the board stood by its declared mission – to authorize charter schools in order to expand opportunities for Mississippi children, not deny them.
I recently came across an old McDonald’s menu from the early 2000s. A Quarter Pounder cost $2.29. A regular shake $1.69. Large fries $1.59.
Today, you would need to pay about twice that. Two decades of inflation – particularly in the past three years - means that a dollar buys much less than it did back then.
We are all familiar with the idea that prices rise over time. Ever since the US Federal Reserve broke the link between the US dollar and gold in August 1971, inflation has become a permanent part of life.
If, however, we measure price changes in constant dollar amounts (what economists call “real terms”), or if you consider how long it might take someone on the median income to earn enough to buy something, we can get a much more accurate picture of how prices have changed.
The chart above from Visual Capitalist shows how the price of various consumer items has changed since the start of the century.
US households get a far better deal when they buy toys, televisions or cellular services than was the case twenty years ago. The price of TVs in real terms has plummeted. A large flat-screen TV in 2000, according to VisualCapitalist, cost about 17 percent of median income. Today? Less than 1 percent of (a much higher) median income.
That’s the good news, but the bad news is that the price of other items has skyrocketed whichever way you measure it. Over the past two decades, the price of hospital services has risen over 200 percent. College tuition is up almost 170 percent.
Why have the costs of some things fallen so dramatically, but the costs of others risen?
Anyone wanting to sell you cellular services, or a TV, or toys in America today is operating in a fiercely competitive market. They are under constant pressure to give customers a good deal.
At the same time, companies in those sectors often operate globally, meaning that they benefit from the advantages of international trade, and can then pass those gains on to their customers.
What about the healthcare economy or higher education? There simply aren’t the incentives for providers in those sectors to give customers a better deal.
Not only is there less competition in these sectors, but they are protected by government regulation and barriers to entry that intentionally keep out the competition.
Here in Mississippi, for example, in order to provide a new healthcare facility, a provider will usually have to get a permit – called a Certificate of Need. Since these permits usually require the approval of existing healthcare providers, they are notoriously difficult to obtain.
Prices are determined via costly negotiations with insurance companies, rather than by pressure to keep giving customers a better deal.
A good rule of thumb is that prices have fallen whenever there is choice and competition, and government regulation is limited. Where there is lots of government regulation, prices have soared.
No one in Washington, as far as I know, has yet come up with a plan to make televisions or toys more affordable. Yet that is what the current administration is proposing to do for healthcare and higher education when they propose more Medicaid and student loan cancellation.
Ironic, isn’t it? Having made healthcare and higher education insanely expensive through regulation, government then comes along with an offer to make them more affordable to some.
What we ought to do instead is to abolish Certificate of Need laws and incentivize providers to offer customers, not just insurance companies, a better deal.
Rules on university tenure need to go, so that instead of running colleges for the convenience of those on the payroll, they are run in the best interests of those that save desperately in order to be able to afford to graduate. We also need to change the law on university accreditation so that there is less box ticking about diversity and inclusion, and more emphasis on how a degree actually adds value for students.
If there was a free market in healthcare and higher education, the cost of both would come down. If we don’t deregulate either sector, prices will continue to rise.
Talking of excessive regulation keeping out the competition, I was dismayed to hear that this week the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board only approved a single new Charter School in 2023.
This means that a decade since Charter Schools were allowed under Mississippi law, we have a grand total of eight. Our Authorizer Board has been cheerfully rejecting more applications than it has approved to the point that I think it is a minor miracle that anyone bothers to apply at all.
If Mississippi had an Authorizer Board for fast food outlets, McDonald’s Quarter Pounders would be an expensive luxury. The only way our state will see a significant increase in Charter Schools is if we actually appoint people to run the Authorizer Board that believe in school choice.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
For decades, many US universities were solid bastions of academic excellence, producing well-rounded citizens. Then suddenly, wham! They’re embroiled in a row about white privilege and the need to make reparations for the past.
