I have just finished reading a rather good book about Mississippi politics. ‘The Switcher’, by Judge Jim Herring, is a biographical account of Mississippi’s colorful election campaigns and candidates.
First elected as a District Attorney in 1971, Herring ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1976 and then for Governor in 1979 – each time as a Democrat. Herring, however, ends up serving as Chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party for seven years.
‘The Switcher’, as the name implies, is a book about one man’s personal journey from the Democrats to the Republicans. But it is also the story of how an entire state flipped to the GOP.
Until Thad Cochran’s election as US Senator in 1978, Mississippi had not had any state-wide Republican politicians since the 1880s. Not much changed until 1992, when Kirk Fordice and Eddie Briggs were elected Governor and Lieutenant Governor. Even then, it was not until 2011 that the Democrats lost their hold on the state Legislature.
Why did Mississippi flip? For Herring – and indeed for many Mississippians - Ronald Reagan clearly exerted powerful pull factor. A key moment the book refers to came when Herring heard ‘the Gipper’ speaking in Gulfport about the need for “steadiness of purpose, fidelity to ideals and love of country”.
Reagan’s brand of conservatism, with its attachment to the free market, limited government and uncomplicated patriotism, attracted millions of traditional Democrat voters across the South. Mississippi's switch was made possible, too, thanks to the heroic efforts of Billy Mounger, Wirt Yerger and Clarke Reed. In some sense, one might even argue Mississippi's 'switchers' made possible not only the conversion of our state but perhaps too, the Reagan Revolution. Thank goodness for ‘switchers’! Without them, there would have been no Reagan Democrats, and the 40th President is unlikely to have been a conservative.
Mississippi proves that you do not – or at least did not - need to be a Republican to be classified as conservative. Plenty of folks that voted for Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Bill Clinton in 1992 had conservative views when it comes to Faith, Flag, Free markets and Family.
Herring himself remains consistent to his political principles across each chapter of the book, favoring limited taxes, light regulation and adherence to the Constitution.
He, like many in our state, might have switched parties, but his conservative ideals remain largely unchanged.
Being a conservative is more than just allegiance to a particular party. It ought to be about more than having the right bumper stickers or watching Fox News over CNN.
Although Jim’s book doesn’t mention Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish forefather of the conservative movement, reading it is clear to me that he is a Burkeian conservative at heart – like most folk in Mississippi, and perhaps indeed America.
Burke, an early supporter of the American Revolution and doughty defender of free trade, believed that throughout a nation’s history, a process of trial and error means some laws and government arrangements survive, while others die out. Those that survive we should therefore regard as a sublime inheritance because they represent in effect the aggregated wisdom of past generations. That, to me, seems to be the essence of conservatism.
Mea culpa. My bad. In a recent article on crime, I wrote that “from 2016 to 2022, violent crime in our state increased by 741 percent, according to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. We went from 538 violent crimes a year to 4,529. That is 3,991 more violent crimes and more victims.”
Actually, those numbers are wrong. I took the figures from the Mississippi Crime Statistics website in good faith, but it now seems that the website only includes partial data for 2016.
To make the point that criminal justice leniency is fuelling an increase in crime, I should have stuck with the 260 percent increase in homicides in Jackson between 2013 and 2021. The actual statistics are grim enough without me needing to (inadvertently) provide erroneous ones. My apologies.
Each Memorial Day, we come face-to-face with the human cost of freedom. While we observe the holiday to honor our war dead – not all U.S. veterans – it is nonetheless an especially significant day to our surviving veterans. They have learned the hard way, having lost friends in battle, that honoring the fallen is more than just a platitude.
Veterans know better than most that the fallen young we honor each Memorial Day are not just names on a wall. They are not an abstraction. They were real people, with their own hopes and dreams and plans for the future. Many of them dropped those plans to answer the call and never got the chance to pick them back up.
The wartime loss of our best young men and women leaves gaping holes in families and communities across the nation. In a tragic reversal of the natural order, it compels mothers and fathers to bury their sons and daughters, and young children to venerate mythical parents they never knew.
