MCPP CEO & President Douglas Carswell spoke at the Rotary Club of Pascagoula on Wednesday.

Douglas regularly attends luncheons hosted by Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs and other organizations to promote the mission of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Anyone interested in having Douglas speak at a luncheon or meeting can make a request here. Aaron Rice, the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, is also available for speaking requests to discuss litigation and constitutional law in Mississippi.

American patriotism is in decline, according to a recent poll published by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ-NORC poll makes grim reading. It shows a steep decline in the number of Americans who say that patriotism is very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998 to 38 percent today.

There has also been a similar slide in the percentage of Americans who say that religion is very important to them. Perhaps most disturbing of all, only 23 percent of American adults under the age of 30 regard having children as very important.

These poll findings suggest the sort of collapse in self-confidence that you might expect to find in a country that had suffered defeat in war, or after a cataclysmic economic crisis. Why this loss of self-belief?  

What explains this massive change in American attitudes toward their own country in the past 25 years?  And what can we do about it? 

America was founded on the principle that every American is created equal, and that each individual is in possession of inalienable rights.  Of course, there were times when America failed to live up to those lofty ideals, but for the first two centuries of the Republic’s existence, these principles were the essential ingredient of American cohesion.   

Thanks to these Founding principles, folk from different ancestral backgrounds in England, Poland or Italy, eastern Europe, west Africa or south Asia, could all come together and see one another as fellow citizens of the same Republic.   

About 30 years ago, things started to change.   

Rather than being taught to see themselves as individual citizens, young Americans were increasingly encouraged by left-wing educators to define themselves in terms of their racial background or gender or various other immutable characteristics.  Many young Americans are invited to see their primary loyalty, not to fellow citizens of the Republic, but to whichever oppressed group it is that they supposedly belong to, in a hierarchy of victimhood.   

The consequences of seeing the world this way can be murderous, literally. 

For much of the 20th century, Americans were taught to believe that through hard work and perseverance, they could achieve anything.  Today, many young Americans are invited to believe that nothing they do matters much since it is ‘the system’ that either privileges them or stacks the odds hopelessly against them.  Is it any wonder that the same poll showed a sharp decline in the percentage of young Americans who believe in the importance of hard work? 

Unequal outcomes between Americans are increasingly attributed to ‘systemic’ discrimination, rather than being seen as reflective of differences in individual behavior.  As a result, in the name of ‘equity’, we have started to see a return of government-sponsored discrimination, further undermining America’s Founding ideals.   

If you spend three decades trying to make Americans believe that their country is, as CNN might put it, a Republic founded by slave owners on stolen land, it is hardly surprising that patriotism then declines.   

If you tell a generation of young Americans that human civilization has messed up the planet and that looming eco-catastrophe means we are all doomed, you should not be surprised that they are less keen on having kids than their grandparents. 

This new poll shows that bad ideas have bad consequences.  Combating bad ideas, and countering them with good ideas is what we at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy do.  Here is how we are helping lead the fight back. 

Last year we led the campaign for a law to combat Critical Race theory in our state.  It was a good start, but it is not enough.  Legislation alone will not stop ‘woke’ ideologues pushing their views on kids.  We need to inspire the next generation of American leaders to fight back. 

This is why we launched the Mississippi Leadership Academy last year.  Two dozen future Mississippi leaders took part in the six-month program, one day a month.  They heard from leading conservative historians, academics and authors.  They were given an introduction to the morality of the free market and America’s Founding ideals.  They listened to talks by some of our state leaders, including Attorney General Lynn Fitch and State Auditor, Shad White. 

The program was so successful in energizing a cohort of young Mississippians, we will be expanding the program next year. 

If we are going to root out left-wing ideology from the classroom, America needs an education revolution.  In half a dozen states, including Texas, Florida and Arkansas, moms and dads now have control over their child’s share of education tax dollars.  They can allocate their child’s portion of the budget (often around $10,000-15,000 a year) to a school of their choice – public, private or home-school. 

The moment mom and dad have more control, guess what happens?  Money gets spent in the classroom, not on an army of ‘woke’ education administrators.  Schools stop promoting left-wing ideology and start teaching kids the way they should.   