What we once called “political correctness” has been a thing on certain progressive university campuses since the 1980s. But until relatively recently, extreme ideas more or less stayed there. Now it feels as if these radical ideas are moving mainstream.
Last week, as millions of Americans celebrated July 4th, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (owned by the international corporation, Unilever) put out a tweet claiming that the United States "exists on stolen land," which should be "returned."
Not long before that, one of Bud Light’s marketing executives talked about the need to distance the brand from "frat guys," and embrace "inclusivity." Their campaign certainly seems to have cost them the "frat guys," without perhaps including as many new transgender customers. Reports suggest they lost about a third of their sales. Not long before that, there was Disney, a leading family entertainment business in America, which decided to take a radical stance on social issues in Florida that many families might object to.
Espousing “woke” ideas might enable a certain sort of not-very-bright academic to appear cleverer than they actually are. But why indulge these ideas in the world of business? What possesses an established company to suddenly embrace an ideological stance almost designed to offend millions of potential customers?
Initially, I assumed that it was all part of a cunning marketing plan. Now I wonder if it is arrogance coupled with a blind adherence to ideology.
To understand why some people go woke, perhaps we should try to understand something about the nature of the “woke” belief system in the first place.
Those that are “woke” are called “woke” because they see themselves as having woken up to the way that the world actually works – hence the name. According to their self-image, they have a heightened awareness of social injustice. So much so, in fact, that they have an understanding of the world around them that others do not have.
A defining characteristic of being “woke” is to have a sense of moral superiority over those that are unwoke. It is this sense of moral superiority, I believe, rather than any carefully thought-through marketing campaign, which explains why some marketing executives run such gratuitous campaigns.
“Woke” ideology is really a belief system, rather like a religion. Indeed, for many of its adherents, “woke” ideology has become a kind of post-religious religion. "When a man stops believing in God," wrote GK Chesterton, "he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." For the past half-century, there has been a decline in traditional religious observance throughout the Western world. The cult of woke has come along as the belief system for those who no longer believe.
“Woke” ideas give people a way of making sense of the world - however absurd it might seem to the rest of us. “Woke” ideology places everyone into a hierarchy of victimhood. Those with certain immutable characteristics are deemed "oppressors," and those with others are deemed the "oppressed." It is your so-called “intersectional identity” that determines where you sit in the hierarchy of victimhood – and fundamentally, your moral worth.
Once you see the world this way, politics ceases to be a matter of personal preference or opinion. Instead, it becomes a choice between absolute right Vs absolute wrong. Marketing ceases to be a matter of trying to maximize sales and revenue. It becomes a chance to demonstrate your absolute righteousness, even at the expense of telling your customers they are bad.
Saddest of all, those that join the cult of woke all too often stop seeing friends and family as an assortment of people, with mixed tastes and opinions, bound by love. Instead, those that are not part of the cult of inclusivity and tolerance must be cut off.
If the “woke” creed resembles a religion, it is one that does not seem to offer much hope of redemption. Those that fall short get canceled.
According to the cult of woke, socioeconomic outcomes in America are not explained by differences in individual aptitude or behavior. They are explained by the unfairness of "the system," which the “woke” believe is inherently immoral and wrong.
Once you start to see the world that way, you don’t just start to believe that America is always in the wrong. Like every bloody revolutionary from the Jacobins to the Leninists, you start to believe that you need to tear down what exists and start again.
“Woke” ideas are not merely an annoyance or an irritation. They are a profoundly malevolent belief system that unless tackled, risk tearing the American Republic apart.
It is encouraging that we are starting to see consumer boycotts against “woke” corporations, but we need to see much more of it. I have been impressed with Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign against “woke” investment managers on Wall Street. This could be the start of something big.
Here at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we run a Leadership Academy designed as an antidote to "woke." We introduce young Mississippians to the idea that the free market and America are a force for moral good. We teach classes on why the United States is a profoundly moral achievement, and why Americans should take pride in their country and its (imperfect) past.