Returning veterans shoulder the burden too. They visit with the spouses, children, siblings, parents, and friends of their fallen brothers and sisters in arms. After their service, they find that they must forge a new life and identity, shorn of the mission and comradery that gave them purpose, all while grieving the loss of too many close friends whose lives were cut short.
While some veterans struggle to find their place in life after combat, most find that the personal grit forged through their wartime experience serves them equally well in civilian pursuits. In George Washington’s farewell address to the Continental Army, he urged veterans of the American Revolution to “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens, than they have been persevering and victorious as soldiers.” Today’s veterans continue to live up to that charge.
Yet even decades later, as veterans reap the hard-won blessings afforded by our great country, their minds endlessly return to the young dead who never got that chance. The chance to marry that special someone. To buy that first home. To bring those wonderful children into the world. To experience the satisfaction of a rewarding career. To reach their golden years, surrounded by friends and family, secure in the knowledge that they preserved the blessings of peace for themselves and their posterity.
As they shoulder these burdens, veterans must also find the balance between fostering appreciation of the honorable sacrifices made for our great country and maintaining their own personal code of integrity. In one of Shakespeare’s tragic dramas, Roman general Coriolanus disappoints the crowd while seeking public office by refusing to show his war wounds, finding it beneath his dignity. While angst over participation in this ancient custom may seem arcane to most, it is a dilemma familiar to many veterans.
Stories of sacrifice by our veterans and their fallen friends can move later generations to a deeper appreciation of the greatness of our country. The lived experience of survivors can also correct misperceptions that war veterans are too scarred to be social assets, needing instead to be pacified with government benefits and dismissed from the larger community.
But many veterans are quiet professionals, wary of contributing to these important narratives for fear of profiting from the sacred sacrifices of their brothers and sisters. Especially in today’s culture of victimhood, where success often depends on one’s ability to tell a compelling story of experiencing prejudice or adversity, veterans fear sullying noble service by seeming to seek personal advancement or victim-class status, even when their motives are pure.
That partly explains why you do not hear veterans brag about their wartime adventures or complain about their struggles. They are far more likely to worry about overstating their service and sacrifice. When asked about it, many are quick to volunteer that they didn’t do anything special. It is a way of preempting gratitude they have never felt comfortable accepting, especially when friends of theirs didn’t make it home.
What do we owe our fallen this Memorial Day? Remembrance, of course. Yet we can also strive to be a nation deserving of the veterans who buried our fallen. A country that believes in our veterans, that knows they have important contributions to make on the home front, and maintains its appreciation, even when it is never asked for.
***
Aaron Rice serves as the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, which brings constitutional litigation on behalf of Mississippians whose rights have been threatened by government action, and has won major victories for the personal, economic, and religious liberty of Mississippians. Prior to his legal career, Aaron served in the Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq, where he received the Purple Heart for sustaining combat injuries that resulted in the loss of his left leg below the knee. He is also a Truman Scholar, a recipient of the Buckley Award in recognition for his leadership in the conservative movement, and has been named one of Mississippi's Top 50 Most Influential leaders.
Mississippi, it is often said, has an incarceration problem. Our state locks up too many people for too long, we are told.
Over the past two decades, Mississippi’s prison population has in fact fallen. In January 2014 the prison population of our state was 21,008. By January 2022, that figure had declined by almost a fifth to 16,931.
Those who argue Mississippi should incarcerate fewer people have been getting exactly what they asked for.
Now let’s take a look at what has happened to violent crime in our state over that time.
From 2016 to 2022, violent crime in our state increased by 741 percent, according to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. We went from 538 violent crimes a year to 4,529. That is 3,991 more violent crimes and more victims.
Anti-prison advocates like to argue that locking people up in large numbers does not work. Crime, they point out, was high even when Mississippi locked people up in greater numbers than almost anywhere else in America. The trouble is that Mississippi after these anti-incarceration reforms is a vastly more violent place than Mississippi was without them.
In 2013, the year before Mississippi enacted legislation designed to reduce the rate of incarceration, 28 people out of every 100,000 Jackson residents were murdered. By 2021, that number had nearly quadrupled to 101 homicide victims per 100,000 residents in our capital city.
Of course, just because there has been a surge in violent crime at the same time that the prison population has been reduced, it does not automatically follow that the former has been caused by the latter.