Sadly, in Mississippi too many self-styled ‘conservative’ lawmakers continue to have intentionally done everything they can to prevent education freedom.  Every time a supposedly ‘conservative’ lawmaker thwarts school choice, they are helping sustain radical leftist ideas in the classroom.  This needs to change. 

Two years ago, shortly after I had arrived in America, I went to watch my first-ever game of football.  It was at a local high school on a Friday night, and I did not even know the rules of the game. 

Just before the start, the crowd rose to their feet to sing the Star Spangled Banner and declare the Pledge of Allegiance.  So new was I to your country, I did not know the words of either back then. 

But I did know I was witnessing something special; a display of authentic, uncomplicated patriotism.  I was so moved that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.  Please don’t ever abandon that belief in your own country, as other less happy lands have done.  American exceptionalism is worth fighting for.   

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. 

(Jackson, MS): Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was in Jackson this week outlining her roadmap for education freedom in America.

At a lunch event hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson, Mrs. DeVos shared her candid thoughts on what it was like to work with President Donald in the White House.

A passionate campaigner for school choice, Mrs. DeVos spoke about how un-American much of our current education system actually is. Sharing her thoughts on the Covid lockdowns, Mrs. DeVos explained why the decision to lockdown schools was one of the worst decisions made by public officials ever. Covid lockdowns, she explained, set back the educational attainment of a generation of young Americans permanently.

Covid lockdowns did, however, alert parents across the country to what was happening – or often not happening - in the classroom. Since then, Mrs. DeVos explained, America has seen a ‘great parental awakening.'

Starting in Virginia, with the election of Glenn Youngkin, a parent-led revolution in education is underway. West Virginia, Arizona, Texas, Florida and Arkansas have all started to implement school choice programs that will allow moms and dads to allocate their child’s tax dollars to a school of their choice.

Mrs. DeVos talked about her new book, Hostages No More, which explains why education freedom is so necessary, and discussed what it might take to bring a similar change in education in Mississippi.

Interviewed on stage in front of hundreds of people by Douglas Carswell, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Mrs. DeVos talked about some of the vested interests that want to control every aspect of the education system.

She went on to explain why education freedom was essential in order to combat extreme ‘woke’ ideology in the classroom.

“Here in Mississippi, we passed a law to combat Critical Race theory,” Douglas Carswell explained. “Listening to Mrs. DeVos is it clear that that is not enough to stop radical leftist ideas being promoted in schools at taxpayers’ expense. Only education freedom – giving moms and dads the power to allocate their child’s share of tax dollars – will end the advance of ‘woke’ ideology in our schools."

A couple of months ago, Storm Elliot caused rolling blackouts in several Southern states. Luckily, most of Mississippi avoided power outages, but portions of Northeastern Mississippi that get their power from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) experienced losses of electricity as TVA was forced to cut power to residents for the first time in its 90-year history.

To ensure nothing like that happens again, now might be the time to ask what we need to do to ensure that we have a reliable grid for the future. That means questioning some of the claims made by the wind and solar lobby as to the reliability of renewable energy.

Blackouts occur when there is not enough electricity supply on the grid to meet demand. This is a real challenge for energy companies, not least because electricity is consumed instantaneously. The grid is not a storage device, like a giant bathtub that fills with electricity for later use.

TVA experienced blackouts during Winter Storm Elliot because electricity demand far exceeded supply forecasts, and some coal and natural gas plants had unexpected problems causing them to go offline.

On the demand side, TVA set new all-time high power generation records on Friday, December 23rd, 2022, and it still wasn’t enough to keep up with demand on its system, forcing the company to initiate rolling outages for two hours and fifteen minutes.

According to Bloomberg, electricity demand surpassed expectations in part because there was a massive shift toward electric heating from 2009 to 2020. Demand also exceeded expectations due to a lack of historical data for similar cold snaps in December.

On the supply side, TVA experienced 6,000 MW of outages at power plants that resulted in the shortfall in supply. The Cumberland coal plant, a 2,500 MW facility owned by TVA, tripped offline due to frozen instrumentation, and a natural gas flows from Appalachia to the Tennessee Valley fell by half as a result of mechanical problems with pipelines, according to data analysis from BloombergNEF.