If we are to develop an effective antidote to the “woke” delusion, perhaps we must also recognize that human beings need to believe in something bigger and better than themselves. If we do not offer them a good and true belief system, they will latch on to one that is malevolent and false.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
What was the most significant thing Donald Trump did as President?
Love him or loathe him, Trump’s Supreme Court appointments look like they might have been the most consequential thing he did in office. Of the nine Justices on the Court, one third of them - Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett - are Trump appointees.
Trump’s trio have decisively changed the balance of opinion on the Court – and the implications of this only seem to grow.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that ‘affirmative action’ cannot be used as part of a university admissions process. Or to be more precise, it ruled that the system used by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, does not comply with the principles of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment or the protections of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
For decades, universities have used race-based preferencing to rig their selection systems in favor of some racial groups, and at the expense of others. Often this has meant universities admitting more African American students, with lower grades, than they otherwise might have, and at the expense of Asian American students with higher grades.
In the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, “all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution”.
Progressive academics, hooked on ‘woke’ ideology as an addict is to meth, may deviously look to circumvent the ruling. Regardless, an important victory has been won by those who believe that the way to end racial discrimination is to stop racially discriminating.
So-called ‘affirmative action’ can now be challenged in the knowledge that the Supreme Court will likely rule against it should ‘woke’ bureaucrats be daft enough to let things go far. Let the litigation begin …. Perhaps we will now see a flurry of cases aimed at overturning ‘affirmative action’ when it comes to awarding public procurement contracts and practices within local government?
A day later, the Supreme Court made another momentous decision, when it ruled that President Biden’s plan to cancel over $400 billion of student loan debt was also contrary to the Constitution. A few hours after that, the Court ruled that a Christian website designer could not be compelled by state law in Colorado to articulate views that they did not themselves endorse.
A year before, the Court famously overturned Roe Vs Wade, ruling that decisions about abortion should be left to each individual state.
Maybe the Court’s most consequential ruling of all is one that has received the least attention. Last summer, the Court ruled that the Environment Protection Agency did not have the power it presumed to have. For the first time since the New Deal, the legal assumptions that have allowed for the aggrandizement of the administrative state are being challenged.
Responding to the Court’s recent ruling on affirmative action, President Biden declared that ‘this is not a normal court’. He’s right.
The norm, since the Warren court of the 1950s, has been to have the Supreme Court adjudicate on the basis of what the judges would like the law to say. Today, we have a Supreme Court ruling on the basis of what the law actually says. So accustomed have we become after decades of judicial activism that might not feel normal, but it is what the Founders intended.
Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan attempted to change things, selecting the brilliant Robert Bork to sit on the Court - only to have him rejected by Congress after a bruising battle. Something similar almost happened when Bush the elder appointed Clarence Thomas. He had to endure a smear campaign similar to what Brett Kavanaugh experienced more recently.
Some characterize the change in the composition of the Court as a tilt towards conservatism after years of leaning liberal. I am not sure that is quite right. Recent Court rulings on election law in Alabama and Louisiana certainly weren’t welcomed by many conservatives in those states.
What the Supreme Court seems to have done is move away from judicial activism in favor of originalism – the idea that they should stay true to the original intentions of the Founders when they drafted the Constitution.
Perhaps that’s one bias the Supreme Court should always have.
Mississippi was hit by epic thunderstorms the other week. Like thousands of other people across the state, perhaps you were left without electricity?
For me, no electricity meant trying to work without air-conditioning. Not having any AC was not a productive experience. As I sweltered in the heat, I was left wondering how people in Mississippi managed before the advent of AC?
Invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, within living memory, there were plenty of homes and offices in Mississippi that did not have any AC. For a start, it was once very expensive. According to the website HumanProgress.org, the cost of AC units has fallen by 97 percent since the early 1950s. AC only became ubiquitous in cars and shops within the past two or three decades.
Imagine what life would be like in Mississippi without refrigeration? As late as the 1950s, that was how a significant number of people in our state lived.