The reality is, however, that across America the average state prisoner released has around five previous convictions. That means that we have a pretty good idea of who is committing the lion’s share of the extra crime; those that have already been convicted and released.
"But it is so expensive to lock up so many people!" the reformists insist.
It is expensive to maintain prisons, just as it is expensive to maintain our country’s borders. But there are some things that the government needs to do even if costly.
As Shad White, our State Auditor has shown, leniency is expensive, too. According to estimates by the State Auditor, each homicide in Mississippi costs taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.2 million. On top of that, of course, come all kinds of other costs paid for by the victims of the violent crime.
"But what about the human cost of incarcerating people?" the anti-prison advocates are quick to ask. "Locking people up harms families, and the children of inmates suffer."
Anyone who assumes that releasing violent criminals back into the bosom of their families will automatically be good news for those families might not have met many violent criminals.
Eight years ago, back when every policy-maker in Jackson seemed intent on drifting along with the anti-incarceration vibe, we were told that there were better ways to reduce crime than by filling the prisons.
Unfortunately, we have yet to find them. When you factor in selection bias, there is remarkably little evidence that most rehabilitation programs have the efficacy that those who run them want them to have.
Anti-prison advocates are currently campaigning to have Mississippi’s Parole Board release more parole-eligible prisoners from custody.
It is true that our Parole Board currently approves a lower percentage of parole applications now than it has done for years. But that is because there has been a massive surge in the number of people automatically entitled to apply for early release to the Parole Board.
Why the increase in parole applications? Because of legislation that the anti-prison advocacy groups helped pass which automatically entitles violent offenders to appeal to the Parole Board in the first place.
The Parole Board has recently been criticized for getting some parole decisions wrong. I can’t help wondering if the Board might have done a better job if they had not been flooded by new cases at the insistence of anti-prison activists.
The tragedy of this misguided anti-prison agenda is not only that it is driving a surge in crime. It has detracted from Mississippi implementing the type of prison reform that conservatives ought to support.
More needs to be done to make our prisons more humane. The prison system ought to do a far better job of differentiating between violent criminals and the non-violent. With so many young men graduating from the prison system each year, surely we could do a better job of ensuring they emerge with a better set of life skills?
These reforms are only going to be attainable if we have a prison system that achieves its primary purpose; locking up bad people in order to prevent them from doing bad things to good people.
There is now overwhelming evidence that we should abandon Mississippi’s flirtation with an anti-incarceration agenda – and it is not just a question of crime. If Mississippi wants to see the kind of economic growth that other states have experienced, we need to reduce our crime rates.
Over the past few years, we have been told that America’s police and criminal justice process are systemically racist.
The police, it is implied, are inherently unfair in their treatment of African Americans and other minorities. Prosecutors and the courts, it has often been suggested, are much harsher in their treatment of certain groups. Systemic racism, some tell us, explains different outcomes when it comes to criminal justice.
The narrative of systemic racism is nonsense - but it needs to be exposed as nonsense or it risks becoming dangerous nonsense.
Rafael Mangual, who came to Jackson last week, is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute. His book, Criminal (In)Justice reveals that the supposed biases of the criminal justice system are nothing of the sort.
According to Mangual’s research, different outcomes in the criminal justice system are not reflective of any supposed biases of the system. They reflect differences in behavior.
Crime in America, particularly violent crime, is hyper-concentrated, both geographically and demographically. This might be an uncomfortable truth for some, but the truth needs to be acknowledged. Moreover, as Mangual, and others have shown, the victims of violent crime in America are disproportionately African American.
When left unchallenged, the narrative of systemic racism undermines law enforcement It has enabled radical activists – often aided by well-meaning conservatives – to advance an anti-police / anti-prison agenda over the past decade.
Citing the fallacy of police discrimination, activists have successfully demanded that the police be less proactive in arresting wrongdoers. There has been a large decline in the number of arrests made in America each year since 2010.
Radical reformers have also demanded that public prosecutors go easy on those that break the law. They have even advanced an anti-prison agenda, claiming that felons should not face jail time. America’s prison population is today 25 percent lower than it was in 2011, and the incarceration rate in Mississippi has fallen significantly in the past two decades.