These factors converged to cause the Christmas Blackouts. However, if we learn the wrong lessons from Winter Storm Elliott, we will spend billions of dollars without reducing our risk of blackouts during future winter storm events.

Wind and solar advocates have correctly identified the problems that occurred with these specific coal and natural gas plants during Elliott, but they have offered “solutions” that are expensive, unreliable, and entirely unsatisfactory. In essence, they are faulting coal and natural gas power plants for not being dispatchable enough while simultaneously promoting energy sources that are not dispatchable at all.

For example, in the wake of the storm, RMI argued that building large, interregional transmission grids and more wind turbines would have helped alleviate the magnitude and duration of blackouts in the Southeast, which is plausible, but their implication that such a strategy could prevent blackouts in the future is misguided.

Becoming more reliant upon interregional transfers of wind energy will not necessarily shore up Mississippi’s electric grid during future winter storms because wind turbines in the Upper Midwest shut down when temperature dip below -22° F to prevent the turbines from sustaining damage.

This means that if we get an even colder winter storm, we can’t necessarily depend upon the wind fleet in the Upper Midwest to perform as well as it did during Elliott. Adding more solar to Mississippi’s grid will also be of limited value in future winter storms because winter peak electricity demand tends to occur at night—when the sun isn’t shining— but temperatures are coldest and demand for home heating is high.

Winter storms like Uri and Elliot have shown that fuel supplies for natural gas power plants can be compromised during extreme cold weather events. As our grid has moved away from coal and nuclear plants with onsite fuel storage, we have also increased our risk of blackouts.

To increase grid resiliency, regulators should consider requiring onsite fuel storage at natural gas plants—whether that be liquefied natural gas or oil at dual fuel plants—to ensure that grid reliability is not compromised by fuel supply interruptions. This strategy kept the lights on in New England while TVA was issuing rolling blackouts.

Winter Storm Elliott will be a lesson learned for future forecasting, but with the rapid electrification of the home heating sector, it is becoming increasingly clear that Mississippi and other states will need more dispatchable power plant capacity on its system to handle increasing electricity demand, not less.

Proposals to reduce the risk of power outages by building more wind and solar facilities are opportunistic attempts to “both sides” the reliability debate and draw false equivalencies about the relative reliability of wind and solar to dispatchable energy sources like nuclear, coal, and natural gas.

Resources are finite, so energy regulators must prioritize solutions like onsite fuel storage that will provide the highest value for the lowest cost. If we learn the wrong lessons from Elliott, then we will find ourselves in the same situation during the next winter storm event.

Isaac Orr is a policy fellow specializing in energy and environmental policy at the Center of the American Experiment.

What on earth is going on? Mississippi’s Senate just rushed through a bill that would make major changes to Mississippi’s school funding system, the MAEP, with very little advanced warning or discussion. The bill, passed unanimously, was hardly even debated.

If our elected representatives are serious about making big changes to education funding, why wait until the tail end of the legislative session? If we are to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on the education system, do we not owe it to the taxpayer to at least discuss how that money is to be allocated?

The MAEP, or to give it its full name, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, has been inadequately funded for far too long. Were the Senate’s proposal to become law, it would be only the third or fourth time in three decades that MAEP has been fully funded.

But why now? Why rush such an important measure through the Senate with so little discussion? Why change a funding system that is already hideously complex and convoluted, without discussing how to reduce its complexities with those that have to work with it?

I can’t help but think this is not really about improving education in our state. It is political posturing in an election year.

Various candidates for office want to look like they are on the side of teachers. They appear willing to rush through legislation that they know has little chance of passing in the House in order to look like the good guys – and wrongfoot their rivals.

Forgive me for being a little cynical, but I wonder if when the Senate passed this bill it really did so expecting the measure to become law? Or, as seems likely, are they expecting the House to say ‘no’? If they did it expecting the bill to fail, then it seems like a pretty expensive press release.

Proposing to shovel more money into the school system in an election year is not going to fix our state’s education.

Over the river in Arkansas, the new Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders shows how these things should be done. She has outlined detailed, well-considered plans for change, inviting a coalition of different groups to engage with her proposals. She did not wait until the end of the legislative session to announce significant changes.