When the first self-contained refrigerator, the Frigidaire, went on sale in 1919 it cost $775 – or about $12,000 in today’s money. Today, you can buy a vastly better refrigerator for only a fraction of the cost.
It’s not only the costs of keeping cool that have come down.
In 1979, to buy a 14-inch television, the average American earning the average wage would have needed to work 70 hours to earn enough. Today, a vastly better TV can be purchased for the equivalent of 4 hours of work.
The other day I re-watched Wall Street, that classic 1980s movie starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. In the movie, Gekko uses one of the first commercial cell phones, a DynaTec. Apparently, Gekko’s phone retailed for almost $4,000 at the time, or over $10,000 in today’s prices. It needed re-charging after 30 minutes.
Today, even someone on the minimum wage in Mississippi could afford a vastly better cell phone than anything available to Wall Street billionaires a generation ago.
Among those officially classified as ‘poor’ in America, 99 percent live in homes that have a fridge, 95 percent have a television, 88 percent have a phone and over 70 percent own a car.
1996, the real cost of household appliances has fallen by over 40 percent. The cost of footwear and clothes by 60 percent. Indeed, the average American home is full of gadgets, entertainment systems and labor-saving devices many of which had not even been invented when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
As my friend the author, Matt Ridley puts it, “Our generation has access to more calories, watts, horsepower, gigabytes, megahertz, square feet, air miles, food per acre, miles per gallon, and, of course, money than any who lived before us”.
And here’s another remarkable thing. We get all this extra stuff without having to work as hard. In 1913, the average American worker put in 1,036 hours that year, compared to less than 750 hours a year now.
Often, I hear people talking about there being ‘too much technology’. It is fashionable to say that we should turn away from technology and get back to a pure and simple past. Really? I’ve heard anyone express that sort of opinion in the poor places, such as Uganda or Kenya, that I’ve lived in. If anyone ever tells you that we have too much technology, you might want to suggest that they switch off the air-conditioning for a few hours and think about it.
Thank goodness for modern technology – and the free market that makes it available at an affordable price for everyone.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Why is economic output per person seven times higher on one side of the U.S.–Mexico border than on the other? Why is income per capita in Taiwan almost three times higher than it is in China? What explains the fact that the average Canadian is 12 times richer than the average Moroccan?
We are often invited to believe that a society’s relative success has a lot to do with its geography or climate. Not so.
There are plenty of resource-rich countries in Africa, blessed in every imaginable way by geography and climate, that still produce only grinding poverty. Conversely, there are plenty of resource-poor places, such as Japan and Iceland, that prosper.
Much more important than a country’s natural resources is its political economy.
If property rights are insecure, power arbitrary, and taxes high, a society will remain poor. If, on the other hand, people are free to spend more of their own money and make their own choices for themselves and their families, society overall will thrive.
Perhaps the single best illustration of this is Korea. Since the end of the Korean War, the Korean peninsula has been divided. North Korea has been run by a communist dictatorship, under which there are no property rights and rules for everything, including what you can wear. South Korea, especially since the 1980s, is an open, free-market society, with relatively low taxes and light regulation.
The North today can barely feed itself. The South is as wealthy as Europe or the United States.
Korea shows us what happens when a society is subjected to two different extremes—one free market, the other a tyranny.
Making sure that every society is run along free-market principles is essential to maximize prosperity. But even with the most liberty-minded policies in place, would everyone in a free-market society flourish?
In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist, Walter Mischel, undertook a famous experiment. He offered kids a marshmallow on the understanding that they could either eat the marshmallow right away or they could wait a few minutes and have two.
What Mischel was doing was measuring each child’s time preferences. Those kids who were prepared to wait had what we call a low time preference. The less patient kids who opted to have one marshmallow right away had what we call a higher time preference.
Having assessed each kid’s time preference, Mischel then tracked their progress over the years that followed. He discovered a startling correlation between having a low time preference (being prepared to wait) with academic and other kinds of success. Those inclined toward instant gratification, his research seemed to suggest, would be less successful.