These reforms, introduced in the mistaken belief that America’s criminal justice system is discriminatory and unfair, have had disastrous consequences – especially for the minority communities that the reformers claimed they want to help.
Below is a graph from the Wall Street Journal, citing data from JAMA. It shows the firearm homicide rates for men by race.
During the 1990s, when get tough measures were taken to reduce violent crime, the firearm homicide rate for African American men fell dramatically. When the current wave of reforms started to take effect in about 2015, homicide rates for African American men soared.
Is the criminal justice system, now that it has fewer proactive arrests, less prosecution and shorter sentencing, doing a better job today for African American men?
Here in Mississippi in 2014-16, well-meaning conservatives introduced legislation to overhaul sentencing laws. They did so claiming that there were better ways to reduce crime than by filling the prisons.
How did that work out?
In 2013, the year before policies were introduced to reduce the rate of incarceration, 28 people were murdered in Jackson per 100,000 people. By 2021, almost four times that many people, 101 per 100,000 people in our capital city were homicide victims.
Despite what is often claimed, Mississippi does not have a problem with over-incarceration. Since 2002, the prison incarceration rate in our state fell from 1,207 per 100,000 to 916 per 100,000 by 2021. Mississippi’s incarcerated population decreased from 21,008 on January 3, 2014, to 16,931 by January 3, 2022, a decrease of 19.4 percent.
The reduction in the incarceration rate in our state has been mirrored by a significant rise in violent crime. If you quit locking up bad people, you free them to do bad things to good people.
Rather than measure the rate at which we lock people up relative to the number of people in our state, perhaps we ought to measure the incarceration rate against the level of criminality in our state.
There is nothing credible about claims that America’s criminal justice process is systemically prejudiced. Such claims must not be allowed to undermine the effectiveness of the fight against crime.
Nor is there anything good or noble about misguided criminal justice reforms that allow offenders to reoffend. It is time that these truths were spelled out.
Over the past decade or so, America has experienced a radical experiment with criminal justice reform.
The number of people arrested each year has fallen sharply. Public prosecutors now prosecute significantly fewer cases. Those that have been convicted have generally been given shorter sentences. As a consequence, America’s prison population is now 25 percent lower than it was in 2011.
It isn’t only those on the far left, motivated by an anti-police and anti-prison agenda, who have pushed for these changes. Plenty of well-meaning conservatives signed up for criminal justice reform, too. Everyone needs a second chance, right?
In 2018, it was conservatives in Washington DC that passed the First Step Act, which explicitly sought to reduce the prison population. Here in Mississippi in 2014, we overhauled sentencing laws in the belief that there are better ways of preventing crime than filling up our jails.
Criminal justice reform might have cut the number of people arrested, prosecuted and jailed, but these measures have not cut crime. Quite the contrary, in fact. These well-meaning reforms are responsible for the sharp spike in crime that we have seen in many parts of America, such as Jackson, Mississippi – a city that now has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country.
In 2013, the year before Mississippi overhauled sentencing laws, 28 people were murdered in Jackson per 100,000 people. By 2021, almost four times that many people, 101 per 100,000 people in our capital city were homicide victims.
When the Mississippi Center for Public Policy recently surveyed Jackson families about education opportunities, I was shocked to discover that their overwhelming concern was not school standards or even transport. It was safety. Decent families worrying about their kids getting shot are the price we pay for naïve criminal justice reforms.
Those that make public policy need to deal with the world as it is, not as they would wish it to be. To give us a reality check, we hosted a large public event with Rafael Mangual, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and our tough-on-crime state auditor, Shad White.
The author of the best-selling book, "Criminal (In)Justice," Rafael Mangual spelled out a few uncomfortable truths.
Firstly, the majority of crime in America – and Mississippi – tends to be concentrated in a small number of places. That said, it would be a mistake to think that if we were to exclude Hinds County from the stats, Mississippi would be safe. Even without the Jackson crime hotspot, crime throughout our state is far too high.
As Shad White added, we need statewide action and cannot dismiss crime as a distant problem.