Gov Sanders is proposing to put a lot more cash into their school system. So much so, in fact, that by 2025 Arkansas teachers will have a minimum salary of $50,000 a year. But at the same time, Governor Sanders will give every family in the state control over their share of their kid’s tax dollars.

Mississippi leaders should be using any additional education funding as leverage to secure those kinds of changes to empower parents. Our state legislature should be the place to make carefully considered law, not ammunition for electioneering.

What we have instead is positioning and posture. This is short-term virtue signaling, not the long-term thinking we need to raise education standards in this state. Mississippi deserves better.

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy hosted 12-time All-American swimmer Riley Gaines at River Hills Club of Jackson on Thursday to promote a Women’s Bill of Rights in Mississippi.

Gaines was on her way to winning a national title at the NCAA swimming championship in 2022 when she tied with a female-identifying, transgender athlete who previously lived as a man. 

In an effort to spread awareness of fairness and keep women in women’s sports, Gaines travels the country promoting women’s rights. She has gained popularity through her willingness to speak out against injustice and a large following on TikTok. 

With the help of the Independent Women’s Forum, Gaines has been an avid proponent of a “Women’s Bill of Rights,” a growing phenomenon across the country. This bill codifies the definition of a woman and protects single-sex spaces. 

This legislation, titled “The Title IX Preservation Act,” was introduced during the 2023 Legislative session, with versions from Rep. Jill Ford and Sen. Angela Hill, but sadly died in committee. Mississippi Center for Public Policy is hopeful for its reintroduction in the 2024 Legislative Session and will be advocating heavily for this bill’s passage. 

“Mississippi was one of the first states to ensure there were women-only sports. So, Mississippi was ahead of the curve there, which is phenomenal, but what good is that bill if we can’t define the term ‘woman?’” Gaines said. “It’s crucial that we’re able to do so to protect women, not just in sports, but in any law that mentions the term ‘woman.’”

Gaines was also joined Thursday by Independent Women’s Forum policy analyst Mandy Gunasekara. Gunasekara, who previously served for the Trump Administration as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Chief of Staff, said she wants to ensure her home state is moving forward, not backward in protecting the rights of women. 

Nearly 100 individuals attended the event, getting to visit with Gaines and Gunasekara afterward. 

Click here to watch an interview of Riley Gaines with MCPP CEO & President Douglas Carswell.

MCPP will be hosting several other speakers in the coming weeks and months, including former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on March 23 and fossil fuel analyst Alex Epstein on April 18. 

Ever since the 2010 Affordable Care Act, states have been able to enroll low-income Americans in Medicaid using federal subsidies. So far, 39 states have signed up to expand Medicaid this way. Mississippi is one of 11 states that hasn’t. Should we?

The debate over Medicaid expansion in Mississippi is a perfect example of what happens when politics becomes polarized. The argument generates heat rather than light. Advocates on either side stopped listening to each other long ago.

Those opposed to Medicaid expansion refer to it as ‘Obamacare’ as though simply associating the idea with the 44th President was reason enough to reject it.

Advocates for more Medicaid often imply that those on the other side harbor some sort of moral flaw. Governor Tate Reeves has been remarkably consistent in opposing more government throughout his career. This has not prevented various critics from implying that his rejection of Medicaid expansion is cynical or opportunistic.

What most Mississippians, I suspect, really want to know is whether more Medicaid will lead to better health care.

Medicaid has already been expanding in Mississippi, even without our state formally opting into the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Between 2014 and 2023, Medicaid spending in Mississippi rose almost 40 percent. This year, Medicaid spending will total an estimated $7.2 billion. There are currently about 880,000 Mississippians on Medicaid, a 22 percent increase over the past three years.

Expanding Medicaid further under the provisions of the ACA would mean enrolling every low-income adult (those on less than $20,120 pa) on Medicaid. This would place an estimated 300,000 more people on Medicaid in Mississippi, meaning over 1.1 million Mississippians were signed up for Medicaid.

“And about time too!” some might say. “If 300,000 more people qualified for Medicaid, we would see a dramatic fall in the number of uninsured, meaning more people accessing better health care”. But would they?

Advocates for expansion have yet to show that increasing the number of Medicaid claimants by a third would itself mean improved access to health care. Might not enrolling over a quarter of a million more Mississippians on Medicaid just make it harder for those on Medicaid to get the health care they need? It’s not as if the 880,000 current Medicaid recipients are getting optimal outcomes, is it?