Time preferences, it seems, play an important part in how we as individuals do. Might time preferences also have a role in explaining the different trajectories societies take?
Could it be that the United States, Canada, Finland, and Japan are relatively rich because they are countries with low time preferences? There’s a body of evidence to suggest that poorer countries, such as Mexico and Russia, have higher time preferences, and that really poor countries, such as Tanzania and Nigeria, have really high time preferences.
The conventional explanation for this is that prosperity produces lower time preferences. Might it not be the case that lower time preferences produce prosperity?
If being wealthy explained your time preferences, not the other way around, you might expect that people with comparable incomes in different countries have similar time preferences. They don’t. As with Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, the implication is that time preferences affect outcomes, not the other way around.
Mainstream economists have a lot to say about how individuals transact with other individuals. They less often look at how we as individuals transact with our future selves.
Surely how people in a society transact with their future selves is critical in explaining economic outcomes. In a society with a low time preference, people are more likely to defer consumption and save. Dropout rates in education are likely to be lower. Capital and knowledge will accumulate from one generation to the next.
Time preferences are a key factor driving a society’s economic development. What about propensity to commit crime? Presumably, if you’re willing to risk seeing your future self sent to prison in return for the chance of an immediate material reward, you have a different time preference from that of someone who isn’t.
Time preferences can clearly be influenced by public policy. Hyperinflation, for example, would give people a powerful incentive to spend rather than save. Some research has suggested that exposure to communism had affected the time preferences of East Germans, compared with those who lived in West Germany (although the effect is wearing off and Germans overall have some of the lowest time preferences in the world).
When considering some of the United States’ deep-rooted, inter-generational socio-economic challenges, we ought perhaps to think a little more about time preferences. How do time preferences vary across the country? What can we do to lower time preferences? Can one actually lower time preferences, or is it perhaps a case of not raising them?
Idealists believe that if only we adopted the right policies, we would get better outcomes. A conservative idealist should recognize that there are some aspects of human nature that we can neither change nor perfect. The importance of time preferences might be one of them.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has hired Ava Grace Coley and Edward Wilson Jr. as its interns for the summer.
Ava Grace Coley, a native of Richland, Mississippi, will help the Mississippi Center for Public Policy this summer with data collection and direct mail, as well as aid in the production of audio and visual output.
This fall, Coley will be going into her junior year at the Magnolia Homeschool Program. In 2021, she participated in two formal debates and in 2020 participated in a mock trial.
Coley would like to help make the case for changes to improve the education system. She believes deeply in the need for an education system that takes into account everyone’s individuality. She also strongly supports women’s rights and religious liberty.
This summer, Edward E. Wilson Jr., a native of Jackson, Mississippi, will aid MCPP in crafting reports on the issues of governmental pay disparity and work with the Center in its data collection and storage.
Wilson recently completed his high school career at Jackson Prep and will be attending the University of Mississippi’s Sally McDonnell Honors College in the fall, pursuing a degree in international studies through the Croft Institute and Public Policy Leadership with the Trent Lott Institute for Public Policy. During his time at Jackson Prep, Wilson was Captain of his Debate Team, culminating in a 2023 second-place National Finalist finish. He also worked as an opinion writer for Jackson Prep's newspaper, “The Sentry”, for which he won the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association 2023 Award for Mississippi State Wide Best Opinion Editorial.
Wilson strongly believes in reforming the education system to account for greater autonomy in school choice, as well as increased economic reform to encourage further private investment into Mississippi.
"I am super excited to have Ava and Edward joining us over the summer!" said Douglas Carswell, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. "Ava and Edward will be working with us as we advocate for the changes Mississippi needs to prosper – and it is great to have them as part of our team."
The average person in Mississippi is 25 percent richer today than they were in 2017. In just five years, the per capita income in our state went from $36,902 to $46,248.
Before you ask, those dollar amounts are in constant 2022 dollars. In other words, even allowing for inflation, Mississippians are a quarter richer now than they were only five years ago.