A second truth that Mangual spelled out is that the victims of crime in America are disproportionately African American. Conversely, Mangual showed, when the police, prosecutors and the courts do decide to get tough on violent offenders, crime rates fall – and the beneficiaries are overwhelmingly African American.
A narrative has been advanced in recent years that America’s police and criminal justice system is systemically racist. Mangual showed that this narrative is simply wrong. Different outcomes in the criminal justice system do not reflect supposed biases of the criminal justice system but are reflective of offender behavior. Some have suggested that there is a link – or at least a correlation - with the breakdown in family structure, too.
As for the idea that we need to give people second chances, reflect on the fact that the average released state prisoner in the United States has approximately five prior convictions. Second chance? Sounds more like a fifth chance to me.
Who is not moved by the idea of redemption? The cold reality is that approximately 80 percent of released state prisoners will be rearrested at least once over a 10-year period after their release.
Yes, prison should aim to rehabilitate, but too often in the name of redemption, we are releasing criminals to reoffend. The primary purpose of prison must be to incarcerate bad people so that they cannot do bad things to good people.
Far too often when I read about a murder in our state, it emerges that the perpetrator has a previous history of run-ins with the law, and often convictions. There is nothing good or kind about misplaced criminal justice reform.
The U.S. dollar is the cornerstone of the global financial system but is facing a crisis of confidence from decades of reckless fiscal and monetary policies. If this continues, the dollar could soon lose its global reserve currency status. Global competitors such as China and Russia are taking advantage of these reckless policies, further threatening trust in the dollar.
Confidence in a currency is only as strong as that of the institutions issuing the currency. In the dollar’s case, those institutions are the federal government and the Federal Reserve. Both have been irresponsible in their respective fiscal or monetary policies, and the ramifications of their mischief for the dollar would be a weaker economy and higher inflation domestically and a reshuffling of economic power globally.
Since early 2020, Congress has added more than $7 trillion to the national debt from massive deficit spending. Congress financed this by issuing U.S. Treasury securities, crowding out investments like private sector equities and bonds. Additionally, net interest payment on U.S. debt is about 8% of the federal budget and increasing rapidly. Interest expenses are expected to exceed spending on national defense or safety nets soon if Congress fails to rein in excess spending.
While the House Republicans’ bill to raise the debt ceiling and cut spending is promising, it’s unlikely to go anywhere with Democrats in charge of the Senate and the White House.
Since the early 2000s, the Federal Reserve has held its target federal funds rate too low for too long. And in 2008, it started purchasing longer-term Treasury securities and other assets, known as quantitative easing.
The Fed operates under a dual mandate of encouraging stable prices and pursuing full employment. It violated the former part of the mandate through asset purchases that fueled inflation. It now violates the latter part of the mandate as it crushes employment with quantitative tightening and the resulting higher interest rates, hence what’s known as the “boom-and-bust cycle.”
These violations, combined with its early incoherent messaging on inflation, erode confidence in the Fed’s monetary policy prowess. And this is far from a domestic concern, as global trade partners see the writing on the wall and are acting accordingly. And if confidence in the dollar continues to wane, so will the Fed’s ability to conduct monetary policy effectively by not being able to substantially influence market interest rates.
Recently, the Saudi Arabian government approved partial membership with China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This is part of China’s strategy to expand its influence beyond the West. China conducted its “first major lNG sale in renminbi instead of dollars” and made Brazil its main trading partner instead of the U.S.
Other countries are also beginning to move away from the dollar for international transactions.
Countries across the globe know the U.S. is in economic trouble and are changing the way they do business. We should react accordingly, beginning with ending these government policy failures weakening the U.S. economy and the dollar.
First, we should address excessive fiscal and monetary policy discretion by Congress and the Federal Reserve, respectively.
This can be achieved by rules-based policies, such as a strict government spending limit for Congress and the Taylor rule for the Fed. Doing so would reduce the costly mountain of debt created by Congress and the monetary mischief by the Fed, helping to provide confidence in the economy and dollar.
Second, the U.S. should eventually move off the fiat currency system eventually.
The dollar should be backed by real assets like gold and silver. Reimplementing the gold standard or something with underlying value from productive use of capital and labor, making it more attractive to domestic and international investors.