Those wanting to expand Medicaid often cite the state of our cash-strapped rural hospitals in support. More Medicaid patients, they tell us, would save these hospitals from closure. Are we certain of that?

We already know that rural hospitals lose approximately 12 cents on the dollar for every Medicaid patient that they treat. How would increasing the number of loss-making Medicaid patients save them? Rather than insult those that raise this point, or accuse them of dishonesty, those wanting to add 300,000 more people to Medicaid ought to address these points.

On the opposing side, I have yet to hear a slam-dunk explanation as to why Mississippi should reject a scheme that would see Washington DC shoulder 90 percent of the costs.

“Ha! Just wait until that federal subsidy dries up! The cost of all this extra Medicaid will end up being paid for out-of-state taxes” some have said to me. Really?

Federal subsidies might only cover 50 – 78 percent of the cost of earlier Medicaid enrollees, but I am not aware of any state currently having to pay more than 10 percent of the costs of expansion under the ACA. Were that to change, to be fair, it would have massive consequences for tax rates in our state seeing as Medicaid in Mississippi costs in excess of $7 billion. It would mean goodbye income tax elimination and hello tax hikes – forever.

Those opposed to federal subsidies for Medicaid might be more convincing if they had opposed subsidies for all those other boondoggles down the decades.

Enrolling more people on Medicaid might reduce the number of uninsured people on paper. I doubt it will lead to the improved outcomes proponents of Medicaid expansion expect.

A few days ago, the brilliant Florida physician, Dr. Lee Gross, was in Jackson talking about a different way of providing affordable health care. Dr. Gross’ model does not involve insurance, socialized or otherwise. Instead, Dr. Gross’ patients, many of whom are on low incomes, pay a monthly subscription of $80 ($30 per child). In return, they get unlimited primary health care treatment.

How is Dr. Gross able to make this work as a viable business? Precisely because he does not deal with insurance companies. According to Dr. Gross, it is the interaction between insurers and providers that pushes up costs for physicians and patients – and which helps explain why America has some of the highest healthcare costs in the world.

Simply offering to deal with providers on a cash basis allows Dr. Gross’ medical practice to secure substantial discounts (for example a 95 percent discount for an MRI scan), which he passes on to patients making his subscription model viable. Here is a list of some of the cost reductions Dr. Gross is able to routinely secure for his patients.

Subscription-based primary care provision works in Florida because there is a competitive market in services – and is growing rapidly.  Florida does not have the restrictive laws that we have here in Mississippi that intentionally limit the number of providers.   

If policymakers in Mississippi really want to ensure better health outcomes, they should remove the myriad of protectionist laws.  No amount of federal subsidy will improve outcomes as long as they remain. 

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. 

In the early days of the internet, a law was passed that has had a critical role in enabling it to evolve. Long before many of today’s social media titans even existed, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act made it clear that internet companies are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.

It is hard to imagine what the internet would look like today without this key protection. If social media sites were liable for what people posted, they would out of necessity need to police what was said.

“Policing what people post is exactly what social media sites already do” say some critics of Section 230. Frustrated at the apparently anti-conservative biases of certain sites, a number of conservatives advocate for an end to Section 230.

Social media companies like Facebook, they argue, are in effect editorializing content when they use algorithms to control what we read. If they are going to editorialize like a newspaper, why not make them liable like a newspaper for what appears on their platform?

Conservative critics of Section 230 have been joined by those on the left who believe that social media sites should do much more to tackle ‘misinformation’. They actively want to oblige tech companies to control what we read and see.

This week the Supreme Court is hearing evidence in a case that could have profound implications on the future of Section 230. In Gonzalez Vs Google, the argument is being made that Google is liable for how the search engine firm’s algorithms present their results.

Think of how many items are uploaded onto the internet every day. The internet would be unusable without being able to order and organize. It is hard to see how we would be able to use the internet without relying on companies like Google to do this for us.

Even the most basic system of ordering content, by date order or alphabetically, means having some sort of algorithm. It seems absurd to me to make a search engine liable for how its algorithm operates.