Does it surprise you that Mississippi is actually doing well? For as long as anyone can remember, Mississippi has been browbeaten into believing that we are bottom of the class, with the lowest income and slowest growth.
It is time we stopped thinking of our state as last. As someone new to this state, I can see it’s an outdated image. As someone that has looked at the numbers, I know it just isn’t so.
Between 1959 and 2022, Mississippi was the second fastest-growing state in America, with average annual growth of 2.61 per year.
Pretty impressive, no? It would have been a lot more impressive if it was not for the period between 1980 and 2010. Having achieved some remarkably fast growth relative to other US states in the 1960s and 1970s, Mississippi slowed down dramatically in the 80s, 90s and the noughties.
Mississippi had three decades of sluggish growth from about 1980 to 2010 because our state had bad public policies.
For much of the period from 1980 to 2010, Mississippi was a one-party (Democrat) fiefdom. The size of government grew. More and more people were hired to work at public expense, crowding out the private sector. With too much government and too many people living at public expense, taxes rose relative to those in other states. More bureaucrats meant more bureaucracy. After decades of more government, you needed permits and approval for far too many things in our state.
With Mississippi not prospering, her leaders turned to Washington for help. Politics in the state focused on how to secure handouts from the feds. If grants from the federal government made a state rich, Mississippi would be the richest state in America. They don’t – and Mississippi stayed in the economic slow lane.
The real news is that after decades of these bad public policies, Mississippi is starting to grow rapidly again. Why? Because bad public policy is being replaced by good public policy.
In the past few years, Mississippi has significantly cut the tax burden, notably slashing the state income tax to a flat 4 percent. Since 2018, the size of the public payroll has been significantly reduced.
In 2021, there was an important move made to deregulate the labor market, with a universal occupational licensing law. This has put pressure on licensing boards to remove some of the most arduous red tape.
As a direct consequence of this not only is per capita income in our state rising, but we are growing faster relative to other states. Having been one of the slower-growing states since the 1980s, between 2020 and 2022, Mississippi was the 15th fastest-growing state in America.
Just imagine what our state might achieve if we were to build on these public policy improvements and completely eliminate the income tax?
What if we repealed some of the so-called CON laws that inflate the cost of health care in our state, and made Mississippi a less costly place for employers to hire?
Far from being bottom of the class, Mississippi school standards have in fact improved. The use of phonics and testing has had a significant impact on children’s literacy. What if we built on that achievement by giving mom and dad control over their child’s share of education tax dollars to spend at a school of their choice?
Mississippi needs leaders prepared to build on the impressive reforms of the past few years, and which are already having a significant impact in improving our state. We need leaders who believe that with good public policy, Mississippi can be the equal of any state. It is good policy, not federal handouts that will decide if we prosper.
You don’t have to be a supporter of either to believe that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump haven’t been given a fair hearing.
Less than four years after he was elected Prime Minister with a whopping 80 seat majority in Parliament, Boris Johnson has not merely been thrown out of office. He has now in effect been ousted from his constituency seat by a committee of MPs, without having lost an election. On the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump faces federal charges that he endangered national security by keeping a stash of classified documents he should have left in the Oval Office.
Trump, who according to the latest polls is front runner to be the 2024 Republican party presidential candidate, is not the first former President to have held on to classified material that was not his to keep. He is, however, the first former President to be prosecuted for doing so. Trump, who many believe could beat Biden, may face a substantial prison sentence if found guilty.
Many Americans are uneasy about the prosecution of Trump, and not necessarily because they support him. As with the way Boris has been treated in the UK, many view it as a politically motivated attempt by his opponents to destroy someone that they fear they cannot bring down using the ballot box.
Politically motivated prosecutions have long been a feature of politics in certain less stable parts of the world. In Brazil or Rwanda or Malaysia, those that have lost elections get prosecuted on what some might say are spurious charges.