Finally, the U.S. must take international trade seriously.
It should adopt a foreign policy of peace and goodwill through free-trade agreements with countries that benefit all parties. Tariffs and other protectionist measures do not provide that path. They lead to trade wars and tension between countries and hurt people’s livelihoods across the globe. Encouragement of global trade would support a stronger dollar.
Failing to take these steps will continue the slide of confidence and value of the dollar globally. It also jeopardizes the economic future of our country. This will result in more U.S. global partners exiting agreements and reducing investment in America. The consequences will be a weak economy and dollar that will hurt Americans.
Charles Beauchamp, Ph.D., CTP®, is an associate professor of finance at Mississippi College and a contributing fellow at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
This article originally appeared on the Daily Caller.
(Jackson, MS): Best-selling author Rafael Mangual was in Jackson this week advocating for more policing and stricter incarceration policies.
Over the last two decades, Mangual said there has been a shift in criminal justice reform. At a luncheon hosted last week by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, he said the leniency and skepticism surrounding criminal justice is evidenced by a 25% decrease in the prison population, a 15% decrease in the jail population and a 25% decline in arrests.
While activists continue to advocate for decarceration and depolicing, Mangual's research shows that this policy agenda is dangerous.
The majority of crime in America is concentrated in just a handful of places, geographically and demographically. Fifty percent of the murders that occur in the country happen in only 2% of US counties - half of US counties will not see a single homicide in a given year. Demographically, Black men are 10% more likely to be the victim of homicide in America compared to their white counterparts. For example, since 2008, 95% of shooting victims in New York City were Black or Hispanic males.
This data shows, Mangual said, that the most vulnerable people, the ones who are more likely to be involved in violent crimes, are minorities living in impoverished areas.
The argument on the other side is that the United States has an incarceration problem - the United States makes up 5% of the world's population, but 20% of the world's prison population - but in order to decarcerate, the US must do it safely, something Mangual said cannot be done for a majority of criminals currently in our prison system.
Two-thirds of the country's prison population consists of offenders convicted of violent felonies or crimes involving weapons. More than 80% of offenders released from prison will commit more crimes once released and re-arrested for violent felonies. Mangual said this goes against the left's agenda which promotes the idea that the US doesn’t give second chances.
"What that tells us is that the most serious crime problem that we have is one that is driven by people who have been given multiple bites of the apple despite showing their repeated criminal conduct, but they have no intention of playing by society’s rules," Mangual said. "And yet the agenda that we have seen characterizing criminal justice policy increasingly over the last several decades has been the idea that we ought to decarcerate en masse."
Mangual was joined at the event by Mississippi State Auditor Shad White. White has been a strong advocate for eliminating crime in Mississippi and said that we can take the ideas Mangual has given us and apply them here in the Magnolia State.
For the last two years, Jackson has ranked as the highest city per capita for homicide in the country. If Jackson were taken out of the equation, Mississippi would still rank in the top five most dangerous states per capita in the US, which shows that crime is not just a Jackson problem - it's a Mississippi problem, White said.
In order to combat crime in Mississippi, he said we have to be pro-law enforcement and get tough on violent criminals.
"I’m grateful for a nationally recognized expert to come here and tell us about the real data underlying real solutions that we can get at this problem," White said. "We have a responsibility to the most vulnerable in our society to enact real solutions to get at this problem."
If liberty keeps on winning across the South, America’s center of economic gravity is likely to shift.
Throughout the 20th century, economic activity in America was clustered around the traditional business hubs in the Northeast, the Midwest, and California. Southern states were a bit of a backwater.
Then a generation or so ago, things started to change. In the 1970s, Atlanta, Orlando, and Dallas expanded rapidly. In the 1980s, per capita incomes in a number of southern states started to catch up with other parts of the country. But overall, the South still lagged behind. Even as some of the more peripheral parts of the South began to thrive, the deeper south you went, as a general rule, the less growth and prosperity you were likely to find.
Not for much longer. The southern United States is now not only the most populous part of America. There is mounting evidence that the southern states are going to become America’s economic powerhouse.