I worry that if a search engine like Google is made more liable for what it shows me every time I use it, we would soon find all kinds of unintended consequences. Far from searching gazillions of sources, I imagine that the search engine would seek to limit what they search to a pool of approved sources.

Until 1695, anyone in England with a printing press needed a license for it. Only those that published things that the powerful approved of could legally operate one. I worry that we are about to recreate a world in which there are in effect licenses for having a digital printing press. Only social media companies that operate in an approved manner will be viable. Those that post on them will need approval too. The internet will have less diversity of thought and more uniformity. We will all be poorer.

Mississippi’s legislature has focused a lot on Jackson this session.

A bill that could have helped create more Charter Schools died in committee. Another seeking to give voters the power to recall elected officials never made it. Lawmakers apparently did not have time to consider a Parents’ Bill of Rights or reforms that might improve health care in our state either.

But what they did manage to do was find plenty of time to consider how to fix the state of our state capital.

With Jackson’s water supply reliably unreliable, Senator David Parker introduced a bill that establishes a new regional water authority, run by a board appointed by city and state leaders. Then there was legislation introduced to give the Capitol police in Jackson jurisdiction across the whole city, rather than over a few blocks downtown. Legal measures were also approved to create a court system for the newly extended policing area.

"Good," I hear you say. "Jackson’s a mess and time spent trying to fix these things is time well spent."

Our capital certainly has one of the highest homicide rates per person in America. Last year, 133 people were murdered in the city. Anything that provides us with more effective law enforcement and a better system of public prosecution deserves support.

Then there are the persistent problems with Jackson’s water supply. As someone that works downtown, I can confirm that the sludge that flows from the faucets is the same sepia color as before. Anything that means a city of 150,000 people might at least have reliable running water has to be a good thing, right?

For years, of course, the mainstream media attacked Mississippi’s leaders for not concerning themselves with what was going on in Jackson. Remember when Jackson’s water troubles hit the national headlines last year? There was no shortage of commentators on hand to inform the rest of America that it was all down to the failure of state officials for not getting involved. Donna Ladd even suggested to NBC News that the lack of running water in the city was "a direct legacy of white-supremacist thinking at the state level." Really.

Now that state officials are actively seeking to fix some of the state capital’s problems, of course, the mainstream media throws out precisely the same kind of accusations. CNN recently informed us that creating a functioning court system for the city "smacks of a modern-day Jim Crow regime."

Attacked when they do. Attacked when they don’t. I have a great deal of sympathy for state officials who get vilified for leadership failings that are 100 percent made in Jackson.

That said, conservatives should think carefully before stepping in with state power to try to fix local-level incompetence. Why?

Each time that the state government steps in, what they are doing is fixing specific problems caused by municipal failure. They aren’t addressing the underlying causes of that failure, which is a lack of accountability. Stepping in to do what city officials cannot or will not do might even make the accountability problem worse.

Thirty years ago back in my native Britain, Margaret Thatcher faced a similar problem. Although elected Prime Minister with a large majority, in certain parts of the country local government was in the hands of those that were known as the 'looney Left.' The 'looney Left' were often so incompetent they could not run a bath.

Eventually, Mrs. Thatcher felt she had to intervene, taking steps to prevent the 'looney Left' from destroying the cities that they ran. Her interventions might have improved things in the short term, but they caused a long-term strategic problem for conservatives.

First, it put back to the day when people in those badly run areas had to face the consequences of how they voted. If anything, people knew that they could carry on voting the way they did safely in the knowledge that the central government would intervene before anything got out of hand.

Second, it played into the hands of local politicians whose whole schtick was to foster grievances, as opposed to run things competently. Having an outside authority step in to take responsibility not only lets the grievance-mongers off the hook. It gives them a whole new set of real or imagined grievances to complain about, assisted by a media only too willing to amplify those grievances. (See the media coverage after Governor Reeves restored Jackson’s water supply for details).

Third, conservatives who see state intervention as the solution to Jackson’s multiple municipal failings ought to ask themselves how far they might be willing to go. If new state structures are the answer to the city’s water problems, why not create a similar system to oversee the airport? If we now have a new court system, why not a new structure to run the city’s failing schools?

No conservative would want the federal government to step in and run our state. We should be cautious about having the state government intrude too far into municipal affairs either.