Until a few weeks ago, that was not how we did things in Anglo American democracies. Even the most corrupt and venal leaders – Richard Nixon in America
or David Lloyd George in Britain – were allowed to live with dignity. Now I am not so sure.
Both Boris and Trump trigger in their opponents a similarly deranged reaction. Instead of opposing them, their opponents set out to vilify and destroy.
Rather than accept that Boris Johnson, having lost the job of Prime Minister, might remain as a humble backbencher, penning the occasional newspaper column, his critics have driven him from the Commons altogether. Petty and petulant, the third-raters that sit on the House of Commons Privileges Committee have even demanded Johnson be denied the Parliamentary pass issued to all ex-MPs.
In their report, the Committee insist that Boris deliberately misled Parliament, without producing anything much in the way of hard evidence. Their report perhaps tells us more about prejudices of its authors than it does about the conduct of the former Prime Minister.
The irony is that there are so many things that Boris Johnson, like Donald Trump, ought to be asked to account for.
Why, like Trump in America who deferred Anthony Fauci, did Boris go along with the pro-lockdown public health officials? How did he end up imposing a lockdown that turned out to be as economically ruinous as it was epidemiologically unnecessary?
Instead of asking these, the real questions, Trump and Boris’ enemies are making them look like martyrs.
For all the attention and the outrage Boris and Trump attract, what, I wonder, did either actually achieve? Yes, I know that Boris Johnson broke the Brexit deadlock. But there is another way of looking at what happened after Britain voted to leave the European Union seven years ago.
Having headed up the Brexit campaign in the summer of 2016, Boris and other leading Brexiteers proved incapable of working together to form a government. As a consequence of their dysfunction, we ended up with the hapless Theresa May as Prime Minister – and the attendant attempts to overturn the referendum result. Ergo the deadlock.
Eventually Boris promising to break that Brexit deadlock won him an election landslide that allowed him to make Brexit a legal and constitutional reality. Even then the as yet unresolved issues surrounding the Northern Ireland protocol, and the miniscule progress made in decoupling the UK from the EU’s regulatory orbit, mean that Brexit is not as done a deal as is sometimes supposed.
As for Johnson’s other apparent big achievement, I am not convinced that further committing Britain to Net Zero will be seen as a wise decision in the future. In fact, alongside compulsory lockdowns, it may yet rank among the worst.
What about Trump? For all the sound and fury, what did he deliver? He made some strategically significant appointments to the Supreme Court, which could potentially
have long term consequences for the size and shape of America’s administrative state. In the Middle East, Trump achieve what many US foreign policy experts once saw as impossible with the Abraham Accords.
Trump gave America tax cuts, but without any attempt to rein in federal spending, he put America on the path towards the level of fiscal incontinence achieved by Joe Biden today.
There is a strong sense that both Trump and Boris could have accomplished so much more. Why didn’t they?
“The administrative state was against them at the outset” some will say. The permanent bureaucracy – or ‘deep state’ as some refer to it - was always going to resist some of what Trump and Boris wanted.
That is precisely why each of them desperately needed a phalanx of completely loyal, committed and – above all –competent staff around them. Instead, each of them presided over a court of chaos. Downing Street and the White House saw some decidedly odd choices of lieutenants.
To overcome the enmity of permanent officials, conservative leaders need to be prepared to recalibrate the machinery of government around them as a day one priority. Neither Boris nor Trump could see the importance of doing so, until it was too late. They could not even use the power of appointment competently, with Boris elevating ideological enemies and Trump sometimes not filling key vacancies for months.
As someone that worked in the early days of the Boris government on Whitehall reform, I saw urgent issues constantly allowed to squeeze out the important. Eventually the thing that was squeezed out was Boris.
Of course, it is not impossible that either Trump and Boris could bounce back. The events of the past few weeks have, if anything, made them more electable. Having failed to take on the administrative state first time round, I suspect a second term President Trump or Prime Minister Boris would not make that mistake again.
No wonder there are some people determined to make sure that never happens.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, one of the leading think tanks in the southern US.