According to a new report out this week by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, economic prospects are brighter in the South than in any other region of the country. With the exception of Louisiana, every southern state in the U.S. is now ranked in the top half of the country in terms of economic outlook. Even my own state, Mississippi, rose five places this year and is now ranked as having the 22nd-most-promising economic outlook in America.
It is the traditional business centers of California (45th), Illinois (46th), and New York (50th) that are the laggards in terms of economic outlook.
To be sure, ALEC’s ranking lists states on the basis of future economic prospects. It is not a measure of how things are, but rather of how the authors think things might be. Even so, it is remarkable that anyone should now rate the economic prospects of Mississippi or Alabama as brighter than California’s.
What explains America’s emerging southern success story? It has a great deal to do with low taxes, limited government, and liberty. California might have once been an easygoing state, with light regulation and an attractive environment for entrepreneurs. Today, it has an almost European zeal to make rules for everything. New York and Chicago are so hostile to businesses, they’ve suffered an exodus of talent and capital over the past decade.
Southern states, meanwhile, have become more business-friendly — and it is not just the giants, such as Texas and Florida, that have introduced free-market reforms. ALEC’s report shows that even states such as my own Mississippi have made themselves more business-friendly than some of the traditional big-business states.
In 2022, Mississippi’s Tax Freedom Act significantly cut the state income tax. That not only gave a massive tax break to hundreds of thousands of Mississippians. The reform also meant that we moved to a flat 5 percent state personal income tax right away, with the rate falling further to a flat 4 percent by 2026. This, perhaps as much as anything, helps explain why our state rose five places in ALEC’s rankings.
Second, Mississippi adopted a universal occupational-licensing law. This sounds very technocratic, but the law’s effect is straightforward: It removes a lot of red tape in the labor market, making it easier for outsiders to move to Mississippi and get certified here if they have been approved elsewhere.
Even more important in the longer term, enabling outsiders to get more easily certified creates pressure within Mississippi to eliminate unnecessarily onerous regulation that prevents Mississippians from being certified. Already, policy-makers are looking at how to eliminate a number of boards that frankly do little beyond restrict the number of people who can earn a living in a particular area of employment. It is probably too early for the impact of this to show up in any data, but the cumulative effect over time could be profound.
Third, Mississippi has gradually reduced the percentage of the workforce on the public payroll. Historically our state has tended to have a lot of people working for government. There are still, according to ALEC’s report, 606 public employees per 10,000 people in our state, but the numbers are now coming down. Shifting more people from employment in big government bureaucracies to the private sector is likely to increase future productivity.
ALEC’s report suggests that as free-market reforms have spread from one southern state to the next, with some southern states emulating their neighbors, growth and prosperity have started to spread.
If liberty keeps on winning across the South, America’s center of economic gravity is likely to shift.
Best-selling author and Fox News commentator Alex Epstein was in Jackson this week advocating for fossil fuels and warning of the harmful effects of the Net Zero movement.
At a lunch event hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson, Epstein shared his thoughts on the benefits of fossil fuels and the climate.
A philosopher by trade, Epstein has spent an extreme amount of time researching the facts and figures of our world's energy sources. He saw the move toward a Net Zero environment from government organizations, corporations and financial institutions wanting to completely eradicate fossil fuels, but after years of study found that over the next few decades, in order for our society to thrive, we should be growing, not eliminating, fossil fuels. A better world is one that uses more fossil fuels, he said.
His book, "Fossil Future," states that when arguing in favor of fossil fuels, one should look at the benefits and side effects — both of which prove that fossil fuels are affordable, reliable, versatile and scaleable for a multitude of people to take advantage of.
Fossil fuels power 80% of the world's energy today. Without them, the planet would not be able to properly operate. There is no evidence, he argues, that replacing fossil fuels with solar or wind energy would create a Net Zero environment or would be the most cost-effective solution.
"When it comes to fossil fuels, there is an enormous tendency to ignore or deny the enormous benefits, including climate benefits, and then to exaggerate or ‘catastrophize’ the side effects," Epstein said. "...I think the fate of the world depends on using and expanding fossil fuels."
In order to continue in a free market society, we need the freedom to capitalize on the fossil fuel industry and not be forced to use inferior energy schemes.
